Original Date: October 6, 2025
Intellectual history is male-centered and text-centric. While African intellectuals are rarely included as knowledge producers in global intellectual history, African female voices constitute the bulk of those intellectuals whose projects are marginalized and ignored. This piece on Letitia Obeng, a forerunner in aquatic biology and environmental science, restores women’s voices to view by shifting attention in intellectual history from traditional canons and themes to science and development thinking. As a pioneering scientist, Obeng’s public intellectual career was shaped by 1960s modernization theory, the building of Ghana’s hydro-electric power generation plant, the Akosombo Dam, and her role as a scientist and development expert at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Obeng fashioned a theory of sustainable development by arguing for an environmentally responsible development concept rooted in a multidisciplinary approach. Her philosophy interweaves biotic diversity, the socio-economic life of affected communities, science and engineering. Using her published works and oral interviews, I argue that Obeng’s pioneering sustainable development thought should reside within the context of global intellectual history not the least because she expands our knowledge of science, dams and sustainable development. Letitia Obeng, born in the Eastern region of Ghana to a family deeply steeped in Presbyterian and protestant ethic, is the first Ghanaian woman to acquire a degree in zoology and be awarded a doctoral degree. She is widely considered the “grandmother of female scientists in Ghana.
About Mary Owusu
Mary Owusu teaches at the History Department at The King’s University, Edmonton and the University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast. She earned her doctoral degree in history at Dalhousie University, Halifax. Owusu has been a ZKF Research Resident (University of Konstanz, Konstanz); an Izaak Walton Killam Fellow (Dalhousie University, Halifax); a Fulbright scholar-in-residence (Baldwin Wallace University, Ohio); a Cadbury Fellow (University of Birmingham, UK); and a recipient of the Barbara Harlow Award (University of Texas at Austin, Texas). Her research explores topics in the areas of African intellectual history and historiography, indigenous knowledge systems and development history, colonialism and postcolonialism, as well as Black Nova Scotian history. She is the author of Prempeh II and the Making of Modern Asante (Accra: Woeli 2009) and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Ghana: Founding Fathers, Nation-building and Transnational Thinkers (Cambridge University Press 2024).