Ama Ata Aidoo’s work as creative artist, cultural worker, teacher, and thinker makes significant contributions to African literature and culture. Her diverse literary achievements in drama, poetry, fiction, and essays illuminate struggles and triumphs facing women and men in their post-independence Ghanaian society. Aidoo is a creative writer who believes ardently that telling stories and reciting poems can inspire social change. Her vision is historic, committed to black peoples in Africa and the diaspora, as well as feminist. Aidoo casts a probing though sympathetic eye on colonial history and postcolonial realities, on her people’s ancient traditions and the dubious paradoxes of modernization. Her work represents how the personal and the intimate are as political as public discussions of law and nation. “Even in terms of the relationship between a man and a woman,” she remarks, “the factors that affect the relationship are very often outside of themselves; they have to do with social structure, with economics, with political reality” (Modebe 1991, 40).

Aidoo’s artistic and social commitments unfold seamlessly and are rooted in her personal family history. Christened Christina Ama Ata Aidoo, she was born on March 23, 1942, in Abeadzi Kyiakor in Ghana’s central region. Aidoo acknowledges that her mother shared a rich heritage of “talking” stories with her daughter. She first “heard” what later became Anowa, a drama, in the form of a song that her mother sang. “Looking back to my parentage,” Aidoo remarks, “I think I come from a long line of fighters. . . . I have always been interested in the destiny of our people. . . . I am one of these writers whose writings cannot move too far from their political involvement” (James 1990, 13–14). Her paternal grandfather was “tortured to death in a colonial prison for being ‘an insolent African’”; and her father supported Kwame Nkrumah and believed that, “‘above all, a nation should educate its women’” (quoted in Allan 1993, 191). Aidoo had first heard Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey’s famous statement from her father, “If you educate a man, you educate an individual. If you educate a woman, you educate a nation.” Her father was very keen that Aidoo receive an education “in spite of the prevailing bias,” notes Allan, “against schooling for girls” (192). Aidoo attended the Wesley Girls’ High School at Cape Coast where her writerly bent was encouraged by an English teacher, Barbara Bowman, whose gift of an Olivetti typewriter was most valuable to the aspiring young writer.