Nationality Ghanaian Role Author | Name Ama Aidoo Genre Drama, fiction | |
 | ||
Occupation Author, playwright, professor Books Changes: A Love Story, Our Sister Killjoy, The Dilemma of a Ghost, The Girl who Can: And Othe, African Love Stories Similar People Yaba Badoe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head, Mariama Ba | ||
An audience with ama ata aidoo at the royal african society s annual literature festival
Ama Ata Aidoo, née Christina Ama Aidoo (born 23 March 1942, Saltpond), is a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright and academic. She was also a Minister of Education in Ghana under the Jerry Rawlings administration. She currently lives in Ghana, where in 2000 she established the Mbaasem Foundation to promote and support the work of African women writers.
Contents
- An audience with ama ata aidoo at the royal african society s annual literature festival
- Ama ata aidoo on feminism in africa bbc hardtalk
- Life
- Film
- Writings
- Awards and recognition
- Selected works
- As editor
- References
Ama ata aidoo on feminism in africa bbc hardtalk
Life
Born in Saltpond in Ghana's Central Region, she grew up in a Fante royal household, the daughter of Nana Yaw Fama, chief of Abeadzi Kyiakor, and Maame Abasema. Aidoo was sent by her father to Wesley Girls' High School in Cape Coast, from 1961 to 1964. The headmistress of Wesley Girls' bought her her first typewriter. After leaving high school, she enrolled at the University of Ghana in Legon and received her Bachelor of Arts in English as well as writing her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, in 1964. The play was published by Longman the following year, making Aidoo the first published African woman dramatist.
She worked in the United States, where she held a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University. She also served as a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, and as a Lecturer in English at the University of Cape Coast, eventually rising there to the position of Professor.
Aside from her literary career, Aidoo was appointed Minister of Education under the Provisional National Defence Council in 1982. She resigned after 18 months, realising that she would be unable to achieve her aim of making education in Ghana freely accessible to all. She has also spent a great deal of time teaching and living abroad for months at a time. She has lived in the United States, Britain, Germany, and Zimbabwe. Aidoo taught various English courses at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, in the early to mid-1990s. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Africana Studies Department at Brown University.
Aidoo is 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 books of fiction.
Film
She is the subject of a 2014 documentary film, The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo, made by Yaba Badoe.
Writings
Aidoo's works of fiction particularly deal with the tension between Western and African world views. Her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy, was published in 1977 and remains one of her most popular works. Many of Aidoo's protagonists are women who defy the stereotypical women's roles of their time, as in her play Anowa. Her novel Changes won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Africa). She is also an accomplished poet—her collection Someone Talking to Sometime won the Nelson Mandela Prize for Poetry in 1987—and has written several children's books.
She contributed the piece "To be a woman" to the 1984 anthology Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan.
In 2000 she founded the Mbaasem Foundation, a non-governmental organization based in Ghana with a mission "to support the development and sustainability of African women writers and their artistic output", which she runs together with her daughter Kinna Likimani and a board of management.
Aidoo is the editor of the 2006 anthology African Love Stories.
Awards and recognition
Awards Aidoo has received include the 1992 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Africa) for her novel Changes.
The Aidoo-Snyder book prize, awarded by the Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association for an outstanding book published by a woman that prioritizes African women’s experiences, is named in honour of Ama Ata Aidoo and of Margaret C. Snyder, who was the founding director of UNIFEM.
Launched in March 2017, the Ama Ata Aidoo Centre for Creative Writing (Aidoo Centre), under the auspices of the Kojo Yankah School of Communications Studies at the African University College of Communications (AUCC) in Adabraka, Accra, was named in her honour — the first centre of its kind in West Africa, with Nii Ayikwei Parkes as its director.