1. Kofi Awoonor's work combined the poetic traditions of his native Ewe people with contemporary and religious symbolism to depict Africa during decolonization.
22 Facts About Kofi Awoonor
1. 2.
Kofi Awoonor started writing under the name George Awoonor-Williams, and was published as Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor.
3.
Kofi Awoonor taught African literature at the University of Ghana.
4.
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.
5.
George Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor-Williams was born in Wheta, in the Volta region of what was then the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana.
6.
Kofi Awoonor was the eldest of 10 children in the family.
7.
Kofi Awoonor was a paternal descendant of the Awoonor-Williams family of Sierra Leone Creole descent.
8.
Kofi Awoonor attended Achimota School and then proceeded to the University of Ghana, graduating in 1960.
9.
Kofi Awoonor studied literature at University College London, earning a Master's Degree in 1970.
10.
Kofi Awoonor helped to found the Ghana Playhouse, where he played the lead role in Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel.
11.
Kofi Awoonor spent the early 1970s in the United States, studying and teaching at Stony Brook University where he obtained his Ph.
12.
Kofi Awoonor returned to Ghana in 1975 as head of the English department at the University of Cape Coast.
13.
Kofi Awoonor was Ghana's ambassador to Brazil from 1984 to 1988, before serving as ambassador to Cuba.
14.
From 1990 to 1994, Kofi Awoonor was Ghana's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, where he headed the committee against apartheid.
15.
Kofi Awoonor was 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.
16.
The early poetry of Kofi Awoonor borrows from the Ewe oral tradition.
17.
On 21 September 2013, Kofi Awoonor was among those killed in an attack at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi.
18.
Kofi Awoonor was in Kenya as a participant in the Storymoja Hay Festival, a four-day celebration of writing, thinking and storytelling, at which he was due to perform on the evening of his death.
19.
Kofi Awoonor's remains were flown from Nairobi to Accra, Ghana, on 25 September 2013.
20.
Kofi Awoonor's body was cremated and buried at a particular spot in his hometown at Wheta in the Volta Region.
21.
Besides the personal and cultural lament, Kofi Awoonor shrewdly decried what he would have considered the decadent spectre of Western influences on the history and fortunes of African people in general.
22.
Kofi Awoonor 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.