The Legend of Ama Ata Aidoo

by Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Social media rules the world these days, and all the bad news come from therein! It was from the Facebook page of the prolific Nigerian scholar based in Germany, Dr Shola Adenekan that I learnt of the death of the pioneer African feminist writer Ama Ata Aidoo on May 31, 2023.

Ama Ata Aidoo holds the record as Africa’s first published woman dramatist with the publication of her play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, in 1965.

A playwright, novelist, poet, and academic, she served as Ghana’s Secretary of Education between 1982 and 1983 in the government of John Jerry Rawlings.

Born into royalty in the Central Region of Ghana on March 23, 1942, she initially bore the Christian name of Christina and was educated at Wesley Girls High School in Cape Coast. She took a Bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Ghana, Legon where she wrote the play The Dilemma of a Ghost.      

A wunderkind, she was gifted with a creative writing fellowship at the esteemed Stanford University, California. USA. She became a lecturer at Legon from 1969 and served as a Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies. She rose to become a Professor at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana.

Ama Ata Aidoo settled in Zimbabwe in 1983, helping to develop the educational curriculum. In 1988 she won a Fulbright Scholarship, and became a writer-in-residence at the University of Richmond, Virginia in 1989. She eventually served as Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.

She set up the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra in 2000 to support and promote the writings of African women writers.

Ama Ata Aidoo announced herself as a writer of great promise with the publishing of her play The Dilemma of a Ghost in 1965. Her collection of short stories, No Sweetness Here, was published in 1970. Her second play, Anowa, got also published in 1970. Her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint, was published in 1977. She published her debut collection of poetry, Someone Talking to Sometime, in 1986. It was also in 1986 that she published her collection of stories for children The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories. In 1987 she published her second collection of poetry Birds and Other Poems. She published another collection of poems in 1992 entitled An Angry Letter in January.

An irrepressible icon of African literature, Ama Ata Aidoo published her award-winning novel Changes: A Love Story in 1991 in Britain and 1993 in USA. Changes won the coveted 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Africa).

In 1997 Ama Ata Aidoo published The Girl Who Can and Other Stories while Diplomatic Pounds and Other Stories was released in 2012.

She was the editor of African Love Stories: An Anthology in 2006. As a part of her 70^th birthday celebrations in 2012, the book Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70 edited by Anne V. Adams was published, and it included contributors such as Ngugi wa Thiongo, Atukwei Okai, Margret Busby, Micere Mugo, Biodun Jeyifo, Toyin Falola, Jane Bryce, James Gibbs, Chikwenye Okonjo-Ogunyemi, Abena Busia, Femi Osofisan, and her daughter Kinna Likimani etc.

A 2014 documentary film, The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo made by Yaba Badoe, showcased the lifework of Ama Ata Aidoo.

The Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association instituted the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize for an outstanding book published by a woman that prioritizes African women’s experiences in honour of Ama Ata Aidoo and Margaret C. Snyder. The Ama Ata Aidoo Centre for Creative Writing (Aidoo Centre), Accra was launched in 2017 as the first of its kind in West Africa with Nii Ayikwei Parkes as its founding Director.

I was in the company of Ama Ata Aidoo at the 2009 Caine Prize for Africa Writing Workshop in a remote beach in Accra, Ghana where she was one of the invited guest writers. She read her flah fiction while Caine Prize Administrator Nick Elam beamed his torchlight for her to read. It was an opportunity for me to learn from her that Ayi Kwei Armah, author of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, heard the phrase “No Sweetness Here” from her and put it in his novel instead of the widely held belief that she borrowed the title of her book No Sweetness Here from Armah!

The works of Ama Ata Aidoo earned high critical acclaim. According to critic Simon Gikandi, The Dilemma of a Ghost “centres on the problems of childbearing, infidelity, and exogamy that arise when Ato Yawson, the protagonist, returns to Ghana with an Afro-American wife, Eulalie Rush. The consequences of this unannounced marriage symbolize both the private and the public dilemmas of the postcolonial subject and her or his society. …The ideological and stereotypical assumptions of both Eulalie and her new in-laws give rise to the seemingly irreconcilable encounter between the West (the United States) and Africa (Ghana).”

With the death of Ama Ata Aidoo on March 31 at age 81, Africa has lost a most original and iconic voice in the world of creative writing, letters and intellection.