Shortly after its independence from Britain, Ghana became a transnational center for emerging political projects of black liberation. Its president, Kwame Nkrumah, sought to integrate a Marxist ideology with local knowledge in the context of the new nation-state, and proposed cultural initiatives that would support this synthesis. The plays of Efua Sutherland, a leading member of Ghana’s independence-era cultural elite, and Ama Ata Aidoo, who has come to be seen as an important figure of African post-colonial writing, reveal the ambitions and the difficulties of African modernity. Both writers situate a colonial legacy against Ghanaian cultural life and a black transnational influence. While fulfilling a state mandate for original productions, their plays (in particular, Sutherland’s Edufa and Foriwa, and Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost) complicate the statist ideology with an emergent African feminism that disallows synthesis, and shows the critical power of difference.
