Legendary Ghanaian writer and feminist Ama Ata Aidoo is dead

A well-known dramatist, poet, and author from Ghana, Professor Ama Ata Aidoo, has died at the age of 81.

On Wednesday, May 31, 2023, Aidoo passed away. Her celebrated career spanned more than five decades. According to a statement by Kwamena Essandoh, the family’s head:

“The Family of Prof. Ama Ata Aidoo tells the public that our cherished relative and writer passed away away in the early hours of today morning, Wednesday, May 31, 2023, following a brief illness. We do so with tremendous grief, but with the hope of the resurrection.

“In due order, funeral plans would be revealed. The Family seeks discretion at this trying time.”

In works like Changes, Our Sister Killjoy, and The Dilemma of a Ghost, the acclaimed feminist highlighted and depicted the predicament of African women. She objected to what she called a “Western perception of the African female as a downtrodden wretch.”

In the early 1980s, she also held the position of Ghana’s minister of education, but she left the position after failing to make education free.

The 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Changes, a love story about a statistician who marries a polygamist after divorcing her first spouse, was one of several literary honors that Ata received for her novels, plays, and poems.

Along with other renowned authors like Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, her writings, especially plays like Anowa, have been studied in schools throughout West Africa. Younger writers, like Nigeria’s award-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, were greatly influenced by her.

Her forceful condemnation of colonialism and current exploitation of Africa’s resources was incorporated into Burna Boy’s ‘Monsters You Made’ in 2020 song by the Nigerian Afrobeats sensation.