Subterms
In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading […] More
A playwright, novelist and poet, she was a leading African writer who explored the complexities faced by modern women living in the shadow of colonialism.Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian playwright, author and activist who was hailed as one of Africa’s leading literary lights as well as one of its most influential feminists, died on Wednesday. She was 81.Her family said in a statement that she died after a brief illness. The statement did not specify the cause or where she died.In a wide-ranging career that included writing plays, novels and short stories, stints on multiple university faculties and, briefly, a position as a cabinet minister in Ghana, Ms. Aidoo established herself as a major voice of post-colonial Africa.Her breakthrough play, “The Dilemma of a Ghost,” published in 1965, explored the cultural dislocations experienced by a Ghanaian student who returns home after studying abroad and by those of his Black American wife, who must confront the legacies of colonialism and slavery. It was one of several of Ms. Aidoo’s works that became staples in West African schools.Throughout her literary career, Ms. Aidoo sought to illuminate the paradoxes faced by modern African women, still burdened by the legacies of colonialism. She rejected what she described as the “Western perception that the African female is a downtrodden wretch.”Her novel “Changes: A Love Story,” which won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book, Africa, portrays the psychic and cultural dilemmas faced by Esi, an educated, career-focused woman in Accra, Ghana’s capital, who leaves her husband after he rapes her and lands in a polygamous relationship with a wealthy man.In this work and many others, Ms. Aidoo chronicled the fight by African women for recognition and equality, a fight, she contended, that was inextricable from the long shadow of colonialism.“Our Sister Killjoy” was Ms. Aidoo’s debut novel.Her landmark debut novel, “Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections From a Black-Eyed Squint” (1977), recounted the experiences of Sissie, a young Ghanaian woman who travels to Europe on a scholarship to better herself, as such a move was traditionally described, with a Western education. In Germany and England, she comes face to face with the dominance of white values, including Western notions of success, among fellow African expatriates.As a Fulbright scholar who spent years as an expatriate herself, including stints as a writer in residence at the University of Richmond in Virginia and as a visiting professor in the Africana studies department at Brown University, Ms. Aidoo too experienced feelings of cultural dislocation.“I have always felt uncomfortable living abroad: racism, the cold, the weather, the food, the people,” she said in a 2003 interview published by the University of Alicante in Spain. “I also felt some kind of patriotic sense of guilt. Something like, Oh, my dear! Look at all the problems we have at home. What am I doing here?”Whatever her feelings about life abroad, she was welcomed in Western literary circles. A 1997 article in The New York Times recounted how her appearance at a New York University conference for female writers of African descent “was greeted with the kind of reverence reserved for heads of state.”Although she never rose to hold that title, she had been Ghana’s minister of education, an appointment she accepted in 1982 with the goal of making education free for all. She resigned after 18 months when she realized the many barriers she would have to overcome to achieve that goal.Ms. Aidoo’s novel “Changes: A Love Story” won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book, Africa.After moving to Zimbabwe in 1983, Ms. Aidoo developed curriculums for the country’s Ministry of Education. She also made her mark in the nonprofit sphere, founding the Mbaasem Foundation in 2000 to support African women writers.She was a major Pan-Africanist voice, arguing for unity among African countries and for their continued liberation. She spoke with fury about the centuries of exploitation of the continent’s natural resources and people.“Since we met you people 500 years ago, now look at us,” she said in an interview with a French journalist in 1987, later sampled in the 2020 song “Monsters You Made” by the Nigerian Afrobeats star Burna Boy. “We’ve given everything, you are still taking. I mean where will the whole Western world be without us Africans? Our cocoa, timber, gold, diamond, platinum.”“Everything you have is us,” she continued. “I am not saying it. It’s a fact. And in return for all these, what have we got? Nothing.”Christina Ama Ata Aidoo and her twin brother, Kwame Ata, were born on March 23, 1942, in the Fanti village of Abeadzi Kyiakor, in a central region of Ghana then known by its colonial name, the Gold Coast.Her father, Nana Yaw Fama, was a chief of the village who built its first school, and her mother was Maame Abba Abasema. Information about Ms. Aidoo’s survivors was not immediately available.Her grandfather had been imprisoned and tortured by the British, a fact she later invoked when describing herself as “coming from a long line of fighters.”She said she had felt a literary calling from an early age. “At the age of 15,” she said, “a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how, I replied that I wanted to be a poet.”Four years later, she won a short story contest. On seeing her story published by the newspaper that sponsored the competition, she said, “I had articulated a dream.” More
Maxine Angel Opoku has found a new audience for her music with songs opposing a proposed law that would make it illegal to identify as gay, transgender or queer.ACCRA, Ghana — When Maxine Angel Opoku was still an upstart musician, relatively unknown and struggling to stand out in Ghana’s competitive music scene, she sang about love, romance and being sexy.Then, in August 2021, lawmakers in the country’s Parliament introduced a bill that would imprison people who identify as transgender, as Ms. Opoku does, and her art urgently turned to advocacy. Her music began to attract both legions of new fans as well as powerful adversaries.“Dear Mr. Politician, fix the country right now. The people who voted for you, are disappointed in you,” Ms. Opoku sings in one of her latest songs. “Kill it, kill it, kill the bill.”The subject of the song is the “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill,” which, if passed, would make identifying as gay, transgender or queer a crime punishable with a maximum prison sentence of five years.As Ghana’s only openly transgender musician, Ms. Opoku, who is known on stage as Angel Maxine, is one of the most visible targets of the proposed legislation in a country where the gay and transgender community is largely closeted.Ms. Opoku, preparing for the day last month in Accra, Ghana.Francis Kokoroko for The New York Times“Music is the tool for my advocacy,” Ms. Opoku said in an interview in Accra, the capital of Ghana. “This is the only way my voice can reach the politicians, the president, the homophobes, the layperson.”Same-sex sexual acts are already criminalized in Ghana, in part because of a British colonial-era law, but it is currently not a crime to publicly identify as gay, transgender or queer.In response to the proposed legislation, Ms. Opoku released a song called “Kill the Bill” and, shortly before that, another song, “Wo Fie,” which means “in your home,” in the Akan language, one of the most widely spoken in Ghana.“Wo Fie” talks about how L.G.B.T.Q. people may be part of every family, and calls for tolerance and respect. In the lyrics, Ms. Opoku sings about being unapologetically herself.Ms. Opoku, the oldest of five children, was born in Accra on Sept. 3, 1985, to a fashion designer mother and a civil servant father.“Everybody that saw her would say: ‘Hey, you have a beautiful girl,’” her mother, Faustina Araba Forson, 60, recalled. “Then I would say: ‘No, it’s a boy.’”“She loved wearing girls’ dresses, playing with the girls,” her mother added. “She was a girl trapped in a male body.”Still, it took Ms. Forson many years to accept her daughter’s identity. Ms. Opoku recalled that mother and child would frequent churches to hear pastors, including the controversial Nigerian preacher T.B. Joshua, seeking to “cast the gay out.”“One day I was praying, and I heard God say, ‘I created her in my own image and I love her,’” Ms. Forson said.Ms. Opoku started out singing at home during morning devotional prayers with her family, and as a teenager shadowed members of a now defunct girl group. She began performing music as a woman in 2008 while studying hospitality management in Koforidua, a city north of Accra. It was a dangerous endeavor. Once, during a set, a bottle was thrown from the audience, striking her in the head, she said.With no label to back her or to sponsor recording sessions, she put her music — whose sound is a fusion of Afropop, dance hall and the increasingly popular Afrobeats — on hold and instead moved between jobs in the hospitality sector as a cook and waitress, where she faced issues such as misgendering.Ms. Opoku and her mother, Faustina Araba Forson.Francis Kokoroko for The New York TimesEven before the threat of prison in the impending legislation, to be openly gay or transgender in Ghana was extraordinarily risky, with those identifying — or perceived to be — as such facing acts of violence from both strangers and their own families. Employment and housing discrimination is common.“Some get forced into marriages, get thrown out of their homes; some of them drop out of school because they no more have support,” said Leila Yahya, executive director of One Love Sisters, Ghana, an advocacy organization for L.G.B.T.Q. Muslims, and a friend of Ms. Opoku.Ms. Opoku returned to music in 2018, and while defiance has won her followers online at home and abroad, it has also marked her out. Her home was ransacked and looted by a mob last year, forcing her to scale back on public appearances. Ms. Opoku was not at home when the mob attacked.“They could have taken me to the police station, maybe I could have even died,” said Ms. Opoku, who now performs rarely, and only in private. “I could have been lynched.”After Ms. Opoku’s home was attacked, the maverick musician Wanlov the Kubolor and his sister, known as Sister Deborah, helped her find a safe space and began a professional and personal relationship. The siblings, long viewed as social contrarians in Ghana’s music industry, are featured on both “Kill the Bill” and “Wo Fie.”“It blew me away, the stuff she was living with from day to day: financially, psychologically, physically,” said Wanlov the Kubolor. “I don’t think I could have survived that life.”Ms. Opoku said she also wants to be known for music unrelated to her activism. But that has been an unrealized ambition, so far. A completed mini-album of non-advocacy songs remains unreleased because of a lack of sponsorship, she said.Ms. Forson with a picture of Ms. Opoku as a child next to her aunt.Francis Kokoroko for The New York TimesFor Wanlov the Kubolor, the recent rise in Ms. Opoku’s public stature has been equal parts joyful and painful.“It is painful because she could have bloomed much earlier, because she has a super talent, and she could have been a world star already,” he said.Recently, the song “Wo Fie” went viral on TikTok outside Ghana, and he believes Ms. Opoku’s increasing international visibility — although fraught with safety risks — could also serve as a protective factor for her.But Ms. Opoku isn’t so sure. “Every day is dangerous for me,” she said. “I cannot walk on the street as a normal person.”Taking a bus is out of the question, she said, as is going to the market. “I cannot do a lot of things,” she said.Her daughter’s safety is front of mind for Ms. Forson, too. “I fear for my daughter a lot,” she said. “She is a vociferous person and so she is a target, and I always pray that God should protect her.”If passed, the bill would criminalize positive portrayals of queer life in the media, codify the widely discredited pseudoscience of conversion therapy and compel the families and neighbors of L.G.B.T.Q. people to report them to the authorities.Those who are arrested can avoid prison by undergoing psychiatric and endocrinological treatment “to overcome their vulnerabilities.” The bill also states that allies who give any form of assistance to L.G.B.T.Q. people, such as housing, could be sentenced to between five and 10 years in prison.Ms. Opoku, with friends, at a hotel before a workshop she facilitated for people in Ghana who identify as transgender.Francis Kokoroko for The New York TimesThe proposed legislation is backed by the country’s powerful religious leaders, politicians from the two leading parties and large sections of the local media. It also has broad popular support in a country where a 2019 survey found that 93 percent of Ghanaians would dislike having a homosexual neighbor.The bill has also galvanized outspoken opposition from a small but influential coalition of local academics, lawyers and rights activists.Last month the Speaker of Parliament, who has previously expressed support for the legislation, said it was a priority and would be passed before the next elections in 2024.Thanks in part to the L.G.B.T.Q. antipathy fomenting around the bill, Ms. Opoku said it was difficult to see a future for herself in Ghana. It’s nearly impossible for her to perform freely in public now; the bill would make it legally impossible.“I don’t see a life here for me,” she said. “If I cannot come out openly, go on the streets to move about my daily life, if I cannot get a job, how do I sustain myself? This is no life.”Despite the difficulties, she remains resolute about speaking up for Ghana’s L.G.B.T.Q. community in the face of this rising hostility.Her next song, she said, will encourage at-risk people to sign up for the H.I.V. prevention pill PrEP.“I feel like it is a responsibility,” Ms. Opoku said. “If I win, people like me will also win.”She added, “People like me will also be happier, people like me will also feel free.”Ms. Opoku, at home.Francis Kokoroko for The New York TimesReporting for this story was supported in part by the Pulitzer Center. More
Shakespeare in the Park is back, and Dede Ayite’s West African-influenced costume designs are just as lively as Jocelyn Bioh’s adaptation.When Saheem Ali, the director of this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park production of “Merry Wives,” thought about which costume designer he wanted to create the clothes for the show, he knew immediately that it should be Dede Ayite. The two have been friends for years, and have worked together on “Twelfth Night” for the Public Mobile Unit, “Fires in the Mirror” at Signature Theater Company and the upcoming “Nollywood Dreams” at the MCC Theater.“Dede fit the bill for this particular project to a T,” he said. Not only because of her artistry, he added, “but because of her identity.” He knew the Ghanaian-born costume designer “would bring an authenticity and a truth to the world that I couldn’t imagine any other designer bringing up for this particular world.”In the playwright Jocelyn Bioh’s modern take on Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” the setting is Harlem instead of Berkshire, England; its characters West African, not English. Falstaff is a lifelong Harlemite; the Pages are Ghanaian; and the Fords are Nigerian. The costumes play as vital a role in reimagining and breathing new life into this work as the acting, the writing, the sets and more. In his review, The New York Times’s chief theater critic, Jesse Green, said Ayite’s costumes helped the production look “especially grand.”Ayite, a two-time Tony Award nominee for her work on “Slave Play” and “A Soldier’s Play,” knew that she wanted the costumes to reflect and highlight both the similarities and the differences between the cultures. She and her team sourced fabrics from Kumasi, Ghana, as well as from fabric haunts in Yonkers and the Bronx. She said she hoped that the costumes would add to the production’s celebration of Harlem and other immigrant communities and what contributions, cultural and otherwise, immigrants bring to the places they settle in.Dede Ayite gathered a variety of Ankara prints for her designs in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe patterns and symbols reflect the play’s characters and their personalities.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m hopeful that as people get to experience the show and see these Black beautiful bodies and shapes and people onstage, that they truly see them and embrace them and recognize that they exist and they matter,” Ayite said.She recently spoke about her process, the art of marrying traditional and modern West African styles with modern Western designs and creating costumes that flatter and feel natural on actors with different body shapes.The Pages and the FordsSusan Kelechi Watson as Madam Ford, left, in a lace blouse and wrap skirt that is usually worn by Nigerian women. Pascale Armand, center, and Kyle Scatliffe as the Pages. Armand is wearing a two piece jumpsuit.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe characters Ekua and Kwame Page are from Ghana, and for some of the couple’s clothes, Ayite got woven kente cloth from that country. Madam Page is a traditional woman who still has her finger on the pulse, Ayite said. For one of Madam Page’s dresses, Ayite leaned into a traditional silhouette reminiscent of the 1950s, but it also has modern-day cutouts and design details.“It feels like an Ankara print, but in some ways feels like an elevated or modern version of an Ankara print,” Ayite said, adding that she chose three Adinkra symbols with specific meanings to add a sense of playfulness to the garment. Those symbols — representing strength and humility; unity; and wisdom and creativity — speak more broadly to Madam Page’s personality and character, which viewers become familiar with throughout the play.With each costume, Ayite said, she wanted to create layers that symbolize where a character was from and who they are as an individual.Naturally, the Pages dress quite differently from the Fords, who are from Nigeria.Ayite dove into her own knowledge of the countries and into a well of research about different styles of dress not only within the two countries, broadly, but also within different tribes. The Nigerian couple, for example, are Igbo.For every character, Ayite played around with various silhouettes and shapes. Madam Ford’s dress at the top of the show is a modern take on the traditional aso ebi, a type of uniform dress worn as a show of solidarity for celebrations in Nigeria.Traditionally, Ayite said, “it’s a bit longer, but we shortened it a little bit, so we see a bit more leg.”Falstaff the HarlemiteJacob Ming-Trent as Falstaff, a Harlemite whose interactions with his West African neighbors are reflected in his clothes. The print for the Ghana Must Go bag inspired this pair of shorts.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo bring to life Bioh’s version of Falstaff, the loud, often clownish and inappropriate beer-bellied player of Harlem, Ayite wanted to create a conversation, through costume, of his Harlem roots and his interactions with his West African neighbors.In one scene, when Falstaff goes to speak with Madam Ford, he puts on a colorfully printed Stacy Adams shirt that looks as if it has paint speckled across it. Ayite pointed out that the shirt “is very American,” but there are elements of Africanness in his costumes that fit with his African neighbors. Falstaff has a pair of shorts with the print of the common Ghana Must Go bag. The print on the bag — a colorful red-and-white or blue-and-white plaid — has been around for decades.“It brings me joy just to highlight that as a people, we come from somewhere and the culture is deep, it’s rich, and as much as we might lose certain things, there are essences of it that never leave us,” she said.Doctor CaiusDavid Ryan Smith as Doctor Caius dressed in an agbada or Senegalese boubou. Shola Adewusi plays Mama Quickly, who runs a clinic with the doctor.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDavid Ryan Smith plays the Senegalese Doctor Caius, whose personality is bold, as are his costumes. He’s educated, has a bit of flair, and he has money. Each of his costumes takes up space and demands attention thanks to the silhouettes and striking colors.“He wants to be seen,” Ayite said. “He’s a presence that we feel like we need to acknowledge. You can’t miss him.”Secondary CharactersAbena, right, as Anne Page, who is courted by three suitors, including MaYaa Boateng’s Fenton, left. Dede Ayite gave the younger characters a more fashion forward look.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAyite has traveled to several African countries and when she arrived in the United States 20 years ago, she settled in Harlem. These experiences are perhaps why the show’s costumes feel authentic to all the cultures they represent.The research and her experience come alive with each character, but especially stand out among the younger, perhaps more fashion forward characters, like Anne Page.She is a first-generation American, who wears clothes that could be seen on West 116th Street and in a viral TikTok post. Ayite explored how being a first-generation young woman could factor into how she would dress. One scene, for example, has Anne in a classic, long white button-down. But atop it is a printed corset that feels both old and new, African and American.“I changed the paneling a little bit and the silhouette of that corset, so it feels like it’s pushing against culture a little bit,” she said, “so it feels African, but also feels like — in terms of fashion — she has our finger on the pulse because she has access to YouTube, to Instagram, to TikTok.” More
