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Ama Ata Aidoo (b. 1942) - in full Christina Ama Ata Aidoo |
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Ghanaian writer, who has depicted the role of African woman in modern society. Her acclaimed prose works include No Sweets Here (1970), a collection of short stories, the semi-autobiographical novel Our Sister Killjoy (1979), and Changes (1991), which won the 1993 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa region. Aidoo has noted that the idea of nationalism has been used by new leaders as a tool to keep people oppressed. She has criticized those educated Africans who profess to love their country but are lured away by the material benefits of the developed word; educated in the West, they internalize the ideologies of the colonizer and eventually fail to return to home for the benefit of their own communities. Aidoo believes in a distinct African identity, which she sees from a female perspective. "'My dear young man,' said the visiting professor, 'to give you the decent answer your anxiety demands, I would have to tell you a detailed history of the African continent. And to do that, I shall have to speak every day, twenty-four hours a day, for at least three thousand years. And I don't mean to be rude to you or anything, but who has that kind of time?'" (from Our Sister Killjoy, 1977) Ama Ata Aidoo was born in Abeadzi Kyiakor, Gold Coast, now Ghana.
Her father was a chief of Abeadzi Kyakor, a political individual, as
Aidoo's grandfather who was killed by the British. Because of her
father's position, Aidoo grew up in a royal household with a clear
sense of African traditions. Her father was also an advocate of Western
education and sent her to Wesley Girls' High School in Cape Coast. In
1964 Aidoo graduated from the University of Ghana in Legon, where she
received a bachelor's degree in English. At that time she called
herself "Christina Ata Aidoo". While still studying, she started to
publish poetry, and began to work with Efua Sutherland,
founder of the Ghana Drama Studio. Writing poetry had been already her
childhood's dream. Her first story was 'Unto Us a Child Is Born,' that
she had written and submitted to a short story contest organized by a
national newspaper. She won the prize and bought with the money a pair
of shoes. Aidoo's work falls into various genres: fiction, drama, poetry,
essays, letters and criticism. Her central issues are the legacy of the
slave trade, the impact of neo-colonialism on the Educated Ghanaian
elite, and the notion of exile and African diasporic identity.
Exploring her own past, Aidoo wrote in the poem 'Homesickness':
"Daughter of my Mother and my / Father's Orphan, / what is to become of
me?" Often
her stories focus on the role of women in the process of change. "Isn't
it clear that the African man alone isn't able to cope with out
relationship with the West and the rest of the world," she has said.
After rejecting identification as feminist, Aidoo amemded her position
later. From the beginning, Aidoo
has based her plays more or
less on earlier tradition. She gained first notice with the
play The Dilemma of a Ghost (1964),
which concerned the problem of conflict between traditional culture and
Western education and values. Aidoo has said, that she got the gist for
the work from a children's playsong in Takorandi. In the story a young
man from Ghana, Ato Yaweson, who was educated in the United States,
returns home and brings with him seeds of conflict. The conflict is
compounded by his wife's ignorance and immaturity. In the end Ato's
mother helps to save the family. Aidoo's play was written after Ghana
had gained freedom from colonial rule. However, euphoria in the country
had turned into disillusionment. The play premiered at Commonwealth Hall's Open-Air Theatre, University of Ghana, in March 1964. It received mixed reviews, but was succesfully produced in Accra, Lagos, Ibadan, and elsewhere. Her second play ANOWA (1970), which was set on an earlier historical period than Dilemma of a Ghost, was based on a Ghanaian folktale of a girl who defied her parents in choice of her husband, and marries an attractive stranges who turn out to be the devil in disguise. Its inspirational source was a story that Aidoo's mother had told her. The play had a successful production in Britain in 1991. No Sweets Here collected Aidoo's early short stories, written from the mid-1960s. It was republished in 1995 by the Feminist Press. In 'Something to Talk About on the Way to the Funeral' Aidoo uses the technique of oral storytelling. "Everybody needs a backbone. If we do not refer to the old traditions, it is almost like operating with amnesia," she has argued. The narrator tells her sister about Aunt Araba, beautiful, enterprising, and economically self-empowered woman. In her puberty she is sent to stay with a lady relative and learns to bake epitsi, tatare, boodoo, and other sweeties which satisfy "the tongue but do not fill the stomach". However, she returns home after troubles with the lady's husband – Araba has a child, Ato, and marries a good husband. Aunt Araba starts to bake and sell ordinary bread with success. Ato remains the only child, his real father sends him to college but he is spoilt. Ato has a child with a girl, Mansa, promises to marry her but cannot do it because he has got another girl into trouble – her parents are influential and Ado has to marry her. Aunt Araba sends Mansa to a friend and she starts to bake with machines. Araba dies, her spirit gone. "Certainly it was her son who drove it away." But Mansa, whom she has trained, is expected to carry on her legacy. Aidoo's work at home and teaching took all her spare time and it was not until 1977 when she finished her next book, Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint.
This novel dealt with the encounter between African and European
cultures, and the psychological impact of post-colonialism on women.
The young heroine, Sissie, is disillusioned and alienated by her
experience in England and in the "heart of darkness" of Bavaria,
Germany. She feels uncomfortable about the use of a language that
"enslaved" her, and she experiences racism and ignorance about Africa
throughout her journeys. When her friendship comes on the brink of
lesbian love, Sissie is disgusted, and decides to return to Ghana. Aidoo's narrative technique alternates between prose and poetry, sometimes one word covers an entire page. Sissie is not an omniscient narrator but other characters are treated as equals, who speak in their voices. In the manner of oral storytelling, Aidoo appeals directly to the reader. Our Sister Killjoy was largely ignored by African (male) critics. Partly as a response to this silence, Aidoo wrote the famous essay, 'Unwelcome Pals and Decorative Slaves', first presented in Calabar, Nigeria, in 1981, at the International Conference on African Literature and the English Language. The protagonist of Changes is a modern African woman, Esi, who earns more than her schoolmaster husband Oku. After a "marital rape" – a concept that has not raised so much debate in Africa than in the West – she asks for a divorce. She begins an affair with a Muslim businessman Ali Kondey. Though Ali is married, he can have more than one wife. They marry, and there are fewer demads put on Esi. She realizes that her husband is unable to give her the attention she needs and they drift apart. Esi is left to wonder "what fashion of loving was she ever going to consider adequate.'' Aidoo has taught for many years in the United States and Kenya. She
has been a professor of English at the University of Ghana and a fellow
at the Institute for African Studies, where she wrote and researched
Fanti drama. In 1974-75 she served as a consulting professor to the
Washington bureau of the Phelps-Stokes Fund's Ethnic Studies Program.
She has attended an advanced creative writing course at Stanford
University and she has been at the Harvard International Seminar. After J.J. Rawlings' coup of 31 December 1981, arts were given a new national importance. The following period saw the birth of many festival across the country. The most important was the PANAFEST (the Pan African Historical Theatre Festival), which sought to bring Africans on the continent and in the diaspora together. In addition, Chinese engineers constructed a massive National Theatre, which opened in January 1993. Playwrights such as Aidoo, Asiedu Yirenkyi and Ben-Abdallah held high governmental posts, often in Information, Education or Culture; Aidoo served as Secretary for Education for eighteen months in the early 1980s. "I thought at that time the most valid thing I could do was to be the PNDC Secretary for Education, because I believe that education it the key, the key to everything. Whereas I do not discount the importance of my work as a writer or the possibility of doing things with my writing, I thought that out there as minister, or whatever, you have a direct access to state power, to affect things and to direct them immediately." (Juju Fission: Women's Alternative Fictions from the Sahara, the Kalahari, and the Oases In-Between by Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, 2007, p. 182) Disappointed in the progress of her plans, Aidoo offered to resign but was instead dismissed from office. A year later she left her home counry for Zimbabwe. In the poem 'Speaking of Hurricanes,' published in An Angry Letter in January (1992), she said: "blew our hopes / up, down, left, right: anywhere and everywhere . . . except / forward to fulfilment." Between 1970 and 1985 she published little, but in 1986 appeared a collection of poetry, Someone Talking to Sometime, which was followed next year by The Eagle and the Chickens, a children's book. While in Harare, Zimbabwe, she worked for the Curriculum Development Unit of the Ministry of Education. She was also active in the Zimbabwe Women Writers Group. Some of the stories of The Girl Who Can and Other Stories (1999) had originally appeared in periodicals before being collected in this volume. The title story told about the relationship between mothers and daughters, between the younger and the older generation. The conflict is seen through the eyes of Ajola, the seven-your-old daughter of Kaya; her grandmother Nana considers her legs too thin: "If any woman decides to come into this world with her own two legs, then she should select legs that have meat on them: with good calves." Her legs become an object of different claims and cultural expectations, as if distantly echoing the thoughts of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon of the colonized-body. A politically outspoken person, during President Clinton's stay
in Ghana in 1998 Aidoo criticized the mass media, saying that it has
made the visit look like second coming of Messiah. The acclaimed Kenyan
author Ngugi Wa Thiong'o has said in an article written to celebrate Aidoo's 70th birthday: "Her infectious
laughter and warm personality easily break barriers of culture and
race, even when and where she is at her most critical. She never
compromises on questions of African dignity and standing in the world."
In 2010 Aidoo concluded her time at Brown University as a long-term visiting
professor of Africana Studies and literary arts. Upon settling back in
Ghana, she served as the Executive Director of Mbaasem, a foundation she established to promote
the work of Ghanaian and African women writers. Aidoo's third
collection of stories, Diplomatic Pound & Other Stories, came out in 2012. After the Ceremonies: New and Selected Poems (2017) brought together new and old poems written over the course of three decades. The published ones were mainly from Someome Talking and An Angry Letter in January. For further reading: Women Writers in Black Africa by Lloyd Brown (1981); Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves (1986); In their Own Voices, edited Adeola James (1990); Diverse Voices, edited by Harriet Devine Jump (1991); Black Women's Writing, edited by Gina Wisker (1993); The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo by Vincent Odamtten (1994); 'Ama Ata Aidoo' by Hildegard Hoeller, in Postcolonial African Writers, edited by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (1998); Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo, ed. Ada Uzoamaka Azodo and Gay Wilentz (1999); 'Aidoo, Ama Ata' by C.M. [Christopher Mari], in World Authors 1990-1995, ed. Clifford Thompson (2000); Fertile Crossings: Metamorphoses of Genre in Anglophone West African Literature by Pietro Deandrea (2002); New Directions in African Literature: A Review, edited by Ernest N. Emenyonu (2006); Juju Fission: Women's Alternative Fictions from the Sahara, the Kalahari, and the Oases In-Between by Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi (2007); Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70: A Reader in African Cultural Studies, edited by Anne V. Adams (2012); 'The drama of dislocation: staging diaspora history in the work of Adrienne Kennedy and Ama Ata Aidoo,' in Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic by Samantha Pinto (2013); Transnational Africana Women's Fictions, edited by Cheryl Sterling (2022); West African Women in the Diaspora: Narratives of Other Spaces, Other Selves by Rose A. Sackeyfio (2022) - Other African women writers: Flora Nwapa (1931-1996), Mariama Bâ (1929-81), Buchi Emecheta (b. 1944), Tsitsi Dangarembga (b. 1959) Selected works:
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