Two years ago, Peggielene Bartels, a US citizen and resident of Maryland, received an early morning phone call. Her uncle, the king of a village in Ghana, had died. Bartels was the next in the line of succession, and so she became king of Otuam:
Nana Amuah-Afenyi VI is Bartels’ new title, but she is better known as King Peggy. This straight-talking, 57-year-old is the first woman in her fishing community of 7,000 people in Ghana’s Central Region to be anointed a king, or “nana.”
She now juggles two lives — from the palace in Otuam and from a modest condo outside Washington, D.C. Since the 1970s, Bartels, a naturalized U.S. citizen, has been a secretary at Ghana’s Embassy in Washington where she still spends most of her time, running royal affairs back home in Otuam over the phone and on trips to Ghana.
“So, when they told me, I was a little bit reluctant to accept it, because it comes with responsibilities. And here is a secretary in the United States, I have my own obligations, bills and stuff and becoming a king, you have to be really rich,” she says.
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