One of Africa’s most-celebrated authors and playwrights, Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, has died aged 81.
A renowned feminist, she depicted and celebrated the condition of African women in works such as The Dilemma of a Ghost, Our Sister Killjoy and Changes.
She opposed what she described as a “Western perception that the African female is a downtrodden wretch”.
She also served as education minister in the early 1980s, but resigned when she could not make education free.
In a statement, her family said: “Our beloved relative and writer passed away after a short illness” – requesting privacy to allow them to grieve.
A university professor, Ata Aidoo won many 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 enters into a polygamous marriage.
Her work, including plays like Anowa, have been read in schools across West Africa along with the work of other greats like Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.
When asked by BBC HARDTalk’s Zeinab Bidawi in 2014 if she regarded herself as a writer with a mission, she replied: “In retrospect, I suppose I could describe myself as a writer with a mission. But I was never aware that I had a mission when I started to write.
“People sometimes question me, for instance, why are your women so strong? And I say, that is the only woman I know.”
She was a major influence on the younger generation of writers, including Nigeria’s awarding-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
“When I first discovered Ama Ata Aidoo’s work – a slim book on a dusty shelf in our neighbour’s study in Nsukka [in south-eastern Nigeria] – I was stunned by the believability of her characters, the sureness of her touch and what I like to call, in a rather clunky phrase, the validating presence of complex femaleness.
“Because I had not often seen this complex femaleness in other African books I had read and loved, mine was a wondrous discovery: of Anowa – tragic, humane and many dimensional, in Aidoo’s play set in the 1800s’ Fantiland; of Sissie – the self-assured, perceptive main character of the ambitious novel Our Sister Killjoy, who wryly recounts her experiences in Germany and England during the 1960s; and the varied female characters in No Sweetness Here, my favourite of Aidoo’s books.”
Nigerian Afrobeat superstar Burna Boy included her powerful criticism of colonialism and ongoing exploitation of Africa’s resources in his song Monsters You Made in 2020:
“Since we met you people 500 years ago. Look at us, we’ve given everything. You are still taking. In exchange for that, we have got nothing. Nothing. And you know it. But don’t you think that this is over now! Over where? Is it over?”
Ama Ata Aidoo was born in a small village of Ghana’s central Fanti-speaking region in 1942.
Her father opened the first school in the village and was a strong influence on her.
At the age of 15, she decided she wanted to be a writer – and within just four years had achieved that ambition after being encouraged to enter a competition.
“I won a short-story competition, but learned about it only when I opened the newspaper that had organised it and saw the story had been published on its centre pages – and realised the name of the author of that story in print was mine,” Ata Aidoo once said as she looked back at her career.
“I believe these moments were crucial for me because … I had articulated a dream… it was a major affirmation for me as a writer to see my name in print.”
She went on to study literature at the University of Ghana and became a lecturer, publishing her first play in 1964.
After her 18 month-foray into politics, she went into self-imposed exile in Zimbabwe for a time and became a full-time writer.
