The play, The
Blood of a Stranger, discusses how Whitehead, the cunny character in the play, tricks the people of Mandoland. Maligu the king’s adviser has just received
a letter from his brother in the city about the coming of a Whiteman to
Mandoland. Seeing a great opportunity in this visit, Maligu goes to Soko, the
village priest, whom he tries to convince about the possibility of making money
from the Whiteman’s visit.
However, when the news reaches Santigi Mando V and
his impetuous son, Kindo, it is met with suspicion because the land had in the
past been forewarned of an impending danger if a stranger is accepted in the
land. To Maligu and Soko, this will not help their plan. Therefore, Soko, being
the priest, would have to cook up lies around the Whiteman’s coming to make the
idea acceptable to the king. To this effect, Soko then divines that the oracle
has indeed prophesied the coming of the stranger and that he must be warmly
welcomed. To make it sound more convincing, he further states that the oracle
has also offered that the blood of a virgin girl be spilled for sacrifice to
ward off any evil as a result of the Whiteman’s visit.
Harvest
of Corruption tells the story of most African countries after independence, how
the politicians on whom the affairs of the countries have been entrusted,
mismanaged the economy through corrupt practices. These politicians connived
with police and judges, as seen in the case of the corrupt Inspector and Judge
in the play, to siphon public funds into their personal pockets. They ran the
country as their own homes, prostituting and squandering public money at will,
at the expense of the suffering masses. Thus, Harvest of Corruption is Ogbeche's effort at drawing our attention
to the evils perpetrated by our politicians and their resultant negative values
in our society.
At
the beginning of The Burning of Rags
we are thrown straight into the heart of the play, a situation which reveals
the death of Maltilda, Denis’ former wife as she remains, even in the
afterlife, unhappy because her son, Yona, has not been circumcised. Her
apparition appears to Agala, Denis’ father, displaying her displeasure at his
and Denis’s failure to circumcise her son; she claims to have carried out the
act herself. She says, “When you and your son failed me, I circumcised
him myself.”
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.
