The renowned African poet, Kofi Awoonor, was one of the victims of the terrorist killings in Nairobi that have claimed at least 62 lives, it has emerged. Awoonor, aged 78, a Ghanaian poet, diplomat and academic, had been in Nairobi for the Storymoja Hay festival. Kwame Dawes, Ghanaian-born Jamaican poet and writer, said in an article in the Wall Street Journal:   “I had asked him to attend the festival to help celebrate some new initiatives in African poetry that I was spearheading.

“I saw him a day earlier than that fateful day.  It had been a few years since I had last seen him in Ghana.  We embraced.  We laughed a lot, sharing witty and biting jokes in sotto voce during an often-amusing press conference.  That afternoon he gave hope and encouragement to so many poets and writers who gathered to hear him offer a master class for poets.”

Kofi Awoonor was born in Ghana in 1935. His collections of poems include The House by the Sea, which chronicled his time in detention in Ghana on death row in the 1970s. His son, who was with him in the Westgate Mall, was wounded in the gunfire from attackers believed to be Somali Islamists.

Awoonor’s first collection, Rediscovery and Other Poems, was published in 1964. He was Ghana’s ambassador to the United Nations between 1990 and 1994. Earlier this year it was announced that The Promise of Hope, a collection of his new and selected poems from 1964 to 2013, would be published next year.

Kwame Dawes added: “Awoonor’s verse is distinguished by its almost seamless combination of the syntax, cadence, and posture of the traditional Ewe poetic tradition, and the lyric concerns of modernist poetry.  His confidence in his Ewe voice and culture made him more likely to reshape English prosody than for English prosody to alter him.

“In his last poems, he continues his fascinating dance with the prospect of death that began with the tactile and violent possibilities that haunted him during his time in prison.  Now, he embraces inevitability and faces it with grace and peace.”

You can read one of Kofi Awoonor’s poems here