2024 DAVID BUCHAN LECTURE
Global Health Crises, Heritage, and the Ghanaian Folk
Professor Kwesi Yankah
Thursday, 21 November 2024
6.30pm, Sir Duncan Rice Library, 7th Floor, Meeting Room 1
Book your place at elphinstone@abdn.ac.uk
Two diseases have ravaged Africa in the past fifty years: HIV/AIDS and COVID-19. These have triggered folk responses in Ghana framed within cultural attitudes to calamity and the considered potency of the spoken word. At the same time, because the very nature of these crises constrains verbal production, Ghana’s presidency has resorted to a heritage of visual symbolism as an integral part of crisis management. This paper is based on research with HIV patients returning to die at home as well as indigenous responses to COVID-19.
Kwesi Yankah is a Ghanaian academic, author, and a university administrator. He is a professor of linguistics and oral literature specializing in the ethnography of communication. He has served as the Pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana and the president of the Central University. The author of several books, he was inducted as a fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. He is currently the Ghanaian Minister of State in charge of tertiary education.
Kwesi Yankah doctoral thesis earned him the Esther Kinsley Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation at Indiana University,United States.He spent most of his working life in academia and lectured at the University of Ghana. He held several positions in the university where he was Dean of Students of the university as well as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Head of Linguistics Department.His last position at the university was that of Pro-vice-chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs.In September 2011, he succeeded Professor Victor Gadzekpo as the President of the Central University in Ghana his appointment coincided with Rev. Prof. Addow Obeng's appointment as Central University's Pro Vice Chancellor.
Kwesi Yankah served as the university president until March 2017, when he was appointed a Minister of State.During his working life, Kwesi Yankah also contributed to several newspapers, and has authored many books, including Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Royal Oratory.
In July 2016 he was honoured at the 2016 Africa Summit for his contribution to education in Ghana and his contribution to Africa’s development. Kwesi Yankah has been Senior External Advisor, Center for Local Strategies Research, University of Washington and a Member of the Policy Working Group, African Presidential Archives and Research Centre,Boston University. In 1999 he was elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in Accra. He served a three-year term as the Honorary Secretary of the Academy from 2003.