SOURCE: Gardner, Susan. “Culture Clashes.” Women's Review of Books 12, no. 2 (November 1994): 22-3.

In the following review, Gardner compares and contrasts Changes: A Love Story with Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta's Kehinde.

Ama Ata Aidoo and Buchi Emecheta, despite their different nationalities (Aidoo is from Ghana, Emecheta from Nigeria) have much in common. Emecheta, born in 1946, divorced, has four living children; Aidoo, a few years older, widowed with one daughter. Both are among the first African women writers to publish in English and gain a worldwide audience. Each lives in exile—Emecheta in London and Aidoo in Zimbabwe. Emecheta's exile is personal and professional: she has stated that she could never publish her books—numbering, in US editions, more than a dozen novels, one autobiography and several children's stories—in Nigeria, not only because of technological difficulties but because men dominate the Nigerian literary establishment.

For Aidoo—playwright, poet and...