Afua Ava Pamela Cooper ONS (born 8 November 1957)[1] is a Jamaican-born Canadian historian.
[1] By the time she graduated in 1975, Cooper had founded an African Studies Club at her school and had become a Rastafarian.
[1][4] Her dissertation, "Doing Battle in Freedom's Cause", is a biographical study of Henry Bibb, a 19th-century African-American abolitionist who lived and worked in Ontario.
Her dissertation served as inspiration for the Canadian government "to designate Bibb a person of national historic significance.
In 2011, Cooper was named to the James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University.
[5] In 1990, Cooper opened the festivities in Queen's Park, Toronto celebrating the release of Nelson Mandela from prison; the crowd for her performance is estimated to have included 25,000 people.
[1] She is the co-author of We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women's History (1994).
In 2002, Cooper helped found the Dub Poets' Collective, "the only grassroots poetry organization in Canada".