In Changes, Ama Ata Aidoo does not simply tell a story — she dismantles one.
Set in postcolonial Ghana, this riveting novel unfolds at the intersection of language, love, and liberation, asking what it truly means for an African woman to own her story in a world that often writes it for her.
Changes is Aidoo’s quietly radical exploration of how African women navigate the shifting landscapes of tradition, modernity, and selfhood. It’s little wonder that this feminist masterstroke won the Best Book (Africa) at the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, after its publication in 1991.
Through the intertwined lives of Esi Sekyi, Opokuya Dakwa, and Fusena Kondey (and the men in their lives), Aidoo paints a deeply human portrait of the contradictions, courage, and costs of African womanhood.
Esi Sekyi is not your “typical” Ghanaian woman — at least not the kind society celebrates. With a Master’s degree in data analysis and a prestigious job at the Department of Urban Statistics, she embodies intelligence and independence, qualities that both empower and alienate her.
When Esi’s husband, Oko, rapes her, an act he perceives as an expression of marital love, she walks out of their six-year-old marriage — an unthinkable act in her cultural context. Her decision to prioritise her autonomy is seen as defiance, rather than strength.
“Is Esi, too, an African woman?” Oko asks, echoing the story so often told, that a woman’s worth lies in endurance and maybe suffering, not freedom.
Aidoo uses this question to expose how language and cultural norms uphold patriarchy. The “unfeminine,” “booklong,” “semi-barren” Esi. These words become instruments of control and linguistic shackles meant to define and diminish her.
Yet, resolute, Esi refuses to be narrated by others. Her divorce becomes a liberating act of rebellion in a system that had no place for assertiveness in women.
In contrast to Esi stands Opokuya, her loyal friend and emotional anchor. Opokuya is a nurse, wife, and mother of four, portrayed as the quintessential “feminine” woman: nurturing, selfless, pragmatic.
But beneath her gentleness lies quiet resistance. Each morning, she and her husband, Kubi, would spar over who gets the family car. Though she appears calm and level-headed, Opokuya finds agency through her voice.
In finally acquiring Esi’s old car, Opokuya claims autonomy over her movement and provision for her family. Like many women, she learns to negotiate power not by confrontation but through subtle assertion.
And then there is Fusena, wife of the wealthy Ali Kondey. Once a promising teacher, she abandons her career to support her husband, Ali, whose ambitions eventually lead him into Esi’s arms.
Aidoo tells Fusena’s story more through gestures than words, her silence becoming a language of its own. When she realises that “life should offer more than marriage”, the weight of that revelation is almost excruciating.
The love she so freely gave her husband cost her herself. Through Fusena, Aidoo reveals the quiet despair of countless women whose dreams are traded for stability, social acceptance, and the life of a husband.
Across these intertwined narratives, Aidoo reveals how deeply language shapes gender and power in African societies. Patriarchy speaks in both whispers and commands, glorifying women’s sacrifice through idioms, and romanticising their suffering through proverbs, as seen in Esi’s conversation with her grandmother, Nana.
Also, through casual conversations, patriarchal language is used to reduce women’s ambitions to “Western” delusions. Aidoo, with the signature wit and warmth of her omniscient narrator, reclaims those same linguistic spaces, dancing between English and Ghanaian idioms, humour and heartbreak, tradition and transformation.
In Changes, love is not the grand romantic ideal of fairy tales; it is a mirror reflecting inequality, desire, and disillusionment.
Whether in Esi’s unheard-of divorce (because what kind of African woman divorces her husband for loving her so deeply, so obsessively, that he must show it by raping her?), Opokuya’s quiet compromises, or Fusena’s silenced sorrow, love becomes a test of how much a woman is willing to give up — or reclaim.
Aidoo’s genius lies in her refusal to offer easy answers. Instead, she invites the reader to sit in the discomfort of contradictions and to see that freedom, for women, often arrives with loneliness, and that empowerment can coexist with regret.
More than three decades after its publication, Changes: A Love Story remains urgent and relevant. It speaks to a generation of women still negotiating the balance between career and care, voice and silence, love and independence.
In Aidoo’s Ghana, as in our world today, women are still revising the stories written for them, still renegotiating what it means to be “African enough,” “feminine enough,” or simply enough to belong, enough to be listened to.
Changes reminds us that language is not merely a means of expression but a tool of liberation. Each time a woman tells her own story, she reshapes the world. Through the rich, deeply colourful portraiture of these women, Aidoo reaffirms our faith in the written word’s power to reach, to teach, to empower, and to inspire.
