A Conversation with Efua Sutherland's Legacy

Efua Sutherland died in 1996, but she is everywhere in Accra. Her name is on a road, a children's park, a drama studio. Her plays are performed in schools and theaters. Her ideas about African theater — that it should be communal, participatory, rooted in oral tradition — have shaped a generation of artists who may not even know her name.

But her legacy is more complicated than the official version suggests. Sutherland was not just a playwright. She was a theorist, an educator, a cultural entrepreneur who built institutions from scratch in a country that was still figuring out what it meant to be independent. She founded the Ghana Drama Studio, the Kodzidan (Story House) in Ekumfi Atwia, and the Ghana Experimental Theatre.

Her work was always in dialogue with the question that haunted post-independence Africa: what does it mean to be modern and African at the same time? Her answer was not to choose between tradition and modernity, but to insist that the distinction was false — that African traditions were themselves dynamic, evolving, capable of absorbing new influences without losing their essential character.