Ama Ata Aidoo (1942- 2023) was a Ghanaian novelist, playwright, poet, politician, academic and activist: 'one of Africa's leading literary lights as well as its most influential feminists' (New York Times). Born in a Fante royal household, her grandfather had been murdered by British neocolonialists, and her father was a chief who built their village's first school. Aidoo attended Wesley Girls' High School and obtained a degree in English from the University of Ghana, Legon. She won her first story contest aged 19, and her breakthrough play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, made her the first published female African dramatist in 1965. Her debut novel, Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections From a Black-Eyed Squint,was published in 1977, and Changes: A Love Story won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Aidoo rejected the 'Western perception that the African female is a downtrodden wretch' and chronicled the fight for equality as inextricable from colonial legacies. She taught at the University of Ghana for years, and served as a lecturer and professor in English at the University of Cape Coast. A Fulbright scholar, Aidoo spent many years as an expatriate academic and writer in residence. She also served as Minister of Education in Ghana in the early 1980s but resigned when she could not achieve her goal of making education free for all. After moving to Zimbabwe in 1983, she developed curriculums for the government, and later founded the Mbaasem Foundation in 2000 to support African women writers.
