Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian playwright, author and activist who was hailed as one of Africa’s leading literary lights as well as one of its most influential feminists, died on Wednesday. She had a wide-ranging career that included writing plays, novels and short stories, semesters on multiple university faculties and, briefly, a position as a cabinet minister in Ghana. Her breakthrough play, “The Dilemma of a Ghost,” explored the cultural dislocations experienced by a Ghanaian student who returns home after studying abroad and by those of his Black American wife, who must confront the legacies of colonialism and slavery. Her novel “Changes: A Love Story,” which won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book, Africa, portrays the psychic and cultural dilemmas faced by Esi, an educated, career-focused woman in Accra, Ghana’s capital, who leaves her husband after he rapes her and lands in a polygamous relationship with a wealthy man. Her landmark debut novel, “Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections From a Black-Eyed Squint” (1977), recounted the experiences of Sissie, a young Ghanaian woman who travels to Europe on a scholarship to better herself, as such a move was traditionally described, with a Western education.
In Germany and England, she comes face to face with the dominance of white values, including Western notions of success, among fellow African expatriates. As a Fulbright scholar who spent years as an expatriate herself, Ms. Aidoo too experienced feelings of cultural dislocation. Ms. Aidoo was a major Pan-Africanist voice, speaking out against the centuries of exploitation of Africa's natural resources and people. She accepted an appointment as Ghana's minister of education in 1982 with the goal of making education free for all, but resigned after 18 months due to the many barriers she would have to overcome. After moving to Zimbabwe in 1983, she developed curriculums for the country’s Ministry of Education and founded the Mbaasem Foundation in 2000 to support African women writers.
She was also a major Pan-Africanist voice, advocating for unity among African countries and for their continued liberation. Christina Ama Ata Aidoo and her twin brother, Kwame Ata, were born on March 23, 1942, in the Fanti village of Abeadzi Kyiakor, in a central region of Ghana then known by its colonial name, the Gold Coast. Ms. Aidoo's father, Nana Yaw Fama, was a chief of the village who built its first school, and her mother was Maame Abba Abasema. Her grandfather had been imprisoned and tortured by the British, a fact she later invoked when describing herself as “coming from a long line of fighters.” She had felt a literary calling from an early age, and four years later, she won a short story contest.
