War & Peace Quote by Ama Ata Aidoo

There is steel under Aidoo's apparent pragmatism: she isn't pleading for "relevance" so much as issuing a warning about what art becomes when power is predatory. "For us Africans" is doing heavy political work. It refuses the safe, museum-glass version of literature as private self-expression and replaces it with a collective mandate shaped by history: colonial extraction, post-independence disillusionment, and states that learned to police language as efficiently as they police bodies. In that landscape, "purpose" isn't an aesthetic preference; it's survival strategy.

The verbs are deliberately aggressive. "Expose, embarrass, and fight" sketches a ladder of escalation, from revelation to social shaming to outright resistance. "Embarrass" is the sharpest choice: it understands corruption not only as theft but as performance, a theater of impunity that depends on the public learning to look away. Literature, for Aidoo, is counter-theater. It makes elites visible in the one place they can't easily manage: the moral imagination of readers.

Then comes the trap she sets for Western literary gatekeeping. Calling the African artist "utilitarian" anticipates the sneer that engaged writing is propaganda or less "pure" than art-for-art's-sake. "It is understandable" is both concession and indictment: of course it's utilitarian when institutions are brittle, journalism is muzzled, and courtrooms can't be trusted. The subtext is bracingly unsentimental: if a society is on fire, the storyteller doesn't get points for describing the flames beautifully. The point is to make them stop.