Ama Ata Aidoo Research Articles

The Revisiting Modernization Short Story Competition

GHANA STUDIES / Volumes 12–13 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 273 THE REVISITING MODERNIZATION SHORT STORY COMPETITION YABA BADOE When I was asked to help organise a Short Story Competition as part of the Revisiting Modernization Conference, I leapt at the opportunity, even though I didn’t have a clear idea of what exactly would be involved. To begin with, there was talk of four or five illustrious literary judges to select a winner, under thirty years of age, who would dazzle us with a story that addressed the project of modernization in Ghana “through the lived experiences of nation-building and citizenship.” Possible subjects might include rites of passage (such as funerals, confirmations, weddings, rituals and confirmations), differences in generational attitudes, challenges to sexuality and gender, large scale modernization projects and the impact of mobility and new forms of technology, such as telephone, radio and cinema on daily life. The competition would be open to young, unpublished writers living in Ghana. And the reward for the best story? $700 in cash, and $100 worth of books. All well and good. Yet as a middle-aged, about to be published “novelist,” I found myself mulling over just how youthful, young in a Ghanaian context was supposed be. Under twenty-five? Around thirty-five? Below forty? I discussed the practicalities of organising the competition over a drink at Shangri-la hotel with the writer, Ama Ata Aidoo, and her daughter , Kinna Likimani. They have established the Mbassem Foundation, a mother-­ and-daughter-run organisation that encourages and develops Ghanaian women’s writing. They persuaded me that to encourage creative writing in an environment where there are so many pressing demands on an artist’s time, it was advisable to open the competition to potential writers , whatever their age. After all, hadn’t a recent winner of the prestigious Noma Award for a book published in Africa, been a debut writer well in his sixties? And as for inviting so many judges to select a winner, the fewer the 274 Ghana Studies • volumes 12–13 • 2011 better! Didn’t I know that literary judges are notorious for failing to agree on anything? I relayed these suggestions to the conference organisers. And so it was that the Short Story Competition was thrown open to unpublished writers resident in Ghana, irrespective of age. With the help of friends and colleagues the competition was publicised at the University of Ghana: on campus radio, on the university website, and on the notice boards of the English Department and the Institute of African Studies. Before long it was advertised at Cape Coast University, and then, at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. Thanks to Mbassem, a notice for the competition was displayed on the fiction page of The Daily Graphic. The closing date for entries was 15 December 2008. In early November, the first submission to the competition, landed on my desk. The writer, still a teenager, thanked her family, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit for having guided her through her journey in life. She had already written two novels and hoped that the judges of the competition would look kindly on her latest offering. I read the story avidly, but since it exceeded the word limit of 5,000 by at least 15,000, and would be better described as a novella than a short story, I put it to one side. By mid-November, fliers for the competition had been distributed to cultural centres throughout Accra: the Goethe Institute, the British Council and the Alliance Frangaise. Fliers were strewn around shops at the Accra Mall and in Accra secondary schools, where I’m told they were quickly transformed into aeroplanes. On 15 December 2008, five submissions were presented to me, while I was perched in my office at the Institute, by eager competitors. One was an article about mining in Ghana, another, a treatise on a dam. None of the submissions could be described as short stories. Where had we gone wrong, I wondered. In setting out our stall to attract fragments of fiction to complement the themes...

Women and War in Contemporary Love Stories from Uganda and Nigeria

Women and War in Contemporary Love Stories from Uganda and Nigeria Sofia Ahlberg (bio) This essay puts contemporary women's short fiction from Uganda and Nigeria in conversation through the analysis of literary representations of love in the context of war. Proposed here is a mode of reading the love story by reflecting more generally upon narrative's relation to political turmoil, violence, and conquest. Addressing the underlying theme of love as a creative stimulus for self-expression, it explores the potential of women's love stories from Uganda and Nigeria to resist, and sometimes resolve, conflict. Though Nigeria and Uganda share similarities with regards to their social, cultural, and economic conditions, as well as their colonial histories, the extent of their literary output differs considerably. In comparison to Uganda where there has been a revival of literature only relatively recently, Nigerian writing has already altered the collective social body and even the land itself has been transformed under its influence. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Ugandan writers looked at in this essay write about issues concerning daughters confronting the challenges of a modern world. Theirs is an internalized narrative, one that acknowledges that social and political change begins from within the self and the ability to raise one's voice above that of the mainstream. Their Nigerian counterparts, by comparison, write from the point of view of the mother who struggles to keep together and shepherd her dependents in moments of disunity and national crises. When considered together, Nigerian and Ugandan texts occasion a rare possibility to discuss the shifts in African women's writing in times of Civil War and regional conflict. The concerns shared by women writers from both countries point to the benefits gained from transnational dialogue, especially within equatorial Africa. However sober the writing from Uganda seems by comparison [End Page 407] to the more idealistic vision from Nigeria, all narrators considered in this essay stand out as women in control of their destinies, women of personal integrity and self-worth. By engaging in the cultural and socio-political transformation of Uganda and Nigeria as evident in the literature of some of their contemporary women authors, this essay aims to embrace a new vision of what constitutes love and how subjects express it. Though universal, the portrayal of love is far from inclusive. Buchi Emecheta gives voice to the erroneous belief that literary love is the domain of the West when she notes in her autobiography that as a young woman she equated England with romance and the typical Englishman with Mr. Darcy.1 As defined and informed by its chivalric, European origins, there is seldom an African presence in romantic fiction. Fiction, including romantic fiction, is monopolized not only by white authors, but by white, male authors, notes Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi in the preface to Gender in African Women's Writing.2 The overall aim here is not only to shift focus from the white, male world of fiction from last century to the black, female world of today (although this in itself would be a worthy pursuit considering the still disproportional weight toward Eurocentric, male authors in literature departments around the world), but to contribute to a new appreciation of the love story as a textual antidote to war. For the purpose of this discussion, the meaning of war is diverse, ranging from armed conflict in which women fall victim as civilians to women's own struggle or "war" for control over their bodies and their sexuality. In her discussion of Ama Ata Aidoo's novel Changes—A Love Story, Nfah-Abbenyi argues that the author's portrayal of love is political for many reasons, not least because it is informed by a cultural and socio-historical context beyond any individual's control.3 Similar claims can be made about the stories discussed in this essay with one significant difference. Politicized without doubt, love as narrated by Monica Arac de Nyeko, Doreen Baingana, SefiAtta, and Anthonia Kalu is also there for pleasure alone, as part of "the human condition," as Aidoo herself writes in the introduction of the recently published anthology African Love Stories.4 Paradoxically, however, it is precisely...

La « Montagne raciale » : et après ? Parcours identitaires dans deux romans ghanéens contemporains

Afro-American poet Langston’s Hughes’s challenge to the "Negro artist" in 1926—to run away from "the race towards whiteness" and climb the "racial mountain" in order to "discover himself and his people" reverberated throughout the colonial and later postcolonial world. Echoes of his plea have long been found in West African literary works concerned with restoring a positive image of the black self, but other "mountains" to be conquered have more recently come into view, especially in women’s writings. Two Ghanaian novels, Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1977), by Ama Ata Aidoo, and Beyond the Horizon (1995), by Amma Darko, illustrate some transformations of the issue raised by Hughes

“What fashion of loving was she ever going to consider adequate?” Subverting the ‘Love Story' in Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes

Ama Ata Aidoo is a celebrated writer and critic, as well as an African nationalist and feminist. This is a position she has defended in various articles and interviews, arguing that African feminism is an indigenous body of theory specific to the realities of African life. She has focused much of her work on the portrayal of African female identity in literature. Her writing has involved the reworking of previous, usually male-authored, literary stereotypes into believable characters, as well as an exploration of new, more complex roles for her female characters. Since this examination of gender roles moves beyond the traditional roles of ‘mother' and ‘wife,' it has a special bearing on modern African women faced with new questions of gender, power and identity.English in Africa Vol. 34 (1) 2007: pp. 155-171

Polygamy in African fiction

Polygamy in the form of polygyny is still practised all over Africa and remains an obstacle to female emancipation in many countries, including South Africa, where it is recognised legally by the Customary Marriages Act. This article examines the rhetoric surrounding polygamy in a number of African texts, including critical articles, the thirteenth‐century epic Sundiata, Rebecca Hourwich Reyher's biography of Christina Sibiya and novels by Mariama Bâ, Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, Es'kia Mphahlele, Ama Ata Aidoo, Lazarus Miti and Onuora Nzekwu. Although a small number of these texts argue in favour of the stability and order of traditional African polygamy, the overwhelming majority indict the institution as totally incompatible with any hope of female happiness or self‐expression. Sisterhood among women, which is memorably portrayed in many of the texts, especially the female‐authored ones, is seen as impossible among co‐wives in a polygamous marriage.

Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestions of �j� in Africana Literature, by Teresa N. Washington

Reviewed by: Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Àjé in Africana Literature Oyekan Owomoyela Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Àjé in Africana Literature By Teresa N. Washington Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. xi + 333 pp. ISBN 0-253-21757-1 paper. The author seeks to formulate for Àjé, a manifestation of female power and agency pervasive in Africana oral and literary texts, "a definitive, holistic Africa-based model" that would replace Western misconstructions. The two-part study discusses Àjé in oral traditions in the first, and in the second, Àjé's operations in literature, primarily Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, T. Obinkaram Echewa's I Saw the Sky Catch Fire, Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa, and Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress Indigo, supplemented with works by numerous other authors. Far from being an exclusively Yoruba phenomenon, Washington's Àjé is a "boundless and comprehensive" force widely dispersed in West and Central Africa, and in the New World in the form of Hoodoo. Timeless and ubiquitous, Àjé both empowers women and bridges the gender divide, enforcing gender balance. One of Teresa Washington's major contributions to the discourse of black feminism is her assertion that Africana women's struggle is not to regain lost power, "for their inherent biological, spiritual, and political power cannot be usurped," which is not to say that men might not resort to stratagems "to suppress Àjé politically and oppress women socially" (167). The statement recalls Pierre Vergér's earlier testimony that at the dawn of creation Olódùmarè invested Àjé with inalienable veto power over the aspirations of Ògún and Obàrìsà, and of all creatures who people the earth. Hence the designation Àjé, the substantive part of which is jé (acquiesce). [End Page 215] Washington's book testifies to the author's impressive knowledge of Africana lore and literature, especially their feminine and feminist aspects, and is destined, deservedly, to become an authority for students of the Africana universe. Because in the global intellectual economy scholarship published in the West tends to displace African knowledges, some cautions are in order. The first is that although a brilliant exposé of Africana manifestations that mimic the attributes of Yoruba àjé, Our Mothers is not quite a treatise on àjé itself. The second addresses the integrity of traditional terms and usages. Washington asserts that among the Yoruba of Nigeria, ìyá mi (my mother) having undergone tonal changes becomes ìyà mi, which she translates as "My Mysterious Mother" (4). Thereafter she consistently substitutes Ìyàmi Òsòròngà for Ìyámi Òsòròngà. While dialectal or individual idiosyncracies might make Ìya-à-mi into Ìyàmi, the widely acceptable (or authentic) rendering is Ìyámi (My Mother), not Ìyàmi (which means not "My Mysterious Mother" but "My Suffering," "My Punishment," etc.). Also, sprinkled throughout the work are Yoruba words that are imprecisely parsed; for example, the verb "júbà" is never a noun (226) like ìbà (homage) or ìjúbà (its cognate). The cautions are, however, not intended to diminish the brilliance of Washington's achievement. Oyekan Owomoyela University of Nebraska, Lincoln Work Cited Vergér, Pierre “Grandeur et décadence du culte de Ìyámi Òsòròngà (Ma mère la sorcière) chez les Yoruba.” Journal de la Société des Africanistes, 35.1 (1965): 141–243. Google Scholar Copyright © 2007 The Indiana University Press

African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality (review)

Reviewed by: African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality Padmini Mongia Byron Cam inero-Santangelo. African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005. X + 172pp. "The Empire writes back," Salman Rushdie famously quipped, referring to the spate of books being published in the 1980s by writers based in Britain but whose origins, like Rushdie's own, lay in countries once colonized by Britain. The catchy and clever phrase continued (and continues) to have provenance within literary and scholarly communities. In 1989, the Australian critics Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin wrote a book for the Routledge New Accents series, where they used the same phrase as their title to explore "theory and practice in postcolonial literatures." Through the 1980s, along with the flurry of excitement that surrounded books by writers such as Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Michael Ondaatje—writers who claimed belonging to both southern and metropolitan locations—a theoretical vocabulary was also being popularized by the work of postcolonial critics. As new cultural and theoretical maps were being drawn, Homi [End Page 634] Bhabha's work on cultural hybridity offered an alternate model for examining the colonial encounter and its theorization. Yet, despite the tremendous influence of Bhabha's work and the numerous calls urging postcolonial theory out of the binary oppositions in which it was often caught, Byron Caminero-Santangelo says that "the study of postcolonial hybridity remains tied to a typology which defines postcolonial cultures in terms of their oppositional relationship with the West" (1). In African Fiction and Joseph Conrad, he argues that many of the best-known and most influential African novels of the last fifty years "address different forms of colonial power and discourse generated by the history of national independence and the development of the postcolonial nation," even though these novels have often been read through the restrictive prism of writing back to dominant European colonial fictions (4). Caminero-Santangelo's readings of classic African novels go "beyond writing back" and offer a fresh perspective on the intertextual relationship between contemporary African novels and the colonial fictions, such as those by Joseph Conrad, which preceded and influenced them. A long Introduction, "Beyond Writing Back," lays out the theoretical concerns of Caminero-Santangelo's book; it is followed by individual chapters on single texts by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Tayeb Salih, Nadine Gordimer, and Ama Ata Aidoo. "Writing back," replete with the subversiveness inherent in the model, has become a standard way of understanding resistance in literatures by people of formerly colonized nations. Courses where the work of Conrad is coupled with that of Chinua Achebe (in particular) are numerous. Caminero-Santangelo's book rightly argues that the writing back model limits our interpretations of African texts. So much more than merely responses to Conrad's fictions, African fiction deals with issues and concerns stemming out of the contexts in which these fictions were produced and to which the authors are responding. While arguing against the limits of the "writing back" model of literary/critical analysis, Caminero-Santangelo examines the political necessities that made the model such a popular one. "Writing back" played a profound part in generating many of the works produced by native writers in the years immediately following decolonization. For many writers writing in the early years after decolonization, there was a grim necessity to decolonize the mind by challenging the fictions that had shaped Western (and even non-Western) perceptions of half-made societies, as Naipaul would call them. Achebe, for instance, as Caminero-Santangelo points out, credits his becoming a novelist with "a desire to counter the image of Africa that runs through British literature as exemplified by Heart of Darkness" (5). However, the prominence of works like Things Fall [End Page 635] Apart has "fueled and given legitimacy to the notion of a tradition which runs counter to a European literary tradition." The impetus to assert difference between a European and African literary tradition also came from critics and theorists interested in challenging the views of many European literary critics, heavily influenced by a colonial discourse that denied the "existence of African literary traditions" (6). Further...

Analyzing Ghanaian Emotions Through Narrative: A Textual Analysis of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Novel Changes

Contemporary African emotional expression is a cultural artifact that has encoded within it the story of colonial and postcolonial history. Through an analysis of Ama Ata Aidoo’s award-winning novel Changes, this article explores how emotions are expressed in contemporary Ghanaian literature. From literal translations of indigenous languages and culturally specific nonverbal communication to Western expressions and locally created neologisms, the contemporary Ghanaian text Changes offers a glimpse into the unique world of Ghanaian emotions—a world that is an interesting mix of the indigenous, Westernization, and time.

The Politics of History and the Vernacular in Early Twentieth-Century Ghana: Situating Gaddiel Acquaah'sOguaa Abanin Ghanaian Social and Literary History

The paper's main argument is that texts do not have exclusively specific textual origins but are produced within historical conditions and linked to a variety of other texts within the broad spectrum of literary history. In retrieving and re-positioning Gaddiel Acquaah's historical poem of 1930 in Ghanaian literary history, it explores the impact of social and political contexts on its production and examines its intertextual links with contemporary texts in Ghanaian literature. It argues that while such textual connections illuminate differing negotiations of historical memory across time they at the same time reveal continuities in perspective and suggest plural rather than linear movements in literary history. The paper's intertextual reading of Gaddiel Acquaah's Oguaa Aban, Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons, Opoku-Agyeman's Cape Coast Castle, and Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa reveals that only such connections across periods and languages can illuminate the production of texts and the complexities of a postcolonial paradigm.

The Politics of History and the Vernacular in Early Twentieth-Century Ghana: Situating Gaddiel Acquaah's Oguaa Aban in Ghanaian Social and Literary History

The paper's main argument is that texts do not have exclusively specific textual origins but are produced within historical conditions and linked to a variety of other texts within the broad spectrum of literary history. In retrieving and re-positioning Gaddiel Acquaah's historical poem of 1930 in Ghanaian literary history, it explores the impact of social and political contexts on its production and examines its intertextual links with contemporary texts in Ghanaian literature. It argues that while such textual connections illuminate differing negotiations of historical memory across time they at the same time reveal continuities in perspective and suggest plural rather than linear movements in literary history. The paper's intertextual reading of Gaddiel Acquaah's Oguaa Aban, Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons, Opoku-Agyeman's Cape Coast Castle, and Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa reveals that only such connections across periods and languages can illuminate the production of texts and the complexities of a postcolonial paradigm.

African fiction and Joseph Conrad: reading postcolonial intertextuality

Beyond writing back : alternative uses of postcolonial cultural hybridity -- Extravagent aberrations : Conrad, hybridity, and Chinua Achebe's No longer at ease -- Under Kenyan eyes : Ngugi wa Thiong'o's re-vision of Under western eyes -- Legacies of darkness : neocolonialism and Conrad in Tayeb Salih's Season of migration to the north -- Subjects in history : disruptions of the colonial in Heart of darkness and July's people -- Struggling toward the postcolonial : the ghost of Conrad in Ama Ata Aidoo's Our sister killjoy.

Black women, identity, and cultural theory: (un)becoming the subject

In Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory, Kevin Everod Quashie explores the metaphor of the girlfriend as a new way of understanding three central concepts of cultural studies: self, memory, and language. He considers how the work of writers such as Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Dionne Brand, photographer Lorna Simpson, and many others, inform debates over the concept of identity. Quashie argues that these authors and artists replace the notion of a stable, singular identity with the concept of the self developing in a process both communal and perpetually fluid, a relationship that functions in much the same way that an adult woman negotiates with her girlfriend(s). He suggests that memory itself is corporeal, a literal body that is crucial to the process of becoming. Quashie also explores the problem language poses for the black woman artist and her commitment to a mastery that neither colonizes nor excludes. The analysis throughout interacts with schools of thought such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and post-colonialism, but ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic, one that ultimately aims to center black women and their philosophies.

An interview with Ama Ata Aidoo : 'I learnt my first feminist lessons in Africa'

This is an interview with Ghanaian writer AMA ATA AIDOO. It took place in Accra (Ghana), on January 1998. After living abroad for more than fourteen years, Aidoo decided to go back to Ghana. When this interview took place, she was still trying to settle down. Since then, she has kept herself intellectually active, and has been invited to lecture to numerous international universities and prestigious institutions all over the world. With the passing of time, she has become still more vocal and critical, and she continues to be widely admired in Africa and abroad. Aidoo is considered an outspoken African writer who tackles feminist issues in her fiction. Brought up in, and respectful with the Akan tradition she comes from, Aidoo openly states that she learnt her first lessons in feminism from African women, and in Africa. In this interview, we focus on feminist theories—and the controversies around African, African-American, and Western Feminisms—and look at some of her most relevant works, to see to what extent her female protagonists deal with the somewhat schizophrenic reality of colonialism, and post-colonialism, at the same time they face African traditional culture and modernity.

Ama Ata Aidoo's Orphan Ghosts: African Literature and Aesthetic Postmodernity

Ama Ata Aidoo's Orphan Ghosts: African Literature and Aesthetic Postmodernity

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Biodun Jeyifo.Modern African Drama, Norton Critical Editions. New York: Norton, 2002.

Known for their canon-making authority, the Norton Critical Editions series have also tended to neglect literature and especially drama outside the British and American centers. The appearance of a critical edition that is also an anthology of African drama is thus a reason for celebration. This collection offers both seasoned scholars and new students a range of plays and critical essays in one volume, which will give drama and African studies higher profiles in universities. The volume combines oft-anthologized plays like Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman and Sizwe Bansi Is Dead by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, and the less well-traveled Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels by Femi Osofisan, from the usually well-represented Nigeria and South Africa, with others less known but no less important, such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Ngugi wa Mirii's I Will Marry When I Want (Kenya), Ama Ata Aidoo's Dilemma of a Ghost (Ghana; the only play by a woman), and Collision of Altars by Ethiopian Tsegaye Gabre Medhin. It also includes criticism on individual plays and key theoretical essays, from writers and activists like Fanon, Soyinka, and Ngugi, and from scholars, including the anthology's editor, which place African drama in the broader postcolonial context.

Ama Ata Aidoo's Orphan Ghosts: African Literature and Aesthetic Postmodernity

Ama Ata Aidoo's Orphan Ghosts: African Literature and Aesthetic Postmodernity

Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo (review)

Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo (review)

Individual vs. Communal Healing: Three African Females' Attempts at Constructing Unique Identities

Individual vs. Communal Healing:Three African Females' Attempts at Constructing Unique Identities Vivian Yenika-Agbaw (bio) Within the past decade, scholars and critics have identified and discussed various images of African womanhood in literature. Most often these include images of motherhood, wifehood, and other subservient roles linked to class and ethnicity.1 These images are prevalent in the works of both male and female African writers. The differences lie, however, in their interpretations. Often, male authors hail African womanhood as supreme; hence, African women must be put on a pedestal because of the sacrifices they make for the well being of their families and society. However, the female authors, for the most part, interpret the roles in relation to patriarchal oppression. To them, denying oneself other identities in order to serve fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons limits the woman in several ways. Consequently, African female writers like Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Mariama Ba provide alternative images of how women in different settings actually deal with this reality. As African women struggle against roles assigned to them by patriarchal structures, their daughters must either accept the limited options presented as their ultimate destiny, or look for alternative identities in a world that nurtures, confuses, and at times destroys them. Their fight to maintain a "self" they feel comfortable with must begin at an early age. Like many of their mothers, these teenaged girls may choose to accept the limitations of their gender, or, like their fathers, they may continue to deal with the reality of being black and African in a world still governed by western values. As a result, depicting adolescent girls in literary works continues to be a challenge even to African female writers. As a compromise between what is expected of adolescent girls in their African communities and an ideal they should aspire for, some female authors marry teenaged characters to older, wealthy men as second wives, or to men of equal or better circumstances for protection. Some use teenaged girls to punish the men in their communities, and other authors depict girls sent abroad without their consent to pursue western education.2 Still there are some authors who let their African female adolescent characters live in their society, examine their options, and make tough decisions as they search for identities suitable for their evolving needs. Two authors whose works exemplify this are Tsitsi Dangaremgba and Zaynab Alkali. Their novels, Nervous Conditions (1992) and The Stillborn (1989), explore adolescent girls' quests for new selves in their respective African communities. These authors painstakingly describe the compromises these girls make to accomplish personal goals; their dilemmas in male-female relationships; and, when necessary, their constant struggle with what Joy Bostic refers to as "multidimensional oppression" (142).3 The ability to assert one's identity without being crushed by the weight of indigenous and hybrid cultures cannot be over-stated, for cultural crossroads can be treacherous places even for the bravest of people. Adolescent Girls and Cultural Conformity or Resistance Dangaremgba's and Alkali's female adolescent characters deal with multifaceted problems that are overwhelming even to the adults in their worlds of southern Africa and West Africa. Tambudzai in Nervous Conditions is a poor, teenaged girl who must make difficult choices in the midst of patriarchal, colonial, racial, and class struggles. Within the Shona culture, she is expected to abide by the patriarchal rules that govern her village and other local communities. In the larger context of her country, Zimbabwe, she must also deal with racial and class issues that perpetually make her feel like an inferior other to the whites and the wealthy. Her struggles are compounded by remnants of colonialism that inadvertently make her a beggar in her own country. Simply put, life in such an environment can never be fair. In the opening lines of the first chapter, the reader meets a thirteen-year-old girl whose perspective on life may be regarded as shocking. Using the first person narrative, Dangaremgba presents Tambudzai's confession: I was not sorry when my brother died. Nor am I apologizing for my callousness, as you may define it, my lack of feeling. For it is not...

Staging Modern Vagrancy: Female Figures of Border-crossing in Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Churchill

As the irruption of the consciousness of border-crossings into our present cultural analyses evinces the escalated shifting of global human geography, articulations of nomads as fluid, flexible, or liberatory subjects have proliferated in our humanistic studies.2 Joining the important debates resulting from such articulations,3 this essay revisits the problem of border-crossing by examining its figurations in contemporary women authors' dramatic works. Specifically, through a reading of such figurations by Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Churchill, this essay sets up a critical encounter between a Ghanaian woman much ignored and an English woman much embraced in Euro-American feminist theatre studies. This juxtaposition has its linguis tic and temporal justification: both Aidoo and Churchill write in English, and both are part and parcel of the cultural openings made possible by the disintegration of the British Empire in the post-World War II sea change, as Aidoo is among the prominent black writers redefining a radically transforming post-British Sub-Saharan Africa, and Churchill is among the leading English authors remaking the public scenes of the turbulent western metropolis. The focus of this essay, however, is on their distinct stagings of female figures moving across the fermenting horizons and organizing

Slavery and Etiological Discourse in the Writing of Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, and Buchi Emecheta

Slavery?human bondage for labor exploitation in domestic or market contexts?is a theme that has been explored by the Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, the Nigerian Buchi Emecheta, and the South Africanborn, Botswana-naturalized Bessie Head?all women writers whose writing is contemporaneous. In addition to their interest in chattel slavery, the writers look at states that share some characteristics with slavery, notably oppression across class, ethnicity and gender, servility, and dependency. Ari effect of the explorations is a consideration of the metaphorical status of slavery.1 Appearing at a time when the tendency in African literature was toward a close reflection of the current social and political developments, these writers' depictions of slavery are remarkable. In quantitative terms, the thematic emphases of the literary and critical literature in Africa from the mid 1960s through the 1970s was not slavery but a re-evaluation of the meaning of political independence for the African societies that in the pre? ceding eight to ten decades had been European colonies. No sooner than many African societies, already politically altered through the contact with Europeans, regained political autonomy, there arose a feeling in those societies that they were still trapped in a subservient position within a recalcitrant imperialist European economic sphere. The feeling as articu? lated in much of the literature was of betrayal by an independence that had brought many of the new African countries a myriad of political, eco? nomic, and social problems. The congruence of the theme of slavery in Aidoo's Anowa (1970), Head's Maru (1971), and Emecheta's The Slave Girl (1971) is, therefore, not a simple reflection of the temper of the postindependence period. But the congruence is also not a mere coincidence. The interest in the theme of slavery in the work of Aidoo, Head, and Emecheta suggests a deeper structural analysis of historical time than a focus on the immediate independence period as a privileged moment through which the postindependence morass in Africa could be under? stood. Head additionally suggests in Maru that racial and ethnic bigotry comes from a universally expressed desires by one individual to dominate another. This article argues that the three writers together trace a trajec? tory in cultural interpretation different from a tendency to focus on Africa's immediate political realities. It suggests that the writers' represen? tations of slavery are explorations of more remote or submerged causes of the problems frequently configured as neocolonial. Furthermore, it sug? gests that the writers' depictions of gender relations in the chosen texts are not the texts' exclusive destinations?as has tended to be assumed by much ofthe critical focus on these texts' gender discourse. The depictions of gender relations, and of the position of women in particular, serve a