Dr. Emmanuel Kissi - An African Pioneer

Brother Emmanuel Kissi comes every month to the MTC to give all missionaries going to Ghana on their missions a physical, so they can stay in the country.  We met with Brother Kissi too!  We are very grateful for the service he gives to the missionaries!

Brother Kissi was born in Abomosu, Ghana. He studied medicine in England. In 1979, while completing training in surgery in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, he joined the LDS Church.

After his return to Ghana, Brother Kissi and his wife Elizabeth, who is a nurse, established a medical clinic in Accra which they named Deseret Hospital. The hospital at times has been aided by groups of LDS Church members from the United States.  He has also been involved with trying to coordinate humanitarian medical care by other doctors in Ghana.  Brother Kissi was among those featured in the film Lives of Service about Latter-day Saints of African descent.

Initially after his return to Ghana, Brother Kissi was a professor at Legon University medical school and was working as a general surgeon at Korle Bu Hospital.

The first Latter-day Saint he met in Ghana was Priscilla Sampson-Davis who was reading the Doctrine and Covenants while waiting for treatment at the hospital.

Church leadership

By 1982, Brother Kissi was serving the LDS Church as a district president in Ghana. He had also been a branch president, and in the late 1980s he was a counselor in the presidency of the Ghana Accra Mission. Then in June 1989, the government of Ghana suspended all meetings of the LDS Church and expelled all foreign church representatives. Brother Kissi was designated as the official head of the church in Ghana, a position he held until "The Freeze" was over in November 1990. At the same time, from 1989 to 1991, he was president of the Ghana Accra Mission.

After this Kissi served the church as a Regional Representative of the Twelve, then as a counselor in the mission presidency.   Brother Kissi was serving as patriarch of the Accra Ghana Lartebiokorshie Stake  before being called as an area seventy from 2002 to 2007.   In 2004, he spoke at Brigham Young University on the growth of the LDS Church in West Africa.

Kissi was present at the dedication of the Accra Ghana Temple in 2001.