Ghanaians Mourn a Poet and Scholar Killed in Nairobi Mall AttackBy ADAM NOSSITER
Published: September 23, 2013
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Kofi AwoonorThe rain has beaten me
And the sharp stumps cut as keen as knives
I shall go beyond and rest,
I have no kin and no brother,
Death has made war upon our houseDAKAR, Senegal — Ghanaian schoolchildren memorized those lines from the 1960s by one of their country’s most famous poets, Kofi Awoonor; their sorrow over the newly liberated continent’s travails foreshadowed, in a terrible way, the violence that took Mr. Awoonor’s life on Saturday.
Mr. Awoonor — poet, diplomat, statesman, scholar and cultural icon in his native Ghana — was killed in the terrorist attack by Somali militants on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. His death at 78 has shocked citizens in Ghana, the West African nation whose difficult beginnings and subsequent steadying he accompanied and chronicled.
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