Yaba Badoe (born 1954)[1] is a
Ghanaian-
British documentary filmmaker, journalist and author.[2]
Career
Yaba Badoe was born in 1954 in
Tamale,
northern Ghana.[3] She left Ghana to be educated in
Britain at a very young age.[4] A graduate of
King's College, Cambridge, Badoe worked as a civil servant at the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ghana,[4] before beginning her career in journalism as a trainee at the
BBC.[5] She also was a researcher at the
Institute of African Studies at the
University of Ghana. She has taught in
Spain and
Jamaica and has worked as a producer and director making documentaries for the main television channels in Britain.[6] Among her credits are: Black and White (1987), an investigation into race and racism in
Bristol, using hidden video cameras for
BBC1; I Want Your Sex (1991), an arts documentary exploring images and myths surrounding black sexuality in Western art, literature, film and photography, for
Channel 4; and the six-part series Voluntary Service Overseas for
ITV in 2002.[6]
In addition to making films, Badoe is a creative writer, her first novel, True Murder, being published in London by
Jonathan Cape in 2009.[7] Reviewing True Murder in The Africa Report, Zagba Oyortey described it as "a rich complex of wonder, loss, friendship and prescience from the viewpoint of Ajuba, an African girl transposed from her idyllic home in Ghana to a boarding school in rural England after the collapse of her parents’ marriage."[8] Her short story "The Rivals" was included in the anthology African Love Stories (Ayebia, 2006), edited by
Ama Ata Aidoo,[9] and she has also written three children's books.[10]
Badoe directed and co-produced (with
Amina Mama) the documentary film The Witches of Gambaga, which won Best Documentary at the Black International Film Festival in 2010, and was awarded Second Prize in the Documentary section of
FESPACO 2011.[11] Her most recent film, launched in 2014, is entitled The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo.[12][13]
In 2016, Badoe participated in the conference-festival "Telling Our Stories of Home: Exploring and Celebrating Changing African and Africa-Diaspora Communities" in
Chapel Hill, North Carolina.[14]