With heartfelt grief, Kwamena Essandoh Aidoo recently announced the passing away of their beloved relative and celebrated literary icon, Ama Ata Aidoo. Disclosing that she died after a brief illness, he informs that the family wishes for privacy to grieve.
Born in a small village in Ghana’s central Fanti-speaking region in 1942, Ama Ata Aidoo first decided to become a writer at the age of fifteen. She had just won a newspaper short story competition. In retrospect, she reasoned about her career: “I won a short story competition, but learned about it only when I opened the newspaper that had organised it, and saw the story had been published on its centre pages and realised the name of the author of that story in print was mine. I believe these moments were crucial for me because … I had articulated a dream… it was a major affirmation for me as a writer, to see my name in print.”
Ama Ata Aidoo’s first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), established her as the first published African woman dramatist. She won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 1992 for Changes, a novel that explores the complexities of a polygamous marriage. Other notable works for her include Anowa (1970) and Our Sister Killjoy (1977). Her works oppose what she described as a “Western perception that the African female is a downtrodden wretch”.
Ama Ata Aidoo will be remembered greatly for her contribution to African literature and her influence on the younger generation of writers. Acclaimed Nigerian Writer Chimamanda Adichie writes of her in a piece for The Africa Report, 2011: “When I first discovered Ama Ata Aidoo’s work – a slim book on a dusty shelf in our neighbour’s study in Nsukka – I was stunned by the believability of her characters, the sureness of her touch and what I like to call, in a rather clunky phrase, the validating presence of complex femaleness.
“Because I had not often seen this complex femaleness in other African books I had read and loved, mine was a wondrous discovery: of Anowa, tragic and humane and multi-dimensional, in Aidoo’s play set in the 1800s in Fantiland; of Sissie, the self-assured, perceptive main character of the ambitious novel Our Sister Killjoy, who wryly recounts her experiences in Germany and England in the 1960s; or of the varied female characters in No Sweetness Here, my favourite of Aido’s books.”
Ama Ata Aidoo studied at the University of Ghana and lectured there for years.
May her soul rest.
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