GYIMAH v. KUMAH

JUDGMENT OF OLLENNU J.

This is an appeal from a judgment of the Kwahu Local Court “A” given on the 12th August, 1958, declaring certain 10 farms to be property of the plaintiff’s family stool, the Siao Stool of Twenedurase.

The following facts are not in dispute:-

(i) the plaintiff is the present occupant of the Siao Stool;

(ii) the land on which the farms in dispute are situate, Kyikyiwah land, and the villages thereon, belonged to the said Siao, and are now property of the plaintiff’s stool;

(iii) the parents of the defendant (Kumah), Gyenyereh and Nyamewah, were not blood relations of the said Siao. They came from the former Northern Territories (now Northern Ghana), but they stood in a certain relationship to the said Siao, which was such that the defendant, their son, is now obsorbed into the Siao family, and is one of the elders of the family, and recognizes the plaintiff as his head of family;

(iv) the defendant, as a principal member of the said family, has twice been made lead of Besease village, and family’s principal village on the said Kyikyiwah land. The defendant’s present appointment as head of that village was made by the plaintiff.

[p.198]

The plaintiff’s case is that the parents of the defendant were slaves of the late Siao, and that they, together with other slaves of the said Siao, worked on and extended farms which Siao had made on his land (the said Kyikyiwah land) prior to acquiring those slaves; and that whatever farms the slaves made they made for their masters, and never had their separate individual farms. The plaintiff claimed the 10 farms as some of the farms made in this way.

The defendant put up three or four different stories:

(1) his parent were strangers from the Northern Territories who lodged with the said Siao. They were not slaves of Siao. The farms in dispute were made by his father Gyenyereh on land given to him by Siao.

(2) his father, who had lodged with Siao, went back to the Northern Territories and brought more people, who joined him in lodging with Siao. His said father, and each of those strangers, made farms on the land with Siao’s permission. Those other Northern Territories men predeceased his father, and his father thereupon inherited the farms made by those people. Some of the 10 farms in dispute are farms which his said father so succeeded to, and which he (1st defendant has now inherited;

(3) his father accompanied the late Siao to war against the Ewes. During that war his father captured