Join a young Ghanaian woman on her journey into Europe’s heart of whiteness to meet the natives in this iconoclastic modern classic.

‘A wondrous discovery.’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
‘A treasure: one of the works that inspired my own literary journey.’ Tsitsi Dangarembga
‘Aidoo has reaffirmed my faith in the power of the written word.’ Alice Walker
‘Modest, lyrical, reflective and intelligent .. Deserves as wide an audience as it can get.’ Angela Carter

‘Ver do you come from?’ she asked Sissie. ‘Ghana.’ ‘Is that near Canada?’

Sissie is leaving Ghana for the first time. Arriving in Europe on a scholarship to experience the glories of a Western education, she plunges into this new continent’s heart of whiteness, observing the strange customs of the natives.

Drinking cocktails at the German Embassy, she cringes at her countrymen.
In a Bavarian castle, she is seduced by the lonely mother of Little Adolf.
In freezing London, she witnesses ‘been-tos’ sharing myths of an overseas idyll.
In between continents, she writes a letter on the plane to her exiled former lover.
But it is not sent. She will tell these tales back at home.

Ama Ata Aidoo’s landmark debut Our Sister Killjoy exploded into the world in 1977. With its blistering feminist satire of the West African diaspora, colonial legacies and toxic racism, expressed in a radical literary form – prose poetry, letter, manifesto – its provocative impact remains unmatched half a century on.

Introduced by Ayesha Harruna Attah