Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, one of Africa’s most celebrated authors and playwrights, has perished at the age of 81. She portrayed and celebrated the condition of African women in such works as The Dilemma of a Ghost, Our Sister Killjoy, and Changes.
She opposed what she termed a “Western perception that African women are oppressed wretches.”
In the early 1980s, she also served as education minister but resigned when she was unable to make education free.
In a statement, her family revealed that “our beloved relative and writer” had passed away after a brief illness and asked for privacy to grieve.
Professor Ata Aidoo has received numerous literary awards for her novels, plays, and poems, including the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Changes, a love story about a statistician who divorces her first husband and initiates a polygamous marriage.
Her works, including plays such as Anowa, have been taught in West African institutions alongside those of other greats such as Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.
In 2014, when asked by Zeinab Badawi of BBC HARDTalk if she considered herself a writer with a mission, she responded, “In hindsight, I suppose I could describe myself as a writer with a mission. However, I was unaware of my purpose when I began writing.
“People sometimes ask me why your women are so robust, for example. “This is the only woman I know,” I respond.
She had a significant impact on the younger generation of writers, including the award-winning Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
“When I first discovered Ama Ata Aidoo’s work – a slim book on a dusty shelf in our neighbor’s study in Nsukka [in south-eastern Nigeria] – I was astounded by the realism of her characters, the deftness of her touch, and what I like to call, in a rather awkward phrase, the validating presence of complex femaleness.
“Because I had not often seen this complex femaleness in other African books I had read and adored, mine was a wondrous discovery: of Anowa, tragic and humane and multidimensional, in Aidoo’s play set in the 1800s in Fantiland; of Sissie, the self-assured, perceptive protagonist of the ambitious novel Our Sister Killjoy, who wryly recounts her experiences in Germany and the 1960s; or of the diverse female
In his song Monsters You Made in 2020, Nigerian Afrobeats superstar Burna Boy included her forceful critique of colonialism and ongoing exploitation of Africa’s resources:
Since we first met 500 years ago. Consider us, we’ve sacrificed everything. You are still studying. We have nothing in exchange for this. Nothing. And you are aware. But don’t you suppose this is over at this point? Where are we? “Is that it?”
1942 saw the birth of Ama Ata Aidoo in a small village in the central Fanti-speaking region of Ghana.
Her father established the first school in the village and had a significant impact on her.
She decided at age 15 that she wanted to be a writer, and four years later, after being encouraged to enter a contest, she had accomplished her goal.
Ata Aidoo once reflected on her career by saying,
“I learned I had won a short story contest only when I opened the newspaper that had organized it, saw the story had been published on its front page, and saw that my name was listed as the author.”
“I believe these moments were pivotal for me because… I had articulated a dream… seeing my name in print was a major affirmation for me as a writer.”
In 1964, she published her first play after studying literature at the University of Ghana and becoming a university lecturer.
She moved into self-imposed exile in Zimbabwe and became a full-time writer following her 18-month political career.
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