We are delighted to announce that our long-time friend and collaborator, Professor Kofi Anyidoho, FGA, was recently inducted into the Royal Society of Edinburgh as a Corresponding Fellow.

Professor Anyidoho joins the RSE’s current roll of around 1,600 leading thinkers and practitioners from Scotland and beyond. He is one of seven Corresponding Fellows from around the world to receive this honour in 2021. Those who are elected to the Fellowship have undergone a rigorous assessment of their achievements, professional standing and the contribution they and their work make to wider society.

Prof Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair, read the citation for Prof Anyidoho at the official induction celebration on Wednesday 28 April, which you can read in full below.

Our heartfelt congratulations to Prof Anyidoho!

More information and a full list of the fellows can be found at the RSE Website 

 

Citation for Professor Kofi Anyidoho

Written and read by Professor Alison Phipps OBE, PhD, FRSE, AcSS, FRSA

“We lost our breath among the hostile winds”

These are the words of the poet and pioneer scholar of African Humanities at University of Ghana Legon, Professor Kofi Anyidoho.

The winds have indeed been hostile.

With a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Austin, Texas, and an MA in folklore studies from University of Bloomington, Indiana Kofi Anyidoho began the work of creating a disciplinary space in the academy for the equitable consideration of forms of knowledge and literature in particular, which had been enslaved, erased and denigrated for centuries.

Widely acclaimed as one of Africa’s best contemporary bi-lingual poets, his poetry is rooted in ancestral tradition of guardians of the sacred word, his mother, grandfather and other family members well-known as poet-cantors. His work as a scholar is also dedicated to foregrounding significant dimensions of African and Pan-African traditions of knowledge, even as he seeks to establish important interconnections with other traditions of knowledge based on his training in comparative literature and multidisciplinary approaches to knowledge production. Kofi Anyidoho is an exponent par excellence of archaeologies of knowledge which have enabled traces of lost histories to be found in oral history, oral and written literatures, the performing arts and traditional African architecture.

First Occupant of the Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies at the University of Ghana; Kwame Nkrumah Centenary Lecturer, Julius Nyerere Intellectual Festival lecture University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Millennium Excellence Award 2015 Laureate for the Literature Prize. As Vice-President (Arts) of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences [GAAS], Chairman of the Board of Governors of NAFTI (National Film and Television Institute) and Chairman of the Founding Governing Council of the University of Health and Allied Sciences, Ho., Kofi Anyidoho has contributed significantly to the academic health and infrastructure of his native Ghana, but has also worked widely across the continent and globally, serving as Africa Regional Chairman and Member, Pan-Commonwealth Panel, Commonwealth Writers Prize [1999-2000]; And he is as active as ever in his ‘retirement,’ contributing across Africa to work on Volume Nine of UNESCO’s History of Africa Project, the African Union Encyclopaedia Africana Project and several cultural and artistic endeavours.

At a time when both contemporary humanities scholarship and social movements world-wide have taken a lively interest in slavery past and present, and when the repercussions continue to be felt through historical trauma and the de-development of Africa by Europe, it is fitting that the Royal Society of Edinburgh would honour to one of Africa’s greatest living humanities scholars. As the Royal Society of Edinburgh actively considers how to engage with its own history and slave legacies the election of Prof Anyidoho to this Corresponding role is a fresh sign of hope that perhaps the hostile winds may be set fair soon.

For his pioneering work in the development of African Humanities the Society is humbled and honoured to admit Professor Kofi Anyidoho as a Corresponding Fellow.

Akpe Akpe Akpe.

[Ululation]

First published: 10 May 2021

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