On September 21 last year, Africa lost one of its illustrious sons, the Ghanaian poet and author, Prof Kofi Awoonor, in the Westgate Shopping Mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya. He was in Kenya for the Storymoja Hay Festival. In the past few weeks, Ghananians have been celebrating the first anniversary of his death. The Chairman of Council, University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS) in Ghana, Prof Kofi Anyidoho, is one of those determined to immortalise the late poet. Prof Anyidoho, a renowned poet and scholar, and cousin to the late Awoonor, was supposed to accompany him to the festival. In this exclusive interview with Evelyn Osagie in Ghana, Anyidoho recounts how he missed death by the whiskers, his moments with Awoonor and more.
In the past few weeks, there have been activities in Ghana marking the first anniversary of the death of poet and novelist Prof Kofi Awoonor in the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi Kenya. You seem to be on top of it all, what is the significance?
Indeed, it has been weeks of activities by different groups. From Thursday, September 18, there was a two-day international symposium in his memory at the University of Ghana, Legon, tagged: Kofi Awoonor and the challenge of history, where a literary award named after the poet was launched to celebrate African talents. It was attended by Ghana President John Dramani Mahama with the academia, his children and other members of the family, students and other well-wishers from within and abroad. It was followed by an evening of poetry and testimonials from the people who knew and interacted with him; and later his poetry collection, The Promise of Hope, was launched. And at his country home in Wheta, Volta Region on September 21, the Speaker of Parliament, Edward Doe Adzaho, unveiled the Awoonor Mausoleum and an educational fund instituted by his children in honour of their father to support students in Wheta.
The programmes were meant not only to commemorate the one year anniversary of his death, but to celebrate him and his legacies. He had been an inspiration to all: he was very intelligent, profound and deep. His poems were always laced with wisdom. He says “Reaching for the stars we stop at the house of the Moon/And pause to relearn the wisdom of our fathers”, saying if we don’t do that we would not find our way to stars.
It is unfortunate that we are losing the tradition of celebrating people while they are still alive. But for us, he lives on; his legacies would never die. Initially, we planned to organise something to coincide with the release of the book, Promise of Hope, earlier in the year, after family consultations, because at the time, they were building a mausoleum for him at home in Wheta, we decidedto plan something proper for September.
Then, we’ve also considered the possibility of his house being not just a museum piece but a place for creative activities, such as creative residences/fellowships so that he would continue to inspire younger writers.
Awoonor was not just a writer, he was not afraid of politics. It was always a pleasure to learn from him every Sunday in his house, watching people, including high-profile politicians and the media, come and go, seeking for advice and help. And he was always there for people.
You were close with the late Awoonor. Besides both your first names are similar, how were you related?
We are very much related. The similarity in the name “Kofi” is not just a coincidence by the day of the week in which we were born. Beyond that we are related from the same extended family, according to the African tradition. We are from the same town. As far as I know, Awonoor’s mother and mine regarded each other as cousins. They would visit each other. My sisters were regularly in his mother’s house when she became too old to move around. So, when he died, I found myself becoming the family’s spokesperson and spokesperson for funeral planning committee.
Were you in Kenya with him when he died?
No, I didn’t go with him, but the invitation to Kenya was sent to him through me. He was in Nairobi at the Storymoja Hay Festival in connection with his new book of poems, The Promise of Hope, which I edited and wrote an introduction for. They were going to use the occasion to do an advance publicity for the collection that was to be used to launch a new series called African Poetry Series, because it was being published together with collections by younger African poets, some from Kenya.
When he found out that I wasn’t going, he said if I had told him, I wouldn’t be going he wouln’t have accepted the invitation because he didn’t want to go alone. That was how he bought a ticket for his son, Afetsi. That day when the news first came through…. (silence)
So, you have missed death by the whiskers?
It is even more complicated than that. You see, my daughter was getting married on that same Saturday, that was why I couldn’t go with him and also why he wished he hadn’t accepted the invitation because he would have presided over the marriage ceremonies. When I reminded him of the marriage a few days before he left, he wasn’t happy he was missing it.
Could you recount how the day was for you?
We were at the marriage ceremony when I got the text message, which I still have on my phone, saying: “There was an attempted robbery of a mall in Nairobi where Prof went shopping”. That same day the president was visiting Ho with the Chief of Staff when he got the message from our Ambassador – so they were looking for him. I called his roaming number, but no response and called a second time and somebody picked the phone and I said: “Can I talk to Prof Awonoor?May I know who I am talking to?” And as I called my name, the person on the other line said: “Oh, uncle, this Afetsi.” “Where is your dad?” I had asked. He said: “He is missing. We can’t find him. That was when I became more worried. I called back a little later and texted him, and he sent this text: “Still searching for him!” an hour or so later, the Chief of Staff called that the body had been found and the description fits but that they were still waiting for confirmation. Fifteen minutes later, he called back and said: “Prof, I am sorry to say, it’s confirmed!”
That’s part of the story. Awonoor, as he called himself, was an unrepentant pan-Africanist; interestingly, he died on the late President Kwame Nkrumah’s birthday.
Wow! That is somewhat symbolic, don’t you think?
There were all kinds of things about the whole thing. A day before he died, he gave a lecture in Nairobi and towards the end of it, he said he had written a bit about death but particularly at his age, 79, you can’t get frighten about death. Unless you are an idiot, you should know that you should be moving on and the time to go is near. That an ancient poet from his tradition said: “I have something to say. I will say it before death comes.” And less than 24 hours, he was gone. But he left us with very powerful consoling words in one of his last poems included in the anthology that: When the final night falls us as it fell upon our parents we shall retire to our modest home earth-sure, secure/that we have done our duty by our people; we met the challenge of history and we were not afraid so the final night…goodbye.
I also extracted those lines and used them for my introduction of the collection. And take note, the title of the collection, The Promise of Hope, which I picked from one of his poems that says: I believe in hope and the promise of hope. And this is perhaps more important. Sometimes hope can become too elusive but people become more determined not to give because there is the “promise of hope”. His words should inspire us. In that poem, he’s reconciled himself and thinks he has done his part. That is what I want us to celebrate and to encourage us that whether we die at 41 or at 79 like Awoonor or the late Prof Chinua Achebe, a few years older or like the late Nelson Mandela few more years older, what have we used our lives for?
Your style of poetry is somewhat similar to that of the late Awoonor’s. Is it because of your love and connection with him or your Ewe background?
It is partly that because I was luckier than he was. When I was growing up, I had this example of his person. And that was important because the school’s system was telling us a different thing – that to become a poet, you must imitate the English poets because they knew what poetry is – which was poetry in books. Awoonor was telling me, “There are some really good poetry in the mouths of our people in the village and our singers. And I was particularly blessed because my grandfather was one such person: he was a composer in the oral tradition. My mother became a composer and leader of a very powerful group of performers, composing hers and singing other people’s songs. So while I was busy learning Williams Shakespeare and other good poets in the books; and I was also listening to my mother, grandfather, uncles and the rest of the community. Indeed, it was people like Awoonor who pointed me to that direction. He says we are spending too much investment on English, so we can’t throw it away, but while on it, remember Shakespeares was not the only great poet the world ever produced. He was as good a poet as our tradition poets and any you can find anywhere in the world. So I benefitted from that legacy.
But tragically, we are not passing some these legacies unto our children. If I were to start life all over again, there would be one serious omission I would correct. My children are very fluent in my wife’s language, which is not Ewe. I wish they could speak mine as well; but I didn’t work hard enough to teach them. They grew up in an academic community, and fortunately my wife’s language is a common one around there. So they learnt it without much effort. My sister’s children, who grew up in the so called poorer part of Accra, speak all every available language in the community and would even switch from one to the other with total ease.
Interestingly, I first read the Ewe versions of Shakespeare’s classics and other classical books as a child before reading the English version. And it made me understand the works better. But we don’t have such any more in the schools’ system. So I am working on a departmental project that would involve looking at them again and doing a paper to encourage that their being brought back because they have already been published and used why did we stop using them in our schools.
How did your background affect the man you now became?
That story is a long one. But like I’ve always said, somewhere along the line you need to begin to take yourself serious. But above all, you should never get to the point you tell yourself, “I have got it all”, because you’d never get there. So I am learning every time from my people, school and the libraries. I pay particular attention to people when they sing their songs because I know that there is lots in there that I would never find in the books. But the biggest change came for me when I finally decided to start writing in Ewe towards the end of the 70s. The idea came from Awoonor. He said: “Kofi let’s stop writing letters to each other in English. The next time I receive a letter from you if it is in English, I won’t read it.” Writing in one’s language is a skill which comes with practise. But the problem is that we never practise at all or enough. And that is why many of us are highly literate in other people’s languages but not in ours.
So when I started writing in Ewe, one of the things I did was to take some of the poems I wrote in English and redo them entirely in Ewe. I am excited about it.
All those experiences inspired my love for and understanding of literature. If I hadn’t began reading Shakespeare in Ewe, when I was given his book to readat the training college, I wouldn’t have liked reading them again. So I discovered early the world of stories, in books as written by poets, dramatists and novelists, is one of the most beautiful worlds that you can explore. And I have never regretted it.
At what point did you decide to become a writer?
In primary and middle schools, my best subject was mathematics. I gave it up and I am now reading poems because I didn’t go to secondary school – there was no money for that. I went to Teachers Training College. Perhaps if I had gone secondary school where they had laboratories, I would have become a scientist or medical doctor, helping people to deal with their ailments. Even though that avenue closed for me, I have never regretted the alternative. But I was helped by the creative writing clubs set up first in the Teachers Training Colleges and then extended to the secondary schools. I became one of its founding members and started writing.They organised workshops for us, and if you wrote a good piece you’d be invited to the district, regional and then national workshops. And there was a publishing programme attached to it where the best pieces were selected and published in what was known as Talents for Tomorrow. The Ministry of Education would then distribute them to schools. So, you found yourself being read by people in various schools. While I was at the college, I found out that one of my earliest pieces were published in the Talents for Tomorrow. I still meet people who say they read me long ago in Talents for Tomorrow. That was a tremendous formal programme funded by Ministry of Education but again that has also died away. They never passed it onto the next generation.
Given your experience, what do you say of the argument that children who are taught their school’s subjects in their Mother Tongue tend to understand them more than those taught in English?
As ateacher of literature but of language, this is an area I am quite interested in. interestingly, it is my wife’s area of specialisation. She once gave a lecture on the advantages of basic education being in the first language. Anybody who is arguing against that doesn’t know the truth. How many of the developed countries do their basic education in a foreign language or produce their literatures in some other language. They come to foreign language after they have educated themselves first in their language.What we have accepted as the norm is a total anomaly, but we have been compelled by our colonial experience to think of it as the normal, and sometimes, the only thing to do.
You once gave anillustration at a conference of how the earliest African literate imbibed the culture of speaking English at home rather than the Mother Tongue. Could you recap?
Yes. I said after the Europeans finished converting us, they beat us if we speak the language. And that indeed had its impact. The problem is staring us in the face, and nobody would do it for us.To illustrate the problem and the solution, if an evil-minded person poison you to take over you property but luckily you survive, excepting that the poison has already done some damage, do you go back to the same person to give you medication to cure yourself. Let us leave it at that for people to think about. Would such a fellow ever get well? The evil fellow, whom you think is helping to cure you, may give you a different kind of poison to kill you slowly since people now know he is giving you medications. You may not die today or tomorrow but sooner or later you’d die and nobody would trace it to him?
But I think we should borrow from the churches today – they are showing us the way out. Big churches are now preaching in our languages or when in English someone is attempting to translate to our languages immediately, even though the translation may not be apt at times.
As a people, we woke up early enough but decided to look elsewhere. Look where it has brought us to. Somehow, we seem to believe we would do well, but after 50 years, it is not working. Ghana became independent in 1957 same year as Malaysia. But before Malaysia’s independence, they took a decision that led to the establishment of a language institute that ensures the language, commerce, government, politics and education of the new nation would be conducted in the Malay and not English. The rest of the story is clear. In Malaysia the computers are all in Malay. We keep complaining. But who would do it for us, if not we, ourselves?
At a conference on Colonial History and Forced Labour in Africa in Ho, you shared an illustration on the scars of slavery and force labour, could you recap?
It is one that shows how untrue it is when people say we have forgotten the years of slavery. Although my wife’s grandfather in-law lived for over 110 years, he never forgot that when he was a little boy some of his relations were disappearing never to come back. And even though he hasn’t said it or talked about it, perhaps because it was just too painful, we knew he never forgot. So,in 1986, when were turned from the United States, he asked my wife: “are some of them still alive there in America?”
My point is, in the reconstruction of history, even silence becomes meaningful. The songs that our people sing are perhaps the richest source in the reconstruction of history; the proverbs and even the dance, not just the dance itself but the costumes.
And like the late Awoonor once said indeed, there is not just good poetry in the mouths of our people in the village and our singers, but rich historical stories as well.
When I was in Cape Coast to do a project, entitled Memory and Vision,with an African-American colleague, Sandra from the North-western University, US, they did that dance then, and I asked for its meaning. They said it depicted how their warriors defeated a famous slave raider, who raided different communities, capturing and selling people into slavery.
Some scholars of oral literature have argue that, unfortunately, someour traditional songs and dance with rich historical stories/motifs are on the verge going extinction…
The beautiful thing is that our people themselves, the elders, have not forgotten. I remainvery confident that they are not about to disappear from the surface of the earth.
So, you do not subscribe to the argument that in the face of globalisation, most Africa’s languages and culture are in the brink of extinction?
Not exactly. Globalisation is not a thing of yesterday or today. It’s been going on throughout the millennia. At one point in history, the rest of the world came to Africa to learn. And this is not just a claim but a fact of history which the Europeans themselves have recorded. Although later, scholars in Europe and America tried to cover it up. But they can’t cover it up. I urge you to take a trip to Egypt and do a five-day tour of the Nile to some of the ancient Egyptian sites, you’d find clear evidences of the civilisation developed by the African people.The respect and height they have achieved nobody in today’s world is anywhere near it, be it inPhilosophy, Engineering, Mathematical Sciences and Medical Science.All the so called founders of the Greek Philosophy came to school in Egypt. The points where we lost out was due to the African leaders of that knowledge holding it to their chest without passing it down. The Greeks who came there, went back home with the same knowledge and established public schools and started teaching the children. That is how come we are being told that Pythagoras discovered the Pythagoras Theorem, but that was the mathematical principle on which the pyramids were constructed. David Livingstone comes to Africa and is carried on the head by some Africans to Victoria Falls, and then he announces that he has discovered Victoria Falls. And we have the nerve to be teaching that to our children.
Christopher Columbus first came to Elmina here before striking out across the Atlantic because the Europeans knewthat there were African sailors who knew about other passage from here to the Caribbean. History has it that a former Emperor of Mali, Abu Bakari II, travelled across the Atlantic in several hundred boats and a large contingent of people and disappeared into the Caribbean; but they didn’t go there to discover the place, let alone claim it for themselves. They just disappeared among the local population. Even in those early days, people were regularly going across the Atlantic from Africa into new place. There is a book, They came before the Columbus. The historians and the History Departments would never recommend to us because if they do that then the glory passes away from Columbus to an African.
Your observation is in line with existing argument about historical authorship, i.e. whose history are we telling.
As a poet that is sensitive to the nuances of language, my understanding of history is “his story”. And it is a good chance that his story cannot be my story. So if you leave his story to be the only story that needs to be heard, then I am lost. That is exactly what has happened to us. I had to be very careful here. But if the story were to be properly told, you will discover that Africans have never been helpless victims. If we have lost some of the time, to which some will say most of the time, it is not for lack of trying or fighting back. The late Achebe has this story about the story of a hunter and a lionin which he said he’d heard from an American researcher. What Achebe didn’t know was that that story was our own story which some American visitor was now telling as if it was his creation, he’d took it and didn’t even acknowledge where he got it from. When I first heard that story, it was told by the former Ghana President late Kwame Nkrumah at the 1965 Organisation of African Unity (OAU) conference here in Accra. While hosting the closing banquet, he reminded other AfricanHeads of State of the story of a hunter and a lion where an old man would often tell his grandson stories that in the animal kingdomthe lion is the king. But little boy noticed that when a hunter goes into that forest and there is confrontation between him and a lion, according to the hunter’ss tories, the lion always loses. And the small boy would asked, “Grandpa, I thought you said, the lion was big, fierce powerful and nobody, not even the elephant or the tiger could defeat him?” And the old man replies, “Yes”. And the boy then asks, “The hunter is a small person, how come every time gets into a fight with a lion, the lion gets beaten?” The old man says, “The story, my son, will always end like that until the lion learns to talk”.
That was why Nkrumah established the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, realising that we are spending money on our university that is not telling our children anything about ourselves but simply reproducing European narratives. That was also why he established and recruited people, like the late Kofi Awoonor as Managing Director, for the Ghana Film Cooperation, to train a generation of African filmmakers.
What is your opinion about the role that African leaders have not played in correcting history?
Nkrumah was right on top of it. And everybody said:”Oh, he was too far aheadof his time and colleagues”.Thensomebody reminded us that: “That was not true. He was abreast with the times.We were the ones who expected the rest of the world that were already moving aheadto wait for us.”That was why while he was pushing the cultural front, he was also establishing Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Ghana Atomic Commission,Counsel for Scientific Research,Counsel for Industrial Research, and setting up factories to produce everything from corn beef to textile. He also established an airline, which firsttook offwith an all Ghanaian crew and Akosombo Dam to provide us with electricity.
Given your list, Nkrumah had great vision for the future.
Well, there are many Ghanaians who would tell us that Nkrumah was the worst president. But I wouldn’t have gone to my boarding school, if it hadn’t been for his policies. My parents didn’t have a kobo to send me to school. So, his policies paid for me to go to school from primary to tertiary and eventually to my PhD.
You have mentioned many projects done by the late Nkrumah, what was his greatest legacy, which African leadersshould pay attention to if Africa is to catch up to the rest of the world?
We can spend the rest of the night trying to recount his legacies. But his biggest investment was on his people – Ghana is what it is today because of Nkrumah vision that led him to invest on the people. A lot of the people who are insulting him today would never had gone to school if he hadn’t established the schools. When he took over the reign of government in the early 50’s, we have only one Middle School; not secondary school in the whole of the Northern territory. Within a few years, by the late 50s to early 60’s, every District in the country had a major secondary school. The University of Ghana was established; the University of Cape Coast was established to train teachers for the secondary schools, University of Science and Technology started in Kumasi to produce scientists, engineers, architects, etc. But while he was doing that he kept reminding us that by ourselves alone, we can never get far that African countries needed to come together because our troubles started when we forgot or decided to forget that we are one, from the same source, brothers of same mother. Historical research is constantly corroborating that fact.
You find that, in Nigeria there are people speaking a language that is sister language to Ewe. Our elders will always tell us that they originated from an area around the Kwara River in Nigeria, in a place now known as Ayo
Do you mean “Oyo”?
Yes. Laughs. But that is not being taught in the schools; the historians don’t tell us this. They would tell us how different we are fromour neighbours in Togo because somehow, the French has turned them into differenthuman beings; and how different we are from the people of Benin Republic. As for the Nigeria, in my people’s belief system, they say that when people die here, in Eweland, you are likely to find them in a market in Nigeria.
Wow, why?
Laughs. Because that is where we came from originally.
What cue should the African leaders take from all these?
When we talk of African leaders, who are the African leaders? We count President Mahama, Nigeria President Goodluck Jonathan. But how much good luck can he bring toNigeria as an individual and a leader of Nigeria. The fate of Nigeria is not in the hands of Jonathan, but in the hands of the Nigerian people as primary school teachers, as secondary school teachers, as university professors, as market men and women, as mechanics. So we are now sitting down waiting for somebody to come and tell us what we should be doing. We are waiting for some donor organisation to come and build toilets for us before we even start talking about hospitals. So, I wouldn’t place my fate and future entirely in the hands of government. Who is government? We have the University of Health and Allied Sciences to run in Ho and everybody keeps saying government. And at one point, we managed to arrange a meeting with Mr President and he had courtesy to meet us. He endorsed the requests we made, then he passed it onto us, to the Minister of Education, who in turn, passed it onto the National Council for Tertiary Education, they, in turn, are waiting for “get-fund”. Get-fund, in terms of waiting for the Minister for Finance to release money, ultimately, the Minister ofFinance iswaiting for money to come from the people so that he can distribute it. But the people are waiting for the government. Laughs. Every one of us has an obligation to play.
As funny as it sounds, it is indeed a sad reality. But what role has literature played in telling our story as it ought to be told?
All over world, African writers are being celebrated. Through the years, African writers like Achebe, Awoonorand many others, through their works, have sought to correct the misconception about Africa…our Africa. I keep wondering why people keep asking about literature’s contribution. It is expected that a carpenter should contribute, the Engineers should contribute, the agricultural people should all contribute to national development. But let me add here that while agriculture provides for the nourishment of the body, the arts, including literature, provides for the nourishment of the mind and, especially the soul of the people. And people who put all their resources into developing agriculture alone will inherit a legacy of excrement. Laughs.
What, then, is there to inherit for those who put money in developing the arts?
They are nourishing that part of the human being which doesn’t die. Not as individuals alone, the soul of the nation survives every citizen.Although individual-citizens may die,the soul of the nation lives on.
