Ama Ata Aidoo: A Pan-African Renaissance Woman (1942-2023)

August 2020. As I immerse myself in the mesmerising sounds of Burna Boy's latest track, featuring Chris Martin, an unexpected voice interrupts the song's rhythm. It is a woman speaking passionately and with conviction about Africa's history of exploitation and oppression. Intrigued, I seek to discover the identity of this powerful voice. Google leads me to Ama Ata Aidoo, a remarkable Pan-African woman, whose life and works resonate deeply with the struggles and triumphs of the African continent.

Aidoo’s legacy is too good to paint with overly broad strokes. She was more than just a trailblazing writer, poet, and playwright. Since her birth into a royal family in the Fanti village of Abeadzi Kyiakor in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana), Aidoo’s environment, which involved a front seat in her nation’s struggle for independence, fostered her passion for fighting for liberation using a tool she had loved since a child; words. Born to a Fanti chief passionate about education and a mother who was the homestead’s designated storyteller, Aidoo found solace in the magic of words allowing her imagination to soar beyond her village’s struggles that were part of Ghana’s struggle for independence.?

Aidoo’s father, an anti-colonial man but a pro-western education, ensured that she accessed the best of Western education and sent her to Wesley Girls’ High School in Cape Coast. Her interactions within the school brewed her desire to become a poet despite discouragement from her teacher. Nevertheless, Aidoo received an Olivetti Typewriter that propelled her literary pursuits to become a published poet. Her passion for literature burgeoned and she devoured works by African and international authors alike, drawing inspiration from Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Virginia Woolf. They became a background that propelled her in a literary direction. It, therefore, came as no surprise when she pursued literature and African studies as her major at the University of Ghana for her undergraduate and postgraduate respectively.?

While there she immersed herself in the rich tapestry of African storytelling traditions by joining the University’s School of Drama and Writing workshop. While doing her undergraduate, she discovered her voice as a writer, capturing the essence of African experiences and the plight of women in her eloquent prose. While still in school, she wrote her first play dubbed ‘The Dilemma of a Ghost’. A play about a Ghanaian man who returns from a sojourn in the United States with an African American wife. The play was staged in 1965, and published the following year, making Aidoo the first published African woman dramatist. The play was later produced in Ghana in 1972.?

Returning to Ghana in the late 1960s after her Creative Studies Fellowship at Stanford University in California, Aidoo sought to learn and embrace African heritage beyond the white man’s recount and infuse it in her work. As she served as a teacher of English at the University of Ghana, a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies and a university lecturer and professor, Aidoo was particular about paying homage to the African women writers whose work paved the way for her own like Mariama Ba, Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta, and Nawal El Sadawi among others who explored African themes.?

Following in her father’s footsteps, she became an advocate of proper and accessible education. In the early 1980s, she accepted her appointment as Minister of Education under the Provisional National Defence Council, a political party under the Jerry Rawlings administration in 1982 but resigned after 18 months. When asked in an interview why she resigned after such a short time, she said, “Everyone would listen to Cabinet meetings when my male colleagues were speaking. But me, being a woman, when I brought up a topic of discussion, they wouldn’t pay attention.”?

She acknowledged that her ideas on education were not being received well and most times, ridiculed. Her advocacy for a better Ghana did not die after but was pursued using a different route.?

A literary route.?

Her pen became a wand and her creative spirit transcended the norm. She conjured stories, poems and plays that celebrated the resilience and the authentic beauty of African people. She became a prominent figure in the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA). In this space, she delved into the rich untold stories of the Ghanaian culture, revealing the complexities of its history and the struggles of her people. Through her work, she emerged as a fierce advocate of women’s rights and pan-Africanism. She shattered stereotypes presenting Africa as a monolithic continent.?

With no conscious Western feminist agenda in mind, Aidoo continuously said she learnt her first feminism lessons from her people and tackled African feminism in her fiction. Born in an Akan society, a Ghanaian group which according to her openly favours women to the extent that a woman with four sons is still considered infertile because of her inability to bear daughters, her writings reflected what she saw as a child in the women in her community.?

“People say to me: Your women characters seem to be stronger than we are used to when thinking about African women. As far as I am concerned these are the African women among whom I was brought up,” she said in an interview.?

As a result, Aidoo’s literary contributions reverberated far beyond Ghana’s borders. Her groundbreaking novel, Changes; A Love Story, her second novel after Our Sister Killjoy, examines the complexities of relationships and yearning for personal freedom in post-colonial Africa. Through the lens of her female characters, Aidoo explored the clash between societal pressures and personal desires. Not only did the novel win the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Africa) but also became a clarion call for women across Africa, encouraging them to curve their own destiny and challenge the chains that bound them into ‘expected womanhood’.?

Challenging a rigid African society, Aidoo’s work explored unchartered territories but also topics that were written myopically at the time. In Our Sister Killjoy, which was inspired by her sojourn in London Aidoo depicts same-sex marriages from a naive mind visiting the West. The book attracted backlash from the conservatives in Ghana for presenting same-sex relations and from the lesbian community for not exploring the topic beyond the surface. The portrayal, she insisted, was a reflection of her naivety as a young woman in Europe.?

This was not her first dance with controversy.?

Throughout her life, she continued to be a beacon for social change thus rubbing shoulders with many people in the West and even in her continent with her ideas of just and independent African societies. Despite the atrocious commentary in many interviews about her opinions on diverse matters, Aidoo was never deterred from reimagining a Pan-African society for the continent and its freedom from unnecessary foreign aid, which she claimed was the new form of Western colonisation. To culminate her literary contributions, in 2014, she received the Golden Wreath Award at the Struga Poetry Evenings in Macedonia.?

Aidoo advocated for Africa and women’s liberation beyond her written word. She used her voice as a tool to dismantle patriarchy, sexism, and inequality that suffocates our beloved continent. Aidoo in interviews never shied away from reminding the West how they became the world’s ‘superpower’ and in the same breath, remind Africans to demand better from the West and their puppets residing in Africa.

The children of Africa will remember her for more than just her storytelling prowess.?

A dreamer. A free pan-African daughter.