The Indelible Life of Ama Ata Aidoo

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Pan-African Dreams. Buy the issue here.

In a family like mine, where we regularly went to theatre productions at the Arts Centre in Accra and at the University of Ghana in Legon, playwrights were revered, and when I started my secondary education at Achimota School, I joined the Drama Club as soon as I could. In my first year, I watched Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa; in my second, I was a stagehand for the production of Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel; in my third, I played a small part (Awere) in J.C. de Graft’s Sons and Daughters. When I eventually became president of the Drama Club, I directed Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, also understudying the part of (Bird of the Wayside). In both Anowa and Dilemma, I was struck by the dignity with which local traditions were portrayed, in contrast to the utterances of my priests and some of my science teachers. It is an approach that provided valuable external validation of my father’s own leanings and has become a hallmark of my work and research. My admiration for Ama Ata Aidoo was seeded in these early moments of engagement with her work.

I finally got to see her—off Ghana TV—in 2001 at a reading at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the UK. Still reeling from years of Anglo-trauma at people mispronouncing my name, I experienced something akin to a crush when she corrected the mispronunciation of her name in the introduction. When, during the Q&A that followed, she put an audience member who asked a Euro-chauvinist question in their place, I knew it was full-blown love. Prior to that, I had read Changes, Ama Ata Aidoo’s 1991 novel of love and liberation, with wide-eyed awe at the effortless depiction of different facets of West African society and culture and felt compelled to write a rare book review. In the review, written in late 2000, I described Changes as ‘written without fuss in the language that Ghanaians call English—adapted to suit the whims and imaginings of the local mind.’ Writing my own first novel, Tail of the Blue Bird, in 2007 I was careful to write the parts set in Ghana with the same attentiveness to local use of the English language. I also sought to write characters that I could see as clearly as I saw the male love interest in Changes—Ali, a man who moved the way I like to imagine I moved. A man who wore ‘kohl around his eyes’ with such nonchalance that he made me resume, at the age of 21, a kohl habit that I had abandoned when I was a 10-year-old. Given its visceral impact on me, it is no surprise that Changes was one of the works that I recommended for my African Book Club when I became Associate Writer in Residence with BBC Radio 3 in 2005, alongside Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, The Collector of Treasures by Bessie Head and Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino...