Published in 2025 (first published 1977)
176 pages
Ama Ata Aidoo 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.
What is this book about?
Join a young Ghanaian woman on her journey into Europe’s heart of whiteness to meet the natives in this iconoclastic modern classic.
‘A wondrous discovery.’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
‘A treasure: one of the works that inspired my own literary journey.’ Tsitsi Dangarembga
‘Aidoo has reaffirmed my faith in the power of the written word.’ Alice Walker
‘Modest, lyrical, reflective and intelligent .. Deserves as wide an audience as it can get.’ Angela Carter
Fish and chips.
They lied.
They lied.
They lied.
Sissie is leaving Africa for the first time, arriving in Europe on a scholarship to experience the glories of a Western education.
In Germany, as guest of honour over embassy cocktails, she cringes at her countrymen.
In a Bavarian castle, she is seduced by a lonely local mother to Little Adolf.
In freezing London, she witnesses ‘been-tos’ sharing myths of an overseas idyll.
In between continents, she writes a letter on the plane to her exiled former lover.
But it is not sent. She will tell these tales back at home.
Ama Ata Aidoo’s landmark debut Our Sister Killjoy exploded into the world in 1977. With its blistering feminist satire of the African diaspora, colonial legacies and toxic racism, expressed in a radical literary form – prose poetry, letter, manifesto – its provocative impact remains unmatched.
