Content area
Full text
They conclude that all things African are bad and all things European and American are good. I know that the world will be a better place if all of us respect one another's way of life, agreeing that no one is either superior or inferior; and that all of us are equal but our ways of seeing the world, worshipping God, rearing children or tending our crops may be different.1
THESE WORDS, by a thirteen-year-old in the early 1960s, capture the essence of Kobina Sekyi's ideas as expressed in his play The Blinkards, the earliest Ghanaian play, written and first produced in 1916. Situated within the colonial era, it satirizes the mannerisms of people who, in the early-twentieth century, had travelled to Britain and returned to tite Gold Coast with condescending attitudes towards their own cultures and peoples; they had bought into the lie of white supremacy and African inferiority. The play focuses on the institution of marriage, questioning the tendency to adopt a Western style of contracting a marriage in an effort to be modem or civilized. It also examines attitudes towards speaking English instead of the local language, and notes the preference for European food and clothing as against African food and clothing. Sekyi exposes and interrogates the apparent inferiority of all things African and the supposed superiority of all things Western. I contend that the play raises questions that are still relevant more than five decades after Ghana's independence.
I was fascinated to discover how this early-nineteenth-century Gold Coast intellectual was so far ahead of his time in his thinking, and why, though not a trained theatre practitioner, he found the medium of theatre a suitable means of sharing his views with his compatriots, who in large part thought of him as strange. James Gibbs, in an enlightening essay based on a painstaking search through old newspapers and archives, re-creates the conditions under which Sekyi produced his play in Cape Coast in 1916. He provides very useful background information and highlights the success of this first production, noting, however, that "the impact of the production was not followed by the establishment of a theatrical tradition or even by any real circulation of the script of tiie play."2 In fact, the play was...