Famous Ghanaian author, Prof. Christiana Ama Ata Aidoo, has died.
A statement by the head of her family, Kwamena Essandoh Aidoo said the renowned writer died in the early hours of yesterday at the age of 81.
The statement read: “The family of Prof. Ama Ata Aidoo, 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, 31st May 2023, after a short illness.
“Funeral arrangements will be announced in due course. The family requests privacy at this difficult moment”.
Aidoo published award-winning novels, plays, short stories, children’s books, and poetry, and influenced generations of African women writers.
She was born on 23rd March 1942 in Abeadzi Kyiakor, near Saltpond, in the Central Region of Ghana. She attended the Wesley Girls’ High School and the University of Ghana.
The writer, whose works were written in English, emphasised the paradoxical position of the modern African woman.
Aidoo began to write seriously while an honours student at the University of Ghana in 1964.
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” (the African educated abroad), voiced again in her semi-autobiographical experimental first novel, Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections From a Black-Eyed Squint (1966).
She won a fellowship to Stanford University in California, the United States; 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.
Aidoo rejected the argument that Western education emancipates African women.
She further exposed the exploitation of women who, as unacknowledged heads of households when war or unemployment leaves them husbandless, must support their children alone.
Between 1982 and 1983, she served as Ghana’s Minister of Education.
Aidoo published a few works between 1970 and 1985.
Her later titles included The Eagle and the Chickens (1986; a collection of children’s stories), Birds and Other Poems (1987), Changes: A Love Story (1991), An Angry Letter in January and Other Poems (1992), The Girl Who Can and Other Stories (1997), and Diplomatic.
