Alexander Opicho
During my childhood days in Bungoma District, Western Kenya, we had a socially conspicuous neighbour. He was a tall brown man in his late thirties. He had over eight hundred native cows and five granaries permanently filled to the roof with maize, millet, sorghum, pumpkin, and calabash. This neighbour of ours also had three enviable, bustling, short wives, over twelve giant pots for brewing beer, and over ten acres of sugar fields for commercial purpose. What made our neighbour more conspicuous was that he never had any sandals; he was always walking bare-foot in a grime-ridden, brown, pull-neck, home-made-sweater hanging over an ever-black long trouser folded back to the knees of his legs. Our neighbour was showy with his style of picking a screw of snuff from a giant and ever-filled tobacco-horn; he showed off more with his style of inserting the tobacco in his ample nostrils without sneezing. Our neighbour had an unwavering schedule of having the three meals of the day from his mother’s house before his eating circuit that began at the first wife’s and then down to the third wife’s. Our neighbour’s name was Wanyonyi (born during planting season). By then his mother was over 90 years old; her name was Akombe. So, people stole the opportunity behind his back to refer to him as Wanyonyi Akombe. A pique to his overtly patriarchal manners. When Akombe died, Wanyonyi wailed and wept at his mother’s graveside for five hours every evening for 10 years. It was a source of childish amusement.
Later on I also came to learn that Chairman Mao Tse Tung mourned at his mother’s grave-side for 30 months. While on the cross and a few hours shy of his death, Jesus Christ also beckoned John, his disciple, to take care of Mary (mother of Jesus). Those of us who are familiar with Islam are aware that the deepest loss to the Prophet Mohamed (SWS) was the death of his mother.
Ergo, I will not escape the moral duty to stand on the exemplary shoulders of the above giants to mourn Mama Ama Ata Aidoo. I will mourn her for the rest of my life. She was not my biological mother. But she is the mother of my intellectual audacity, sense of maverick position in literature, and unflagging sense of chauvinism for female education. She died at the age of 81, on 31 May 2023.
Born in Ghana eight decades ago, Ama Ata Aidoo maintained an unbroken literary momentum; she published intellectually incisive novels, farcical-cum-tragi-comic plays, informative short stories, spell-binding children’s books, and poetry. Beyond books, her literary talks were full of bravura; she spoke the truth to capital. In one of her speeches, available on YouTube, she cautioned the Western capitalist machinery to stop their traditional culture of double speak about the Anthropocene – Ebola, HIV, Tuberculosis, Asthma, COVID-19, to mention but a few. During her life, she was outspoken in support of female education all over the world; she was always aglow with feminist fire that broke through the fissures of patriarchal rocks to illuminate feminist consciousness to the generations of African women writers ranging from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Doreen Baingana, Helen Oyeyemi, Sefi Atta, Taiye Selasi, and NoViolet Bulawayo, without forgetting to mention Susan Nalukwe Kiguli, Emma Dabiri, and other daughters of Africa who dedicated their whole lives to being crusaders for human rights through the praxis of feminist ideology.
Ama Ata Aidoo’s father was an advocate of female education; he went against the zeitgeist of his time to send Ama Ata to the Wesley Girls’ High School in Cape Coast from 1961 to 1964. When she was in Form Three, the headmistress asked her what she planned to do with her future. Aidoo replied that she wanted to be a poet. ‘Poetry doesn’t feed anyone, Christine’, the teacher told her. Nevertheless, she bought Aidoo an Olivetti typewriter to encourage her literary pursuits. A few months later, Aidoo spotted a pair of pink shoes in a store. Wanting to buy them but lacking the cash, she decided to enter a Christmas short story contest sponsored by the local newspaper, The Daily Graphic. She wrote her entry in longhand and sent it in. On the twenty-fourth of December of the same year, Ama Ata was in her mother’s kitchen; when she opened the centre page of a stray, old newspaper, she saw her name. This is how she got the money, of course from her first publication. Ama Ata used the money to buy the coveted pink shoes. She was only 18 years old at the time.
While she was a junior university student, she wrote her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, about a Ghanaian man who returns from a sojourn in the United States with an African-American wife, much to his family’s dismay. The play, initially staged in 1965, was published the following year, making Aidoo the first published African woman dramatist. These are the efforts you cannot come by easily among the TikTok-toting university students in our present times.
Aidoo wrote Anowa, a play based upon an old Ghanaian legend and concerning the African slave trade, an issue which she insists African writers continue to ignore. The play continues to resonate with global anti-slavery consciousness; it was performed in 2012 by a multicultural cast at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Ama Ata Aidoo’s first novel, Our Sister Killjoy (1977), was inspired by her sojourn in Europe, which looked like a rehearsal for going to heaven for most of Africans of her time. Sissie, the protagonist in the novel, is disappointed by what she finds in London and Germany. She is further confused by the sexual overtures of her German friend, Marija. Aidoo says that she has been attacked by both conservative Ghanaians for presenting same-sex relations in her work, and by lesbians for not exploring the issue more fully. She insists that her portrayal of Sissie is not a judgment, but a reflection of her own naïveté as a young woman in Europe. This was sometimes before she was appointed Ghana’s Minister of Education in 1982. She used her ministerial position to help female teachers earn respect. However, Aidoo was frustrated by her inability to effect change and by her desire to write; she left the ministerial post after only 18 months and went back to writing.
The texture of literary bravura is palpable in Aidoo’s unabashedly feminist disposition and inclusive literary socialization that echoes with cultural rights of non-binary sexualities, women in general, and mothers and daughters in particular by having them figure prominently in her work. This is hardly surprising as Aidoo got the idea for her first play from a story told by her mother and was herself the single mother of a daughter. This virtue appears across the range of her works; in Choosing, the writer-turned-teacher-turned-trader frequently asks her mother for advice, although she doesn’t always follow it. In Outfoxed, she recounts a contentious mother-daughter relationship. Esaaba, believing that she is finally in a position to win her mother’s respect, travels to visit her only to find that she has died, seemingly timing her death to spite her daughter.
Ama Ata Aidoo was eco-friendly in practice through her antinatalist family values. She only had one child, a daughter. A position which she defended by arguing that, ‘I didn’t think much of myself as a mother in practical terms. Even with my one daughter, I’ve always felt that I was not able to give her as much of my time and attention as I considered necessary. So having another child or more children was simply out of the question.’ However, in 2000, Aidoo established Mbaasem, meaning Women’s Words, a foundation dedicated to promoting the work of Ghanaian and African women writers.
Ama Ata Aidoo was not writing for money. One day she won a literary prize worth thousands of dollars, but the prize presenter failed to pronounce Aidoo’s name correctly; Aidoo rejected the prize in public and walked away. She was a great soldier who crusaded for the dignity of the African image. Yes, she was not alone in the struggle. There were also Mariama Ba of Senegal and Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta, both from Nigeria. It is the struggle that was also supported by the heroic Naawal El Saadawi, the author of Woman at Point Zero, from Egypt, and many others, like Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Grace Ogot, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison. However, Ama Ata Aidoo stood out for her multiple talents in the spoken word, long prose, plays, poetry, and fierce activism for human rights.
Personally, I respect her latest literary efforts in her short story No Sweetness Here. This story, which was recently read to the public in London by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Guardian Books Podcast festival, has Mad! Mad! Mad literary flavor, unique intellectual depth, sharp witticism, radical feminism, iconoclasticism, deconstructivism, determinism, fatalism, sensationalism, cosmopolitanism, spotless-humanism, and matchless capacity to paint the angst of human despair in the abyss of existentialism. It is in this story that Ama Ata Aidoo comes out to say that, ‘as if globalized patriarchal value systems have socialized a fallacy that women must accept to be foolish in order to survive in a marriage’, but how long will they be foolish? She condemns this fallacy by arguing that bad marriages destroy the soul.
I fully agree: it is very true there is no sweetness in a marriage that requires a woman to accept being foolish even if she is not. Long Life, dear Mama! Ama Ata Aidoo.