阿玛·阿塔·艾杜

Ama Ata Aidoo (23 March 1942 – 31 May 2023) was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academician. She was the Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings's PNDC administration.

Aidoo's first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making her the first published female African dramatist. As a novelist, she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers.

Early life

Christina Ama Ata Aidoo was born on 23 March, 1942 in Abeadzi Kyiakor, near Saltpond, in the Central Region of Ghana. She was initially called Christiana Ama Aidoo. Some sources ( including Megan Behrent, Brown University, and Africa Who's Who) have stated that she was born on 31st March. She had a twin brother, Kwame Ata.

Aidoo was raised in a Fante royal household, the daughter of Nana Yaw Fama, chief of Abeadzi Kyiakor, and Maame Abasema. Her grandfather was murdered by neocolonialists, which brought her father's attention to the importance of educating the children and families of the village on the history and events of the era. This led him to open up the first school in their village and influenced Aidoo to attend Wesley Girls' High School, where she first decided she wanted to be a writer.

Aidoo later credited her years at Wesley Girls' High School in Cape Coast with nurturing her early interest in literature.

Education

From 1957, Aidoo attended Wesley Girls' Senior High School in Cape Coast. After high school, she enrolled at the University of Ghana, Legon, in 1961 where she obtained the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English and wrote her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, in 1964. The play was published by Longman the following year, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist.

Career

After graduating, Aidoo held a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University in California before returning to Ghana in 1969 to teach English at the University of Ghana. She served as a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies there and as a lecturer in English at the University of Cape Coast, where she eventually rose to the position of professor.

Aidoo was appointed Minister of Education under the Provisional National Defence Council in 1982. She resigned after 18 months, realizing that she would be unable to achieve her aim of making education in Ghana freely accessible to all. She has portrayed the role of African women in contemporary society. She has opined that the idea of nationalism has been deployed by recent leaders as a means of keeping people oppressed. She criticized those literate Africans who profess to love their country but are seduced by the benefits of the developed world. She believed in a distinct African identity, which she viewed from a female perspective. She held strong Pan-Africanist views on the necessity of unity among African countries and was outspoken about the centuries of exploitation of Africa's resources and peoples by western powers.

In 1983, she moved to live in Zimbabwe, where she continued her work in education, including as a curriculum developer for the Zimbabwe Ministry of Education, as well as writing. While in Harare, she published a collection of poems in 1985, Someone Talking to Sometime, and wrote a children's book entitled The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories (1986).

In London, England, in 1986, she delivered the Walter Rodney Visions of Africa lecture organized by the support group of Bogle-L'Ouverture publishing house.

Aidoo received a Fulbright Scholarship award in 1988, was writer-in-residence at the University of Richmond, Virginia in 1989, and taught various English courses at Hamilton College in Clinton New York in the early mid-1990s.

In 1991, she and African-American poet Jayne Cortez established and co-chaired the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA), and board members of OWWA have included J. E. Franklin, Cheryll Y. Greene, Rashidah Ismaili, Louise Meriwether, Maya Angelou, Rosamond S. King, Margaret Busby, Gabrielle Civil, Alexis De Veaux, LaTasha N. Diggs, Zetta Elliott, Donette Francis, Paula Giddings, Renée Larrier, Tess Onwueme, Coumba Touré, Maryse Condé, Nancy Morejón, and Sapphire.

From 2004 to 2011, Aidoo was a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department at Brown University.

She chaired the Ghana Association of Writers Book Festival from its inception in 2011.

Aidoo was a patron of the Etisalat Prize for Literature (alongside Dele Olojede, Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Margaret Busby, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, and Zakes Mda), created in 2013 as a platform for African writers of debut novels of fiction.

At Yari Yari Ntoaso: Continuing the Dialogue, the symposium of African writers held in Accra, Ghana, in 2013, Aidoo was a plenary speaker, alongside Angela Davis and others.

Writings

Aidoo's plays include The Dilemma of a Ghost, produced at Legon in 1964 (first published in 1965) and Pittsburgh in 1988, and Anowa, published in 1971 and produced at the Gate Theatre in London in 1991.

Her works of fiction particularly deal with the tension between Western and African worldviews. Her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy, was published in 1977 and remains one of her most popular works. It is notable for portraying a dissenting perspective on sexuality in Africa, and especially LGBT in Africa. Whereas one popular idea on the continent is that homosexuality is alien to Africa and an intrusion of ideas of Western culture into a pure, inherently heterosexual "African" culture, Aidoo portrays the main character of Killjoy as indulging in lesbian fantasies of her own, and maintaining sympathetic relationships with lesbian characters.