The creative genius of Africa’s first renowned female dramatist to be published, Ama Ata Aidoo, took centre-stage at the just-concluded Toyin Falola Interview Series, where leading authors, dramatists, poets, novelists, university administrators and politicians both within Africa and the larger world, took turns in celebrating the literary ingenuity, scholarship and humanity of the late writer.
Aidoo was born on March 23, 1942 and died on May 31, 2023. She was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academic. She was Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings’s PNDC administration. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo 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.
Speaking at an online event which was put together by erudite professor of History based in the United States of America, Toyin Falola, to honor the late literary giant, critically acclaimed novelist, Bisi Adjapon, told the audience that “I am speaking from the point of view of a person who attended the same secondary school as Aunty Ama, decades after she had already left. Decades after she graduated and blazed the literary path, I entered the same school. It was there that I learnt about her. Some say she was inspired by tradition while others say that tradition had existed before and she enhanced it. I wrote because Aunty Ama did.
“Years later in America, I would direct plays and eventually become the artistic director of a theatre company for the young. That seed that Aunty Ama planted in me through her works bore fruits. As a half Yoruba raised in Ghana, I tried to push away the practice of kneeling when greeting.
The whole idea of genuflecting before another human however irked me but when I approached on stage, as if it was the most natural thing, I dropped to my knee. I was that honoured. She was warm, happy that I was an old girl of Wesley Girls High School. In the limited time we had, I told of her works’ impact on my life and others. She encouraged me to come to the house but the timing was always problematic. She was always vibrant and feisty. Despite difficulties, I expected her to live for another decade. Her torch flamed mine and mine has ignited others. Her spirit and works will continue to live forever.”
Lawyer, human rights activist and poet, Dr. Ogaga Ifowodo, told of the influence Aidoo had on him while he was navigating through the labyrinth of his literary recesses. “I trained as a lawyer but found the possibility of becoming a poet when I was in secondary school at the Federal Government Warri.
In Form Three, we read The Dilemma of a Ghost. Years later after I had graduated, I had worked with the civil liberties organisation for ten years I had really wanted to come to where my head was which was literature. Soyinka advised me to go to the US for studies because by then I had published my first collection and getting ready to publish the second.
I ended at Cornell for further studies. I found Ama Ata Aidoo becoming a distant mentor while I was searching for myself in the academia. I met her at events but I never a close relationship with her. She lives on and her memory will not fade,” he said.
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Ghana’s former Minister of Information, Kojo Yankah eulogized the spirit and progressive ideology which Aidoo represented. For him, “We lose a sense of who our writers are not too long after they are dead.
We at the African University College of Communications decided on the 75th anniversary birthday of Ama Ata Aidoo to establish a centre of creative writing and named it after her. We did this in 2017; it has been one of the most impactful centres at the university. Since its establishment, over 4000 students have participated in the activities of the Ama Ata Aidoo centre. The director of the centre has produced four anthologies.
“I met her on many occasions. It is important that we keep the memories of our writers. We need to find centres or establish many where students can go and study about them. We are working on the Pan-African heritage world museum in Ghana where we will have a literary section.”
Earlier, Egyptian cultural journalist and author, Ashraf Aboul-Yazid, noted that “I see Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo as an outspoken woman who resists and subverts traditional literary boundaries. Aidoo’s long, varied and prolific literary career publishing poems, plays, short stories, essays and novels—garnered much attention from critics and after teaching fir several years at various institutions in Africa and the USA, earned the respect and recognition of the African American writer, Alice Walker.
“Aidoo advances the complex lives of women who act in contradictory ways haunted by African traditions, but caught up in the disintegration of postcolonial Africa. She is just one of the many female voices that urgently needed to be heard after being silenced for so long.
Aidoo’s recurring themes are marriage, motherhood, emotional and economic dependence, women’s education, their political and economic marginalisation, and resistance to oppression. With an unconscious Western feminist agenda always in mind, Aidoo insists that she did not learn her notions of feminism outside of Africa, and that her vocal women simply come from her Akan-Aidoo side.”
