ABSTRACT
Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor was born on March 13, 1935, in the small farming village of Wheta in the Volta region of Ghana. His maternal grandfather, Chief Nyidevu Besa, was a noted elder of the Asiyo division of the Ewe and a successful farmer. His father was a tailor by trade. Kofi Awoonor’s primary-school education was at the Catholic Mission at Dzodze, which he attended from 1939 to 1943, and then at Bremen School at Keta, a school founded by Presbyterians on land given to them by Awoonor’s great-grandfather in 1847. This early missionary education proved to be a significant factor in his work, which reflects, on many levels, the struggle to free himself from the values and attitudes acquired during his colonialist education. In his first volume of poetry, he was to make explicit reference to the necessity of abandoning the Christianity taught to him at the mission schools to embrace his traditional religion.
