John atukwei okai biography for kids

His early work was published under the name John Okai.

Atukwei okai poems

With his poems rooted in the oral tradition, he is generally acknowledged to have been the first real performance poet to emerge from Africa, and his work has been called "also politically radical and socially conscious, one of his great concerns being Pan-Africanism ". Atukwei Okai was born on 15 March in Accra , Ghana , and from the age of three for eight years lived in the country's Northern Region, where his father Ga by birth was a school headmaster in Gambaga.

In , he went on a scholarship from the government of President Kwame Nkrumah to Moscow , where he earned his M. Nkrumah had meanwhile been overthrown in a coup in , and when Okai returned home the following year, he and other Ghanaian students who had studied in the Soviet Union were not welcomed by the new regime and had difficulty finding employment.

He recalled: "It was a most despondent time of my life I was already a writer and broadcaster of some note before I went to the Soviet Union. It galled greatly that those of us that went to study in the former Eastern Bloc were tarred by the general suspicion attached to socialism in those days. We were not politicians and we did not get our scholarships on our political affiliations.

We were young Ghanaians with passion to help build the country. Okai subsequently took up a post-graduate scholarship from the University of Ghana to pursue studies in the UK , earning his Master of Philosophy M. Atukwei Okai died aged 77 in Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, Accra, on 13 July , after a short illness, survived by his wife Beatrice and their five daughters.