Akosua Busia

Akosua Gyamama Busia, born on 30 December 1966 in Accra, Ghana, is an actress, writer, and songwriter whose career spans stage, film, and literature. She is the daughter of Kofi Abrefa Busia, who served as Prime Minister of the Republic of Ghana from 1969 to 1972 and held the title of prince within the royal family of Wenchi, a subgroup of the Ashanti people. Through her father's lineage, Busia herself holds the status of princess. Her sister, Abena Busia, is a poet and academic who served as a professor of English at Rutgers University and has been Ghana's ambassador to Brazil since 2017. Together, the two sisters co-founded the Busia Foundation International, an organization dedicated to providing assistance to the disadvantaged.

Busia began acting at the age of 16 and trained at London's Central School of Speech and Drama on scholarship. Her earliest documented performance was the role of Juliet in a production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet at Oxford University, where her siblings were studying, in a cast that was otherwise entirely white. Her film debut came in 1979 with the adventure film Ashanti, which starred Michael Caine and Peter Ustinov. After relocating to Los Angeles in the early 1980s, she appeared in the slasher film The Final Terror, directed by Andrew Davis, though the film was not released until 1983, by which point several of its cast members, including Daryl Hannah and Rachel Ward, had already gained public recognition.

Busia became widely known to film audiences through her role as Nettie, the younger sister of Whoopi Goldberg's character Celie Harris, in Steven Spielberg's 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple. That same year she appeared as Ruth in Badge of the Assassin. In 1986, she played Bessie in a film adaptation of Richard Wright's novel Native Son, alongside Geraldine Page and Matt Dillon, and also starred in Hard Lessons with Denzel Washington and Lynn Whitfield. Later film credits include the role of Jewel in John Singleton's Rosewood in 1997 and the role of Patience in Antoine Fuqua's Tears of the Sun in 2003. She has also appeared on the television series ER.

Beyond performing, Busia has contributed significantly to film as a writer. She was one of three co-writers on the screenplay adaptation of Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved for the 1998 film directed by Jonathan Demme. In 2008, she directed The Prof. A Man Remembered. Life, Vision & Legacy of K.A. Busia, a documentary about her father. In 2024, she released the drama film In Search of a Blessed Life: He Who Hath, inspired by the book He that Hath, to Him Shall Be Given by Dag Heward-Mills, and that same year her documentary Stevie Wonder in Ghana: In Search of a Blessed Life was also released. Her literary output includes the novel The Seasons of Beento Blackbird, published by Washington Square Press in 1997, and the poem "Mama," which appears in the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby. She also co-wrote the song "Moon Blue" with Stevie Wonder for his 2005 album A Time 2 Love.

On 12 October 1996, Busia married American film director John Singleton; the couple divorced on 15 June 1997. They have one daughter, Hadar Busia-Singleton, born 3 April 1997, who attended school in Ghana before returning to the United States.

Busia's Broadway career spans 1991 to 2016, with credits including Mule Bone and Eclipsed. After an eighteen-year hiatus from acting to raise her daughter, she returned to the stage in Danai Gurira's play Eclipsed, appearing in both its off-Broadway and Broadway productions alongside Lupita Nyong'o. For her off-Broadway performance as Rita in that production, she received an Obie Award for Distinguished Performance.