Atukwei Okai

Atukwei John Okai (15 March 1941 – 13 July 2018) was a Ghanaian poet, cultural activist and academic. He was Secretary-General of the Pan African Writers' Association, and a president of the Ghana Association of Writers. Quotes I was lucky to have grown up in a literary home. My father was a school headmaster in Gambaga in the Northern Region, and he loved books. I grew up and had my formative years in Gambaga from age of three, for eight years. I attended the school where my father was the head. It was a unique school where the five hundred pupils were encouraged to recite the Lord's Prayer in their own languages. And we all participated in whatever language was chosen. That really fostered a true sense of comradeship among the students. It also made us less clannish, and helped us to develop appreciation for other people's culture. You can imagine the pride I enjoyed when fifty or so years later, I chanted parts of the Lord's Prayer in Yoruba to an amazed audience in Lagos, during the presentation of my poem, “Fanfare for Oduduwa”. My father was a true Pan-Africanist with friends from all over Africa. I grew up with some Yoruba students in my house, and could speak sentences of Yoruba. I still remember the colours of the environment, the sonorous songs of the birds, and the graceful agility of the animals. On one occasion the townsfolk succeeded in killing a huge lion that had been terrorizing the community. As the procession of hunters bearing the “palanquined” but vanquished lion got close to our classrooms, all of us pupils jumped over the ledges of our large low windows and ran to join the procession to the chief's courtyard. I became a member at age sixteen, when it was founded in 1957. The youngest member, I was then at the Accra High School. When I finished school in 1960, to help me earn some income, I assisted the Society's secretary, Miss Cecile Mchardy, who was then the secretary to Commander Jackson, who was in the Akosombo Project. Working out of her office, I was put in charge of the distribution of the maiden issue of the society's literary journal, perhaps the Country's first, The Okyeame Magazine. External links Category:Poets from Ghana Category:Academics from Ghana Category:Cultural critics Category:1941 births Category:2018 deaths