William Abraham, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been honored with a commissioned portrait in the All Souls College at Oxford University in England. In 1959, Professor Abraham became the first African scholar to win a Prize Fellowship at the college. Today, he remains the only African to ever win the prestigious award.
Professor Abraham studied philosophy at the University of Ghana Legon and later at Oxford University. In 1966, a few years after returning to his home country of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, president of Ghana, was ousted in a military coup and Abraham was imprisoned for nine months. He came to the United States in 1968 and joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1973. He taught there for 21 years.
