Story by: Franklin ASARE-DONKOH
A former Ghanaian High Commissioner to Sierra Leone and Ambassador to Côte d’Ivoire, Ambassador Kabral Blay-Amihere has revealed that the name “Kabral” was given to him by friends during his first year at university and not his biological father.
He made this revelation when he took his turn on the Bold, the Beautiful, the Ugly, and the Maverick (BBUM) Show, on GTV.
Narrating how he came by the name “Kabral”, Ambassador Blay-Amihere said that his activities after the assassination and death of Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral, a Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer, pan-Africanist, intellectual, poet, theoretician, revolutionary, political organizer, nationalist, and diplomat, got noticed by some students and began calling him “Kabral”.
He explained that he saw the wisdom and impact of the name “Kabral”, hence adopting the name of a great revolutionary and pan-Africanist without any hesitation.
“I started life as Kwabena Amihere in my primary school days, but in my secondary school and university, I became Peter Blay-Amihere, (Blay which is my biological father, and Amihere is the name of my step-father, who made me what I am today.
In 1973, after the death of Guinea-Bissau’s leader. As a first-year student, I found myself all over celebrating the demise of such a great African leader, and after that, everybody started calling me ‘Cabral’ I found it more romantic than ‘Peter’, so I replaced Peter with Kabral.
I changed the C in the original Cabral to K to make it sound like an African,” Ambassador Blay-Amihere retorted on Sunday, August 7.
Ambassador Kabral Blay-Amihere was born in Ekwe, a village in the Western Region (Ghana). At age 28, he became the Director of the Ghana Institute of Journalism.
Ambassador Blay-Amihere attended St. Augustine’s College (Cape Coast). He is an alumnus of the University of Ghana, Legon, the London School of Economics, and is a Nieman Fellow of Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in civil law by the University of Sierra Leone in 2007.
He was at one time General Secretary and President of the Ghana Journalists Association, President of the West African Journalists Association, and executive member of both the Commonwealth Journalists Association and the International Federation of Journalists. A former Chairman of the National Media Commission and part-time lecturer at Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone.
