Dr. Edward Addo, who died earlier in this month, was an outstanding physician and medical scientist who made a valuable contribution to medical history in the Caribbean, for which he was awarded the Chaconia Gold Medal of Trinidad and Tobago. The scientific work for which he was rewarded is used by the WHO in many parts of he world. He was not a native. He was born in Ghana and through marriage came to live in his wife's homeland many years ago and gave this country the benefit of his love and care for the human condition. Like so many other Ghanaians whom I have met, he never carried his achievements on his chest. His personality was one of simplicity and charm. And there was nothing in his manner that revealed the royal background from which he had descended. Trinidad was fortunate to have produced the lady with whom he fell in love. For by coming here he learnt that he was not Edward Addo the First but Edward Addo the Second, who came to the Caribbean and made a valuable contribution to its development.

His progenitor was born in Ghana in 1742 and came to Barbados in slave status on one of those thousands of slave ships which young men saw leaving their shores for hundreds of years for foreign lands. According to oral history, some two hundred men of that family Chieftaincy left their coastal homeland in search of adventure and only one ever returned. The one who came to Barbados never returned. He remained there in slave status until 1817 when he was manumitted and died 14 years later in 1831 at the ripe old age of 89.

It is worthwhile sharing my knowledge of his life with fellow citizens in the Caribbean because there is a greater tendency for them to look back and wallow in their imagination of what they think it was like for Africans in plantation slavery than to follow Bob Marley's advice:

Edward Addo the First left a will covering five foolscap pages which was prepared two years before his death. In it he gave the essential features of his life history. His time of arrival in the Caribbean is not known, but he named the plantations on which he worked, and their owners. He named his first female companion, who was a free mulatto, daughter of a free Irish woman and an African slave. His eight children with her were therefore free. He states in his will that he regarded their mother as his wife, but being in slave status, of course they could not marry. After her death he managed the properties she left for her children.

His second companion with whom he had eleven children was born 1780 and was the daughter of his plantation master, an Englishman, and an African of slave status. This mother of his children and his first two children with her were manumitted in 1809 to England by his plantation master's son, who was at the time a student at Christ Church College, Oxford. The other children, the last of whom was born when he was 87, were therefore born free. He married their mother in 1817, the year when he became Christian. He continued managing the properties, which his first companion had left for his children who were born free.

He was obviously a man who had a great image of himself and planned for the future. Slave status did not enslave his mind. In his will he left property and slaves for his wife and all his children in perpetuity. And he decreed that if his wife consorted with any other man or married any other man, the property he left for her be taken away and distributed among his children. He charged her, in his will, to look after the education of his children. This she did.

Before slavery was abolished in 1834, their two eldest sons were schoolmasters earning fifty and sixty pounds per annum. There was no need to take away from her the property that her husband had left her with. She carried on his good work by giving property to the Methodists to build a church and died in 1860. He did not know what the future would be, but he looked into it, and provided for those he left behind. That was a great lesson. He would have felt vindicated if he knew of the achievements of many of his descendants.

The research, which provided this information, was done largely by one resident in Barbados. Edward Addo the Second knew of his progenitor. My discussions with him revealed that his ancestors lived in James Town way back during the period when the Portuguese were trading in slaves on the Ghanaian coast. They certainly had long involvement in the politics of that region, for at least one of them was a member of the United Gold Coast Convention and was imprisoned by the British in the 1940s with Nkrumah and other prominent citizens. The Caribbean link with Africa was created by Edward Addo the First and was strengthened by Dr. Edward Addo the Second. One can only hope that Afro-Caribbeans will look back only to generate the will and the moral strength to build a future instead of dwelling on a past the totality of which we can never understand.