Kwame Anthony Appiah - Biography

Biography

Appiah was born in London to Enid Margaret Appiah, an art historian and writer, and Joe Emmanuel Appiah (born 16 November 1918), a lawyer, diplomat, and politician from the Asante region, once part of the British Gold Coast Colony but now part of Ghana. For two years (1970–72) Joe Appiah was the leader of a new opposition party that was made by the country's three opposing parties, simultaneously he was the president of the Ghana Bar association. Between the years 1977-78 he was Ghana's representative at the United Nations. He died on 8 July 1990 in an Accra hospital at age 71.

Anthony Appiah was raised in Kumasi, Ghana, and educated at Bryanston School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he earned his BA (First Class) and Ph.D. in philosophy. Appiah has three sisters: Isobel, Adwoa and Abena. As a child, he also spent a good deal of time in England, staying with his grandmother Isobel, the Honourable Lady Cripps, widow of the English statesman the Right Honourable Sir Stafford Cripps. His family has a long political tradition: his maternal grandfather Sir Stafford was Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer (1947–1950) under Clement Attlee. His own father, Charles Cripps, 1st Baron Parmoor, was the Labour Leader of the House of Lords (1929–1931) under Ramsay MacDonald; Parmoor had been a Conservative MP before defecting to Labour. Through Professor Appiah's father, a Nana of the Ashanti people, he is also a direct descendant of Osei Tutu, the warrior emperor of pre-colonial Ghana, whose reigning successor, the Asantehene, is a distant relative of the Appiah family.