Ama Ata Aidoo
Ghanaian author and poet
Christina Ama Ata Aidoo (March 23, 1942–May 31, 2023) was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academic. She was Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings's PNDC administration. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist. As a novelist, she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers.
Quotes
editThe Dilemma of a Ghost (1964)
edit- Money making is like a god possessing a priest. He never will leave you, until he has occupied you, wholly changed the order of your being, and seared you through and up and down, Then only would he eventually leave you, but nothing of you except an exhausted wreck, lying prone and wondering who are you.
- The best way to sharpen a knife is not to whet one side of it only. And neither can you solve a riddle by considering only one end of it.
No Sweetness Here: A Collection of Short Stories (1970)
edit- People are worms, and even the God who created them is immensely bored with their antics.
- The very old certainly do not go back on lunch remains but they do bite back at old conversational topics.
Our Sister Killjoy (1977)
edit- But what she also came to know was that someone somewhere would always see in any kind of difference, an excuse to be mean.
- We are victims of our history and our present. They place too many obstacles in the way of love. And we cannot enjoy even our differences in peace.
- Sissie knew that she had to stop herself from crying. Why weep for them? In fact, stronger in her was the desire to ask somebody why the entire world has had to pay so much and is still paying so much for some folks' unhappiness.
- it is quite clear now that all of the peoples of the earth have not always wished one another well. Indeed we are certain now, are we not, that so many people have wished us ill. They wish us ill. They have always done. They still do.
- Clearly, she was enjoying herself to see that woman hurt. It was nothing she had desired. Nor did it seem as if she could control it, this inhuman sweet sensation to see another human being squirming. It hit her like a stone, the knowledge that there is pleasure in hurting. A strong three-dimensional pleasure, an exclusive masculine delight that is exhilarating beyond all measure. And this too is God's gift to man? She wondered.
- There are powerful forces undermining progress in Africa. But one must never underestimate the power of the people to bring about change.
- Guilt is born in the same hour with pleasure, like anything in this universe and its enemy.
- Love? Love? Love is not safe, my lady silk, love is dangerous. It is deceitfully sweet like wine from a fresh palm tree at dawn. Love is fine for singing about and love songs are good to listen to, sometimes even to dance to. But when we need to count on human strength, and when we have to count pennies for food for our stomachs and clothes for our backs, love is nothing. Ah my lady, the last man any woman should think of marrying is the man she loves.
- Feminism is not an ‘ism’ that belongs to women only, but a way of looking at the world.
- In so many places in the world, there is an assumption that African women are the most oppressed. It is not true, we are not! At least not all.
- My regret is that we Ghanaian girls are not using the freedom we have inherited, and men are now moving in to colonise us.
- We have to get girls educated. Education that does not put them down is needed in society. We have to open up, talk and write, hold up these negative trends for discussion, analysis, abolition, and possibly banning. As far as Iʼm concerned, society needs attitudinal change.
- In a society like ours with so many adults literally having had no formal education, adult education should be dynamic so that it helps fill some of these gaps.
- Nobody could tell me writing was a man’s job.
- I started writing when I was very young. I didnʼt know at the time that I was to become a writer. I know that I read all the time. The house was full of books, and I remember rummaging through the cupboards and drawers looking for books to read. There were always books to read. I grew up in a village, a small town in the central region called “Abiadze”. My father was the chief of the village then called “Kyiakor”. He actually opened the village school with our class and some excellent teachers. My mother and another man from the village used to tell us stories every night. I think all of this prepared me to be a good writer.
- One of the issues that parents educating their wards around here unfortunately donʼt seem to be aware of is that, to help young people develop, you just have to give them positive stimulants, like interacting with them nicely, loving them, taking care of necessities, talking by word of mouth and correcting them where necessary.
- Yes I am. It is about a group of people who escaped a terrible epidemic like AIDS, and they felt the only way they could be saved would be to leave their current surroundings and build a new place somewhere else and stay there. Putting some mechanism in place will help them stay safe from the rest of the world, possibly away from other human beings. Inside that country, they have some rules and regulations that they thought could help them, including a decision to build a steel wall higher than the Great Wall of China. Since I don’t know how it ends, I cannot say how they will end it. Whether it will help them, and whether they will be saved or not.
- Well I think it is because first of all, they assume that feminism is equal to lesbianism, which it is not. Feminism is an ideological orientation, a perspective on the world and life. The other is a sexual orientation, and the two shouldn’t conflict as they belong to different spheres of human life. One is a mental state, and the other is sexual. In a paper that I worked on in the 80s, entitled African women at century’s end, I stated that everybody should be a feminist, including men. Feminism is not an ‘ism’ that belongs to women only, but a way of looking at the world. It insists that young women in this life should be given the best possible facilities for our development, health, well-being and employment, so that when we become old we can be catered for like old men are.
- I survived as a woman where men dominated because my people were supportive of women. In so many places in the world, there is an assumption that African women are the most oppressed. It is not true, we are not! At least not all. As an Akan, Fante woman, I grew up in a society where there was not much discrimination against girls. That is why I could be a writer and nobody could tell me writing was a man’s job. I had to go to University to be told by someone that I speak and do other things like a man. My regret is that we Ghanaian girls are not using the freedom we have inherited, and men are now moving in to colonise us.
- Children in this country are receiving virtually no education. Even in the so-called private schools, where they are paying so much, the children are taught extraneous things and in the end donʼt receive a good education. The teacher-student relationship is poor, affecting teaching and learning.
- Religion and religious practices interfere with education to a large extent. Remuneration and other support is poor in state-sponsored schools. The boarding school system is a major problem in senior high schools. No education system in an advanced country centres its secondary education on boarding. They brought it from England, the colonial masters. Those public boarding schools are all completely private in England today. The state schools are day schools. How can you have the teenage children of an entire country housed in boarding schools? Unless we do something about that, there will be no significant improvement in the country’s education system.
- The exclusion of women is not something that we in Ghana have inherited. In a greater part of Ghana at least, even those tribal areas that are ‘patrilinealʼ, girls are just like other children. So this business of women canʼt do this or do that is very new somehow. I didnʼt grow up in a home where I was forced to learn how to cook. Maybe my people were too strange. Nobody ever told me not to do anything because I was a girl.
- We have to get girls educated. Education that does not put them down is needed in society. We have to open up, talk and write, hold up these negative trends for discussion, analysis, abolition, and possibly banning. As far as Iʼm concerned, society needs attitudinal change.
- Yes, I agree! Adult education in our environment is a very necessary complement for education. Adult education as an institution has to be re-energised and reorganised by reminding the public of its importance. In a society like ours with so many adults literally having had no formal education, adult education should be dynamic so that it helps fill some of these gaps. The fact that adult education seems to have declined so drastically is also a symptom of what has happened to us as a people and as a country, both in terms of education itself and in the application of knowledge generally.
