Yaba Badoe is an award-winning filmmaker and writer.
Yaba Badoe is an award-winning Ghanaian-British documentary filmmaker and writer. A graduate of King’s College Cambridge, she has taught in Spain, Jamaica and Ghana. Her short stories have been published in Critical Quarterly, African Love Stories: an anthology, edited by Ama Ata Aidoo, and New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby. Her first novel for Young Adults, A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars, was shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award 2018 and nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Award 2018. In 2014, Yaba was nominated for a Distinguished Woman of African Cinema Award.
Books
Man-Man and the Tree of Memories
Coming 12 October 2023
Illustrated in vibrant full colour by Joelle Avelino, Yaba Badoe’s story of dance, celebration, carnival and slavery, about a family understanding their past to change the future.
Set in contemporary Notting Hill, Man-man and his friends are swept up in the exuberant preparations for carnival. But his mother is ill and even as he dances, he calls desperately to the Queen of Revels, as old as time to make her well again.
Swept away with his best friend Kareem and sharp-tongued sister Panama, to a place in between, the Queen of Revels plunges Man-man into Africa’s past and reveals his family’s heritage. As they gather around the sacred Tree of Memories, he witnesses many slaves, captives whose pain and anguish and longing is held by the tree. Man-man understands how this is draining his mother and how he must help her back to the freedom stolen from his ancestors.
Library
Films
The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo
The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo explores the artistic contribution of one of Africa’s foremost woman writers, a trailblazer for an entire generation of exciting new talent. The film charts Ama Ata Aidoo’s creative journey in a life that spans 7 decades from colonial Ghana through the tumultuous era of independence to a more sober present-day […]
The Witches of Gambaga
The Witches of Gambaga is a haunting 55-minute documentary film about a community of women condemned to live as witches in Northern Ghana. Made over the course of 5 years, this disturbing expose is the product of a collaboration between members of the 100 strong community of ‘witches’, local women’s movement activists and feminist researchers, […]
