His work combined the poetic traditions of his native Ewe people with contemporary and religious symbolism to depict Africa during decolonization.

Professor Awoonor was among those who were killed in the September 2013 attack at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, where he was a participant at the Storymoja Hay Festival.

[2][3][4] George Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor-Williams was born in Wheta,[5] in the Volta region of what was then the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana.

[7] After graduating in 1960, Awoonor worked as a researcher for the Institute for African Studies and began participating in the pan-African campaigns of Kwame Nkrumah.

He was in Kenya as a participant in the Storymoja Hay Festival, a four-day celebration of writing, thinking and storytelling, at which he was due to perform on the evening of his death.

But he is a peculiar and unique writer, one who strives, almost too hard, to bring his ancestry and culture into his poems, sometimes even borrowing words from the local Ewe dialect.

That awareness, not only that he was a relict specimen as an individual, but that the entire culture was suffering entropy, may have come through his poems in a manner that would suggest at first that he was writing about his mortal end.

Besides the personal and cultural lament, Awoonor also shrewdly decried what he would have considered the decadent spectre of Western influences (religions, social organisation and economic philosophy) on the history and fortunes of African people in general.

He would lambast the thoughtless exuberance with which Africans themselves embraced such things, and gradually engineered what he would have considered a self-degradation that went far beyond a loss of cultural identity.