Anowa

by Ama Ata Aidoo

Drama / Anthology

Genres: Plays, African Literature, Africa, School, Read For School, Fiction, Ghana

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

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.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Tyler Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished another play for my World Masterpieces class. This time we read a play from Ghana by Ama Ata Aidoo called Anowa. Written in the 1970’s but set in the 1870’s Anowa follows the namesake character around 19th century Ghana or as they call it in the play The Gold Coast. Anowa is the opposite of all the traditional women in her village and she runs away with a husband she chose for herself. This play is very short but brings forth interesting ideas about women’s roles, mental health, slavery, and participation in society. But it also doesn’t explicitly give you an answer to any of those ideas. It simply proposes them and leaves them for you to decide what to do with them. I’d say the play is also a tragedy as it gets incredibly sad but it’s super deep all the way through. Anowa is such a strong and amazing character, her name literally means “superior moral force” and she is just that. When faced with parents who both fight over the life they want her to have Anowa runs away to live the life she wants. And we see many times some ideas that are brought up with her husband and if she didn’t want it she would stand tall and deny it. Even when her traditional husband didn’t take her opinion to count she was angry about his decisions. Both Anowa and her husband Kofi struggle with mental illness in the play. Anowa for not getting to be the woman she wants to be and Kofi for a reason I’ll leave for you to learn. The play at its core is a struggle between opposing ideologies and each character has a pair that thinks opposite of them. Anowa’s father and her mother, Anowa and Kofi, and the male narrator and female narrator. Each person is an opposite of their pair and it brings interesting dialogue to a 30ish page play. I really enjoyed it though and it’s one of my favorite plays we’ve read in this class. I would for sure recommend it, and you can read it in just about an hour. Ama Ata Aidoo crafted a wonderful and thoughtful play with an amazing central character for African Women and just women in general to look up to (to a point, don’t exactly follow the characters footsteps). This is a 9/10 (4.5/5 stars) for me. Give it a read if you can. -Tyler.

[LocdInBooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anowa was my first feminist heroine inspite of her story being a tradegy and subsequently a cautionary tale about children we choose to dance to the rhythm of their own drum instead of listening to the advice of elders.

Although, at the forefront, it talks about pride and stubbornness, having money not being synonymous with happiness and the need to treat everyone with dignity (women, men, chn, slaves), rereading this play opened my eyes to more themes like gender roles, mental health and independence. Ama's style of writing and the story itself is also very witty and engaging.

Although quite being short play with a doomed protagonist, Anowa tells a story of how we can choose to be ourselves and hope to be "a better person if we [society] had not been what we [society] are."

[Erinayo Adediwura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was genuinely a phenomenal play that interrogated Anowa's contradictory essence of trying to be a person and the gender expectations she was constantly subsumed too which led to such a tragic ending. Anywho genuinely a great refresher and I enjoyed reading the play

Reread this play for a class, will forever still be phenomenal. October 7, 2025

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Anowa felt like watching a tragedy assemble itself in slow, deliberate steps. From the beginning, there is a sense of inevitability—not because the outcome is obvious, but because the world Anowa inhabits has already decided what kind of woman it will not tolerate.

Ama Ata Aidoo writes with a clarity that feels almost surgical. Nothing is wasted. Every line tightens the moral space around her characters.

Anowa herself is unforgettable. She is intelligent, questioning, and stubbornly unwilling to accept answers simply because they are traditional. Her refusal to submit to parental authority, to prescribed womanhood, to silence marks her as dangerous in a society that equates obedience with virtue. What struck me most was how lonely her defiance is.

Anowa does not belong anywhere: not in her mother’s world, not fully in her husband’s, and not even in the future she imagines for herself.

The play’s chorus-like Old Man and Old Woman function as communal consciousness, and I found them both illuminating and suffocating.

They explain, justify, and moralize—but they also reveal how society disciplines deviation. Their voices feel reasonable until you realize how much cruelty hides inside “reason.” Aidoo captures the terrifying power of consensus: how collective certainty can crush individual truth without ever raising its voice.

Kofi Ako’s trajectory disturbed me deeply. His transformation—from ambition to moral collapse—shows how patriarchy damages men as well as women.

His wealth, built on slavery, hollows him out, turning success into shame. The marriage becomes a site of mutual destruction, not because love is absent, but because the world offers no ethical framework in which love can survive unchecked power.

What makes Anowa devastating is its refusal to provide a clear moral refuge. Tradition is exposed as restrictive and violent, but modernity is not redemptive either. Freedom arrives entangled with exploitation. Anowa’s tragedy is not that she chose wrongly, but that the available choices were already poisoned.

The language is spare, the structure tight, and the emotional impact cumulative. By the end, I felt less shocked than exhausted—like someone who has watched injustice unfold exactly as predicted, powerless to stop it.

Anowa is a feminist tragedy that does not console. It does not ask for sympathy; it demands recognition. And once you recognize what it reveals about gender, power, and complicity, the silence it leaves behind feels unbearably loud.

Most recommended

[elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Ghanaian myself, this was one of my first introductions to Ghanaian literature, and an excellent one at that. However I was not too satisfied with the ending as I felt it contradictory. It also felt like although the primary message the book was trying to push was a critique about women’s roles in society, seemingly all paths for Anowa were dictated by society, marriage or a priestess. So did she die because she chose to get married due to societal pressures, albeit to a man of her choice, instead of becoming a priestess as everyone deemed was better suiting? Maybe I’m just missing the point but it’s a great read nonetheless, I recommend.

[ｲirnom · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's ability to elicit immense sadness seizes you unaware. An addition to the list of outstanding tragedies i've read.

"Someone should have taught me
how to grow up to be a woman. I hear in other lands a woman is nothing. And they let her know this from the day of her birth. But here, O my spirit mother, they let a girl grow up as she pleases until she is married. And then
she is like any woman anywhere: in order for her man to be a man, she must not think, she must not talk. O—o, why didn’t someone teach me how to grow up to be a woman?"

[Cameryn Celestina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really beautiful African writing. One of my favorite quotes comes from this play. I read this and wrote a paper on this play for a theatre class. This work discusses how African women are portrayed by society and how they are influenced by men and family. The plot was relatively interesting but a bit confusing. My rating is mostly of the writing and how it shows what goes on in Anowa's mind/how she sees the world.

[Maria do Socorro Baptista · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esta é uma peça que eu adoraria ver no palco, muita rica em detalhes, e muito profunda em simbologia e aspectos culturais. Daria uma excelente discussão acerca do processo de colonização, dos papeis culturais e sociais de gênero, da questão da escravização de pessoas, e muito mais. Um texto riquíssimo. Se eu ainda trabalhasse, certamente o usaria em sala de aula.

[Kwabena A · Rating 4 out of 5]

A striking feminist tragedy: bold, unsettling, and beautifully crafted. In Anowa, Aidoo gives us a woman too powerful for the narrow world around her, and the tragedy that unfolds when brilliance meets a society that cannot bear it.

[sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

some good fucking tragic play, it was dramatic n enjoyable

[Emmanuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a woman.

[Asma · Rating 5 out of 5]

🤍

[molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love it

[Lauren the Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

*read for class*

[David Whalen · Rating 3 out of 5]

kinda just trying to fill out my reading challenge... but this was pretty good and shoutout to Mr gufford,,,,,,,,,,, could use some more plot

[chengchieh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Required for English Class. dnf @ 15% lmao.

[mengwe · Rating 5 out of 5]

hey that was EXCELLENT!! i found a reaaallllyyyy good monologue and some dope scenes!!! and i would be able to do it in my home country's dialect, which is excitinggggg!! yay African plays!!

[Janine R. Lutchman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anowa pulled me in from the start. It's an engaging exploration of how cultural expectations can influence, complicate, and even fracture interpersonal relationships.

[Edidiong Benjamin Umoh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, didactic and tragic

[FathimaHussaini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sem 6 course work

[Boakye Alpha · Rating 5 out of 5]

As usual, you expect Ama Ata Aidoo to deliver. This was my second reading and yet, I learnt new things from it. This book is deeper than it looks on the surface. Pay attention the details and the mentioned and not-so-mentioned arguments raised in there when reading!

[Maureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

''Listen to the advice your parents give,think about what they've saID and if you find that it is sensible(which is the case most at times),follow it.''

Anowa is a girl who listens to her own advice. As a result,she never knew happiness after her marriage to Kofi Ako.Lots of lessons to be learned from this book.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This brings up some really interesting issues with colonialism. I love this play.

[Nayram · Rating 5 out of 5]

hilarious.

[Breanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

Great story. Heavy in themes and deeper meaning.

[Riley Newfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was just really really cool. Would love to see a production of it some time.

[Jasleen Kaur · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anowa is one book which is feministic and also draws attention to various concepts. It is in the form of a play and for sure is a must read for all age groups, irrespective of their likings and choices.

[Nana Sikapa Mega]

It great.