From Daddy to Grandma with Love: Identity, Rituals and Family Traditions

This autoethnographical study explores my life as a ‘gift’ from Daddy to my paternal great grandma; a traditional priestess of the Cape Coast traditional area in Ghana, with love. It delves into the concept of humans as ‘reciprocal gift,’ to unearth the motivation for giving and implications on the gifted individual: i) an invitation to religious partnership ii) an expression of social relationship. We seek to use the concept of gift beyond the dictionary definition- ‘The giving of a present by one party to another.’ The paper nuances and complexifies the meaning of the word to highlight the symbolic significance of daddy’s gesture in terms of identity, rituals and family traditions. We engage with how this shaped my formative life; the contestation between my Christian upbringing and indigenous traditional spiritualities which reached its climax with the dropping of my native name. Drawing on multiple approaches including personal memory and subjective experiences, family records (diaries), interviews and popular culture, and read through the lenses of Erikson’s Psychosocial theory, we situate how the stages of my development raise questions of identity and role confusion. These questions are a present reality for me as an ordained minister and an academic. How has western religious scholarship contributed both to the understanding of indigenous ways of knowing and lifeways, and a path to obscurity and public misunderstanding? What key developments in Africa might help sociologists of religion learn from indigenous epistemologies as new ways of knowing?