Efua Sutherland

Efua Theodora Sutherland was a Ghanaian playwright, director, poet, children's author and cultural activist, and Ghana's first playwright-director. Her plays include Foriwa, Edufa and The Marriage of Anansewa. She founded the Ghana Drama Studio, the Ghana Society of Writers and the Kodzidan story house at Ekumfi-Atwia, co-founded Afram Publications, and first proposed the festival that became PANAFEST.

Early life and education

She was born Efua Theodora Morgue on 27 June 1924 in Cape Coast. She trained as a teacher at St Monica's Training College in Mampong, then studied at Homerton College, Cambridge, one of the first African women to do so, and read linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Teacher and writer

Back in Ghana in 1951 she taught at Fijai Secondary School in Sekondi and at St Monica's, and began writing for children, angered that the books Ghanaian pupils read had nothing to do with their own lives. In 1954 she married Bill Sutherland, an African American Pan-Africanist, and they had three children: the educationist Esi Sutherland-Addy, the architect Ralph Sutherland and the lawyer Amowi Sutherland Phillips.

Theatre

At independence in 1957 she organised the Ghana Society of Writers, which launched the literary magazine Okyeame in 1960. In 1958 she founded the Ghana Experimental Theatre, based at the Ghana Drama Studio in Accra, which Kwame Nkrumah opened in 1963. That year she joined the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana as a research associate, taking the Drama Studio with her, and she helped create the School of Performing Arts. Her plays turned Akan storytelling into modern theatre: Edufa (1967) reworks Euripides' Alcestis, and The Marriage of Anansewa (1975) is built on Ananse stories. She mentored writers including Ama Ata Aidoo and Kofi Anyidoho.

Children, publishing and PANAFEST

With the photographer Willis E. Bell she produced Playtime in Africa (1960), and in the 1980s she led work on a national system of children's parks. Afram Publications, which she co-founded, was incorporated in 1973 and worked from her home at Dzorwulu, Accra. Her 1980 proposal for a Pan-African historical theatre festival inspired PANAFEST, first held in 1992.

Death

She died in Accra on 2 January 1996, aged 71.