Description

In 1991 Ama Ata Aidoo's novel Changes. A Love Story was awarded the prestigious Commonwealth Writers' Prize. She was not a novice writer at all; her writing career had started almost twenty years earlier and her presence in the world of African letters was indisputable. This novel meant the definitive critical recognition of Aidoo's work worldwide. However, for Changes to come to light, a set of earlier texts authored by Aidoo had to be written. These earlier texts are the focus of study of An African Auto(Biography). Ama Ata Aidoo's Literary Quest. It is in those other texts where Aidoo's voice, perennially imbibed with Africanness and femaleness is being shaped and this voice cries out amid the contradictions, ambiguities and desires of the postcolonial arena. Her (auto)biography is a journey into the strangeness that builds the African independent nation and one that challenges Western tradition but in this nation-building process, her experience as a woman is paramount. An African Auto(Biography) explores the creative strategies employed by an African woman to write Africa in the two decades following the independence of her country, Ghana, former British Gold Coast.