The name of Ama Ata Aidoo deserves to feature high on any list of influential Anglophone African writers, particularly notable for giving a perspective on women to be found nowhere else. She made her mark not only as an author – with plays, novels, short stories, poetry and essays – but also as a politician, an academic and an activist. Holding strong Pan-Africanist views, she was fearlessly outspoken about the centuries of exploitation of Africa's resources and peoples (as can be heard in a video clip about imperialism that went viral), and always made it clear that she learned her first feminist lessons in Africa.
Born in 1940, Christina Ama Ata Aidoo began the trajectory that launched her literary life in a Fante village in the Central Region of what was then the Gold Coast, where she was born to Maame Elizabeth Aba Abasema Bosu and Nana Manu III – also known as Nana Yaw Fama, chief of Abeadzi Kyiakor. Ama Ata was her mother’s first child, though she had many older siblings from her father’s other wives. She grew up in her father’s royal household, shaped by the stimulus of interactions between family as well as those who came to the chief with local issues.
Her father built the village’s first school, which she began attending in 1946. She went on to win a scholarship at 14 to the prestigious Wesley Girls High School in Cape Coast in 1957. During this time, her love of reading and writing was nurtured, leading in 1958 to her receiving first prize for a story in a Daily Graphic competition. Completing her A-levels in 1960, she was admitted the next year to the University of Ghana, Legon, studying for a BA degree in English, while simultaneously demonstrating her creative skill at whatever writing genre she attempted. In 1962, she won an Mbari Club short-story competition with her entry “No Sweetness Here”, and poetry prizes, too, came her way.
While still an undergraduate, Aidoo wrote her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, premiered in 1964 at the Open-Air Theatre, and in 1965 published by Longman – an achievement marking her out as the first published female African dramatist. She joined the Institute of African Studies for two years, until 1966, benefiting from the mentorship of literary pioneer Efua Sutherland. Then, as the winner of a creative writing fellowship, Ama Ata went to Stanford University in California. A spell in the UK followed, freelancing in broadcasting and journalism, and travels took her elsewhere in Europe and on the African continent, including Tanzania and Kenya, where her daughter Kinna was born in Nairobi, with 1969 also bringing a return to Ghana.
In 1970 came her second play, Anowa, and the short-story collection No Sweetness Here. A rising academic career took her to the Department of English at the University of Cape Coast, where she became a professor, participating in many international seminars and educational initiatives. Her witty and unconventional debut novel Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint was published in 1977.
She was appointed Secretary for Education in Ghana in 1982 under the PNDC administration of Jerry Rawlings, but resigned after 18 months, realizing that she would be unable to achieve her aim of making education in Ghana freely accessible to all.
In 1983, she moved to live in Zimbabwe, continuing her work in education, alongside her writing. While in Harare, she published a collection of poems in 1985, Someone Talking to Sometime, and wrote a children's book entitled The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories (1986). From the late 1980s, she was again in the US, including a spell as writer-in-residence at the University of Richmond, Virginia, in 1989. In 1991, she and poet Jayne Cortez founded and co-chaired the Organization of Women Writers of Africa.
In 1992, Ama Ata won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize with her remarkable novel Changes, and she turned again to poetry with her collection An Angry Letter in January; that same year, I was delighted to include her story "Two Sisters" in my anthology Daughters of Africa. (An anthologist in her own right, she edited 2006’s African Love Stories, published by Ayebia Books.) Ama Ata Aidoo’s commitment to promoting and supporting the literary work of African women was demonstrated again by her establishment of the Mbaasem Foundation in Ghana in 2000.
Aligned with the principled life choices she made, and the stalwart beliefs framed by her own experiences, she portrayed in her works memorable women who defied stereotypes in empowering and inspirational ways, negotiating, examining and exploring the intersections of Western and African worldviews.
From 2004 to 2011, Ama Ata was a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department at Brown University. She chaired the Ghana Association of Writers Book Festival from its inception in 2011. In 2012, she published Diplomatic Pounds & Other Stories, a compilation of short stories. Somehow, she found time, year in and year out, to support ventures she deemed worthy, such as the Etisalat Prize for Literature, created in 2013 as a platform for African writers of debut novels of fiction.
Her genuine humility was never affected by the many accolades she received, including the 2012 volume Essays in honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70 (edited by Anne V. Adams, with a stellar list of contributors, among them: Atukwei Okai, Maryse Condé, Micere Mugo, Toyin Falola, Biodun Jeyifo, Kofi Anyidoho, Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, Naana Banyiwa Horne, Nana Wilson-Tagoe, Carole Boyce Davies, Emmanuel Akyeampong, James Gibbs, Vincent O. Odamtten, Jane Bryce, Esi Sutherland-Addy, Femi Osofisan, Kwesi Yankah, Abena Busia, Yaba Badoe, Ivor Agyeman-Duah, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, and Kinna Likimani), and being the subject of a fascinating 2014 documentary film by Yaba Badoe, The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo. In March 2017, the Ama Ata Aidoo Centre for Creative Writing (Aidoo Centre) was launched in Accra (Nii Parkes was its inaugural director), furthering her legacy.
Having already lived a full life defined from its earliest by so much creativity, versatility, integrity and generosity, Ama Ata had even more in mind that she had hoped to give us – including finalising a new novel she told me she had been working on for 18 years. Her death on 31 May 2023 came as a shock, an irreparable loss to family and friends, to everyone fortunate enough to have known her personally. The only mitigation is that her extraordinary talent, tenacity of spirit and the perceptiveness that shines through her writing will live on, sustaining us all into a more optimistic future.
Margaret Busby, London, August 2023