Top 15 Ama Ata Aidoo Quotes

Yes, I agree! Adult education in our environment is a very necessary complement for education. Adult education as an institution has to be re-energised and reorganised by reminding the public of its importance. In a society like ours with so many adults literally having had no formal education, adult education should be dynamic so that it helps fill some of these gaps. The fact that adult education seems to have declined so drastically is also a symptom of what has happened to us as a people and as a country, both in terms of education itself and in the application of knowledge generally.

The exclusion of women is not something that we in Ghana have inherited. In a greater part of Ghana at least, even those tribal areas that are ‘patrilinealʼ, girls are just like other children. So this business of women canʼt do this or do that is very new somehow. I didnʼt grow up in a home where I was forced to learn how to cook. Maybe my people were too strange. Nobody ever told me not to do anything because I was a girl.

Religion and religious practices interfere with education to a large extent. Remuneration and other support is poor in state-sponsored schools. The boarding school system is a major problem in senior high schools. No education system in an advanced country centres its secondary education on boarding. They brought it from England, the colonial masters. Those public boarding schools are all completely private in England today. The state schools are day schools. How can you have the teenage children of an entire country housed in boarding schools? Unless we do something about that, there will be no significant improvement in the country’s education system.

Children in this country are receiving virtually no education. Even in the so-called private schools, where they are paying so much, the children are taught extraneous things and in the end donʼt receive a good education. The teacher-student relationship is poor, affecting teaching and learning.

I survived as a woman where men dominated because my people were supportive of women. In so many places in the world, there is an assumption that African women are the most oppressed. It is not true, we are not! At least not all. As an Akan, Fante woman, I grew up in a society where there was not much discrimination against girls. That is why I could be a writer and nobody could tell me writing was a man’s job. I had to go to University to be told by someone that I speak and do other things like a man. My regret is that we Ghanaian girls are not using the freedom we have inherited, and men are now moving in to colonise us.

Well I think it is because first of all, they assume that feminism is equal to lesbianism, which it is not. Feminism is an ideological orientation, a perspective on the world and life. The other is a sexual orientation, and the two shouldn’t conflict as they belong to different spheres of human life. One is a mental state, and the other is sexual. In a paper that I worked on in the 80s, entitled African women at century’s end, I stated that everybody should be a feminist, including men. Feminism is not an ‘ism’ that belongs to women only, but a way of looking at the world. It insists that young women in this life should be given the best possible facilities for our development, health, well-being and employment, so that when we become old we can be catered for like old men are.

Yes I am. It is about a group of people who escaped a terrible epidemic like AIDS, and they felt the only way they could be saved would be to leave their current surroundings and build a new place somewhere else and stay there. Putting some mechanism in place will help them stay safe from the rest of the world, possibly away from other human beings. Inside that country, they have some rules and regulations that they thought could help them, including a decision to build a steel wall higher than the Great Wall of China. Since I don’t know how it ends, I cannot say how they will end it. Whether it will help them, and whether they will be saved or not.

One of the issues that parents educating their wards around here unfortunately donʼt seem to be aware of is that, to help young people develop, you just have to give them positive stimulants, like interacting with them nicely, loving them, taking care of necessities, talking by word of mouth and correcting them where necessary.

I started writing when I was very young. I didnʼt know at the time that I was to become a writer. I know that I read all the time. The house was full of books, and I remember rummaging through the cupboards and drawers looking for books to read. There were always books to read. I grew up in a village, a small town in the central region called “Abiadze”. My father was the chief of the village then called “Kyiakor”. He actually opened the village school with our class and some excellent teachers. My mother and another man from the village used to tell us stories every night. I think all of this prepared me to be a good writer.

Nobody could tell me writing was a man’s job.

In a society like ours with so many adults literally having had no formal education, adult education should be dynamic so that it helps fill some of these gaps.

We have to get girls educated. Education that does not put them down is needed in society. We have to open up, talk and write, hold up these negative trends for discussion, analysis, abolition, and possibly banning. As far as Iʼm concerned, society needs attitudinal change.

My regret is that we Ghanaian girls are not using the freedom we have inherited, and men are now moving in to colonise us.

In so many places in the world, there is an assumption that African women are the most oppressed. It is not true, we are not! At least not all.

Feminism is not an ‘ism’ that belongs to women only, but a way of looking at the world.