[2] Bankole Awoonor-Renner was born in Elmina in the Gold Coast, a British colony in West Africa.
In 1925 Awoonor-Renner travelled from the US to the Soviet Union along with nine other black men to study at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV).
[5] In 1934 Awoonor-Renner and several others, including Ellis Brown, I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson and Robert Benjamin Wuta-Ofei, founded the West African Youth League (WAYL) in the Gold Coast.
He converted to Islam in 1942, he won a seat on the Accra city council as part of the Moslem Party.
[7] Initially a colleague of Kwame Nkrumah, he helped Ghana's first president found the Convention People's Party (CPP) being imprisoned alongside him in 1950.