Culture Contact and Conflict in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story as an Amelioration of Women’s Condition

Abstract

Using the feminist qualified by the sociological critical framework, this paper demonstrates how the psychological disposition of the characters in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story exhibits the mentality of urban-dwellers, revealing some western culture contact and conflict with traditional African culture. Consequently, it also attempts to analyse how Aidoo artistically exploits the disorganization of social life and the disintegration and erosion of traditional values in post–colonial Africa extrapolating from Ghana for the amelioration of women’s condition. As part of the action, influences and narratives flow, once in a while, from the town to the countryside, like Esi’s consultation with her mother and grandmother in the village whether or not to get married as a second wife to Ali Kondey, these influences reveal western culture contact and conflict with the traditional African culture as demonstrated, especially, by the thoroughly enjoyed sexual escapades by both the woman Esi and the man Ali when they are not yet married, thus exhibiting western or urban culture contact and conflicts with the traditional African ethos which are represented by Esi’s grandmother’s ideas and truths derived from her unadulterated pre-colonial African past. She informs us that in the past, no man who had more than one wife, lived with any on a permanent basis in order to give the woman some respite to do some things for her personal interest like her economic self-sustenance. That was because people just had to be rational rather than emotional. Aidoo is, therefore, advocating that we should glean the positive aspect of our indigenous African culture concerning women’s plight and add the good aspects of western or foreign culture like women’s emotional involvement in coitus, and try to formulate a more favourable condition for the post/neo colonial African woman contemporarily for the positive transformation of the entire society.

LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research, 8(4), 149-165, 2011