With his poems rooted in the oral tradition,[4] he is generally acknowledged to have been the first real performance poet to emerge from Africa,[5] and his work has been called "also politically radical and socially conscious, one of his great concerns being Pan-Africanism".
[citation needed] His performances on radio and television worldwide include an acclaimed 1975 appearance at Poetry International at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, where he shared the stage with US poets Stanley Kunitz and Robert Lowell, and Nicolás Guillén of Cuba.
[6] Atukwei Okai was born on 15 March 1941 in Accra, Ghana,[4] and from the age of three for eight years lived in the country's Northern Region, where his father (Ga by birth) was a school headmaster in Gambaga.
Nkrumah had meanwhile been overthrown in a coup in 1966, and when Okai returned home the following year, he and other Ghanaian students who had studied in the Soviet Union were not welcomed by the new regime and had difficulty finding employment.
Imagine as a young boy being surrounded with so many books, and to be in the company of literary giants like Michael Dei-Anang, J. H. Kwabena Nketia, Efua Sutherland, the late Kofi Awoonor, Crakye Denteh, Kwesi Brew, Geombeeyi Adali-Mortty, Cameron Duodu and many others.... A special mentor was the principal of my Accra High school, William Conton, author of the novel, The African.
The musicality of his poetry has been attributed to influences dating back to his early years in the ambience of North Ghana, which is rich in music-dominated idioms, and he has performed his work widely on radio, television and to live audiences.
[15] Professor Femi Osofisan of Nigeria has stated that "Okai was the first to try to take African poetry back to one of its primal origins, in percussion, by deliberately violating the syntax and lexicon of English, creating his own rhythms through startling phonetic innovations.
[16][17] In 1968 Atukwei Okai was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (UK) and in 1979 was awarded an Honorary Fellowship in the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa in the US.