Aidoo's latest novel, Changes, A Love Story , published in 1991, marks a shift in her work away from the more overtly political tone of her previous work. Indeed her preface to the reader and the critic, explicitly expresses her intent to move away from the major themes that dominate her earlier work :
several years ago when I was a little older than I am now, I said in a published interview that I could never write about lovers in Accra. Because surely in our environment there are more important things to write about? Working on this story then was an exercise in words-eating! Because it is a slice from the life and loves of a somewhat privileged young woman and other fictional characters - in Accra. It is not meant to be a contribution to any debate however current.
Changes, is indeed a love story and yet it is radically different from the typical romance novel. Under the guise of a love story, Aidoo delves into a social critique and analysis of the status of women in Ghanaian society. The disclaimer in the preface is laced with irony as Aidoo attempts to pass the novel off as a romance novel when in fact it demonstrates the impossibility of a love story existing outside of or untouched by the social, economic and political reality of contemporary Accra. As Aidoo said in an interview, "I've grown to see that life is not just political the liberation struggle, or even economics: love is political, and everything is intertwined." Indeed for the protagonist Esi as well as for the other two main female characters, Fusena and Opokuya, love or happiness in love is virtually impossible to have or to keep and is perpetually infringed upon by societal constraints. The love story, then, is to a large extent, simply a cover which Aidoo uses for a much more political message and social analysis of the problems faced by women in contemporary Ghanaian society.
Whereas in No Sweetness Here, Aidoo depicts primarily working class women who often face material hardship in a newly independent Ghana in which the conditions of the majority of people's lives have not improved; the setting for Changes is primarily the middle and upper middle classes of Accra approximately thirty years later. By this time, the economic situation in Ghana had changed drastically and Ghana was internationally being applauded for the progress made as its economy grew and visible improvements in infrastructure and other areas were made. For the majority of people, however, very little had changed as most of the improvements that were made benefited primarily the a small minority of people in the upper strata of society.
The main characters of Changes are primarily people who have in fact benefited from both independence and the economic growth that followed much later. They are part of an educated, professional elite who are not hindered greatly by material or economic restraints. Nonetheless, the women of these classes continue to have their lives and their freedom infringed upon because of their status as women. Aidoo demonstrates that the specific forms of oppression faced by women are not class specific and while they may be worse for working class women, professional, middle and upper class women are not exempt from the constraints placed on all women by virtue of their gender.
[These materials have been adapted from an honors thesis written by Megan Behrent, Brown University, 1997]
