The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) will on Sunday June 11 2006 at 6am reflect on the life of one of Africa's eminent historians, Professor Albert Adu Boahen, who died on May 24 2006 at 74 in Accra, Ghana. To be broadcast on its radio programme, Brief Lives, it will be repeated in the evening in the United Kindgom on radio 909/693 and other parts of the world and on the internet at www.bbc.co.uk/5live .
According to senior producer at the current affairs department of the BBC, Lesley McAlpine, Sunday's special edition presenter, Dotun Adebayo will look at Adu Boahen's life as a scholar and political activist.
Two scholars and also authors who worked in different ways with the late historian have been invited for the discussion-the British historian, Thomas McCaskie and Ghanaian writer, Ivor Agyeman-Duah.
Thomas McCaskie is professor of Asante History( of which he has devoted research time and writings in the last 40 years) at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham and recently elected professor of African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London where Adu Boahen in 1959 obtained his Ph.D in Imperial History. McCaskie previously taught, after his Ph.D from Cambridge University, at the Universities of Ghana and Northwestern, Evaston. He is author of among others: The Oxford History of the British Empire; State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante; Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village. He co-edited with Albert Adu Boahen the 2003 publication, The History of Ashanti Kings and the Whole Country Itself and other Writings.
Ivor Agyeman-Duah, currently a practising diplomat in London is founder of the Centre for Intellectual Renewal in Ghana.He had previously been Visiting Scholar -in- Residence at the College of Arts and Letters, California State University, Pamona. Among his six published books is: Political Reflections on the Motherland(1991), an anthology of essays including those of Boahen, the late President, Dr. Hilla Limann and President Emeritus of the Methodist Conference, Rev. Dr. Samuel Asante Antwi. Agyeman-Duah is executive producer of the TV production, Yaa Asantewaa-Heroism of an African Queen of which Boahen served as advisor. He also worked as the professor's researcher on his last published book-Etuo ato Bare: Yaa Asantewaa and the Yaa Asantewaa War of 1900.
