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
