Maya Angelou's Years in Ghana, 1962-1965

Maya Angelou moved to Accra, Ghana in 1962, following an earlier stretch in Cairo, and remained there until 1965, a period she later recounted in her fifth autobiography, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. She was not simply a visitor: she worked as assistant administrator of the University of Ghana’s School of Music and Drama at the Institute of African Studies, wrote as a freelancer for the Ghanaian Times and the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, and served as feature editor at the pan-African magazine African Review. Encyclopedia.com’s biographical account of her also lists Fanti, a language spoken in southern Ghana, among the languages Angelou spoke, a marker of how deeply she embedded herself in Ghanaian life rather than simply passing through it.

She was part of a small, tightly knit community of Black American expatriates drawn to Kwame Nkrumah’s newly independent Ghana by the promise of Pan-Africanism, a group that included the historian and civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois, who spent his own final years in Accra, along with the novelist Julian Mayfield, the writer William Gardner Smith, the lawyer and activist Pauli Murray, and the sociologist St. Clair Drake. Angelou brought her teenage son, Guy Johnson, whom she had given birth to at 17, with her to Ghana; he enrolled at the University of Ghana as a student not long after they arrived, and the period was marked by a serious car accident he survived, an episode Angelou wrote about at length in her memoir of these years.

Her time in Ghana ended when Malcolm X visited the country in 1964. The two had already met years earlier, and his visit, along with the pull of the movement he was building back home, prompted Angelou to return to the United States in 1965 to help him establish the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the same organization mentioned elsewhere on this site in connection with Malcolm X’s praise for Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising. Malcolm X was assassinated within months of her return, before the organization could be fully realized.

A claim has circulated online describing a specific 1985 television interview in which Angelou discussed raising Guy using a “West African technique,” a framing this site could not independently verify against an accessible transcript or recording, and no specific quotes from that interview are presented here as fact. The documented record shows three years living and working inside a Ghanaian institution, raising her son there, and leaving only when a more urgent call, from Malcolm X himself, pulled her home.