Ama Ata Aidoo, groundbreaking Ghanaian writer, dies at age 81
Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian playwright, author and activist hailed as one of Africa’s leading literary lights and one of its most influential feminists, passed away on Wednesday. She turned 81.
Her family said in a statement that she died after a short illness. The statement did not specify the cause or where she died.
In a broad career that has included writing plays, novels and short stories, stints on multiple university faculties and, in short, a position as cabinet minister in Ghana, Ms. Aidoo established herself as a major voice of post-colonial Africa.
Her seminal play, “The Dilemma of a Ghost,” published in 1965, explored the cultural disruptions experienced by a Ghanaian student returning home after studying abroad and that of his black American wife, who has left behind the legacy of colonialism and slavery. must confront. It was one of several of Mrs Aidoo’s works that became staples in West African schools.
Throughout her literary career, Mrs. Aidoo sought to shed light on the paradoxes faced by modern African women, still burdened by the legacy of colonialism. She rejected what she described as the “Western perception that the African woman is an oppressed wretch.”
Her novel ‘Changes: A Love Story’, which won the award in 1992 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Book, Africa, portrays the psychological and cultural dilemmas faced by Esi, an educated, career-oriented woman in Accra, the capital of Ghana, who leaves her husband after he rapes her and finds herself in a polygamous relationship with a wealthy man .
In this work and many others, Mrs. Aidoo chronicled the struggle of African women for recognition and equality, a struggle, she claimed, inseparable from the long shadow of colonialism.
Her groundbreaking debut novel, “Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections From a Black-Eyed Squint” (1977), recounts the experiences of Sissie, a young Ghanaian woman who travels to Europe on a scholarship to better herself, as such a move was traditionally described, with a Western background. education. In Germany and England, she comes face to face with the dominance of white values, including Western notions of success, among African expatriates.
As a Fulbright scholar who spent years as an expatriate herself, including as a writer-in-residence at the University of Richmond in Virginia and a visiting professor in Brown’s Africana studies department, she too experienced feelings of cultural disruption.
“I’ve always felt uncomfortable abroad: racism, the cold, the weather, the food, the people,” she said in a 2003 interview published by the University of Alicante in Spain. “I also felt a kind of patriotic guilt. Something like: Oh, my love! Look at all the problems we have at home. What am I doing here?”
Whatever her feelings about living abroad, she was welcomed in Western literary circles. A 1997 article in The New York Times related how her appearance at a New York University conference for women writers of African descent “was greeted with the kind of reverence reserved for heads of state.”
Although she was not, she had been Ghana’s education minister, an appointment she accepted in 1982 with the aim of making education free for everyone. She resigned after 18 months when she realized how many barriers she would have to overcome to reach that goal.
After moving to Zimbabwe in 1983, she developed curricula for the country’s Ministry of Education. She also made her mark in the non-profit sphere, establishing the Mbaasem Foundation in 2000 to support African women writers.
She was an important pan-Africanist voice, advocating for unity among African nations and for their continued liberation. She spoke with anger about the centuries-long exploitation of the continent’s natural resources and people.
‘Since we met you 500 years ago, now look at us”, she said in an interview with a French journalist in 1987, later sampled in the 2020 issue “Monsters You Made” by Nigerian Afrobeats star Burna Boy. “We gave everything, you still take. I mean, where will the whole western world be without us Africans? Our cocoa, wood, gold, diamond, platinum.”
“Everything you have is ours,” she continued. “I do not say it. It is a fact. And in exchange for all these, what do we have? Nothing.”
Christina Ama Ata Aidoo and her twin brother, Kwame Ata, were born on March 23, 1942, in the Fanti village of Abeadzi Kyiakor, in a central region of Ghana, then known by its colonial name, the Gold Coast.
Her father, Nana Yaw Fama, was a village chief who built the first school, and her mother was Maame Abba Abasema. Information on Mrs Aidoo’s survivors was not immediately available.
Her grandfather had been captured and tortured by the British, a fact she later cited when she described herself as “coming from a long line of warriors.”
She said she felt a literary calling from an early age. “At age 15,” she said, “a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.”
Four years later, she won a short story contest. When she saw her story published by the newspaper sponsoring the contest, she said, “I had articulated a dream.”