This prominent Gold Coast journalist and politician was an ardent African nationalist. Born around 1907, he was educated at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He eventually became the first African to be admitted to the Institute of Journalists in the United Kingdom. He also became a member of the Association of Writers in Moscow For many years, Awoonor-Renner edited the Gold Coast Leader before becoming assistant editor of the Times of West Africa. Throughout the inter-war period, he contributed poems and articles to all of the newspapers in British West Africa, promoting the cause of African independence. A collection of his poems, entitled This Africa, appeared in 1928. Awoonor-Renner was elected the first president of the militant Pan-African Council and was a member of such organizations as the West African Youth League and the Friends of the Asante Freedom Society: He became an avowed Communist during the 1930s and published The West African Soviet Union in 1946. He served on the Accra Town Council during 1942-44 and joined Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) after World War II. He broke away from the CPP and joined the Moslem Association Party in 1954, but played only an insignificant role afterwards as he was dogged by persistent ill health in his later years. Bankole Awoonor-Renner died on 27 May 1970.
AWOONOR-RENNER, Bankole
