Joseph Coleman de Graft (2 April 1924 – 1 November 1978) was a prominent Ghanaian writer, playwright and dramatist, who was appointed the first director of the Ghana Drama Studio in 1962.
In 1953, at the age of 29, and after an education interrupted by four years teaching at his old school, de Graft graduated from the University College of the Gold Coast, one of the first undergraduates to take English Honours.
[6] Of another play, Sons and Daughters (1963, a study of conflict between generations), he said: "I was trying to make young people aware that their lives were important and could be looked at in this way, that they had a right to examine life as they saw it from their own perspective.
"[7] In 1964 de Graft produced a version of Shakespeare's Hamlet performed by students of the University of Ghana School of Music and Drama, which was filmed as Hamile.
Back in West Africa in 1978, as an associate professor in the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, de Graft directed Mambo, his adaptation of Macbeth.
Set in a fictional African country that recalled both Idi Amin's Uganda and Ghana herself, the radical adaptation showed how creatively de Graft was able to use Shakespeare.
[8] His obituary in West Africa magazine stated that a younger generation of Ghana's writers "had learned to look up to him as a monumental figure, teacher and practitioner in one.