Christiana Oware Knudsen was born and brought up in Ghana. As a young, newly trained schoolteacher, she met the Danish, medical doctor, Peder Christian Kjaerulff Knudsen, at Koforidua, Ghana in 1955. They married and had three children. Later on they moved to Denmark to settle. However, her family connection with Denmark goes back long before she met her husband. As the book, The Theologian Slave Trader shows, her mother’s family legend is interwoven in the affairs with the Danish slave-trading fortress, Christiansborg, over three hundred years ago. Also, over one hundred and fifty years ago, Christiana Oware Knudsen’s grandfather, Nana Kwaku (O)Ware, a regional chief, the ‘Gyasehene’, of the kingdom of Akyem Abuakwa, traded with the Danes for Danish guns, gunpowder and schnapps in his young days. This family trade continued with the British, after Christiansborg Fortress was sold to the British in 1850.
Christiana Oware Knudsen holds a Cand Phil. degree in Social Anthropology from Aarhus University, Denmark. She has carried out research and published books in the field of Female Circumcision (The Falling Dawadawa tree: Female Circumcision In Developing Ghana, 1994), and Tribal Markings in Ghana, (The Patterned Skin: Ethnic Scarification In Developing Ghana, 2000). She has also researched in the UK, on topics such as Distant Spiritual-Healing as complementary to medical health care. Her Ph.D. degree was awarded by Derby University, England, and her theses is to be found in the British Library, London. Recently, she has published a satire (Christiansborg Fort: Danish West Africa Revisited, 2008) about Danish tourists failures to reach their destination: the old Christiansborg Fortress in modern Ghana, due to their serious problems with excessive materialism. Now a pensioner, she continues to research and write about certain special diseases that modern medical science cannot yet cure but just control, but a few African Medicine Men & Women (Witch Doctors) in Africa can cure.