Aidoo’s first published story, “To Us a Child Is Born,” won a Christmas story competition in 1958, when she was sixteen. Her second story, “No Sweetness Here,” brought her an invitation four years later to the historic 1962 African Writers’ Workshop held at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Aidoo was quite overwhelmed, introduced as “the writer from Ghana” (as she remarked at a recent African Writers’ Conference at Brown University). Here she met several famous male writers—Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo. Aidoo returned to Ghana and wrote The Dilemma of a Ghost, which was produced in 1964 at the University of Ghana and published in 1965. Her consciousness of black history, of the cultural and historical links among black peoples in the diaspora, motivated this remarkable first drama which placed Aidoo at age twenty-three among the new generation of predominantly male African writers. The historical link between Africans and African Americans that Aidoo explores in this early drama was guided by her astute political vision of black peoples in the diaspora. From this first work, and through all subsequent work, Aidoo claims “a responsibility and I feel that it’s the same type of responsibility I think black people all over feel” (quoted in Pieterse and Duerden 1972, 20).

The Dilemma of a Ghost presents African-American Eulalie Rush, who marries Ghanaian Ato Yawson and returns to her “roots” in Africa. In 1964 such pride in African ancestry, in blackness, and in the discovery of African antecedents in African-American culture, were new concepts in the United States. Even at this early stage, Aidoo recognized that “the whole question of how it was that so many of our people could be enslaved and sold is very very important. I’ve always thought that it is an area that must be probed. It probably holds one of the keys to our future” (James 1990, 20–21). In her formative years in her parents’ progressive home, and in Nkrumah’s Ghana, awareness about connections among black people in the diaspora were not unusual. “Maybe it is because,” she remarks, “I come from a people from whom, for some reason, the connection with African-America or the Caribbean was a living thing, something of which we were always aware. In Nkrumah’s Ghana one met African Americans and people from the Caribbean. In my father’s house we were always getting visitors from all over” (James 1990, 20).