Book Review and Reflection Changes: A Love Story by Ama Ata Aidoo

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Year of publication: 1991
Genre: Romance
Country: Ghana

Introduction

Changes: A Love Story is a classical African love story written by a classical African writer. As the title says, it tells a narrative of lives in flux – changing lives, especially the life of the protagonist, Esi. Like many African love stories, it does not rely on fantasy or grand romance but focuses on people navigating everyday life, relationships, and difficult situations. Ama Ata Aidoo wrote about family, marriage, friendship, as well as love, responsibility, and desire. Layers is a theme I am coming to notice in African love stories – so many layers and not much of the tantalising detail that often accompanies mainstream love stories. I saw this in books like African Love Stories: An Anthology and The Sex Lives of African Women by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, and even in So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ.

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Book Summary

Set in Ghana, the novel centres on Esi Sekyi, an educated, successful and elegant woman. Esi was in a marriage that she no longer wanted to be in, which she eventually ended. She met Ali, with whom she eventually started a romantic relationship, but Ali was married. It was an amazing twist, in my mind at least, that Esi agreed to be his second wife.

Fusena, Ali’s first wife, represents the sacrifices many African women make in marriage. She sidelined her own dreams and career to support Ali’s, leaving the country to live temporarily with him abroad and birthing and rearing their children. At the same time, he worked on advancing his career. And now here he was, choosing to marry another woman. A woman with a career and who was, in that respect, very successful – it was understandable that this was the thing Fusena worried about the most when she first found out – Esi’s level of education – “her husband had brought into their marriage a woman who had more education than she did”, p.100. This was her primary concern – not so much the fact that her husband was bringing in a second wife.

I appreciated how Ata Aidoo structured her book on poignant themes affecting African societies, first with the position of women and how, at times, marriage tends to disempower an African woman. I thought this came out more strongly regarding Esi, even when Esi took care not to let her heart lead when it came to Ali. She measured and rationalised their relationship and made peace with things, but even then, the way Ali ended up treating her felt very disempowering. Ali’s women elders showed this on page 107 when they were tasked with convincing his wife Fusena to accept Esi as the second wife, remembering that nothing much has changed for women in society – “it is a man’s world. You only survived if you knew how to live in it as a woman.” p. 107. Because how is this task given to women when Ali, the man, was the one marrying another woman? He was the one married to Fusena. Yet, he was somehow exempt from the consequences of these actions – women must cushion the blow for him, while other women were at the receiving end of his actions.

This brought So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ to mind, in which the protagonist, Ramatoulaye, was also informed of her husband’s second marriage by a third party (albeit being a man in that situation), not her own husband. These are reinforcements of the patriarchy and the protection granted to men even in extraordinary circumstances. However, there is no mistake that there is a lot of agency in these stories. Esi made the choice to divorce her first husband, despite advice against doing so. She pursued a love interest with a married man and chose to become his second wife. And even in the way that marriage went, Esi still continued to make choices. Yet, with all this agency and choice, I couldn’t help but think about Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi. Although vastly different characters and circumstances, the protagonist in that book, Firdaus, at a certain point made many choices in her favour – her story linked back to the fact that women can have agency and choice, they can make decisions bout their lives. They can and often do make bold decisions bout their lives, yet somehow end up being disenfranchised by a man – put down, denied, disregarded, discarded, even killed by a man. Esi’s “mothers” have warned her about this.

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Recommendations

This book is a strong and honest exploration of women’s realities. The novel shows how women can be deeply agentic and still end up trapped.

I would recommend Changes: A Love Story to readers interested in African women’s writing, stories about marriage and womanhood, and novels that challenge romanticised ideas of love.

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About the Author

Ama Ata Aidoo (1942–2023) was a Ghanaian writer, poet, playwright, and academic. She is widely regarded as one of Africa’s most important literary voices. Her work often explores themes of gender, culture, colonialism, and women’s lives in postcolonial Africa. In addition to Changes: A Love Story, her notable works include Our Sister Killjoy, Anowa, and No Sweetness Here. Read more here.

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