A publication by the Mail & Guardian shows a woman purported to be Theodosia Okoh, the designer of the Ghana flag.
The image used in the publication is not of Theodosia Okoh but rather of a Ghanaian scientist, Dr Leticia Eva Obeng, who, coincidentally happens to be her sister.
Full text
A publication with headline “Red, gold and green: A pan-African history of flags and the remarkable woman who inspired it” comes with a black and white photograph of a woman portrayed to be the late stateswoman and designer of the Ghana Flag–Theodosia Okoh.
The article, which talks about the inspiring story of how Okoh designed Ghana’s national flag and how her contributions appear to be underplayed, was published on Saturday, June 13, 2020.
It has been shared multiple times and republished by other websites.
Verification
Suspecting veracity of the image presented to be Theodosia Okoh, we used Google’s reverse image search tool to get details about the photo.
The results revealed that the image used in the publication is indeed not of Theodosia Okoh, the designer of the Ghana flag, but rather, of another Ghanaian, Dr Letitia Eva Obeng.
Further briefs on Dr Obeng revealed that she is widely recognized as the “grandmother of female scientists in Ghana” and is the first Ghanaian woman to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in science, as well as the first to be awarded a doctorate in science from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
She is currently 95 years old and launched her 381-page book titled ‘Anthology of a Lifetime’ in Accra in July 2019.
A simple Google search of ‘Theodosia Okoh’ shows many different sizes of photos of a woman other than what was used in the news publication.
See the difference in the photos below:
The photo on the left (Dr Leticia Obeng) is what was used in the news publication for Theodosia Okoh while the one on the right is the photograph of Theodosia Okoh.
While these two are very different people, it is important to mention that they are actually biological sisters born to the same mother (Madam Dora Asihene) and father (Very Reverend Emmanuel Victor Asihene, a former moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana).
Based on this mistaken identity, we conclude that a wrong image was used to represent Theodosia Okoh, a major cultural icon, in the news publication.
Well done for setting the records straight we will only take significant consolation that it has led to unearthing more knowledge on the 2 personalities involved.
I suspect Mrs Leticia Obeng is the mother of a headline Ghanaian sprinter in the early 80s