William Ofori Atta
UGCC founder, one of the Big Six of 1948, later foreign minister.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Colonial Era · Kyebi · 1881–1943
He trained for the ministry at a Swiss mission seminary, worked as a lawyer's clerk, and in 1912 was made king of one of the richest states of the Gold Coast. For thirty years he was the most powerful African voice in the colonial government, the chiefs' champion against the educated lawyers of the coast, and the father of a family whose names still fill Ghana's political history: a Big Six founder, a Speaker of Parliament, the colony's first woman doctor, and a president's mother. His reign also ended in a crime that shocked the colony. This is the whole story.
He was born at Kyebi on 11 October 1881, named Kwadwo Fredua Agyeman and baptised Aaron Boakye Danquah (sources differ on the middle name). His younger half-brother, born in 1895, was J. B. Danquah. The family belonged to the royal house of Akyem Abuakwa, the Ofori Panin Fie.
He was schooled by the Basel Mission, at its boarding school at Begoro and then at its theological seminary at Akropong, with a view to further training in Germany. Instead he worked as a clerk, served with the colonial forces in the Asante war of 1900, and learned the working of the law and the colonial state from the inside. On 27 November 1912 he was enstooled as Okyenhene, King of Akyem Abuakwa, taking the stool name Ofori Atta.
Akyem Abuakwa, in the forest of today's Eastern Region, was rich in two things the colony wanted: cocoa, spreading fast across its hills in the early twentieth century, and gold and diamonds in its rivers and forests, including the Atewa range above Kyebi. Ofori Atta inherited a state split by quarrels between the paramount stool and its sub-chiefs, and he set out to make it a model "native state".
In 1916 the governor nominated him to the Legislative Council. From 1928, under the new constitution of Governor Guggisberg, he sat as an elected member for the Akan chiefs of the Eastern Province, and he stayed until his death. He was a formidable debater, and governors listened to him. He was knighted, becoming Sir Ofori Atta, and in October 1942 he was appointed to the governor's Executive Council, among the first Africans ever to sit on it.
Why it mattered: for thirty years, when the British wanted to know what "the chiefs" thought, they asked Ofori Atta. That made him the most powerful African in the colonial system, and the most resented by those outside it.
The great political argument of the 1920s was about who spoke for the Gold Coast. The educated nationalists of the coast, in the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society and the National Congress of British West Africa led by J. E. Casely Hayford, said they did. Ofori Atta said the chiefs did, and that lawyers from Cape Coast had no mandate to speak for the people of the forest states.
He backed the British policy of ruling through chiefs, supported the Native Administration Ordinance of 1927 and the new Provincial Councils of chiefs, and fought the ARPS in the Council. Many educated Gold Coasters saw him as the colonial government's man.
The reconciliation: by the 1930s the two sides had begun to work together. Ofori Atta and Casely Hayford were reconciled, and in 1934 chiefs and nationalists joined in protest against new colonial laws on sedition and water rates. The old divide between chiefs and the educated did not disappear; it runs straight into the politics of the 1950s.
In 1896 the British had arrested the Asantehene Prempeh I and later exiled him to the Seychelles. Ofori Atta, although the king of a state that had long been Asante's rival, was among those who pressed the government to let him return. In 1924 Prempeh came home to Kumasi, and in 1935 the Asante Confederacy was restored under his successor, Prempeh II.
Under Akan matrilineal rules his children could not inherit the stool, so they took his stool name as a surname, Ofori-Atta, and made their careers in law, medicine and politics instead.
UGCC founder, one of the Big Six of 1948, later foreign minister.
Wife of Edward Akufo-Addo, mother of President Nana Akufo-Addo, Ofori Atta's grandson.
Principal of Abuakwa State College, later Speaker of Parliament, and a CPP man: the family did not all vote the same way.
Remembered as the first woman from the Gold Coast to qualify as a medical doctor.
A family of politics: his brother J. B. Danquah named Ghana and founded the UGCC. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren have included a president, finance and works ministers, a later Okyenhene and writers. Few families have shaped a country so long, and critics of Ghana's politics point to the family's reach as a problem in itself.
Ofori Atta died at Kyebi in late August 1943 (sources give 20 or 21 August), aged 61. His funeral rites ended in February 1944 with the blackening of his stool, the rite that makes a dead king an ancestor. In the old days, as across much of the Akan world, such rites had at times been accompanied by human sacrifice.
During the rites the Odikro of Apedwa, Nana Akyea Mensah, a sub-chief of the state, disappeared. Months later his remains were found in a stream. Eight men from Kyebi, among them people close to the royal house, were tried in November 1944 and found guilty of his murder. They were defended by a team of lawyers led by J. B. Danquah. Appeals and legal challenges ran through the West African Court of Appeal and the Privy Council until 1947, and some of the condemned men were then hanged.
How to read it: contemporaries reported that Ofori Atta himself had been looking for ways to end such killings before he died. The case was a colonial sensation, deeply damaged Danquah's reputation among some Ghanaians, and is still argued about in the press today. We give the court's verdict and the facts of the trial, not the rumours around it.
Kyebi (also written Kibi) is about two hours north-west of Accra by road via Nsawam and Suhum, or about an hour from Koforidua, the regional capital. It sits at the foot of the Atewa range, whose forest and water sources are now threatened by bauxite plans and illegal gold mining. The Okyenhene's palace, Ofori Panin Fie, is the centre of the town; visits need permission through the palace. The biennial Ohum festival brings Akyem Abuakwa together at Kyebi.
More: our planned page on Kyebi, seat of Akyem Abuakwa, and Ohum, the festival of ancestral blessings. Nearby: Bunso Eco Park and Aburi on the way back to Accra.
And on MyGhana2027: the intellectual force.
And Casely Hayford: the lawyers of the coast.
And the chieftaincy system: stools, skins and queen mothers.
Two of them, his son and his son-in-law, came from his household.
Also: British colonial administration, 1901–1957, People of Ghana and the 1,000-year timeline.
Ofori Atta was a modern king: mission-educated, a skilled politician and administrator who made his stool the strongest partner of the colonial state. That made Akyem Abuakwa orderly and his family powerful, and it made him the enemy of the coast's nationalists for most of his life. He was right that the chiefs mattered, and they were right that indirect rule suited the British. His real legacy is his children, who took his name into the UGCC, the CPP, Parliament and the presidency. And his reign ended with a reminder that the old ways had not vanished under the new order: a murder at his own funeral, defended in court by his own brother.
Verified: 29 September 2026. Birth date, enstoolment on 27 November 1912, Legislative Council service from 1916 and as an elected member from 1928, and appointment to the Executive Council in October 1942 follow the Encyclopaedia Africana and Robert Addo-Fening's account in the Daily Graphic. His death date is given as late August 1943 because sources differ. Family relationships follow published genealogies. The 1944 murder of the Odikro of Apedwa, the trial of eight accused in November 1944 and the appeals to 1947 follow contemporary reports and court records as published. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.