By Charles Adingupu
The celebrated Ghanaian literary icon, Professor Ama Ata Aidoo, is dead, aged 81.
A statement by Ebusuapanyin Kwamena Essandoh Aidoo, on behalf of the family, disclosed that Aidoo passed on in the early hours of Wednesday, after a short illness.
Aidoo was one of the first female African writers and in rank of Nigeria’s female playwrights like Professor Zulu Sofola, author of such plays as Wedlock Of The Gods, Flora Nwapa, author of “Efuru” and Senegalese Maria’ma ‘Ba of “So Long A Letter” among others.
“Funeral arrangements would be announced in due course. The Family requests privacy at this difficult moment,” the statement added.
Born March 23, 1942 in Abeadzi Kyiakor, near Saltpond, Gold Coast (now Ghana), Aidoo began to write seriously while an honours student at the University of Ghana (B.A., 1964), according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
She won early recognition with a problem play, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), in which a Ghanaian student returning home brings his African American wife into the traditional culture and the extended family that he now finds restrictive.
Their dilemma reflects Aidoo’s characteristic concern with the “been-to” (African educated abroad), voiced again in her semiautobiographical experimental first novel, Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1966).
Aidoo herself won a fellowship to Stanford University in California, returned to teach at Cape Coast, Ghana (1970–82), and subsequently accepted various visiting professorships in the United States and Kenya.
In No Sweetness Here (1970), a collection of short stories, Aidoo exercised the oral element of storytelling, writing tales that are meant to be read aloud.
These stories and Anowa (1970), another problem play, are concerned with Western influences on the role of women and on the individual in a communal society.
Aidoo rejected the argument that Western education emancipates African women. She further exposed exploitation of women who, as unacknowledged heads of households when war or unemployment leaves them husbandless, must support their children alone.
In 1982–83, she served as Ghana’s minister of education.
Aidoo published little between 1970 and 1985, when Someone Talking to Sometime, a collection of poetry, appeared.
Her later titles include The Eagle and the Chickens (1986; a collection of children’s stories), Birds and Other Poems (1987), the novel Changes: A Love Story (1991), An Angry Letter in January and Other Poems (1992), The Girl Who Can and Other Stories (1997), and Diplomatic Pounds and Other Stories (2012).
