Esi Sutherland-Addy

Esi Reiter Sutherland is a Ghanaian academic, writer, educationalist, and human rights activist. She is a professor at the Institute of African Studies, where she has been senior research fellow, head of the Language, Literature, and Drama Section, and associate director of the African Humanities Institute Program at the University of Ghana.

Quotes

• records of the military standard have not been completely told in light of the fact that individuals were occupied with working without archiving.
  • [1]
• You will have a way which you would need to design the thing, you get to a climax and you need to stay up there and let people go home with that feeling of patriotism and so on.
  • [2] In an interview with joyNews.
• Into us a child is born.
  • [3]
• Thank you for meeting with me today so that we can discuss the development of literary broadcasting in Ghana and your experiences of it. I am glad that you asked for us to meet here, in the home of my mother Efua Sutherland, as it was home, of course, not only for me but also for you. So we should be able to look at the trajectory of our lives since we were young around this place and how literature has shaped our lives in so many different ways. Welcome.
  • [4]
• Suddenly in 1951 I started…creative writing seriously.
  • [5]
• I suddenly saw …[w]e needed a programme to develop playwriting and…that led to… the Ghana Experimental Theatre.
  • [6]
• The Drama Studio came as a sudden answer to a problem I had been having, starting the theatre programme.
  • [7]
• Everyone’s talent should be exercised for the good of the whole of society, because [w]hat we cannot buy is the spirit of originality and endeavour which makes a people dynamic and creative.
  • [8]
• I shared Nkrumah’s belief in and vision for the integration of different ethnic groups on the continent, I stated in my play Foriwa (1967) through the character Labaran, “Who is a stranger anywhere in these times in whose veins the blood of this land flows?”
  • [9]
• I want to be able to look up as I walk and see dignity in the place of my birth. All of us should want that.
  • [10]