My wife, dancer and artist Beryl Duodu, who has died in London aged 71, was the great-great granddaughter of the king of the Asantes of Ghana, Kofi Karikari, whose golden death mask, pillaged from the royal mausoleum in Kumase by a British "expedition" in the 1880s, can be found at the Wallace Collection in London. Beryl's father, Berko, was King Karikari's grandson. He met and married her mother, Emma Carder, while he lived in Liverpool. They had three children: Raymond, Olive and Beryl.
During the second world war, Beryl and her sister were evacuated to rural Wales. Beryl said of the experience: "People came to peer at us, selecting those they wanted to take home. Olive and I were passed over again, and again, and again. It was only when we were the last children left that someone took us."
The woman who picked them had the notion, probably never having seen black people before, that the girls had brown faces because they were "dirty". So she would wash them hard to try to remove the "dirt".
After the war, their father, a well-known showman, resumed his stage career and the children began to appear with him all over Europe. They moved to west London, where Berko was in touch with African students. One of these was Kwame Nkrumah, later Ghana's first president. When Ghana gained its independence - 50 years ago tomorrow - Berko sailed for Ghana with Beryl. But he soon died and Beryl was left there. She bloomed in Ghana. She did a solo dance number at the independence ball, which was captured in the film, Freedom for Ghana.
Beryl had trained in the early 1950s at the St Martin's School of Art, London. She could turn her hand to anything: painting, sewing and decorating. But dance was what occupied most of her being. She formed a troupe called the Heatwaves and her choreography was a joyous mixture of Ghanaian hi-life and Cuban-Latin influences.
There was a thriving artistic scene in Ghana in those days, and Beryl and her friend, the South African Genoveva Marais, created Les Belles, who, with some males actors became the Osagyefo Players.
When we moved to Britain in 1984, Beryl continued to develop her interest in making dolls. She created figures from British folklore and, for a time, ran a stall in Covent Garden. Beryl and I met and fell in love in the early 1960s. I was then editor of the Ghana edition of Drum, the pan-African magazine, and she was writing a woman's column for the paper. When Muhammad Ali visited Ghana, it was she who did a spread entitled "The King and I". She also wrote a memorable interview with Dorothy Hodgkin, whose husband, Thomas, was teaching in Ghana, when Dorothy won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1964.
She is survived by our two sons, Akwasi and Korieh, and by two of my sons, Yaw and Kofi. A more patient and faithful wife would be difficult to come by.