Francis Ernest Kobina Parkes was born in 1932 at
Korle-Bu,
Gold Coast (now Ghana), to a wealthy pharmacist, a settler from
Sierra Leone, and an indigene from the
Central Region of Ghana. He was educated in
Accra and
Cape Coast (where he attended
Adisadel College) in Ghana, and
Freetown, Sierra Leone, and worked briefly as a newspaper reporter and editor before joining the staff of Radio Ghana in 1955 as a broadcaster. A precociously intelligent young man, he continued to pursue his interest in literature and storytelling, occasionally contributing to the
BBC's ''African Writers' Club
radio show and even dabbling as an actor in London, appearing in a stage version of Waiting for Wanda'' in the early 1960s before it was produced for TV by the BBC. Parkes also worked as a speech writer for
Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, and later worked at NAFTI (Ghana's Film and Television Institute). Parkes was later president of the Ghana Society of Writers and in the 1970s he worked for the Ghanaian Ministry of Information in Accra. In 1967 he wrote and presented the BBC radio portrait of the American poet
Langston Hughes, who had been instrumental in Parkes' rise to recognition outside of Ghana. Parkes worked in film for much of his later life. He died in Accra in May 2004.
Family Frank Kobina Parkes was part of – and possibly the pioneer of – a Ghanaian artistic dynasty: the well-known Ghanaian broadcaster and novelist
Cameron Duodu was his brother-in-law, and his younger brother Jerry Parkes (also a broadcaster as well as a scientist) was the father of contemporary Ghanaian writer, social commentator and scientist
Nii Ayikwei Parkes. Another nephew, Sam Yarney, is the author of a series of Christian thriller novels, and one of Parkes' sons, also named Frank, is a gospel musician. ==Bibliography==