Ama Ata Aidoo

Christina Ama Ata Aidoo was born on the twenty-third of March 1942 at the village of Abeadzi Kyiakor, near Saltpond, in the Central Region of the Gold Coast — subsequently Ghana — the daughter of Nana Yaw Fama, the chief of the Abeadzi Kyiakor village of the Fante Mfantse people, and Maame Abasema. She was raised in the chief’s household at Abeadzi Kyiakor across the closing years of the British colonial period.

She was placed at fifteen at the Wesley Girls’ High School at Cape Coast — among the principal secondary schools of independence-era Ghana — and completed the school certificate in 1961. She took the bachelor’s in English at the University of Ghana at Legon in 1964 — among the first generation of independence-era Ghanaian women undergraduates — and the graduate certificate in creative writing at the Stanford University at Palo Alto, California, on a Fulbright scholarship in 1965.

She wrote at the University of Ghana at twenty the play The Dilemma of a Ghost — the chronicle of the African American wife Eulalie of the Ghanaian Cape Coast graduate student Ato Yawson on their return to the Yawson family compound at Cape Coast after Ato’s studies in the United States — and the manuscript was published at Accra in 1965 by Longmans, the first published African woman’s play in English. She was twenty-three at the time of publication.

She published the novel Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint at the London house Longman in 1977 — the chronicle of the Ghanaian student Sissie at Bavaria, London and Frankfurt — and the novel Changes: A Love Story at Accra in 1991, awarded the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the African Region.

She served the Government of Ghana between 1982 and 1983 as Minister of Education under the Provisional National Defence Council government of Jerry Rawlings — the principal initiative of which was a free-secondary-education programme. She resigned the post after eighteen months over policy disagreements with Rawlings and went into a fifteen-year working exile, teaching at the University of Zimbabwe at Harare from 1983 to 1991 and at the Brown University at Providence, Rhode Island, from 1992 to 2000.

She founded in 2000 at Accra the Mbaasem Foundation — a writers’ residency programme for African women writers — and directed it for the remaining twenty-three years of her life.

She died at Accra on the thirty-first of May 2023 of complications of a short illness, at eighty-one.

She is honored here as the author of Our Sister Killjoy.