Of all African plays, Ama Ata Aidoo’s ranks among the
best. Renowned for her ingenious creative prowess and her blend of Afro-centric
preoccupations with the Eurocentric underpinnings, Ama Ata Aidoo interrogates
daring issues, both historical and contemporary, facing Africa as a continent and
Africans as a people. In one of her greatest plays, which also double as her
debut, The Dilemma of a Ghost, Aidoo voices out over a number of
agitating problems confronting the post-colonial Africa. Taking the lead here
in this paper are the issues of education, identity, clash of culture, marriage
and of course childbirth; all of these totals the essential popularity accorded
this interestingly crafted play.
Over the years, marriage has been a major preoccupation of many African writers ranging from the female ones: Buchi
Emecheta to Lola Shoneyin to their male counterparts: from Chinua Achebe to Ben
Okri; all of these writers, to be candid, employed different styles to express
this popular thematic concern through the lens of their varying perspectives
and experiences. Uniquely and beautifully too, Ama Ata Aidoo treats this
recurrent universal issue in one of her plays – Anowa.
Since
the very beginning of creation, man has always searched for the “self.” For in
the words of Bob Marley, the popular Jamaican artiste, “If you don’t know where
you’re coming from, how can you know where you’re going to.” It is this notion
of self that propels Ama Ata Aidoo to express her concern on
the issue of identity in her novel, The Dilemma of a Ghost.
