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Ghanaian author, poet, playwright and academic, Professor Ama Ata Aidoo is dead at age 81.
Her family has confirmed that she passed away on Wednesday morning, May 31, 2023, after a career spanning more than five decades.
“The Family of Prof. Ama Ata Aidoo with deep sorrow but in the hope of the resurrection, informs the general public that our beloved relative and writer passed away in the early hours of this morning Wednesday 31st May 2023, after a short illness.
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“Funeral arrangements would be announced in due course. The Family requests privacy at this difficult moment,” the family head Kwamena Essandoh Aidoo announced in a short statement.
Prof Ama Ata Aidoo received international recognition as one of the most prominent African writers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
She was born on March 23, 1942, in Ghana’s Central Region at Abeadzi Kyiakor, close to Saltpond. She studied at the University of Ghana and Wesley Girls’ High School. The author’s English-language writing highlighted the paradoxical position of the contemporary African woman.
As a University of Ghana honours student in 1964, Prof. Aidoo started writing seriously. A Ghanaian student returning home pulls his African American wife into the traditional lifestyle and the extended family that he now finds constrictive, like in the problem play The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), which earned her early fame.
Their predicament represents Aidoo’s recurring concern with Africans who have received education overseas (the “been-to”), which she also expressed in her semi-autobiographical experimental debut book, Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1966).
Prof. Aidoo was awarded a fellowship to study at Stanford University in California. She afterwards returned to Cape Coast, Ghana, to teach (1970–1982), and she later accepted a number of visiting professorships in the US and Kenya.
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She was a major influence on the younger generation of writers, including Nigeria’s awarding-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
In a piece about the Ghanaian in The Africa Report publication in 2011, Adichie wrote:
“When I first discovered Ama Ata Aidoo’s work – a slim book on a dusty shelf in our neighbour’s study in Nsukka [in south-eastern Nigeria] – 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 many 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 Aidoo’s books.”
Nigerian Afrobeats superstar Burna Boy included her powerful criticism of colonialism and ongoing exploitation of Africa’s resources in his song Monsters You Made in 2020:
