Kate Abbam

Kate Victoria Teiba Abbam, born Ewura Ekua Badoe (1934-2016) was a Ghanaian journalist, editor and consultant on women and development.[1][2] Abbam founded Ghana's first women's magazine, Obaa Sima (The Ideal Woman), in 1971.[3]

Life

Awura Ekuwa Badoe was born on October 24, 1934 in Cape Coast.[4] She was given a Christian education, and renamed Kate Victoria,[5] at Saint Monica’s Convent, Cape Coast, Mmofraturo School in Kumasi, the A. M. E. Zion School in Cape Coast and Wesley Girls’ High School in Cape Coast. She won a Ghana government scholarship to read for a degree in Home Science at Queen Elizabeth College in London.[6] She then studied General Science at University of Ghana, Legon.[2] She married Emmanuel Atta Abbam in 1964.[7] From 1964 to 1969 she worked at the Food Research Institute, analysing food and food products.[2]

Kate Abbam founded Obaa Sima as a monthly magazine in 1971. The name, she later explained in an interview, referred to "a woman who is industrious and helps her community... women are called ' obaa sima ' when they have made it through their own efforts – it is the embodiment of the traditional woman".[3] Abbam was owner, editor and principal contributor to the magazine. Her novelette Beloved Twin, for example, was serialized there in 1971-2.[8]

In July 1972, Abbam's husband died, leaving her with small children. She wrote about her treatment as a widow, summarily dispossessed by her husband's family, in Obaa Sima.[5] In 1975 she was awarded a United Nations fellowship to attend the World Conference on Women in Mexico City,[9] reviewing the place of Ghanaian women in the mass media.[10] In 1993 she was enstooled Queenmother of the Anona Clan in the Ekumfi Eyisam in the Central Region, making her Nana Assanwa Ewudziwa Gyampaafor II.[2]

She died in May 2016. Her niece is the writer Adwoa Badoe.

Works
  • Sweet Deceit
  • (as Awura-Ekuwa Badoe) Beloved Twin, Scorpio Books Ghana, 1973
  • (as Ekuwa Teima Badoe) I Shall Return: romance from the woods. 1975

References
  1. Kate Abbam passes on, Modern Ghana, 10 May 2016.
  2. Edmund Quaynor, Editor of 'Obaa Sima' magazine passes on, Ghana News Agency, 28 July 2016.
  3. Jane Bryce (2016). ""Who No Know Go Know": Popular Fiction in Africa and the Caribbean". In Simon Gikandi (ed.). The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean Since 1950. Oxford University Press. p. 224. ISBN 978-0-19-976509-6.
  4. Ralph Uwechue, Africa Who's Who, 1991. p.7
  5. Esi Sutherland-Addy. "'Kate Abbam, On Widowhood'". In Esi Sutherland-Addy; Aminata Diaw (eds.). Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel. Wits University Press. p. 227.
  6. Africa Woman, 1975
  7. The World Who's Who of Women, Melrose Press, 1982, p.1
  8. Stephanie Newell, Making up Their Own Minds: Readers, Interpretations and the Difference of View in Ghanaian Popular Narratives, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 67, No. 3 (1997), p. 398
  9. Bureau of International Organization Affairs, Cable 1975ACCRA03748, 13 June 1975.
  10. Abbam, 'Ghanaian Women in the Mass Media, unpublished paper written for International Women's Year, 1975. Cited in Margaret Gallagher, Unequal Opportunities: The Case of Women and the Media, UNESCO, 1981.
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