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.
