Ama Ata Aidoo

Christina Ama Ata Aidoo (March 23, 1942–May 31, 2023) was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academic. She was Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings's PNDC administration. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist. As a novelist, she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers.

The Dilemma of a Ghost (1964)

 * Money making is like a god possessing a priest. He never will leave you, until he has occupied you, wholly changed the order of your being, and seared you through and up and down, Then only would he eventually leave you, but nothing of you except an exhausted wreck, lying prone and wondering who are you.


 * The best way to sharpen a knife is not to whet one side of it only. And neither can you solve a riddle by considering only one end of it.

No Sweetness Here: A Collection of Short Stories (1970)

 * People are worms, and even the God who created them is immensely bored with their antics.


 * The very old certainly do not go back on lunch remains but they do bite back at old conversational topics.

Our Sister Killjoy (1977)

 * But what she also came to know was that someone somewhere would always see in any kind of difference, an excuse to be mean.


 * We are victims of our history and our present. They place too many obstacles in the way of love. And we cannot enjoy even our differences in peace.


 * Sissie knew that she had to stop herself from crying. Why weep for them? In fact, stronger in her was the desire to ask somebody why the entire world has had to pay so much and is still paying so much for some folks' unhappiness.


 * it is quite clear now that all of the peoples of the earth have not always wished one another well. Indeed we are certain now, are we not, that so many people have wished us ill. They wish us ill. They have always done. They still do.

Changes: A Love Story (1991)

 * Once in a while I catch myself wondering whether I would have found the courage to write if I had not started to write when I was too young to know what was good for me.


 * No matter what anybody says, we can't have it all. Not if you are a woman. Not yet.


 * Love is fine for singing about and love songs are good to listen to, sometimes even to dance to. But when we need food for our stomachs and clothes for our backs, love is nothing. Ah my lady, the last man any woman should think of marrying is the man she loves.


 * There are powerful forces undermining progress in Africa. But one must never underestimate the power of the people to bring about change.


 * Guilt is born in the same hour with pleasure, like anything in this universe and its enemy.