1935 — Kofi Awoonor, Ghana's Ewe Poet, Is Born

On March 13, 1935, Kofi Awoonor was born in Wheta, in Ghana's Volta Region, the eldest of ten, raised on his grandmother's Ewe dirge songs. He carried those rhythms into English poetry, from the 1964 collection Rediscovery to the novel This Earth, My Brother, giving Ghana's postcolonial voice its unmistakable cadence.

A teacher, founder of the Ghana Playhouse, and later Ghana's envoy to the United Nations, his life was sung in two languages until it ended in tragedy at Nairobi's Westgate mall in 2013. The dirge songs of his childhood home became, in his hands, a literature the whole world could read.