Award-winning Ghanaian musician Kofi Kinaata has has become the first known contemporary Ghanaian artist to have his work approved for academic studies in a public Ghanaian university. A twitter page by name Voice of KNUST today shared the development.
According to them, Kinaata’s hit song “Things Fall Apart” has been approved for use as teaching and learning material for second year students of the English department of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology for the first semester of the 2021/2022 academic year.
The song, named after Chinua Achebe’s classic novel ‘Things Fall Apart’ criticises the hypocrisy of the modern Ghanaian society and launches a righteous attack on religion, education, politics and at certain points, colonialism.
Kofi Kinaata has made a name for himself as one of the best Ghanaian songwriters in recent history. He is the only artist to ever win the award for songwriting four times at the Ghana Music Awards, having won in 2016 with the song Susuka, in 2017 with the song Confession, in 2020 with his song Behind The Scenes and in 2021 with his song Things Fall Apart.
Ghanaians on social media have expressed various reactions to this development.
This is however not the first time the artist’s songs have appeared in academic work. A few years ago, his song Confession was also utilised by the same department at the same university. Susuka, another of his songs was also studied by first years students in 2016. 2 years ago, students of the English department of University of Cape Coast also studied one of Kinaata’s songs. His songs have also been featured in examination questions for various courses in the University of Ghana, Legon.
By all indications, he is well on his way to icon status.
