The Girl Who Can
by Ama Ata Aidoo
About the author
Ama Ata Aidoo was a Ghanaian author, poet, and academic whose fiction often centres African women and girls navigating expectations placed on them by family and tradition. Her writing is known for giving young female narrators real voice and interiority rather than treating them as symbols.
What happens in the story
Adjoa is seven years old and lives with her grandmother, Nana, and her mother, Maami, in the fertile Ghanaian village of Hasodzi. She is a thoughtful child who is frequently silenced — her opinions dismissed or laughed off by the adults around her. Worse, Nana repeatedly criticises Adjoa's thin, "spindly" legs, treating them as a defect because, in her view, a woman's body exists chiefly to bear children, and Adjoa's legs don't fit that traditional picture of a "proper" female body.
When Adjoa is chosen to represent her school at a district sports competition, she runs — and wins the cup for best athlete. Seeing those same "spindly" legs carry her to victory forces Nana to reconsider. She realises, for the first time, that a girl's body can be valuable for what it can do, not only for what it looks like or what role it's assumed to serve.
Theme: what the story is really about
The story challenges narrow, inherited ideas about what a girl's body — and by extension, her future — is "for". Adjoa can't win the argument with words; a seven-year-old rarely can, against a grandmother's lifetime of belief. So the story lets her prove her worth through action instead, and it's Nana's own change of heart, not a lecture from anyone else, that carries the message: worth isn't fixed by tradition, it can be demonstrated and discovered.
Exam-style questions and model answers
Q. Why does Nana criticise Adjoa's legs, and what does this reveal about her?
Nana sees a woman's body mainly in terms of childbearing, so legs she considers too thin read to her as a flaw. It reveals how deeply she has internalised a traditional, limited view of a woman's purpose — not malice toward Adjoa specifically.
Q. How does the athletics competition change the course of the story?
It gives Adjoa a way to demonstrate, rather than argue, that her body has value beyond Nana's narrow expectation — winning the race turns the very trait she was mocked for into visible proof of her strength.
Q. What is the significance of the story's title?
"The Girl Who Can" reframes Adjoa from someone defined by a perceived deficiency (thin legs, a girl who is dismissed) to someone defined by capability — the title itself performs the shift in perspective the story is about.