Okyeame — the name refers to the royal linguist or spokesperson in Akan tradition, the one who speaks for the chief — was published by the Ghana Society of Writers in Accra during the 1960s. It was the primary literary magazine of Ghanaian independence-era culture, publishing writers including Kofi Awoonor, Efua Sutherland, and Ama Ata Aidoo.
Its importance to West African literary history is hard to overstate: it was the site where Ghanaian literary modernism defined itself, in conversation with but distinct from the Nigerian literary flowering happening simultaneously across the border. The two traditions shaped each other; the distance between Okyeame and Black Orpheus is measured in miles, not in kind.
Physical copies of Okyeame are extraordinarily rare. Our single issue is a document of Ghanaian cultural history held now in a Nigerian collection — a fitting circularity for a journal whose contributors always understood themselves as West African as much as Ghanaian.