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A tribute to Kofi Awoonor

What you need to know:

  • Most of his writings were greatly inspired by the singing and verse of his native Ewe people
  • The deceased left behind a widow, five sons and one daughter
  • Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems, is Awoonor’s book that will be released early next year

Last Saturday, the African literary scene lost one of its renowned writers. Ghanaian Kofi Awoonor, a poet and author, was one of the victims in the Westgate Shopping Mall siege in which Afetsi, his son, was injured.

The writer was in Kenya for the Storymoja Hay Festival, an international celebration of literature and contemporary culture.

He was expected to take part in a pan-African poetry showcase session on Saturday evening. But he didn’t show up, only for participants to later learn about his death at the Mall, where he had gone with his son.

In his work, Awoonor, who was usually called “Prof” depicted the African continent by joining the poetic traditions of Nigeria with contemporary and religious symbolism.

Most of his writings were greatly inspired by the singing and verse of his native Ewe people.

The 78-year-old was born in Wheta, Ghana. He studied and later taught at the University of Ghana. In 1964, he wrote Rediscovery, his first book, and which was based on oral poetry.

Awoonor, afterwards, wrote a number of radio plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) while he studied literature at the University of London.

Further studies and lectures continued as Awoonor, in the early 1970s, was based in the United States. Yet this was a productive time for him in terms of publishing with This Earth, My Brother, and Night of My Blood coming out in 1971.

Then, he returned to his birth country to run the English department at the University of Cape Coast, only to be imprisoned without trial a few months later for allegedly assisting a soldier who was suspected of trying to overthrow the then Ghanaian military government. He was later released.

ENGAGING IN POLITICS

What came out of the escapade was The house by the Sea, a poetry book about his time in jail. Awoonor also began engaging in politics and government. He was Ghana’s ambassador to Brazil from 1984 to 1988, before serving as an ambassador to Cuba and a permanent representative to the United Nations, heading a committee against apartheid.

On Monday evening, Storymoja Hay Festival, Occupy Nairobi poets and other members of Nairobi’s literary community paid tribute to Awoonor at a function held at National Museum of Kenya.

The deceased left behind a widow, five sons and one daughter.

Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems, is Awoonor’s book that will be released early next year.

***

Susan Linee, a former East Africa Bureau Chief for the Associated Press, once met Kofi Awoonor in West Africa. She narrates what came of the encounter:

“His birth name was George Awoonor Williams, but he changed it. I found him at Cape Coast College in Ghana in mid-1981 where he was teaching literature and poetry at a very threadbare institution.

He spoke with great passion about the importance of language and oral tradition in all writing cultures. He was 46 at the time.

After he returned to Ghana from the US where he held various teaching fellowships, he said he began to appreciate more fully the importance to the writer of having some kind of linguistic base; his was the Ewe language.

Speaking of the influence of colonialism on African writing, he said the French educational system was “more thorough in its assimilation of Africans” whereas the English system was left to missionary enterprise, and most of the missionaries were interested in African vernacular language.

INTERMEDIARY SITUATION

‘By the time I was 15 or 16, I learned to read and write in Ewe (something he would not have done had it not been for the missionaries), and this provided us with an intermediary situation.’

As a result, he said, the English of Anglophone writers in West Africa varies from author to author – there is no standard the way there is in French – Soyinka, P J Clark, Chinua Achebe... it becomes observable when we put pen to paper’.

Asked why he had returned to Ghana in such austere times, he cited an Ewe proverb: ‘the snake that dies on the tree must always come down’.

‘All of us at heart, of course, are still villagers, and the fabric has held out despite our education.

‘I consider literature as a philosophy that pertains to existence....’”

Story by BY CARLOS MUREITHI