APA – Accra (Ghana)
A renowned Ghanaian writer, playwright and academic, Prof. Ama Ata Aidoo has died.
She died on Wednesday, May 31, 2023 at the age of 81, according to her family.
The Graphic reported on Wednesday that the Family of Prof. Ama Ata Aidoo announced with deep sorrow, “but in the hope of the resurrection, the death of our beloved relative and writer who passed away in the early hours of this morning, Wednesday 31st May 2023, after a short illness”.
“Funeral arrangements would be announced in due course. The Family requests privacy at this difficult moment,” the report quoted the family head, Kwamena Essandoh Aidoo, as saying in a short statement.
Born on March 23, 1942 at Abeadzi Kyiakor near Saltpond in the Central Region of Ghana, Ama attended the Wesley Girls’ High School and University of Ghana.
She received international recognition as one of the most prominent African writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Prof Aidoo began to write seriously while an honours student at the University of Ghana in 1964.
The writer, whose work, written in English, emphasised the paradoxical position of the modern African woman.
She won early recognition with a problem play, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), in which a Ghanaian student returning home brings his African American wife into the traditional culture and the extended family that he now finds restrictive.
Their dilemma reflects Aidoo’s characteristic concern with the “been-to” (African educated abroad), voiced again in her semi autobiographical experimental first novel, Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1966).
Prof Aidoo herself won a fellowship to Stanford University in California, returned to teach at Cape Coast, Ghana (1970–82), and subsequently accepted various visiting professorships in the United States and Kenya.
GIK/APA