At age 81, Ghanaian author Prof. Ama Ata Aidoo passes on

 After a career spanning more than five decades, her family has confirmed that she died away on Wednesday morning, May 31, 2023.

"The Family of Prof. Ama Ata Aidoo informs the world that our cherished relative and writer died away in the early hours of today morning, Wednesday, May 31, 2023, following a brief illness, with deep sadness but in the hope of the resurrection.

Funeral plans will be revealed when the time came. In a brief statement, the family's leader Kwamena Essandoh Aidoo said, "The Family seeks privacy at this challenging time.

One of the most well-known African authors of the 20th and 21st centuries, Prof. Ama Ata Aidoo, achieved fame on a global scale.

She was born on March 23, 1942, in Abeadzi Kyiakor, a neighborhood near Saltpond, in Ghana's Central Region. She completed her education at Wesley Girls' High School and the University of Ghana. English-language literature by the author brought attention to the paradoxical status of modern African women.

Prof. Aidoo began writing professionally in 1964 as an honors student at the University of Ghana. In the issue play The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), which brought her early acclaim, a Ghanaian student returning home drags his African American wife into the traditional lifestyle and the large family that he now finds restrictive.

Their plight embodies Aidoo's ongoing worry about Africans who have attended schools abroad (the "been-to"), a concern she also articulated in her experimental semi-autobiographical first book, Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1966).

A fellowship was given to Prof. Aidoo so that she might attend Stanford University in California. After returning to teach in Cape Coast, Ghana, she later accepted many visiting professorships in the US and Kenya (1970–1982).

She had a significant impact on the next generation of writers, particularly award-winning Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

In a piece about the Ghanaian in The Africa Report publication in 2011, Adichie wrote:

“When I first discovered Ama Ata Aidoo’s work – a slim book on a dusty shelf in our neighbour’s study in Nsukka [in south-eastern Nigeria] – I was stunned by the believability of her characters, the sureness of her touch and what I like to call, in a rather clunky phrase, the validating presence of complex femaleness.

“Because I had not often seen this complex femaleness in other African books I had read and loved, mine was a wondrous discovery: of Anowa, tragic and humane and many dimensional, in Aidoo’s play set in the 1800s in Fantiland; of Sissie, the self-assured, perceptive main character of the ambitious novel Our Sister Killjoy, who wryly recounts her experiences in Germany and England in the 1960s; or of the varied female characters in No Sweetness Here, my favourite of Aidoo’s books.”

In his song Monsters You Made in 2020, Nigerian Afrobeats musician Burna Boy incorporated her forceful denunciation of colonialism and continued exploitation of Africa's resources.