Ama Ata Aidoo

Ama Ata Aidoo was a Ghanaian playwright, novelist, poet and academic. Her play The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) made her the first published female African dramatist, and her novel Changes won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa in 1992. She was Ghana's Secretary for Education in 1982 and 1983.

Early life and education

She was born Christina Ama Ata Aidoo on 23 March 1942 in Abeadzi Kyiakor, near Saltpond in the Central Region, with a twin brother, Kwame Ata. Her father, Nana Yaw Fama, was the town's chief and opened its first school. At Wesley Girls' High School in Cape Coast, from 1957, she decided to become a writer. She earned a BA in English at the University of Ghana, where she wrote The Dilemma of a Ghost in 1964, and then held a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University.

Academic and minister

From 1969 she taught English at the University of Ghana and was a research fellow at its Institute of African Studies, later becoming a professor at the University of Cape Coast. In 1982 the PNDC government made her Secretary for Education. She resigned after about 18 months, having concluded she could not make education free for all, and in 1983 moved to Zimbabwe, where she developed school curricula.

Writing

Her work explores the lives of African women and the tension between African and Western ways of seeing. Besides The Dilemma of a Ghost she wrote the play Anowa (1971), the stories No Sweetness Here (1970), the novels Our Sister Killjoy (1977) and Changes (1991), and the poetry collection Someone Talking to Sometime (1985). She also wrote for children, including The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories (1986).

Later work

In 1991 she co-founded the Organization of Women Writers of Africa with the poet Jayne Cortez, and in 2000 she set up the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to support African women writers. She was a visiting professor at Brown University from 2004 to 2011 and chaired the Ghana Association of Writers Book Festival from 2011.

Death

She died on 31 May 2023, aged 81.