Corporation (BBC), becoming the first African to host programs with the service. He also acted in the 1951 film The Boy Kumasenu, playing the role of Yeboah. He worked at Station ELBC, the National Broadcasting Service of Liberia, as assistant director and disc jockey between 1953 and 1955. He joined E. T. Mensah and others to form the jazz band The Tempos but left the band in 1951. In 1955 Warren left for Chicago and joined the Gene Esposito Band as co-leader, percussionist, and arranger. With them he recorded his first album, Africa Speaks, America Answers (Decca, 1956). African music was popular, but it had not been integrated with world music until Warren. Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Osibisa popularized Ghanaba's music. During his stay in America, he worked with Duke Ellington, Max Roach, Charlie Parker, and Louis Armstrong. By 1974 he had returned to Ghana, where on 1 July 1974, Republic Day, he changed his name to "Ghanaba". He later said: "After the United States disillusioned me, I wanted to resurrect the African component of jazz. African interpretations of jazz were different than African American version I heard in the U.S. I discovered Africanness in the U.S. ... I wanted to do African music." In the 1990s, he played a role in the film Sankofa (1993), written and directed by Haile Gerima, who was working in the United States. It was filmed also in Ghana and Burkina Faso. Ghanaba continued to make music until his death on 22 December 2008. He was buried in a coffin designed as a drum by Eric Adjetey Anang of Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop. Family Ghanaba's parents were Susana Awula Abla Moor and Richard Mabuo Akwei, founder and first headmaster of Ghana National School in Accra. As a child Ghanaba was a boisterous free spirit who found little peace and comfort with the strictness of his father. Richard Akwei, a disciplinarian, was an educationist and founder of the Akwei Memorial School in central Accra; also a sports administrator, he is credited with being the first Ghanaian Chief Executive of the Central Organization of Sports (COS), later known as the Sports Council. Ghanaba was married twice and had six children. His first son, Guy Warren Jr., a.k.a. "Odinga Oginga", is an artist specialising in sculpting, painting and carving. His second child, Glenn Gillespie Warren, also called "Ghanababa" (the son of Ghanaba), is a jazz drummer who