When it comes to honoring an international icon during Women’s History Month, there are many choices,, from legendary South African vocalist Miriam Makeba to stage and screen star Lupita Nyong’o, who was born in Mexico but raised in Kenya. Among those warranting consideration is also Ama Ata Aidoo, the highly acclaimed novelist, poet, and playwright from Ghana. Despite the recognition she has received in literary circles, she is perhaps the least known of the three and thus featured here.
In 1965, Aidoo’s “The Dilemma of a Ghost” was the first play by an African dramatist to be published. The one-act play centers on Ato, who has returned to his village with his African American wife, Eulalie. She struggles to adapt to the new culture and faces derision for her failure to adjust to the traditional lifestyle. “Ghost” is a metaphor from a Ghanaian folktale about a ghost unable to move forward or backward, symbolizing Ato’s inability to navigate the challenges of modernity and ties to his communal roots.
Five years later, in “Anowa,” Aidoo continued to dissect the problems African women encountered amid the onslaught of contemporary issues that make it difficult for artists to address traditional matters. She met these problems with a similar intelligence and nuance in her novels, including in “Our Sister Killjoy,” an experimental blend of prose and poetry, and a well-measured analysis of imperialism. As one critic noted, “her characters are often complex, layered, and caught between, or forging new paths through, tradition and modernity.”
Aidoo was the recipient of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 1992 for her novel “Changes.” Eight years later, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra, which focused on supporting African women writers.
When she wasn’t deeply immersed in the world of fiction and imagination, Aidoo was welcomed in the educational and political arenas. From 1982 to 1983, she served as secretary of education in Ghana during the Jerry “J.J.” Rawlings administration.
At one point in her career, she lived in Zimbabwe with her daughter, as noted in Margaret Busby’s “Daughters of Africa,” which includes Aidoo’s story “Two Sisters” among the prominent works by women authors. She told Busby that she wrote from the premise that “only an African knows what it is to be an African and only a woman knows what it is to be a woman and can give expression to the essence of being a woman.”
Aidoo died on May 31, 2023, in Accra at age 81. She was given a state funeral, followed by lying in state at her hometown of Abeadzi Kyiakor.