Cape Coast is a city, fishing port, and the capital of Cape Coast Metropolitan District and Central Region of Ghana. It is one of the country's most historic cities, a World Heritage Site, home to the Cape Coast Castle, with the Gulf of Guinea situated to its south. It was also the first capital of Ghana. According to the 2021 census, Cape Coast had a settlement population of 189,925 people. The language of the people of Cape Coast is Fante.
Ama Ata Aidoo was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academic. She was Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings's PNDC administration. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist. As a novelist, she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers.
Efua Dorkenoo, OBE, affectionately known as "Mama Efua", was a Ghanaian-British campaigner against female genital mutilation (FGM) who pioneered the global movement to end the practice and worked internationally for more than 30 years to see the campaign "move from a problem lacking in recognition to a key issue for governments around the world."
The Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) is a pan-African non-governmental organization founded in 1992 by five women ministers of education to promote girls’ and women's education in sub-Saharan Africa by making sure they have access to schools and are able to complete their studies and fulfill their potential, in line with UNESCO's Education For All movement. The organisation's members include ministers of education, university vice-chancellors, education policy-makers, researchers, gender specialists and human rights activists.
Efua Theodora Sutherland was a Ghanaian 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. 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.
Vida Amaadi Yeboah (1944-2006) was a former Ghanaian educator, politician and civic leader. Deputy Minister of Education and Culture from 1988 to 1993, Yeboah helped found the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) in 1992. Elected member of parliament in 1992, Yeboah became a member of Jerry Rawlings' government, serving as tourism minister from 1997 to 2001.
Okyeame was a literary magazine founded by the Ghana Society of Writers in the post-Independence era, which saw the rapid rise of a new generation of thinkers, writers and poets in the country. The first issue of Okyeame appeared in 1960, and issues were published, at irregular intervals, up until 1972. Inspired by Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister of Ghana, the publication sought to explore the experiences of Africa from a new intellectual framework. Writers published in the magazine include its first editor Kofi Awoonor, Efua Sutherland, Ayi Kwei Armah and Ama Ata Aidoo.
Asiedu Yirenkyi was a Ghanaian playwright, actor, director, theatre company manager and author of screen plays. He was born Emmanuel Asiedu Yirenchi at Akropong-Akuapem in the Eastern Region of Ghana to Charles Okata Yirenkyi, a farmer and Comfort Yaa Nyarkoa, a homemaker. He was the younger brother of the late Ghanaian actor and film maker Rev. Kofi Yirenkyi.
Christine Dranzoa was a Ugandan university professor, academic administrator, biologist, terrestrial ecologist and community leader. She was, at the time of her death, the Vice Chancellor of Muni University, one of the public universities in Uganda.
The African University College of Communications is a private tertiary institution at Adabraka, Accra, Ghana, for the study and teaching of journalism, communication studies, information technology convergence, business, African Studies, providing opportunities for advanced learning, and practical and professional training for the rapid growth and development of Africa.
Tobe Levin Freifrau von Gleichen, a multi-lingual scholar, translator, editor and activist, is an Associate of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University; a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Gender Studies Centre, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford; an activist against female genital mutilation (FGM) and professor of English Emerita at the University of Maryland, University College.
Marian Ewurama Addy was a Ghanaian biochemist and the first Host of the National Science and Maths Quiz. The first Ghanaian woman to attain the rank of full professor of natural science, Addy became a role model for school girls and budding female scientists on the limitless opportunities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Marian Addy was also a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, elected in 1999. In the same year, she was awarded the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science.
Joy Constance Kwesiga is a Ugandan academic, academic administrator, gender specialist, and community activist. She is the vice chancellor of Kabale University, a public institution of higher education in Uganda and accredited by the Uganda National Council for Higher Education in 2005.
Mabel Dove Danquah was a Gold Coast-born journalist, political activist, and creative writer, one of the earliest women in West Africa to work in these fields. As Francis Elsbend Kofigah notes in relation to Ghana's literary pioneers, "before the emergence of such strong exponents of literary feminism as Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, there was Mabel Dove Danquah, the trail-blazing feminist." She used various pseudonyms in her writing for newspapers from the 1930s: "Marjorie Mensah" in The Times of West Africa; "Dama Dumas" in the African Morning Post; "Ebun Alakija" in the Nigerian Daily Times; and "Akosua Dzatsui" in the Accra Evening News. Entering politics in the 1950s before Ghana's independence, she became the first woman to be elected a member of any African legislative assembly. She created the awareness and the need for self-governance through her works.
Abena Pokua Adompim Busia is a Ghanaian writer, poet, feminist, lecturer and diplomat. She is a daughter of the former prime minister of Ghana, Kofi Abrefa Busia, and is the sister of actress Akosua Busia. Busia is an associate professor of Literature in English, and of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University. She is Ghana's ambassador to Brazil, appointed in 2017, with accreditation to the other 12 republics of South America.
The Mbaasem Foundation is a foundation established by Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo in Accra, Ghana, in 2000. It is a nonprofit foundation dedicated to supporting and promoting the work of African women writers, to "establish and maintain a writing place for women". In 2002 the rented headquarters of the foundation was "likened to the transformation of Ernest Hemingway's home in Chicago into a literary haven and museum". The Foundation states its mission as being "To support the development and sustainability of African women writers and their artistic output", and as its goal: "To create an enabling environment for women to write, tell and publish their stories."
Kate Victoria Teiba Abbam, born Ewura Ekua Badoe was a Ghanaian journalist, editor and consultant on women and development. Abbam founded Ghana's first women's magazine, Obaa Sima, in 1971.
Afua or Efua is an Akan day name traditionally given to girls born on a Friday; the equivalent male name is Kofi.
Ayse Bircan is a Turkish activist and writer. As a young left-wing organizer in Turkey, she was targeted by authorities and fled to England, where her work has focused on refugee rights. Her essay "Black and Turkish" appears in the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa.
