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Kenya Westgate Mall Terrorists Kill Ghana Elder Professor Kofi Awoonor | General News | Forum

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Sept. 21, 2013

NewsRescue– Ghana’s Senior citizen, poet and author, Professor Kofi Awoonor, 78, was among the victims who were killed in the September 21, 2013 terrorist attack at Westgate Shopping Mall, Nairobi, Kenya.

So far, 39 people have been killed in the terrorist attack at the Kenyan mall. The radical Islamist Al-Shabaab group has claimed responsibility for the deadly attack which led to a hostage situation. Several other foreigners have also been reported killed in the tragedy the upscale mall.

Kofi Awoonor (13 March 1935 – 21 September 2013) was a Ghanaian poet and author whose work combined the poetic traditions of his native Ewe people and contemporary and religious symbolism to depict Africa during decolonization. He started writing under the name George Awoonor-Williams.

Kofi Awoonor is a lecturer in English and African literature at the University of Ghana. He directed the Ghana Film Corporation. He also founded and directed the Ghana Playhouse. Kofi Awooner served as an editor of the literary journal Okyeame and as an associate editor of Transition. He is the author of several volumes of poetry, including Night of My Blood, Ride Me, Memory, The House by the Sea, and The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook. His collected poems (through 1985) were published in Until the Morning After. –Bio

Awoonor was born in Ghana when it was still called the Gold Coast. He went to university there and went on to teach African literature at the University of Ghana. While at the University of Ghana he wrote his first poetry book, Rediscovery. Like the rest of his work, Rediscovery is based on African oral poetry. In Ghana he managed the Ghana Film Corporation and founded the Ghana Play House. He then studied literature at the University of London, and while in England he wrote several radio plays for the BBC. He spent the early 1970s in the United States, studying and teaching at universities. While in the USA he wrote This Earth, My Brother, and My Blood. Awoonor returned to Ghana in 1975 as head of the English department at the University of Cape Coast. Within months he was arrested for helping a soldier accused of trying to overthrow the military government and was imprisoned without trial. After ten months he was found guilty and released. The house by the Sea is about his time in jail. After imprisonment Awoonor became politically active and has written mostly nonfiction. From 1990 to 1994 Awoonor was Ghana’s Ambassador to the United Nations where he headed the committee against apartheid. -Bio: Wikipedia