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