Victims of a legend: The women Daddy Lumba left behind

On Saturday, 28 March 2026, hundreds of Ghanaian women gathered at the University of Ghana Stadium in Legon for what had originally been announced as the Celebration of Life of Daddy Lumba. By the time they arrived, the event had a different title. A court injunction, filed by the Ekuona Royal Family of Parkoso and Nsuta, had stopped any gathering in the dead musician’s name. And so, in a moment that felt almost poetic in its defiance, organiser Papa Shee simply changed the fliers. The women had not come to mourn a legend. They had come, it turned out, to celebrate his first wife.

The Celebration of the Life of Akosua Serwaa came off that evening despite the legal storm around it, despite the University of Ghana management receiving a court order and formally asking the event to stop, despite everything. It proceeded anyway, and the women who showed up did so knowing full well the legal jeopardy involved. That is not devotion to a pop star. That is something older, angrier, and more urgent than fandom. That is solidarity.

Eight months after the death of Charles Kwadwo Fosu, the man the world knew as Daddy Lumba, Ghana has still not buried the conversation his passing started. And at the centre of that conversation, largely obscured by legal jargon and the noise of social media commentaries, are two women who deserve far more than the roles they have been assigned in this story.

Daddy Lumba died on 26 July 2025 at the Bank Hospital in Accra, aged 60, after what his family described as a short illness. Within hours, even as his music poured from every radio station in the country, even as tears fell from Accra to Kumasi, the private architecture of his life began to crack open in public. What spilled out was not a simple story of love. It was the story of what happens to women when a celebrated man refuses to make hard decisions while he is alive and leaves everyone else to live with the consequences after he is gone.

Priscilla Ofori, known publicly as Odo Broni, had lived with Daddy Lumba for fifteen of the last nineteen years of his life. She bore him six of his eleven children. She was there when his health declined, when the crowds thinned, when the glamour faded into the quieter reality of a sick man who needed care. By every measure of daily life, she was his partner. She was also the woman who was publicly humiliated almost the moment his body was cold, when a radio presenter on DLFM, the station Daddy Lumba himself had built, went on air and dismissed Akosua Serwaa entirely, declaring Odo Broni the only wife that mattered. And when a gathering of dignitaries came to the family home to offer condolences, including former President Akufo-Addo, Daddy Lumba’s own manager introduced Akosua Serwaa as the musician’s “former wife” in front of people who had known both women’s names from his songs for decades.

And yet Odo Broni is the woman the internet largely decided to vilify.

Akosua Serwaa is the woman whose name Daddy Lumba wove into the fabric of his music with a tenderness that made millions feel they knew her personally. He recorded “Makra Mo,” one of his most devastating songs, as a direct appeal to his siblings to care for his wife and children after his death. He sang about Yaa Tiwaa in “Me Mpaebo,” praying for her struggle with infertility with the intimacy of a man who considered this family his own. Fans who grew up with Daddy Lumba knew Akosua Serwaa’s name before they ever saw her face. Her name was embedded in his legacy the way a thread is embedded in cloth. You cannot remove it without unravelling everything.

Akosua Serwaa was also, by the account of music historians, the woman who made his career possible. When the young Charles Fosu and Nana Acheampong were trying to record what would become the groundbreaking debut Lumba Brothers album in Germany in 1989, it was Akosua Serwaa who came forward as producer and provided the financial backing that made it happen. Without her, there is a credible argument that there is no Daddy Lumba as Ghana knew him.

And yet when she arrived in Ghana after his death, it was to a legal battle. She did not stay at her late husband’s home. She went to businessman Kennedy Agyapong’s house to avoid the confrontation waiting for her at the East Legon property where Odo Broni lived, where the machinery of his estate hummed along under someone else’s hand. She went to court in October 2025, asking to be declared his sole surviving legal spouse, arguing that the civil marriage she contracted with him in Bornheim, Germany in 2004 made any subsequent customary union legally void. Her legal team could not produce the original marriage certificate. The court, presiding judge Justice Dorinda Smith Arthur, ruled in November 2025 that both she and Odo Broni were recognised as surviving wives and both were entitled to perform widowhood rites.

It was the kind of ruling that satisfied no one and left both women in the peculiar position of sharing a grief that neither could fully claim in public without the other contesting it.

Ghana’s social media did not respond with nuance. It divided, loudly and bitterly, into two camps that mostly but not exclusively split along the lines of who you believed was the “real” wife. Team Legal Wives rallied behind Akosua Serwaa with a fervour that was partly about her and partly about something much larger: the collective fury of women who have watched men build their most public declarations of love on a woman’s foundation and then quietly replace her. Team Odo Broni pointed to fifteen years of physical presence, to the children, to the woman who was there at the end. The argument on both sides sometimes descended into a viciousness that was uncomfortable to watch, women tearing into other women over the choices of a man who made no will, left no clear instruction, and is not here to answer for any of it.

That last point is the one that cuts through everything else. Daddy Lumba died allegedly without a registered will despite an estate that includes DLFM radio, property in East Legon, and a catalogue of recordings that will generate royalties for decades. He had eleven children across four women. He had two marriages, one potentially civil and one customary, whose legal relationship to each other he never formally resolved. He left two women who loved him, in different ways and across different decades of his life, to fight over his memory in court and on the internet while strangers voted on who deserved to mourn him.

The December funeral in Kumasi came off on 13 December 2025, itself preceded by a court injunction the day before that was reversed at the last moment. Akosua Serwaa and Daddy Lumba’s eldest sister Akosua Brepomaa were not in attendance. His children by Akosua Serwaa, Calvin, Charlyn and Ciara, did travel to Ghana to pay their respects, separating their grief from their mother’s legal battle with a dignity that was quietly remarkable. The estate remains in litigation. The letters of administration case continues. And as of this week, even the Celebration of Life that was meant to give Akosua Serwaa’s side of the family a moment of closure has been wrapped in fresh injunctions, counterclaims and court notices.

There is a conversation that Ghanaians are still reluctant to have about all of this. It is not a conversation about which wife was more legitimate, or about the complexities of Asante customary law, though both matter. It is a simpler, harder conversation about what we owe the people we love when we are still alive to show it. A man can be a genius and still be negligent. A man can sing about devotion with a lyrical precision that moves a nation to tears and still fail, catastrophically, at the private acts of care that protect the people who depended on him. Daddy Lumba asked in “Makra Mo” that his siblings care for his wife and children when he was gone. He did not leave a will to back that request up.

Both Akosua Serwaa and Odo Broni are survivors of a situation they did not design. One built the foundation. One kept the lights on. Neither of them is a cautionary tale. They are both women who gave significant portions of their lives to the same man, who are now fighting over what remains of that investment in public, with strangers issuing verdicts on their worth from the comfort of a phone screen.

The women who gathered at the University of Ghana Stadium on Saturday evening, who showed up despite court orders and institutional warnings and the general chaos of it all, were not naive. They understood what they were doing. They were saying, collectively, that Akosua Serwaa’s story deserves to be heard in a space larger than a courtroom. That a woman who helped build a musical legacy deserves more than to be airbrushed out of it by a radio announcement the week her husband died.

The melody still plays. But Ghana is slowly, and painfully, beginning to reckon with the silence behind it.

Bridget Mensah is a PR, Marketing & Communications professional and General Secretary of the Network of Women in Broadcasting (NOWIB). A dedicated feminist and advocate for women in media, she champions workplace excellence whilst empowering voices and building bridges across the industry. Bridget is passionate about amplifying women’s stories and driving positive change in Ghana’s media. She can be reached via email at [email protected]

Post Views: 10