Cardinal Dery Legacies Collection: Biographies (Sir Edward N. Gyader)

Memoir of a Rural Surgeon:

Autobiography of Sir Edward N. Gyader

By: Edward Nwinyuor Gyader 

ISBN: 978-9988-3-7554-6

Printed in Ghana – (December 2024)

Hybrid H Limited. Accra

Synopsis:

Even though a year has passed by since the death of my brother, Rev. Fr. Edward B. Tengan on (August 3rd, 2023) circumstances beyond my control have meant that his heritage has yet to be properly assessed and transferred to the appropriate individuals to whom he had given as legacies. This means that one cannot, with legal backing, begin to initiate or work on that aspect of his intellectual legacy, including manuscripts, completed and uncompleted. During my last stay with him – February 13 to March 12, 2023 – when he was still the diocesan administrator, I became aware that he was working with Dr. Eward Gyader on a biography project. Indeed, I was with him in the house when a version of a draft document that I have come to find in his computer was delivered electronically to Dr. Gyader.

In January 2024, I was back home with my family to complete part of the traditional rites for my brother. Dr. Gyader invited me to his residence for a chat. During the chat, I knew that the manuscript he had received from my brother before his death was in his mind, just as it was in mine. However, neither of us mentioned it. I was made to understand that the pressing issue in his mind was the proper documentation of the hunting rites within his family and house community of which he had full control as the most senior elder. As he put then “I control the rites” (Private conversation). Accordingly, he was thinking of documenting the rites of the next hunting festival season and he hoped I will give him my support and assistance. Our meeting concluded without any clear commitments on either side, but with the understanding that we will continue to talk in the future. I did not have the presentation that I will have to continue this with him in his afterlife.

I found the manuscript in my brother’s hard disk soon after my conversation with Dr. Gyader but I did not go through it or give any attention to it until I got the funeral announcement and program from his son, Dr. George Gyader. As an independent scholar, I have undertaken, for some time now, the task of properly documenting our cultural history including individual biographies as essential component of our heritage. The fulcrum around which I proceeded to do this has been to focus on the life biography of Cardinal Peter Poreku Dery, who, in the afterlife, has continued his saintly life as “Man of God”. After going through the manuscript, I realised how much Dr. Gyader is narrating a story that is embedded in the legacy story of Cardinal Dery. I cannot express this better than inserting here a description of an incident in Gyader’s life linked to cardinal Dery in his own words:

Most Rev. Peter Porekuu Dery got to know of us through Josephat Kuubayandaa, my classmate for sixth form at Tamale Government Secondary School in 1964. He asked Josephat to bring us to his residence in Wa. When we met him at his residence, Bishop inquired to know who we were and what we were doing in Tamale. We introduced ourselves to him and he went on to ask to know what each of us planned to do in the future. It was then that he promised us that if we qualified for the university after our ‘A’ Level examinations he would try and get us scholarships to study outside Ghana (See Chp.3 par.1)

Gyader concluded his description of the incident by stating the following: “At the end of our sixth form studies, all four of us who used to move together, qualified to go to the university. Bishop Dery did not renege on his promise”.

In an abstract to his book Great Things Happen, Fr. McCoy (1988) described the planting of Catholicism in northwest Ghana since the 1930s as “the story of how God, at a certain moment in history, choose to show His love in a special way to the people of northwest Ghana and how they responded to it” (McCoy 1988: back cover). In a slightly different way, Cardinal Dery in 2001 described his memoir as being “a meaningful sharing of those experiences of mine that shed light on the development of Christianity in this area and how the evangelising task of the church was carried out in those early ages. In this narrative, the Traditional religionist, the Church Historian as well as the Pastor will all find some material that will be useful to them in their given fields (Dery 2001: ix). For the reconstitution of our cosmology after colonial and missionary disruptions, the ancestral Figurines (Kpîîndààr) of both McCoy and Dery appear as our foundational Figures around which all other figurines will be placed. Indeed, they have become the “Totemic Spirit” (Sigra) within the societies of northwest Ghana, allowing each society to ‘traditionalise’ Catholicism into a true African religion.

It is within this context that I feel obliged to make this review synopsis on both the print version of Dr. Gyder’s published manuscript and in the state as I found it on my brother’s hard disk. In the manuscript, Gyader documents for the ordinary person and in simple language the cultural history of northwest Ghana as he had experienced it since the past eighty years. Gyader’s narration of the experiences is raw and vivid allowing each reader to relate with his or her ongoing life story in a dynamic way and revealing possibilities for the future. This dynamism is multifaceted but deeply rooted in four main axes, namely, the fields of school education, the field of medical healing, the field of church and religious life and the field of traditional and modern politics. In each of these fields, Gyader gained the highest honorific titles that can be given to any individual. Hence, in his lifetime he was addressed as Sir, Honourable, Doctor, Nana Edward Nminyuor Gyader. Yet, it is not about gaining the titles that is of major significance here, but the importance these fields have played in the social and cultural developments for the people of northwest Ghana and for Ghana as a whole.

Ghana, as a nation has always viewed school education as a primary factor that will promote national integration and development. Hence, as soon as Ghana became a republic, the Nkrumah government enacted the “free and compulsory” primary education policy for all Ghanaian children of school going age. The missionary church at this time also viewed school education an efficient tool for the establishment of the local church.

Gyader’s story narrates how he made use of the two systems to get to the title of Doctor and via the story, the significance  school education now plays in the lives of Northwesterners is put into a cultural perspective.

Gyader’s career life after school education led to other subsidiary titles in the medical field: Surgeon, Medical Superintendent, and Dean of a Medical School. The circumstances that allowed the acquisition of these titles outline the social and cultural developments taking place within this period, and Gyader’s story is enabling a proper historical documentation of these institutions and putting the way they function into better perspectives. These perspectives come from both local and traditional context, as well as from global and multi-cultural institutions. Hence, Dr. Gyeder described himself as a “multifaceted person” with regards to how he came by the other titles. Gyader’s religious engagements led to the position of knighthood in the Catholic Church. Refused entry into the local Catholic primary school on the excuse that he was not a baptised Catholic, Gyader, through Cardinal Dery, got catholic sponsorship to study abroad and following many years of engagement and many services to the church, Pope John Paul II in 2004 made him a Knight of the church (Knight of St Sylvester).

The very busy work in the medical field and engagements within the church did not prevent Gyader from engaging in politics and traditional cultural life. Indeed, Gyader has always combined politics with every aspect of his life. Hence, in his elementary school days he joined the Young Pioneer Movement founded by Kwame Nkrumah and will continue with student politics during his medical studies. Throughout the period of the revolution in the 1980s, Gyader, while working as a doctor, maintained close relationship with political leaders at the highest office. Indeed, his personal relationship with President Rawlings throughout this period and later with Dr. Hilla Liman, who became the leader of the People’s National Convention (PNC) party, added extra significance to his life story at this time. It is also a documentation on the political history of an important period of Ghana’s political development.

The development of chieftaincy among the Dagara in northwest Ghana differs slightly from that of many other societies. The term ‘Naa’ in Dagara is rooted in Dagara tradition and culture as a merited position and title any one individual in the society can come by during a lifetime. This is possible because of the acephalous structure of the society. As such the title recognises the personal and individual achievements each one in life, but also of individuals within specific house and clan categories as custodians of the institution of chieftaincy itself (naalu). The life story of Gyader recounts his personal involvement both at the institutional level as well as at the personal level. Indeed, it takes us beyond chieftaincy within Dagara context to that of the Akan system via inter-ethnic marriage and kinship and through the title “Nana”.

In essence, the story of Gyader tells us what it means to be a Ghanaian, an African and indeed to be human today. The Ghanaian must develop a multifaceted, multi-ethnic/cultural and a dynamic personality.

References

Dery, P. P. (2001). Memoirs of Most Rev. Peter Porekuu Dery; Archbishop Emeritus of Tamale, by Peter Porekuu Dery, GILLBT Press, Tamale, (2003); Tamale, GILLBT Press,

McCoy, R. F., Dionne, R., & Dewart, J. C. (1988). Great things happen: a personal memoir. Montreal: Society of Missionaries of Africa.