In the following essay on Ama Ata Aidoo's collection of short stories entitled No Sweetness Here, Lloyd W. Brown examines the author's ironic perspective on the traditional roles of women, particularly rural women, in Africa.

In "No Sweetness Here" the perspective on the rural woman shifts from the largely rural viewpoints, or self-images, of the village to the insights of a Western-educated young woman. The narrator is a school teacher through whose eyes we view Maami Ama, one of the vilage women. Maami is very attached to her son Kwesi who is also one of the narrator's pupils, but loses him, first to her estranged husband in a divorce hearing, and shortly after, to a fatal snake bite. The decidedly non-rural sources of the narrator's Western bearing and style are readily apparent in a mockingly scandalous candour about sex that evokes the notorious image of the sexually...