Peggy Appiah, who has died in Ghana, aged 84, was the youngest daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps, Britain's Labour chancellor of the exchequer from 1947 to 1950. In 1953, she married a young lawyer from Ghana (then the Gold Coast) called Joe Appiah, and went on to write, mostly for children, in her adopted country.

When it was announced that the 32-year-old Peggy was to marry a black man, every Colonel Blimp in the Empire was horrified. South Africa's minister of justice, Charles Swart, then busy erecting the pillars of apartheid, described the match as "disgusting". A correspondent of a Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) newspaper wrote that the pictures would "turn the stomach of a pig".

Joseph Emmanuel Appiah was the aristocratic son of the secretary of the Asanteman Council, a powerful body of traditional rulers who, in the previous century, had given a bloody nose to many British "expeditionary forces" sent to "Coomasie" (Kumase, capital of Asante) to capture the "Golden Stool" that gave the Asante King (Asantehene) his authority. "Sir Joseph", as he was known, was a handsome, witty man, and was then London representative of Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister of soon-to-be-independent Ghana. Joe often dined out on the consternation his marriage caused the British.

Peggy was born in rural Gloucestershire. She was educated at Maltman's Green school, in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, and then at Whitehall Secretarial College, London.

Peggy and Joe met at a student dance in 1951: she was then working for an organisation called Racial Unity, while he was studying for the bar at the Middle Temple and was involved in the work of the West African Students Union. By then, she was a cosmopolitan young woman who had lived in Moscow (where her father was British ambassador) and in Tehran, where she worked for the British army, then running the railways.

The couple were married at St John' s church, St John's Wood, north London, with Labour party luminaries such as Aneurin Bevan, Hugh Gaitskell and Michael Foot as guests. Nkrumah was to have been Joe Appiah's best man, but the job went to arguably the more influential figure of George Padmore, a Trinidadian who was political mentor to African nationalist leaders, including Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta.

Peggy settled with her husband in Kumase, where she practically "went native" in the best sense of the phrase. She brought up three daughters and a son, often by herself, for Joe fell out with Nkrumah in 1954, and after independence in 1957, was imprisoned without trial. Indeed, when the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited Ghana in 1961, Joe was still in Nkrumah's prison, and when the Duke visited Kumase hospital, Kwame Appiah, Joe and Peggy's eldest child and now professor of philosophy at Princeton University, was one of the patients he chatted to. Indeed, Kwame precociously seized the moment and told the Duke, in the hearing of the accompanying British journalists: "They have imprisoned my father."

While bringing up her four children, Peggy learned Twi, the language of Asante, and acquainted herself with its folklore. She amassed a huge collection of brass gold weights, known locally as abrammuor. These were, in the past, used to value gold dust, but each gold weight, in addition to denoting a specific amount, was also crafted to encapsulate a proverb - a unique way of conveying abstract thought by handcraft.

Peggy had a creative turn of mind, and out of the stories she heard in Asante came a series of books: Ananse the Spider: Tales from an Ashanti Village (1966); Kyekyekulee, Grandmother's Tales (1993); Yao and the Python (1971); The Children of Ananse (1968); Why There Are So Many Roads (1972); The Lost Earring (1971); The Pineapple Child and Other Tales from Ashanti (1969); Tales of an Ashanti Father (1989); and Gift of the Mmoatia (1972). Her last major work was a collection of 7,000 Asante proverbs entitled Bu Me Be (Tell Me a Proverb) which she co-authored with her son Kwame, and Ivor Agyemang-Duah, currently information officer at the Ghana high commission in London.

At the same time as immersing herself in Asante art and culture, Peggy became a philanthropic figure in Kumase and founded, with the assistance of her children, a school for the disabled at Jachie. She also contributed to the education of many children in Kumase. Those who knew her asked: how could a typical English woman adapt so well as to preserve a marriage that lasted nearly half a century in an Asante society that extols polygamy? A friend explained: "She was determined to accept that Asante was Asante and England was England." She bought a plot at Tafo cemetery in Kumase, so that when she died, she would not be sent back to England, but be buried next to her husband, who died in 1990.

Peggy Appiah is survived by her four children, Kwame, Ama, Ajoa and Abenaa.

· Margaret Enid (Peggy) Appiah, writer, born May 21 1921; died February 11 2006.