Ama Ata Aidoo, former Education Minister and renowned author of ‘The Dilemma of a Ghost,’ has died.
The poet, playwright, and academic, who was born on March 23, 1942, died peacefully at home on Wednesday, according to her family.
The family announced in a press release that “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, May 31, 2023, after a short illness.”
Kwamena Essandoh Aidoo, the family’s head, added, “Funeral arrangements would be announced in due course.”
In these difficult times, the family requests privacy from the general public.
Who was Prof Ama Ata Aidoo?
She has received international recognition as one of the most prominent African writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a career spanning more than five decades.
From 1961 to 1964, Ama Ata Aidoo attended Wesley Girls’ Senior High School in Cape Coast.
Following high school, she enrolled at the University of Ghana, Legon, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and wrote her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, in 1964.
The following year, Longman published the play, making Aidoo the first published African woman dramatist.
Aidoo received a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University in California after graduating, before returning to Ghana in 1969 to teach English at the University of Ghana.
She worked as a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies and as an English lecturer at the University of Cape Coast, where she eventually became a professor.
In 1982, Aidoo was appointed Minister of Education by the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC).
She resigned after 18 months, realizing she would not be able to achieve her goal of making education in Ghana free for all.
She has portrayed African women’s roles in contemporary society.
She believes that current leaders have used the concept of nationalism to keep people oppressed.
She has chastised literate Africans who claim to love their country but are enticed away by the benefits of the developed world.
She believes in a distinctly African identity, which she sees through a female lens.
She moved to Zimbabwe in 1983, where she continued her education work, including as a curriculum developer for the Zimbabwe Ministry of Education, as well as writing.
In 1986, she gave the Walter Rodney Visions of Africa lecture in London, England, as part of a support group for the Bogle-L’Ouverture publishing house.
Aidoo was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1988, and she served as writer-in-residence at the University of Richmond in Virginia in 1989, as well as teaching various English courses at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, in the early mid-1990s.
She was a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department at Brown University for seven years, until 2011.
Aidoo was a patron of the Etisalat Prize for Literature (along with Dele Olojede, Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Margaret Busby, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, and Zakes Mda), which was established in 2013 to provide a platform for African debut novelists.
Writing
Aidoo’s plays include The Dilemma of a Ghost, which was performed at Legon in 1964 (first published in 1965) and Pittsburgh in 1988, and Anowa, which was published in 1971 and performed at London’s Gate Theatre in 1991.
Her fiction is particularly concerned with the conflict between Western and African worldviews.
Our Sister Killjoy, her first novel, was published in 1977 and remains one of her most popular works.
It is notable for depicting a dissenting viewpoint on sexuality in Africa, particularly LGBT in Africa.
Many of Aidoo’s other protagonists are also women who defy traditional gender roles, as in her play Anowa.
Her novel Changes was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Africa) in 1992.
She is also a poet, having won the Nelson Mandela Prize for Poetry in 1987[22] with her collection Someone Talking to Sometime, and has written several children’s books.
Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan, published her poem “To Be a Woman” in 1984.
Her story “Two Sisters” was published in Margaret Busby’s anthology Daughters of Africa in 1992.
Aidoo established the Mbaasem Foundation in Ghana in 2000, with the mission of “supporting the development and sustainability of African women writers and their artistic output,” which she runs with her daughter Kinna Likimani and a board of management.
Aidoo edited the anthology African Love Stories in 2006.
In 2012, she published Diplomatic Pounds & Other Stories, a collection of short stories, as well as Essays by Renowned Writers from Ghana, Africa, and the African Diaspora.
Aidoo has won numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Africa) in 1992 for her novel Changes.
