Sunsum Sessions –
Literature
Accra, 1st March 2018
The legacy of pioneer playwright Efua Sutherland, Ghana’s queen of literature Ama Ata Aidoo, dramatist Nana Akosua Hanson, artist Dorethy Amenuke, and photographer Josephine Kuuire.
Ama Ata Aidoo
Aidoo is a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright and academic. She was a Minister of Education in Ghana under the Jerry Rawlings administration. She lives in Ghana, where in 2000 she established the Mbaasem Foundation to promote and support the work of African women writers. Aidoo's works of fiction particularly deal with the tension between Western and African world views. Her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy, was published in 1977 and remains one of her most popular works. Many of Aidoo's protagonists are women who defy the stereotypical women's roles of their time, as in her play Anowa. Her novel Changes won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Africa). She is also an accomplished poet—her collection Someone Talking to Sometime won the Nelson Mandela Prize for Poetry in 1987—and has written several children's books.
Dorothy Akpene Amenuke
Dorothy Akpene Amenuke is an artist living and working in Kumasi, Ghana. Amenuke’s art involves the manipulation of a variety of fabrics and fibres through cutting, dying, tying, knotting, pasting, weaving and modeling into objects and spatial installations that evoke feelings of containment and maybe protectedness of even subtle repulsion. Devotion becomes a recurring metaphor in her use of materials, laborious processes and communal strategies in the production of her work. These are not mere repetitive obsessive actions but some sort of cumulative prayer. Amenuke is a lecturer in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, College of Art and Built Environment, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi. Amenuke has directed the International Women Artists Workshop (IWAWO 2009) organized by Art In Aktion in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Accra and currently coordinates the itinerant OFKOB Artists’ Residency in Ghana. Amenuke was the recipient of the 2012 Howard Kestenbaum/Vijay Paramsothy International Fellowship in the Haystack Mountain School of crafts, USA, and her work, “How Far How Near”, is in the collection of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (SMA).
Nana Akosua Hanson
Nana Akosua Hanson is a co‐host of Celebrity Fanzone on GH One, a TV Show hosted by three women which focuses on women’s point of view on trending topics in politics, popular culture, entertainment, societal issues and much more. She is the host of the Y Lounge on Y 107.9FM, a youth station dedicated to providing entertainment and education for Ghana’s youth through urban radio. Nana Akosua is a 2016 Mandela Washington Fellow in President Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative. An MA/MPHIL student in the University of Ghana, Institute of African Studies, her research and thesis topic is centered on Culture and Gender in Africa: Rape Culture in Accra. She is the founder of Drama Queens, which aims through theatre to encourage a richer conversation around women’s lives, their roles in society and in world progress. By providing edgy, modern plays that challenge the status quo, Drama Queens aims to encourage its audience to question patriarchal rules, norms and ideas about gender and the role of the female.
Josephine Kuuire
Digital artist Josephine Kuuire’s body of work relies on digital manipulation and portraiture to provide alternate representations of the self. Using herself as a muse, she looks inward through her lens to examine deep-seated conflicts that echo gender, identity and representation debates. Staring at Kuuire’s nuanced reconstructed shots, you get a sense of longing and search, maybe for healing or respite? She has had several major exhibitions and is the winner of the Portraits Ghana Photography Prize.
Efua Sutherland
Ghanaian playwright, poet, teacher, and children’s author, who founded the Drama Studio in Accra(now the Writers’ Workshop in the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon). After completing her studies at the Teacher Training College in Ghana, Sutherland went to England to do further work at Homerton College, Cambridge, and at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Upon her return to Accra, she helped to establish the literary magazine Okyeame, founded the Experimental Theatre, which became the Ghana Drama Studio, and directed the University of Ghana’s traveling theatre group. The Drama Studio produced a number of her plays, including the well-known Foriwa (1962), a play which stresses the alliance of new ways and old traditions, and Edufa (1967), based on Alcestis by Euripides. The Marriage of Anansewa: A Storytelling Drama appeared in 1975. Many of Sutherland’s works were broadcast in Ghana on a popular radio program, “The Singing Net,” and most of her unpublished plays were performed by drama groups in Ghana
