“Love? Love? Love is not safe, my lady silk, love is dangerous. It is deceitfully sweet like wine from a fresh palm tree at dawn. Love is fine for singing about, and love songs are good to listen to, sometimes even to dance to. But when we need to count on human strength, and when we have to count pennies for food for our stomachs and clothes for our backs, love is nothing. Ah my lady, the last man any woman should think of marrying is the man she loves.”
—Ama Ata Aidoo, Changes: A Love Story
“Money making is like a god possessing a priest. He never will leave you, until he has occupied you, wholly changed the order of your being, and seared you through and up and down. Then only would he eventually leave you, but nothing of you except an exhausted wreck, lying prone and wondering who are you.”
—Ama Ata Aidoo, The Dilemma of a Ghost
Ama Ata Aidoo—playwright, poet, novelist, and feminist visionary—was born on March 23, 1942, in Abeadzi Kyiakor, near Saltpond, in what was then the Gold Coast, later Ghana. She grew up in a Fanti royal household. The Fanti, one of Ghana’s major ethnic groups, are renowned for their poetic oral traditions. “My earliest memory of story is listening to my mother tell them in the courtyard,” she recalled. “The Fanti are a people of language—even disputes are poetic.”
Among the Fanti, storytelling is life. Proverbs, folktales, dirges, and praise songs are tools for teaching and remembering. The spoken and the sung are intertwined—to speak beautifully is to live rightly. Aidoo began writing within this world of musical language and moral compass.
Her father, Nana Yaw Fama, was a local chief; her mother, Maame Abasema, also came from royal lineage. Fama insisted that his daughters receive the same education as boys. “My father believed that education was the greatest equaliser,” Aidoo said. That conviction set her on a course rarely taken by girls in 1950s Ghana.
Aidoo attended Wesley Girls’ High School in Cape Coast and later the University of Ghana, Legon, graduating with a BA in English in 1964. She was mentored by Efua Sutherland, the pioneering playwright who merged traditional African storytelling with Western theatre and founded the Ghana Drama Studio. “She taught me that we were not mimics,” Aidoo said. “That we had our own rhythms, our own ways of telling.”
In 1964, while still an undergraduate, Aidoo wrote The Dilemma of a Ghost. It was published in 1965, making her the first African woman dramatist in English to be published. The play tells the story of Ato Yawson, a Ghanaian man returning from America with an African-American wife, Eulalie. Their marriage is caught between diasporic modernity and Ghanaian tradition. “I wrote it because I was angry,” Aidoo said. “Angry that people believed that diaspora Africans were somehow not ‘real’ Africans. I wanted to show the pain on both sides.” In one key moment, Eulalie cries out: “Why must I constantly be punished for a past I had no part in?” The question echoes the dislocation that defines much of Aidoo’s work.
Aidoo’s second play, Anowa (1970), drew directly from Fanti folklore. The title character rejects an arranged marriage, choosing instead a man she hopes to mould. The marriage unravels into tragedy. Through Anowa, Aidoo explored how individual choice collides with communal tradition—how freedom can corrupt as easily as it liberates.
That same year, Aidoo published No Sweetness Here, a collection of short stories capturing the contradictions in post-colonial Ghana. “Life was not a story told by lantern light,” one character reflects. “It was a test you were never prepared for.” Aidoo’s women are often caught between the obligations of kinship and the pull of selfhood.
In 1977, the Ghanaian writer released Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint. The novel combined poetry, prose, and political critique. Sissie, the protagonist, is a Ghanaian student in Europe who sees her hosts with irony and anger: “Europe is not a place,” she says. “It is a condition.” Elsewhere, Aidoo observes: “We are victims of our history and our present. They place too many obstacles in the way of love. And we cannot enjoy even our differences in peace.”
Another line from Killjoy reads: “But what she also came to know was that someone somewhere would always see in any kind of difference, an excuse to be mean.” That directness refused to minimise the unending micro and macro aggressions endured by African women.
In 1982, Aidoo briefly entered politics when she was appointed Ghana’s Minister of Education under Jerry Rawlings. She hoped to expand access for girls and rural children, but left after 18 months. “You cannot shape policy if you do not hold the purse,” she remarked later and returned to writing full-time.
“For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.”
In that conviction, Aidoo stood among the continent’s literary moralists—artists who believed that art was more than a passive mirror - an active weapon. Her fiction, poetry, and plays were written to unsettle, to reclaim the power of the African voice from colonial and patriarchal distortions.
In 1991, Aidoo published Changes: A Love Story. The novel follows Esi, a successful data analyst who divorces her husband after marital rape and enters a polygamous marriage. Aidoo uses this work with irony and empathy to explore how freedom can wound as much as it liberates. Changes went on to win the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Africa) and became a core text in women’s studies and African literature.
Aidoo also wrote poetry. Her collections—Someone Talking to Sometime (1985), Birds and Other Poems (1987), and An Angry Letter in January (1992)—tackled exile, justice, and intimacy. In one poem, she writes: “It is not my fault/I shout for justice/but I cannot keep quiet.” In another, she warns: “Do not let them fool you/the story of the African woman/is not a footnote/It is the story.”
The writer also produced children’s stories and essays that demanded African self-determination. In 2000, with her daughter Kinna Likimani, Aidoo founded the Mbaasem Foundation to support African women writers. “We cannot be guests in our own literary house,” she declared at its launch.
Recognition followed. By the 2000s, Aidoo’s early dismissal by male critics had reversed. She became the first Ghanaian woman playwright on the national curriculum and, in 2021, received the African Studies Association’s Distinguished Africanist Award.
Ama Ata Aidoo died on May 31, 2023, in Accra, aged 81. Ghana declared a period of mourning. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called her “a pathbreaker and an inspiration”.
Ultimately, writing was, for Aidoo, the epitome of unending courage—to tell the truth about the worlds she inhabited and observed, and African women-without fear. “Once in a while, I catch myself wondering whether I would have found the courage to write if I had not started to write when I was too young to know what was good for me.”
Next week: Part Four of Women Writers Out of Africa will feature Egyptian novelist Nawal El Saadawi.
IRA MATHUR is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
