Ama Ata Aidu, the Ghanaian playwright, author and activist, one of Africa’s leading literary figures and hailed as one of Africa’s most influential feminists, died Wednesday. she was 81 years old.
her family said in a statement She died after a short illness. Her statement did not disclose the cause or location of her death.
Aidu has been a leading voice in post-colonial Africa in a wide-ranging career that includes writing plays, novels and short stories, stints in several university faculties, and briefly as a minister in Ghana. established its position.
Her groundbreaking 1965 play The Ghost’s Dilemma tells the story of a returning Ghanaian student and his black American wife who must contend with the legacy of colonialism and slavery. The theme is the cultural turmoil we experience. This was her one of Aidu’s works that became a staple in West African schools.
Throughout her literary career, Aidu sought to highlight the contradictions facing contemporary African women who still bear the legacy of colonialism. She rejected what she described as “the Western perception that African women are oppressed and miserable.”
Her novel “Changes: A Love Story” won an award in 1992. Commonwealth Writer Award Best Picture winner, Africa, explores the spiritual and cultural dilemmas faced by Esi, an educated, career-focused woman living in Accra, Ghana. After being raped by her husband, she breaks up with him and becomes polygamous with a wealthy man.
In this and many other works, Aidu chronicles the struggle of African women for recognition and equality, a struggle she argued was inseparable from the long shadow of colonialism.
her groundbreaking debut novel, “Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections from the Black-Eyed Squint” (1977) recounts the experience of Sissi, a young Ghanaian woman who traveled to Europe on a scholarship to improve herself. education. In Germany and England, she faces the preponderance of white values, including Western notions of success, among the same African expats.
Aydu, a Fulbright scholar who has spent years expatriate, including a residency at the University of Richmond, Virginia, and a visiting professorship in the African Studies department at Brown University, is also culturally active. experienced confusion.
In a 2003 interview published by Spain’s University of Alicante, she said, “I always felt uncomfortable living abroad: racism, cold, weather, food, people.” She “also felt a kind of patriotic guilt. It’s like, ‘Oh dear!'” Look at all the problems we have at home. what am i doing here “
Whatever feelings she had about living abroad, she was welcomed in the Western literary world. A 1997 New York Times article detailed how she was “received with the reverence peculiar to heads of state” when she attended the New York University Conference for African Women Writers.
Although she never held the post, she was Ghana’s minister of education and accepted the appointment in 1982 with the goal of improving education. Free for everyone. She realized she had to overcome many obstacles to reach her goal, and she retired after 18 months.
After moving to Zimbabwe in 1983, Ms. Aidu developed a curriculum for the country’s Ministry of Education. She has also made a name for herself in the non-profit sector, and in 2000 she founded the Mubasem Foundation, which supports women writers in Africa.
She was a major voice for Pan-Africanism, advocating unity among African nations and their continued liberation. She spoke with her anger about the centuries of exploitation of the continent’s natural resources and people.
“Ever since I met you 500 years ago, now look at us‘” she said in an interview with a French journalist in 1987, later sampled in the 2020 song “Monster you made” By Nigerian Afrobeat star Burnaboy. “We gave it all, but you still take it. I mean, what would the whole Western world be without us Africans? Our cocoa, our timber, our gold, our diamonds, our platinum. ”
“All you have is us,” she continued. “I didn’t say that. It’s true. And what could we get for all this? None.”
Christina Ama Ata Aidu and her twin brother Kwame Ata were born on March 23, 1942 in Abeij Kiyakol, Fanti village in central Ghana, then known as the Gold Coast colony.
Her father was Nana Yo Fama, the chief of the village who built the first school, and her mother was Maame Abba Abasema. Information about Aidu’s survivors was not immediately available.
Her grandfather was imprisoned and tortured by the British, a fact she later cited when describing herself as “from a long line of combatants”.
She said she felt a literary vocation from an early age. “When she was 15, her teacher asked me what she wanted to be, and without knowing why or how, she said she wanted to be a poet,” she said. .
Four years later she won a short story contest. Seeing an article of her own published in her convention-sponsored newspaper, she said she “clarified her dream”.
