This digital edition

A Drummer’s Testament: Dagbamba Society and Culture in the Twentieth Century is a collaborative ethnographic work led by John M. Chernoff and Alhaji Ibrahim Abdulai, gathered over decades of lectures, conversation, and translation with a team of elders and research associates in Dagbaŋ, northern Ghana.

This edition reproduces that work without altering a single word. Its purpose is to make the text easier to read, navigate, and cite. Every chapter has been imported from the original publication and stored paragraph by paragraph, so any passage can be linked to and quoted precisely — for example I-1 ¶17.

Alongside the running text, each chapter keeps its original apparatus: the paragraph-by-paragraph outline, the proverbs and sayings excerpted from the chapter, and the list of names, places, and Dagbanli terms it contains.

Search and questions

The whole corpus can be searched paragraph by paragraph, and a source-grounded research assistant answers questions by drawing on passages from across the three volumes, citing exactly where each part of an answer comes from. The guide to this edition explains both.

Credits and rights

Co-authors and principal collaborators include Kissmal Ibrahim Hussein, Benjamin Danjumah Sunkari, Mustapha Muhammad, Alhaji Mumuni Abdulai, and Rev. Daniel A. Wumbee. The material remains under copyright, © 2025 John M. Chernoff, and may be used for personal or educational purposes with no modification of content. The original website remains available at adrummerstestament.com.