Atukwei Okai

Atukwei John Okai was a Ghanaian poet, cultural activist and academic. Rooted in oral tradition, he is generally regarded as the first real performance poet to emerge from Africa. He was the first Secretary-General of the Pan African Writers' Association (PAWA) from 1989 until his death, and a president of the Ghana Association of Writers.

Early life and education

He was born on 15 March 1941 in Accra. From the age of three he spent eight years in the Northern Region, where his Ga father was a headmaster at Gambaga, and attended Gambaga Native Authority School and Nalerigu Middle Boys' School before returning to Methodist Middle Boys' School and Accra High School in Accra. At 16 he became the youngest member of the new Ghana Society of Writers. In 1961 a scholarship from Kwame Nkrumah's government sent him to Moscow, where he earned an MA from the Gorky Literary Institute in 1967, and in 1971 he took an MPhil at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London.

Poetry

His first major collection, The Oath of the Fontomfrom and Other Poems, appeared in New York in 1971, followed by Lorgorligi Logarithms (1974), which sets Ga and English side by side. His poems have been translated into Russian, Spanish, German, Arabic, French and Italian. In 1975 he performed at Poetry International at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London alongside Robert Lowell, Stanley Kunitz and Nicolás Guillén.

Academic and PAWA

He taught Russian literature at the University of Ghana from 1971, became a senior research fellow in African literature at its Institute of African Studies in 1984, and headed the Ga-Dangme education department at the University of Education, Winneba. In 1989 he was elected PAWA's first Secretary-General, and in 1991 the Entertainment Critics and Reviewers Association of Ghana gave him its highest award, the Flagstar, the first time a writer had received it.

Death

He died after a short illness at Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital on 13 July 2018, aged 77, survived by his wife Beatrice and five daughters. After a state-assisted funeral at the Accra International Conference Centre on 13 September 2018, he was buried at the Military Cemetery at Burma Camp.