Ato Sekyi-Otu

Ato Sekyi-Otu
Born	Daniel Sackey Walker 1941 (age 83–84) Saltpond, Ghana
Nationality	Ghanaian
Education	A.B. in Government, PhD in Political Philosophy
Alma mater	Harvard, University of Toronto
Occupation(s)	Political philosopher, Emeritus Professor

Ato Sekyi-Otu is a Ghanaian political philosopher. He was born at Saltpond, Ghana in 1941 and until 1971 was known as Daniel Sackey Walker. He was educated at Mfantsipim School, Cape Coast, where he was Head Prefect in 1960-61 and completed his Cambridge Higher School Certificate in 1961 with distinctions in Greek and Latin. He went to Harvard and received an A.B. in Government in 1966. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Toronto where he worked with the renowned Canadian political theorist C.B. Macpherson and received his PhD in 1971.

Sekyi-Otu taught in the Department of Social Science and the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto until he retired in 2006 as Emeritus Professor. He is best known for his work on Frantz Fanon and Ayi Kwei Armah. In 1996 he wrote an acknowledged classic in the literature on Fanon entitled "Fanon's Dialectic of Experience" published by Harvard University Press. His most recent book is "Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays published by Routledge in 2019, which won the 2019 Caribbean Philosophical Association Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award.

Sekyi-Otu's work has been widely taken up in South Africa and in the Caribbean

His son of the same name is the chief of orthopedic surgery at William Osler Brampton.

Visit to the Bisa Aberwa Museum

During his visit to the Bisa Aberwa Museum and the launch of F. L. Bartels final book, Sekyi-Otu delivered a tribute addressed to the museum creator ^[1] .

Sekyi-Otu explains how the sculptures and artworks in the museum are the "physical embodiment" ^[1] of the many themes and stories him and others have discussed before. The many details of them emphasize "our hidden potentiality" ^[1] that African art and history represents.

Published works

• Fanon's Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) ^[2]
• Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays (Routledge, 2019) ^[3]
• Homestead, Homeland, Home: Critical Reflections (Daraja Press, 2023) ^[4]
• Author's Response (Journal of the African Literature Association, 2019) ^[5]
• Form and metaphor in Fanon's critique of racial and colonial domination (University of Toronto Press, 1975) ^[6]
• Review of Ato Sekyi-Otu: Fanon's Dialectic of Experience (Ethics 108, 1998) ^[7]

• Fanon and the Possibility of Postcolonial Critical Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2011) ^[8]

References

1. Bisa Aberwa Museum (2024-11-05). Ato Sekyi-Otu; Emeritus Professor of social and political thought visits Bisa Aberwa Museum . Retrieved 2025-10-21– via YouTube.
2. Sekyi-Otu, Ato (1996-12-31). Fanon's Dialectic of Experience. Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/9780674043442. ISBN   978-0-674-04344-2.
3. Sekyi-Otu, Ato (2019). Left universalism, Africacentric essays. New York London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN   978-1-138-61177-1.
4. Sekyi-Otu, Ato (June 2023). Homestead, Homeland, Home: Critical Reflections. Daraja Press. ISBN   978-1-990-26354-5.
5. Babanovski, Ivan (2019-05-04). ""A Surreal World": Enigmatic Hermeneutics and the Ethical Turn in Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays". Journal of the African Literature Association. 13 (2): 274–278. doi:10.1080/21674736.2019.1594864. ISSN   2167-4736.
6. Sekyi-Otu, Ato (1975-12-31), "Form and metaphor in Fanon's critique of racial and colonial domination", Domination, University of Toronto Press, pp. 133–162, doi:10.3138/9781442623149-009, ISBN   978-1-4426-2314-9 , retrieved 2025-10-28
7. Sekyi-Otu, Ato (1996-12-31). Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/9780674043442. ISBN   978-0-674-04344-2.
8. Fanon, Frantz (2011). Gibson, Nigel C. (ed.). Living Fanon: global perspectives. Contemporary black history. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan US. ISBN   978-0-230-11999-4.