Peki
About three hours from Accra on the road to Ho. Where he was born and buried.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Arts & Music · Peki · 1899–1995
In 1933 a young music teacher at the Presbyterian seminary in Akropong stood up to lead Sunday service wearing African cloth instead of a European suit. The missionaries were shocked, and the church let him go. Ephraim Amu had already written the song that would outlive the colony: "Yɛn Ara Asaase Ni", "This is our own land", which many Ghanaians still sing with more feeling than the official anthem. He went on to teach a nation to hear its own music, bring the bamboo flute back into the classroom, and end up on the country's money. He never stopped wearing the cloth.
Ephraim Kɔku Amu was born on 13 September 1899 at Peki-Avetile, also called Abenase, in the Ewe hills of today's Volta Region; Peki also gave Ghana Esther Ocloo. He was baptised as an infant by a missionary of the German Bremen Mission, whose schools he attended in Peki before training as a teacher and catechist at the Basel Mission seminary.
From the missionaries he learned Western harmony, hymns and the harmonium. From Peki he knew the rhythms of Ewe drumming and the songs of the villages. The rest of his life was spent joining the two.
In the 1920s he joined the staff of the Presbyterian Training College at Akropong, the old Basel Mission seminary on the Akuapem ridge. There he taught, preached and led the church singing band, and began writing choral music in Twi and Ewe that used African speech rhythms instead of forcing African words into European hymn tunes.
His songs spread through the schools and churches of the south. For the first time, Gold Coast choirs were singing art music that sounded like their own country.
In 1929 Amu wrote "Yɛn Ara Asaase Ni", "This is our own land", in Twi, based on his Ewe song "Mia denyigba lɔ̃lɔ̃ la". In a colony where schoolchildren sang "God Save the King" on Empire Day, it was a song about love of this land, its wealth, and the duty to build it up with one's own hands.
The other anthem: after independence Ghana adopted a different national anthem, but "Yɛn Ara Asaase Ni" is sung at state funerals, independence celebrations and national occasions, and there have been repeated public calls to make it the anthem. See Ghana's national symbols.
Amu did not only write African music; he lived African dress in a mission world that treated it as heathen. He preached in Twi and Ewe, and he wore cloth. When he conducted a Sunday service at Akropong in traditional cloth, the European mission authorities told him they had been taken aback, and the conflict over his "Africanist" ways ended with his dismissal from Akropong in 1933.
Why it mattered: this was not a quarrel about clothes. It was about whether an African could be a Christian, a teacher and a musician without becoming a black European. Amu's answer was yes, and he paid for it with his job.
Within months he had a new post. Achimota, the college founded with Aggrey to take African culture seriously, invited him in 1934 to teach music, scripture and agriculture. He stayed until 1951, apart from study in London at the Royal College of Music from 1937, where he earned his diploma in music theory in 1940.
Amu took the atɛtɛnbɛn, a simple bamboo flute played by herders and in village music, and turned it into a school instrument. He developed a family of bamboo flutes, including the odurugya, standardised their tuning and fingering, and wrote music for them. For generations of Ghanaian schoolchildren, the atɛtɛnbɛn was the first instrument they ever played, and it was Amu who put it in their hands.
More on Ghana's instruments: talking drums and fontomfrom and highlife, hiplife and afrobeats.
Ephraim Amu died on 2 January 1995, aged 95, and was buried at Peki.
About three hours from Accra on the road to Ho. Where he was born and buried.
Home of the national choir and orchestra, and on the back of his banknote.
The easiest way to hear Amu: almost any Presbyterian or school choir sings him.
Ephraim Amu was a mission-trained Christian who refused to accept that being Christian meant being European, and he proved it in the most public way possible: in church, on a Sunday, in cloth. He lost his job for it and won the argument in the end. His music taught Ghanaians that their own rhythms and languages belonged in the concert hall and the classroom, and his song gave the country a hymn to itself decades before it had a flag. Ghana put him on a banknote and then redenominated it away. It should find a more lasting way to thank him.
Verified: 29 September 2026. His birth at Peki-Avetile on 13 September 1899, his Bremen and Basel Mission schooling, his work at Akropong and dismissal in 1933, his years at Achimota (1934–51) and at the Royal College of Music (1937–40), his work at Kumasi and at the University of Ghana (1962–71), the composition of "Yɛn Ara Asaase Ni" in 1929, his bamboo flutes, the 20,000 cedi note (2002–2007) and his death on 2 January 1995 follow the Ephraim Amu Papers at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute, the African Composers Edition and published biographies. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.