Efua Sutherland (Efua Theodora Morgue Sutherland) Biography

Ghanaian playwright, born in Cape Coast, Ghana; she trained as a teacher at Homerton College, Cambridge, and subsequently entered London University's School of Oriental and African Studies. In 1951 she returned to Ghana to teach. She founded the Ghana Drama Studio in Accra in 1957, a seminal resource which was superseded by the National Theatre in 1990; she also established the School of Performing Arts at the University of Ghana in 1964. Her plays include Foriwa (1962), a plea for the acceptance of social change; Edufa (1967), a dramatization of tensions between inherited belief and modernity; and The Marriage of Anansewa (1975), which presents a comic fable of cultural manipulation. Much of her writing attempts to fuse traditional Ghanaian dramatic conventions and urgently contemporary themes. Her other works include the documentary essays of The Roadmakers (1961) and The Original Bob (1970), a biography of the celebrated Ghanaian comedian Bob Johnson.