Aidoo graduated from the University of Ghana in 1964 and then attended a creative writing program at Stanford University. She was married and has one daughter. “Being a mother,” remarks Aidoo, “has been a singularly enriching experience” (James 1990, 13). As a writer and a teacher, she has worked in numerous university settings. In 1968 and 1969 she taught in the School of Drama of the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and in the English department of the University of Nairobi in Kenya. She worked as coordinator of the African literature program at Cape Coast from 1972 to 1982. More recently, she has been a writer-in-residence or visiting professor at the University of Richmond, Virginia, Oberlin College, and Brandeis University.

In Ghana, Allan notes, “from 1972 to 1979, Aidoo held directorships at the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, the Arts Council of Ghana, and the Medical and Dental Council. This period of social activism culminated in her appointment as Minister of Education in 1982” (193). Aidoo took that post because, as she remarks in her interview with James, “I believe that education is the key to everything. Whereas I do not discount my work as a writer or the possibility of doing things with my writing, I thought that out there as minister, or whatever, you have a direct access to state power, to affect things and to direct them immediately . . . but . . . you can’t do that on your own, you are linked to other forces” (11). Aidoo recognized that the entire educational “structure needed shaking up, revolutionizing” (Modebe 1991, 40).

After a year as minister of education, and because she wanted uninterrupted time to work on her writing, she left Ghana for Zimbabwe. But Aidoo always divides her time among teaching, writing, and activist work. Hence, even as she worked on her novel Changes (published in 1991 in Britain and in 1993 in the United States), she worked with “the Zimbabwean Women Writers’ Union, the Ministry of Education, and women’s tie-dye groups,” activities which demonstrate that “Aidoo remains steeped,” remarks Allan, “in African cultural life” (193).

Urbanization in Post-Independence Ghana

My Brother,

let’s just have

—another cup of tea—

And if

this is

the

neo-colonial crime

ask for

whose art it was

Before the British

stole

it.

(Someone Talking to Sometime, 25)