The heartbreaking news of the sudden transition into eternity of my most beloved and genuinely cherished friend, Professor Samuel Otu Gyandoh, brutally hit me with the ruthless force of a deadly blow!
We met at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, USA in 1964, while he was at the Law School, pursuing his graduate studies, and I was at the Divinity School. We shook hands when we encountered each other and never let go for the next fifty-seven years, and called each other “My Brother!” instead of calling each other by our own names.
I consider it an inestimable blessing that our lives intersected with each other, for My Brother was an extraordinary human being who lived in alignment with his manifestly inherent greatness — a great-ness that could not be measured; and my life has been immeasurably enriched by my amiably congenial association with him. He was a delightfully warm person and people seemed irresistibly drawn to his obvious genuineness and, as a raconteur, he was incomparable!
My Brother was exceptionally endowed with a luminous intelligence that brilliantly propelled him to become a distinguished scholar, an eminent lawyer and a masterful professor. But in spite of his glittering achievements, he remained an unassumingly humble and easily approachable, open-
hearted person, whose generosity and compassion for others defy adequate description.
It is dishearteningly difficult to imagine life without My Brother’s reassuring and engaging.
My Brother, may your precious soul rest, eternally, in the bosom of our ever merciful and compassionate Lord!