Who Was Efua Sutherland?

Efua Theodora Sutherland (born 27 June 1924 – 2 January 1996) also known as Efua Nyankoma; Efua Theodora Morgue; Efua Theodora Sutherland was a Fante playwright, director, dramatist, children’s author, poet, educationalist, researcher, child advocate, and cultural activist. Her works include the plays Foriwa (1962), Edufa (1967), and The Marriage of Anansewa (1975). She founded the Ghana Drama Studio, the Ghana Society of Writers, the Ghana Experimental Theatre, and a community project called the Kodzidan (Story House). As Ghana’s earliest playwright-director, she was an influential figure in the development of modern Ghanaian theatre, and helped to introduce the study of African performance traditions at university level. She was also a pioneering African publisher, establishing the company Afram Publications in Accra in the 1970s.

She was a cultural advocate for children from the early 1950s until her death, and played a role in developing educational curricula, literature, theatre and film for and about Ghanaian children. Her 1960 photo essay Playtime in Africa, co-authored with Willis E. Bell, highlighted the centrality of play in children’s development and was followed in the 1980s by her leadership in the development of a model public children’s parks system for the country.

Sutherland’s pan-Africanism was reflected in her support for its principles and her collaborations with African and African diaspora personalities in a range of disciplines, including interactions with Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Maya Angelou, W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois, Margaret Busby, Tom Feelings, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King, Femi Osofisan, Félix Morisseau-Leroy, Es’kia Mphahlele, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Having in 1980 written an original proposal for a pan-African historical theatre festival in Ghana as a cultural vehicle for bringing together Africans around the globe, Sutherland was the inspiration behind the biennial Pan-African festival of theatre arts known as PANAFEST, first held in 1992.

Efua Sutherland died in Accra aged 71 in 1996.

Her Education and Early Career

She was born as Efua Theodora Morgue in Cape Coast, Gold Coast (now Ghana), where she studied teaching at St Monica’s Training College in Mampong. She then went to England to continue her education, earning a BA degree at Homerton College, Cambridge University — one of the first African women to study there — and studying linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Returning to Ghana in 1951, she taught first at Fijai Secondary School at Sekondi, then at St. Monica’s School (1951–54), and also began writing for children. She would later say: “I started writing seriously in 1951. I can even remember the precise time. It was at Easter. I had been thinking about the problem of literature in my country for a very long time. I was on teaching practice with my students once in a village and I got positively angry about the kind of literature that the children were being forced into. It had nothing to do with their environment, their social circumstances or anything. And so I started writing.”

In 1954, she married Bill Sutherland, an African American and Pan-Africanist, who in 1953 had moved to Ghana. They had three children – educationalist Esi Sutherland-Addy, architect Ralph Sutherland, and lawyer Amowi Sutherland Phillips) – and she helped her husband in the establishment of a school in the Transvolta area.

Source: Everything Fante