Ama Ata Aidoo obituary

Ama Ata Aidoo, who has died aged 81, was one of Africa’s most influential writers. Her plays, short stories, novels and essays explored the experiences of women in contemporary Africa, both rural and urban – women who are remarkable for their spirit, humour and resilience.

Aidoo’s play The Dilemma of a Ghost, first staged in 1964 at the Ghana Drama Studio when she was 22, was issued by Longman in 1965, making her the first published female African dramatist. This play contrasts a young African- American wife’s idealised concept of “Mother Africa” with the reality of her Ghanaian husband’s African mother’s traditions and expectations, often conflicting with the values embraced by a younger western-educated generation.

Like her second play, Anowa (1969), The Dilemma of a Ghost draws on both African and western performance traditions. In these plays and many of her short stories, Aidoo created an Africanised form of English for her characters, drawing on her native Akan idioms and sentence structures.

While her first play examines cultural conflicts in contemporary Ghana, during the optimism created by Kwame Nkrumah’s success in achieving independence, Anowa, written after the 1966 military coup that deposed Nkrumah amid accusations of corruption, reflects on Ghanaian history and the complicity of African chiefs with slavery. In the face of political dereliction, the play calls for a shift away from materialism and self-interest.

However, it is Aidoo’s fiction that has reached a worldwide audience. Her first volume of short stories, No Sweetness Here, was published in 1971. Many of the stories were written to be read on radio, with listeners as well as readers in mind, combining traditional oral storytelling, and communal participation, with European reader-oriented narrative techniques. They also showed how western technology can be put to the service of African culture rather than replacing or subduing it.

The use of oral traditions also allowed Aidoo to give a voice to women, in a context where female writers have been marginalised, while the concentration on dialogue, rather than exterior description, places the emphasis on women’s subjectivities, emotions and thoughts, rather than their appearance.

The title of Aidoo’s first novel, Our Sister Killjoy: Or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint (1977), conveys the narrator’s wry self-deprecating humour, together with her awareness of differences in perception. Recounting the experience of a young Ghanaian woman who spends several months in Germany – “the heart of whiteness” – and with two male characters both called Adolf, the novel is in part a reversal of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Indeed there is a literal heart of darkness in the novel when a group of Africans debate the ethics of Christiaan Barnard’s transplant of the heart of an African man. Aidoo uses a variety of narrative techniques in the novel, contrasting “knowledge gained then” and “knowledge gained since”, interspersing prose with fragments of verse, while questioning the usefulness of the English language to express African experience:

A common heritage. A Dubious bargain that left us Plundered of Our gold Our tongue Our life – while our Dead fingers clutch English …

Together with Aidoo’s second novel, Changes: A Love Story, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ prize in 1992, Our Sister Killjoy appears frequently in university courses on postcolonial and women’s writing. Aidoo’s 1985 collection of poetry, Someone Talking to Sometime, was awarded the Nelson Mandela prize for poetry. A second volume of poetry, An Angry Letter in January, appeared in 1992. She also published two more volumes of short stories, The Girl Who Can and Other Stories (1997) and Diplomatic Pounds and Other Stories (2012), as well as books for children.

Christine Ama Ata Aidoo was born, with a twin brother, Kwame Ata, at Abeadzi Kyiakor, near Saltpond in central Ghana (at that time known as the Gold Coast), the daughter of Maame Abasema and Nana Yaw Fama. Her father was chief of Abeadzi Kyiakor, and she belonged to Fante royalty. He founded the first school in Saltpond, and ensured that both his children received a good education there. Aidoo later spoke of the importance of the village storyteller, around whom the villagers would gather in the evenings.

From 1957, the year that Ghana became the first independent African nation, she attended Wesley girls’ senior high school in the city of Cape Coast. There she became aware of Ghana’s connection with the history of slave trading, embodied in the Cape Coast “castle” where captured slaves were held before being shipped to Europe and the Americas.

In 1961 she enrolled at the University of Ghana to study English, and also began writing seriously. The following year she was selected by a panel including Chinua Achebe, Langston Hughes, and Wole Soyinka to attend a writing workshop in Ibadan, Nigeria. She forced her way into the Nigerian Broadcasting office in order to meet Achebe, who was then head of external broadcasting, breathlessly announcing to him that she had “indeed arrived at the shrine”.

After graduation, Aidoo taught at universities in Africa and the US. She was appointed Ghanaian minister for education in 1982 after Jerry Rawlings gained power in a military coup, but in 1983 resigned and moved to Zimbabwe, where she worked for the Zimbabwe Ministry for Education. When she returned to Ghana in 1999, she and her daughter Kinna Likamanni established the Mbaasem Foundation, which sought “to support the development and sustainability of African women writers and their artistic output”.

Throughout her life, Aidoo saw her writing and other activities as part of her endeavour to help Africans recover from the consequences of colonialism.

In an interview in 1987 she declared: “I wish of course that Africa would be free and strong and organised and constructive, etc ... That is basic to my commitment as a writer … I keep seeing different dimensions of it, different interpretations coming through my writing.”

She is survived by her daughter.

Ama Ata Aidoo, writer and educator, born 23 March 1942; died 31 May 2023

Author Ama Ata Aidoo, ‘an inspiration to feminists everywhere’, dies aged 81

The Ghanaian writer and academic Ama Ata Aidoo, whose work focused on the modern African woman, has died aged 81.

Ata Aidoo, whose fans included Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, rejected the idea of what she described as a “western perception that the African female is a downtrodden wretch”, said the BBC.

The author’s work included the play The Dilemma of a Ghost, in which a Ghanaian student returning home brings his African American wife into the traditional culture and the extended family that he now finds restrictive.

Her first novel was the semi-autobiographical Our Sister Killjoy, published in 1977 and about a Ghanaian girl travelling through Europe. In 1992 Ata Aidoo won the Commonwealth writers’ prize for best African book for her novel Changes: A Love Story, about a career-oriented woman as she divorces her first husband and navigates a new relationship.

As well as being a writer and university professor, Ata Aidoo also served as Ghana’s education minister in the early 1980s; she resigned when she could not make education free.

Tributes have been paid to Ata Aidoo on social media. Writer Mona Eltahawy said on Twitter: “So sad to hear that author Ama Ata Aidoo has passed. An inspiration to feminists everywhere, especially us African feminists.”

Zimbabwean author and activist Tsitsi Dangarembga said on Twitter: “We have lost a granary of wisdom & knowledge.”

Ngozi Adichie chose Ata Aidoo’s short story No Sweetness Here, from a collection of the same name, to read on the Guardian books short story podcast in 2018.

Speaking on the podcast, Ngozi Adichie said she had chosen the story because it was “layered and beautiful and complex but also because I think Ama Ata Aidoo is a writer who should be more widely read than she is”.

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Ngozi Adichie also described Ata Aidoo as very funny, and a writer with “wonderful wit”.

“I think really that one of the reasons that she isn’t as well known as she should be in my opinion is because she’s female,” said Ngozi Adichie, “and a lot of her work is very much about women and what it means to be female at a particular place and time.

“Not only does she write about women, but she writes about women truthfully, and sometimes when you write about a subject of that sort in a way that’s true, it makes people uncomfortable and when you have people who are the tastemakers of literature, and if they can’t absorb what you’re talking about, it then makes it difficult for you to be well known.”

Veteran Ghanaian Author, Feminist Ama Ata Aidoo Dies

Ama Ata Aidoo, a revered writer renowned for her outstanding literary achievements and activism, has passed away at the age of 81 after a brief illness.

Aidoo gained recognition for her portrayal and celebration of African women's experiences in her works, including notable titles such as The Dilemma of a Ghost, Our Sister Killjoy, and Changes. She vehemently challenged the Western perception that cast African women as downtrodden, advocating for their empowerment and agency. Nigerian Afrobeats superstar Burna Boy included her powerful criticism of colonialism and ongoing exploitation of Africa's resources in his song Monsters You Made in 2020, reports BBC.

She served as a university professor and Ghana's education minister in the early 1980s but resigned when she could not make education free.

Ghanaian writer and professor Ama Ata Aidoo died on May 31, 2023, at the age of 81.