Exploitation of the Urban African Novel for Women’s Liberation in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story

Abstract

This paper attempts to analyse Aidoo’s novel Changes as an urban African novel against the back-drop of a disorganized social life and disintegrated traditional values within the urban setting of Accra, Ghana. The study examines how the novelist Ama Ata Aidoo, extrapolating from Ghana, artistically explores this disorganization of social life and the disintegration and erosion of traditional values in the post–colonial Africa to expose their impact on the contemporary African woman. Using the sociological qualified by the feminist theory and practice, this paper reveals that Changes is an urban novel because most of the episodes are situated in the city, even though part of the action, influence and narrative do flow, once in a while, from the town to the country-side. For characters that migrate to the city from the countryside, the foreign or non-indigenous elements dominate the rural and traditional. This helps to corroborate the novel’s urbanity. The findings also reveal that Changes is an African novel because, like most other items of cultural borrowing which are undergoing change, this novel reflects values which belong to both the oral and literary traditions. For instance, female characters like Esi the protagonist and her friend Opokuya, in spite of attempts to assert their independence and autonomy because of their economic empowerment as wage – earners in the city, still treasure the African traditional values of marriage. To corroborate the fact that foreign or nonindigenous elements dominate the rural and traditional, Esi fashions out for herself in the city a modified form of polygamy which enhances her liberation.