SUTHERLAND, EFUA
- 4 Min Read
PHOTO CAPTION: Efua Sutherland. SOURCE: Efua Sutherland Legacy.
Efua Theodora Sutherland (27 June 1924 – 2 January 1996), was a Ghanaian playwright, director, researcher, children’s author, poet, dramatist, educationist, child advocate, and cultural activist. A pioneer in establishing post-independence cultural institutions, she founded the Ghana Society of Writers, the Ghana Experimental Theatre, and the Ghana Drama Studio.
She was born on June 27, 1924, in Cape Coast, Ghana, then the British colony of the Gold Coast. She was named after her maternal great grandmother Nana Ama She studied at St Monica’s Training College in Mampong, Ghana. 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, and also began writing for children.
In 1958, Sutherland founded the Ghana Experimental Theatre, which was based at the Ghana Drama Studio built by Sutherland and launched by President Kwame Nkrumah in 1963 with Joe de Graft as its first director.
The Drama Studio produced a number of her plays, including the well-known Foriwa (1962), a play which stresses the alliance of new ways and old traditions, and Edufa (1967), based on Alcestis by Euripides. The Marriage of Anansewa: A Storytelling Drama appeared in 1975.
Sutherland founded the Drama Studio as a workshop for writers who create content for children. The studio quickly became a training ground for Ghanaian playwrights. Sutherland herself authored several works for children, including two animated rhythm plays, Vulture! Vulture! and Tahinta (both 1968), as well as two pictorial essays, Playtime in Africa (1960) and The Roadmakers (1961).
PHOTO CAPTION: Her 1960 essay Playtime in Africa, co-authored with Willis E Bell.
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 1980’s by her leadership in the development of a model public children’s parks system for the country as Chair of the Ghana National Commission on Children.
Sutherland’s Pan-Africanism was reflected in her support for its principles and her collaborations with eminent 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, Felix Morisseau-Leroi, Es’kia Mphahlele, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
Many of Sutherland’s works were broadcast in Ghana on a popular radio program, “The Singing Net,” and most of her unpublished plays were performed by drama groups in Ghana. Many of her short stories can be described as rhythmic prose poems; one of her later plays, Nyamekye, a version of Alice in Wonderland, shows the influence of the folk opera tradition. Sutherland’s book of fairy tales and folklore of Ghana, The Voice in the Forest, was published in 1983.
Her final most significant work at the Institute of African Studies, Legon, was her Children’s Drama Development Project, which was aimed at developing materials, methods and staff for programmes of creative dramatics in and out of school. Sutherland was invited by UNICEF to join a worldwide network of scholars to consider a code of human rights for the protection of children.
Sutherland was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Ghana in 1991, received the Noble Patron of the Arts Award from the Ghana Association of Writers, also in 1991, and won the Flag Star Award of the Arts Critics and Reviewers Association of Ghana in 1995.
PHOTO CAPTION: Efua Sutherland Children’s Park. SOURCE: Modern Ghana.
Efua Sutherland died in Accra aged 71 in 1996. Along with many of her other forward-looking initiatives, Sutherland leaves behind a legacy of inspiring ideas that continue to be explored. The popular children’s park in Accra has been named after her due to her immense contribution on child advocacy as the Chairperson of the Commission on Children.
EA EDITORS
