Kofi Awoonor (born George Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor-Williams; 13 March 1935 – 21 September 2013) was a Ghanaian poet, author and diplomat. His work combined the poetic traditions of his native Ewe people with contemporary and religious symbolism to depict Africa during decolonization. He started writing under the name George Awoonor-Williams, and was also published as Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor. He taught African literature at the University of Ghana. Professor Awoonor was among those who were killed in the September 2013 attack at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, where he was a participant at the Storymoja Hay Festival.

Early life

George Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor-Williams was born in Wheta, in the Volta region of what was then the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana. He was the eldest of 10 children in the family. He was a paternal descendant of the Awoonor-Williams family of Sierra Leone Creole descent. His grandmother was an Ewe dirge singer.

He studied literature at University College London, earning a Master's Degree in 1970.

Career

After graduating in 1960, Awoonor worked as a researcher for the Institute for African Studies and began participating in the pan-African campaigns of Kwame Nkrumah. He was appointed to the Ghana Film Corporation. He helped to found the Ghana Playhouse, where he played the lead role in Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel.

While in England, he wrote several radio plays for the BBC, and began using the name Kofi Awoonor.

He spent the early 1970s in the United States, studying and teaching at Stony Brook University (then called SUNY at Stony Brook) where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1972. While in the United States he wrote This Earth, My Brother and Night of My Blood, both books published in 1971.

Awoonor returned to Ghana in 1975 as head of the English department at the University of Cape Coast. Within months he was arrested for helping a soldier accused of trying to overthrow the military government and was imprisoned without trial. His sentence was remitted in October 1976. The House by the Sea (1978) is about his time in jail.

Awoonor was Ghana's ambassador to Brazil from 1984 to 1988, before serving as ambassador to Cuba. From 1990 to 1994, Awoonor was Ghana's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, where he headed the committee against apartheid. He was also a former Chairman of the Council of State, the main advisory body to the president of Ghana, serving in that position from 2009 to January 2013. In his critical book Guardians of the Sacred Word and Ewe Poetry, he rendered Ewe poetry in translation (1974). The Breast of the Earth: A Study of the History, Culture, and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara is another work of literary criticism (1975). The Ghanaian government confirmed Awoonor's death the next day. His son Afetsi Awoonor, who had accompanied him, was also shot, but was later discharged from hospital.

His body was cremated and buried at a particular spot in his hometown at Wheta in the Volta Region. Also there was no crying or mourning at his funeral all according to his will before death.

Works

Poetry

  • Rediscovery and Other Poems (Mbari Publications, 1964)
  • Night of My Blood (Doubleday, 1971) – poems that explore Awoonor's roots, and the impact of foreign rule in Africa

Novels

  • This Earth, My Brother (Doubleday, 1971) – a cross between a novel and a poem

Understanding and interpreting his works

It is said that Awoonor wrote a great number of his poems as if he was envisioning his own demise.

But he is a peculiar and unique writer, one who strives, almost too hard, to bring his ancestry and culture into his poems, sometimes even borrowing words from the local Ewe dialect.

Being such a strong and avid practitioner of the traditional religion meant that he was of a relict species. Especially for one so highly educated, it was an even rarer phenomenon.

That awareness, not only that he was a relict specimen as an individual, but that the entire culture was suffering entropy, may have come through his poems in a manner that would suggest at first that he was writing about his mortal end.

Besides the personal and cultural lament, Awoonor also shrewdly decried what he would have considered the decadent spectre of Western influences (religions, social organisation and economic philosophy) on the history and fortunes of African people in general. He would lambast the thoughtless exuberance with which Africans themselves embraced such things, and gradually engineered what he would have considered a self-degradation that went far beyond a loss of cultural identity. He would often construct his writings to look at these things through the lens of his own Ewe culture.

Further reading

  • Robert Fraser, West African Poetry: A Critical History, Cambridge University Press (1986),
  • Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates (eds), Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Basic Civitas Books (1999), – p. 153.
  • Lauret E. Savoy, Eldridge M. Moores and Judith E. Moores (eds), Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology, (Trinity University Press, 2006).

References

Kofi Awoonor

  • Report on the death of Kofi Awoonor, 22 September 2013.
  • Paula Kahumbu of Princeton University and director of the Story Moja Hay Festival relates her time with Awoonor the Friday evening before his death
  • Biographical details, University of KwaZulu-Natal.
  • Interview, Sun newspaper (Nigeria), 18 June 2006.
  • Poem: Songs of Sorrow by Kofi Awoonor
  • Francis Kwarteng, "A Tribute to Prof. Kofi Awoonor", VibeGhana, 23 September 2013.