Kofi Awoonor, a well-loved Ghanaian poet, was killed and his son wounded at the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya, on Saturday. Awoonor, 78, was also a statesman — he served as Ghana's representative to the United Nation from 1990 to 1994. He was in Kenya for the Storymoja Hay literary festival.
There are currently entries coming in on the Hay Festival blog, commemorating him, and an obituary in The Wall Street Journal by fellow poet Kwame Dawes.
You can listen to him read one of his poems about 'love, death and evil' on the BBC:
Weep not now my love
for as all die, so shall we
but it is not dying that should pain us
It is the waiting, the
intermission when we cannot act,
When our will is shackled by tyranny.
That hurts.
Yet somehow, I know
the miracle of the world
will be wrought again,
the space will be filled
in spite of the hurt
by the immensity of love
that will defy dying
and Death
Goodnight, my love.
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