Contributors
Gordon Senanu Kwame Adika
is an associate professor and the director of the Language Centre, University of Ghana, where he teaches all aspects of academic discourse to undergraduate and graduate students. He has an MPhil in English and Applied Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, UK, and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Ghana. He has been lecturing, researching, and publishing for several years, and serving as a consulting editor for various organizations and publishing houses in Ghana, including the University of Education at Winneba. For two years he was the consulting editor for the Heritage, an independent Ghanaian newspaper. He is also a member of the Publications Board of the University of Ghana, a member of the Distance Learning editorial team of the university, and a former editor of the Legon Journal of the Humanities. He organized the launch of the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Fellowship Award scheme.
Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor
(1935–2013) was a distinguished scholar, poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist, diplomat, statesman, and African cultural icon. Awoonor earned a BA from the University College of Ghana, an MA from the University College, London, and a PhD in comparative literature from SUNY Stony Brook. He translated Ewe poetry in his critical study Guardians of the Sacred Word: Ewe Poetry (1974). Other works of literary criticism include The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara (1975). A collection of his essays, The African Predicament, was published in 2006. He is the author of novels, including This Earth, My Brother (1971) and Comes the Voyager at Last (1992), and his collections of poetry include Rediscovery and Other Poems (1964), Night of My Blood (1971), Ride Me, Memory (1973), The House by the Sea (1978), The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook (1992), and a volume of collected poems, Until the Morning After (1987). His posthumous collection The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems was launched in September 2014.
John Collins
(E. J. Collins) is a professor and former head of the Music Department of the University of Ghana at Legon. He has been active in the Ghanaian and West African music scene since 1969 as a guitarist, percussionist, harmonica player, band leader, music union activist, writer, and popular performing-arts producer. He obtained his BA degree in sociology/archaeology from the University of Ghana in 1972 and his PhD in ethnomusicology in 1994 from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. He is currently Chairman of the Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation (BAPMAF), an NGO. He is a patron of MUSIGA (Ghanaian Musicians Union), the Afrika Obonu music therapy drum group, and Basil Yaabere King’s Drama Company. He has served as a consultant for a World Bank project to assist the African music industry, and since 2007 has been a board member of the Danish Embassy’s Ghana Cultural Fund. He has worked, recorded, and played with numerous Ghanaian and Nigerian bands, including the Jaguar Jokers, Francis Kenya, E. T. Mensah, Abladei, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Koo Nimo, Kwaa Mensah, Victor Uwaifo, Bob Pinodo, the Bunzus, the Black Berets, T. O. Jazz, S. K. Oppong, and Atongo Zimba. In the 1970s he ran his own Bokoor highlife guitar band, which released twenty songs; during the 1980s and 1990s he ran the Bokoor Recording Studio, eight miles outside of Accra. Collins has published (in Europe, the USA, Japan, Nigeria, South Africa, and Ghana) over a hundred journalistic and academic works (including seven books) on African popular and neo-traditional music. His forthcoming book about Fela Anikulapo-Kuti will be published in Europe. He has given many radio and television broadcasts, including over forty for the BBC. In 1978 he wrote and presented the BBC’s first-ever (five-part) series of radio programs on African popular music, called ‘In The African Groove’; he has also served as a film consultant and facilitator for the BBC, IDTV of Amsterdam, the German Huschert Realfilm, Danish Loki Films, and New Jersey’s Films for the Humanities and Sciences. He is co-leader with Aaron Bebe Sukura of the Local Dimension highlife band, which toured Europe in 2002, 2004, and 2006 and released a CD in 2003 entitled N’Yong on the French Disques Arion label. Along with Professor J. H. K. Nketia and the Ghanaian folk guitarist Koo Nimo, in 1987 he was made an honorary life-member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM).
Kari Dako
is an associate professor in the Department of English, University of Ghana. She has a background in Germanic studies at the University of Oslo, Norway and Justus Liebig University (Giessen, Germany); but she switched fields in Ghana to take her BA and MA in English at the University of Ghana. Her research and publications are mainly on English in Ghana, Pidgins in Ghana, and the Ghanaian novel. Among her publications is the book Ghanaianisms: A Glossary. She has also translated into English, from the original Danish, Thorkild Hansen’s famous trilogy on the Danish/Norwegian slave trade from the seventeenth century to 1850. Kari Dako is also a writer of fiction.
Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu
was Professor of Linguistics and Professor Emerita at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. She was Director of the Language Centre, editor of the Research Review, the journal of the Institute of African Studies, and Head of the African Studies Publications Unit.
James Gibbs
was educated in the UK and USA, and taught at universities in Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Belgium, and the UK. Since retiring from teaching at the University of the West of England, he has continued working as a researcher, reviewer, and editor. A founding and series editor of African Theatre, he took particular responsibility for the series’ volumes on Theatre Companies (2008) and Theatre Festivals (2012). With Femi Osofisan, he has recently co-edited the 2016 volume on another important but neglected area: African Theatre: China, India and the Eastern World.
Bernth Lindfors
is Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written and edited a number of books on anglophone African literatures and on African and African American performers.
Francis Nii-Yartey
was an associate professor and was reappointed as head of the Dance Studies Department of the University of Ghana’s School of Performing Arts. As former artistic director of the University’s Ghana Dance Ensemble and of the National Theatre’s National Dance Company of Ghana, he was at the forefront of contemporary African dance-theatre development in Ghana; for his services in this area he was awarded the State of Ghana’s Grand Medal. He was the founding director of the country’s premier Noyam Institute of Dance. He died in 2015.
J. H. Kwabena Nketia
is founder and director of the International Center for African Music and Dance (ICAMD), based in Legon. He trained at Akropong Presbyterian College, where he subsequently served as Acting Principal in 1952. In 1963 Nketia became a full professor and the Institute of African Studies was inaugurated; two years later he was appointed its director by Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah, in whose government Nketia maintained a central role as musical director, emissary, and cultural consultant from its inception. Since the late 1940s he has studied in the UK at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, and the Trinity School of Music, also in London. In the USA he attended the Juillard School of Music, Columbia University in New York, and Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois). He served as Professor of Music at UCLA as well as at the University of Pittsburgh, and has lectured at many top universities in the USA, Europe, Africa, and Asia, including the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, Indiana, the City University of London, and the China Conservatory of Music. He is the recipient of various national music awards and honorary degrees from foreign universities. He has worked with UNESCO as a consultant in their Intangible Heritage programs worldwide. When the Institute of African Studies commissioned its new complex in 2005, the main conference hall was named after him. Now in his nineties, Nketia continues to travel internationally, giving lectures, demonstrations, and workshops on African music. In July 2008 he presided as emcee over the national award ceremony of the Critics and Artists of Ghana Association, of which he is a founding patron. He has pioneered new signature techniques for scoring African meter, and is among the first to fuse traditional folkloric melodies and rhythms with post-Stravinsky symphonic compositions. His compositions for choral and for orchestral settings are performed worldwide. He wrote the University anthem, “Arise, O Legon.”
Helen Lauer
is a professor of philosophy and former head of the Philosophy Department of the University of Ghana, Legon. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the City University of New York Graduate and Research Center in 1986. She has compiled many cross-disciplinary anthologies of critical theory of the humanities and social-scientific literatures focusing on Africa. Her areas of specialization in philosophy are social ontology and intentionality.
Abena Oduro
is an associate professor in the Economics Department, University of Ghana. Formerly Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, she is currently the Director of the Centre for Social Policy Studies, University of Ghana.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
is University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, New York City. Scholar, teacher, literary theorist and feminist critic, she is one of the most celebrated authorities in global academia. A pioneer in feminist and postcolonial studies, she has received recognition for her work on people marginalized by Western culture—women, immigrants and the working class—including the Kyoto Prize (2012). Her 1976 translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology earned her a place as one of the first translators of his work into English. Her famous 1985 essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” is considered a founding text of postcolonialism. Among her numerous publications are: Myself I Must Remake (1974); In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987); Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Postcoloniality (1993); Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993); A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999); Death of a Discipline (2003); Nationalism and the Imagination (2010); An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalisation (2012). Her other translated works include Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps, Breast Stories, Old Women, and Chotti Munda and his Arrow.
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University. He was Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Global African Studies Program at Seattle University, Washington State, USA. Educated in Nigeria and Canada, he obtained his BA (1978) and MA (1981) from the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, in Ilé-Ifè, Nigeria. He received a further MA (1982) and his PhD (1986) from the University of Toronto. He taught at Obafemi Awolowo University from 1986 to 1990 and Loyola University, Chicago, from 1991 to 2001. He has been Visiting Professor at Scranton College, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea; Ford Foundation Postdoctoral and Teaching Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (2000); Visiting Professor at the Institut für Afrikastudien, Universität Bayreuth, Germany (1999); Visiting Distinguished Minority Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, (1997); Rockefeller Postdoctoral Fellow, Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY (1990); Staff Development Fellow, Canada-Nigeria Linkage Programme in Women’s Studies, Institute for the Study of Women, Mount Saint Vincent University, and Centre for International Studies, Dalhousie University, both in Halifax, Canada (1988). Professor Táíwò is the author of Legal Naturalism: A Marxist Theory of Law (1996). His book, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (2010), was a joint winner of the Frantz Fanon Book Award of the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2015. His works have been translated into French, German, Italian and Chinese.
Alexis B. Tengan
is a Ghanaian Independent Scholar in social and cultural anthropology resident in Belgium and a former teacher of Religious Sciences. He studied at the University of Ghana (Accra), at Lumen Vitae Pastoral Institute (Brussels) and at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He has taught for many years, both in Ghana and in Belgium. He has also been a visiting scholar to many higher institutions in Europe and Africa. He has carried out research on farming systems throughout northern Ghana; on the relationship between art, medicine and religion; and on the Dagara Bagr secret society and myths. His publications in these areas include Mythical Narratives in Ritual: Dagara Black Bagr (2006) and The Art of Mythical Composition and Narration: Dagara White Bagr (2012), both published by Peter Lang. He has established and is curating a private museum of sacred art and objects, with studios in Belgium and Ghana.
Kwasi Wiredu
is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, where he has been based since 1987. He gained his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Legon and did his graduate work at Oxford University, where he studied with Peter Strawson and Stuart Hampshire as his tutors and Gilbert Ryle as his thesis supervisor. He has held visiting professorships at a number of universities, including the University of California at Los Angeles (1979), the University of Ibadan (1984) in Nigeria, and Duke University (1994, 1999–2001) in Durham, North Carolina, USA. Upon graduation he was posted to North Staffordshire at the (now named) University of Keele. He returned to Ghana upon his graduation from Oxford to head the Department of Philosophy at Legon, where he taught for twenty-three years. He has been a visiting professor at UCLA, at Duke University, at the University of Richmond in Virginia, and at Carleton College in Minnesota. He is Vice-President of the Inter-African Council for Philosophy, and for fifteen years has been a member of the Committee of Directors of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies. He has been a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and of the US National Humanities Center. His work has been the subject of session panels internationally (including the World Congress of Philosophy at Brighton, UK in 1988, and the online multilingual polylogue, whose 2002 theme was “Kwasi Wiredu’s Ethics of Consensus”). He has been honoured with the festschrift The Third Way in African Philosophy, edited by Olusegun Oladipo (2002). His books include the classic Philosophy and an African Culture (1980) and Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (1996). More recently he edited A Companion to African Philosophy (2004).
Helen Yitah
is an associate professor and former head of the Department of English, University of Ghana. She obtained her PhD in English at the University of South Carolina in 2006. A literary scholar and cultural critic, she has published books and essays on gender identity in literature, particularly oral and written African literature, American literature, children’s literature in Ghana and women’s cultural production in colonial and contemporary Ghana. She is the Founding Director of the University of Ghana-Carnegie Writing Centre, which was established through her initiative.