Our Sister Killjoy

Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint (1977), the debut novel of Ghanaian author and former Minister of Education Ama Ata Aidoo, tells the story of Sissie, a young African woman who goes to Europe to better herself and receive a proper, European education. In the process, she discovers the realities of colonization, Europe's effect on the young Africans it sponsors, and how both white Europeans and black Africans have been mistaught about the realities of race and racism in their everyday lives. The book is written in a combination of traditional prose and verse.

The book is broken into four sections. The first, “Into a Bad Dream,” Sissie arrives in Germany and is picked up by her wealthy host family in a luxurious Mercedes. They take her out for expensive meals. At one of these dinners, Sissie meets Sammy, a boy who is also from Ghana and whose real name she “does not catch.” Sissie is unnerved by Sammy, whom she feels has lost touch with his home country and has been placed at the party to sing the praises of life in Europe. Sissie realizes she is the only black person at these parties, but despite this, she does not feel inferior to these rich white Europeans.

The second section of the book, “The Plums,” tells the story of a romance between Sissie and Marija Sommer, a German woman whose husband is never home, and who begins to fall in love with Sissie. Every day Marija picks plums off the tree in her yard, and she feeds them to Sissie, who compares herself to the plums. Despite her love for Sissie, Marija is horribly uneducated about matters involving Africa and race; Sissie quickly realizes that Marija and her friends think of her as exotic and strange, rather than as a real person with feelings and goals. Marija thinks that Ghana is near Canada, and laughs at her own ignorance. Eventually, Marija confesses her love for Sissie, who rejects her and goes to Munich.



The third section of the book gives the novel its name. In “From Our Sister Killjoy,” Sissie travels to London, where she is disturbed by the people of African descent who traveled to England to get themselves out of poverty and are now living on the street or in poor conditions with their families. She says that she feels like she needs to shake these parents and tell them that they are running from their troubles only to find more of the same troubles in Europe. She is disturbed that they lie to their families back in Ghana.

In London, Sissie also meets Kunle, a self-exiled Ghanaian who believes that apartheid can be solved by the technology of the West. Sissie is disgusted by Kunle, whom she thinks has internalized his own racism and now looks down on Africa as lesser than, believing the colonizing world is better than his home country. The section ends with Kunle's death in a fiery car accident; Sissie leaves London feeling that the people she saw there were treated like animals.

The final section of the novel is written as a letter from Sissie to her former lover, who has decided to remain in exile in Europe. Sissie's letter is angry and bitter as she writes about how those in exile have left their country behind to falter because they refuse to bring their education back to help those who need it. She writes about the brain drain happening in the East and in Africa, where the smartest and most capable people leave, are educated in the West, and remain there, never returning to become teachers, doctors, or engineers in their home countries. Sissie writes about how choosing to love a man who can do this to his country makes her question her own worth as a strong African woman. She decides not to send the letter, instead choosing to return to her home to tell the true story of her time in Europe.



Aidoo has written many plays, novels, and books of poems, and served as the Minister of Education in Ghana in Jerry Rawling's administration. Aidoo became the first published African woman dramatist with her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, in 1964. She attended schools in Ghana and elsewhere and taught as a visiting professor at many American universities. In 2000, she created the Mbaasem Foundation, a non-profit aiming to support African women writers. Aidoo's fiction and plays deal extensively with the struggle she sees between West Africa and Western nations culturally, politically, and economically, and the effects of colonization on African people. Her protagonists are all women working against the stereotypes that bind them, who, like Sissie, show a strong front against racism, sexism, and Western biases.