Ama Ata Aidoo’s Illimitable Voice

Aidoo—the first African woman to publish a play when her debut, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was released in 1965—was born in Ghana (then-Gold Coast) on 23 March 1942. She was raised in a Fante household and was the daughter of a chief in Abeadzi Kyiakor, a town in the former Gold Coast region. After attending Wesley Girls High School in Cape Coast, Aidoo studied English at the University of Ghana in Legon. At university, she participated actively in writing workshops and the school of drama. As a student in 1964, she wrote and staged her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, which follows the life of a Ghanaian student who returns from studying abroad with his African American wife, and her struggle to come to terms with her cultural past in her new African home. In 1965, the play was published by Longman. Between 1964 and 1966, Aidoo worked as a junior research fellow at the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies, a time that likely strengthened her commitment to incorporating African oral traditions into her work and also had an impact on her writing. She graduated from the University of Ghana in 1964.