Yaba Badoe | |
|---|---|
 Badoe at the 2015 Zanzibar International Film Festival | |
| Born | 1955 (age 67–68) |
| Nationality | Ghanaian-British |
| Alma mater | King's College, Cambridge |
| Occupation(s) | Documentary filmmaker, journalist and author |
Yaba Badoe (born 1955) is a Ghanaian-British documentary filmmaker, journalist and author. [1]
Yaba Badoe was born in Tamale, northern Ghana. [2] She left Ghana to be educated in Britain at a very young age. [3] A graduate of King's College, Cambridge, Badoe worked as a civil servant at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ghana, [3] before beginning her career in journalism as a trainee at the BBC. [4] She also was a researcher at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. She has taught in Spain and Jamaica and has worked as a producer and director making documentaries for the main television channels in Britain. [5] Among her credits are: Black and White (1987), an investigation into race and racism in Bristol, using hidden video cameras for BBC1; I Want Your Sex (1991), an arts documentary exploring images and myths surrounding black sexuality in Western art, literature, film and photography, for Channel 4; and the six-part series Voluntary Service Overseas for ITV in 2002. [5]
In addition to making films, Badoe is a creative writer, her first novel, True Murder, being published in London by Jonathan Cape in 2009. [6] Reviewing True Murder in The Africa Report , Zagba Oyortey described it as "a rich complex of wonder, loss, friendship and prescience from the viewpoint of Ajuba, an African girl transposed from her idyllic home in Ghana to a boarding school in rural England after the collapse of her parents’ marriage." [7] Her short story "The Rivals" was included in the anthology African Love Stories (Ayebia, 2006), edited by Ama Ata Aidoo. [8] She has also written three children's books. [9]
Badoe directed and co-produced (with Amina Mama) the documentary film The Witches of Gambaga , which won Best Documentary at the Black International Film Festival in 2010, and was awarded Second Prize in the Documentary section of FESPACO 2011. [10] Badoe's most recent film, launched in 2014, is entitled The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo . [11] [12]
In 2016, Badoe participated in the conference-festival "Telling Our Stories of Home: Exploring and Celebrating Changing African and Africa-Diaspora Communities" in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. [13]
She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa , edited by Margaret Busby. [14]
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.
Amina Mama is a Nigerian-British writer, feminist and academic. Her main areas of focus have been post-colonial, militarist and gender issues. She has lived in Africa, Europe, and North America, and worked to build relationships between feminist intellectuals across the globe.
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.
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.
Anowa is a play by Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo that was published in 1970, after Aidoo returned from Stanford University in California to teach at the University of Cape Coast. Anowa is based on a traditional Ghanaian tale of a daughter who rejects suitors proposed by her parents Osam and Badua, and marries a stranger who ultimately is revealed as the Devil in disguise. The play is set in the 1870s on the Gold Coast, and tells the story of the heroine Anowa's failed marriage to the slave trader Kofi Ako.
Micere Githae Mugo was a Kenyan playwright, author, activist, instructor and poet. She was a literary critic and professor of literature in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University. She was forced into exile in 1982 from Kenya during the Daniel Arap Moi dictatorship for activism and moved to teach in Zimbabwe, and later in the United States. Mwalimu Mugo taught Orature, Literature, and Creative Writing.
Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint is the debut novel of Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo, first published by Longman in 1977. It has been called "a witty, experimental work whose main point is a stylish dismissal of characteristic attitudes of both the white world and the black middle class." It was described by one reviewer as "a strikingly unusual and pertinent commentary on the African encounter with the West, on European soil.... Without being a conventional narrative or biography, it is a text that uses the framework of an account of a state-sponsored visit to Germany by a young Ghanaian woman to analyse what Europe is and does to those Africans whom it 'sponsors' and educates."
Gambaga Witch camp is a segregated community within Gambaga township in the North East Region of Ghana established as a shelter to accommodate alleged witches and wizards who are banished from their communities.
The Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA) is an organization for women writers in Africa. Founded in 1991, the OWWA aims to promote the oral and written literature of African women, and address issues concerning publishing, censorship and human progress.
Esi Sutherland-Addy is a Ghanaian academic, writer, educationalist, and human rights activist. She is a professor at the Institute of African Studies, where she has been senior research fellow, head of the Language, Literature, and Drama Section, and associate director of the African Humanities Institute Program at the University of Ghana. She is credited with more than 50 publications in the areas of education policy, higher education, female education, literature, theatre and culture, and serves on numerous committees, boards and commissions locally and internationally. She is the daughter of writer and cultural activist Efua Sutherland.
Cinema of Ghana also known as the Ghana Film Industry nicknamed Ghallywood, began when early film making was first introduced to the British colony of Gold Coast in 1923. At the time only affluent people could see the films, especially the colonial master of Gold Coast. In the 1950s, film making in Ghana began to increase. Cinemas were the primary venue for watching films until home video became more popular. The movie industry has no official name as yet since consultations and engagements with stakeholders has been ongoing when a petition was sent to the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture which suspended the use of the name Black Star Films.
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."
The Witches of Gambaga is a Ghanaian 2011 documentary film directed by Yaba Badoe and produced by Amina Mama.
The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo is a 2014 Ghanaian documentary written and directed by Yaba Badoe.
Nana Sandy Achampong is a Ghanaian media practitioner, novelist, poet and educator. He has worked in the fields of journalism, public relations, advertising, marketing, the visual arts and literature in Ghana, the United Kingdom and the United States. He is an author with books that cover the different genres of poetry, play, for children, fiction, non-fiction, Christian, media and anthology. He currently teaches at the African University College of Communications, where he is also the Director of the Ama Ata Aidoo Centre for Creative Writing.
The Dilemma of a Ghost is a play by Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo that was first performed in March 1964 for three nights at the Open Air Theatre of the University of Ghana, Legon, where the author was in her final year of studies, a few months away from graduating. The play was published by Longman the following year, making Aidoo the first published African woman dramatist. It was subsequently published in an edition with Aidoo's second play, Anowa (1970), both works dealing with the differences between Western culture and African traditions.
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