Ama Ata Aidoo

Ama Ata Aidoo was a Ghanaian author and one of Africa’s most influential playwrights and poets who served as education minister in Ghana. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist.

Christine Ama Ata Aidoo was born, with a twin brother, Kwame Ata, at Abeadzi Kyiakor, near Saltpond in central Ghana, the daughter of Maame Abasema and Nana Yaw Fama. Her father was chief of Abeadzi Kyiakor, and she belonged to Fante royalty.

Maame Abasema founded the first school in Saltpond and ensured that both his children received a good education there. Aidoo later spoke of the importance of the village storyteller, around whom the villagers would gather in the evenings.

From 1957, the year that Ghana became the first independent African nation, she attended Wesley Girls’ senior high school in the city of Cape Coast. There she became aware of Ghana’s connection with the history of slave trading.

In 1961 she enrolled at the University of Ghana to study English and began writing seriously. The following year she was selected by a panel including Chinua Achebe, Langston Hughes, and Wole Soyinka to attend a writing workshop in Ibadan, Nigeria.

In 1964, at 22, Aidoo unveiled her play The Dilemma of a Ghost on the stage of the Ghana Drama Studio. The following year, in 1965, it was published by Longman, establishing her as the pioneering female African dramatist in the realm of published works.

The Dilemma of a Ghost and her subsequent play Anowa (1969) both were crafted by weaving African and Western performance traditions. Aidoo's ingenuity shone through as she formulated an Africanized variant of English for her characters, ingeniously incorporating her native Akan idioms and sentence structures into their dialogue.

After graduation, Aidoo taught at universities in Africa and the US. She held a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University before returning to Ghana in 1969 to teach English at the University of Ghana.

Her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy: Or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint (1977), encapsulates her narrator's wittily self-aware humor and keen sense of differing perceptions.

She was appointed Ghanaian minister for education in 1982, but in 1983 resigned and moved to Zimbabwe, where she worked for the Zimbabwe Ministry for Education.

Furthermore, Ama Ata Aidoo earned acclaim for her collection Someone Talking to Sometime, which secured the esteemed Nelson Mandela Prize for Poetry in 1987.

Aidoo won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. The book tells of a career-centered Ghanaian woman as she divorces her first husband and marries into a polygamist union.

In 2000, she with her daughter Kinna Likamanni established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers.

Aidoo was the subject of a 2014 documentary film, The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo, by Yaba Badoe.

Ama Ata Aidoo died on 31 May 2023 in Accra.