Efua Sutherland built a theatre so Ghanaians could see their own stories. The Marriage of Anansewa is still staged

Efua Sutherland wanted Ghanaian theatre to sound like Ghana. She built the stages, trained the actors and wrote the plays to make it happen.

Efua Theodora Sutherland was born in Cape Coast in 1924. She trained as a teacher, studied in Britain and returned to the Gold Coast in the early 1950s, as the country moved toward independence. She married Bill Sutherland, an African American activist who worked in Ghana, and the couple settled there.

The Drama Studio

In the late 1950s, Sutherland founded the Ghana Drama Studio in Accra, an open-air theatre space for new Ghanaian plays, performed in a style that drew on local traditions rather than copying European drama. The studio became a training ground for writers and actors and later became part of the University of Ghana’s School of Performing Arts.

Anansegoro

Her most original contribution was anansegoro, a form of drama based on anansesem, the Akan tradition of storytelling about Kwaku Ananse, the spider trickster. Traditional storytelling sessions involve a narrator, songs and audience participation, and Sutherland built plays around those elements.

The best-known example is The Marriage of Anansewa, published in 1975. Ananse, broke and scheming, tries to marry his daughter Anansewa to the highest bidder among four chiefs, and his plan spirals out of control. The play is still performed in schools and theatres across Ghana.

Other plays

Sutherland’s other plays include Foriwa, about the revival of a town, and Edufa, a Ghanaian reworking of the Greek story of Alcestis, in which a man allows his wife to die in his place. She also wrote poetry and children’s books, among them Playtime in Africa and The Roadmakers, photo books made with the photographer Willis E. Bell.

Community theatre

She set up a story house, the Kodzidan, at Ekumfi Atwia in the Central Region, where villagers could perform and preserve storytelling. The project was an early example of community theatre in Africa.

PANAFEST

Sutherland also proposed the Pan-African Historical Theatre Festival, PANAFEST, which was first held in Cape Coast in 1992. She died in 1996.

Legacy

Her daughter, Esi Sutherland-Addy, became a scholar of African literature and education. Generations of Ghanaian students have acted in or studied her plays.

Sutherland once built a theatre with no roof, so the sky and the audience were part of the performance. Ghanaian theatre still borrows from that openness.