To help celebrate February’s Black History Month, today we’re featuring a guest blog post by Peggielene Bartels—the author of the unique and inspiring memoir King Peggy—available now for pre-order. Bartels has led a storybook life that’s almost too surreal to believe. She grew up in Ghana, went to school in London, became a U.S. citizen while working in the Ghanian embassy, and finally, returned home to Ghana to serve as king of her village. I’ll turn this post over to King Peggy to expand on this improbable story.
As a child, I never knew I would grow up to become a king. I had hoped to become a caterer.
But life has a way of twisting and turning you into surprising paths, causing you to end up in places you never imagined. I studied catering, to be sure, leaving my family in Ghana to attend school in London. Then I had an opportunity to work in the Ghanaian embassy in Washington, DC, which I planned to do for a year or two before returning home to my sauce pans and measuring cups. But somehow, a year or two became almost thirty, and I was still there working as a secretary. I had found love in that time, and lost it when my husband realized I couldn’t have children and returned to Ghana.
I wasn’t unhappy, to be sure, and I was grateful to be a naturalized American citizen with reliable work, excellent health care, hot and cold running water, a car, all those things out of reach for most Africans. Yet having grown up in a large African family, I never imagined I would be living alone, with no husband, no children, and working seven days a week to pay bills. Sometimes I wondered if my life had a purpose. Did I, as so many Americans seemed to do, exist only to pay bills? Is that really a life’s purpose? I had an intense spiritual yearning to connect with something greater than myself and thought perhaps I could be a religious leader of some sort. But that sure didn’t look like it was going to happen.
The phone call that changed my life came at 4 a.m. in August 2008. It was a cousin from Ghana who informed me that my ninety-two-year-old uncle, who for 25 years had been king of a fishing community called Otuam, had died. The elders had taken the names of the late king’s relatives to a sacred shrine, conducted rituals, and determined that I was the next king!
I nearly hung up the phone, thinking my cousin was playing a weird joke on me. But what he said was true. When I went to my new kingdom three weeks later, I found that there was no running water, no ambulance, poor schools, a rutted bone-rattling road, thieving elders who pocketed the taxes to buy themselves whiskey, and a falling-down royal palace that I was expected to rebuild.
It was a mind-boggling challenge. But I have two great advantages that are helping me transform my kingdom. For one thing, my decades in the United States have given me a Yankee can-do attitude that cuts through the corrupt, chauvinistic nonsense that plagues so much of Africa and, quite frankly, most of the world.
Secondly, the fact that I am a woman king is a tremendous bonus. Women have a unique power to gather resources for the less fortunate. We usually have great compassion, rectitude, and selflessness. The world has been run by men for thousands of years and now it’s time to let the women have a chance.
In the three years since I became king, I’ve found in myself qualities I never knew I had: strength, resilience, unbeatable determination, and utter devotion to my people. My life has a purpose now, one that will last me to my dying day, and I feel strongly connected to a higher power.
Though I am an anointed king, with a real gold crown, and a palace, and a town where my word is law, I will never forget where I came from. On the contrary, I feel very humble that kingship was bestowed on an ordinary person like me, who as a girl had dreamed of being a caterer.
I had also dreamed of having many children. And now, by God’s grace, I have 7,000 of them, and I have to take care of them the very best I can.
NOOK owners: go to shop and search for "Peggielene Bartels" to pre-order this one-of-a-kind memoir.
