Abstract
The clash of indigenous and foreign cultures is one of
the prevalent themes present in the works of African playwrights living in the
Diaspora as well as on the continent. The post-1960 African drama was not only
influenced by the impact of colonialism on the traditional African cultures but
also the dramatists’ experiences in the Diaspora. After the intrusion of
colonial powers into African societies, there was inevitable contact between
Traditional and Western cultures. The adoption of foreign cultures by Africans
threatened the stability of traditional cultures since those who embraced the
foreign ways of life often found themselves in a liminal space where they were
neither able to fully embrace the new ways of life nor completely disregard
their traditional life. This being in the ‘middle passage’ often led to
psychological and physical implications that dehumanized the individual. Does
navigating these cultural liminalities require one to adopt a global hybrid
identity? In this paper, I argue that embracing Afropolitanism as a hybrid
cultural identity could help mitigate this conundrum of cultural liminality. I
will explore this option as one of the alternatives to the African and Western
cultural matrix that befalls Africans who embrace foreign cultures through the
works of three African playwrights, The Dilemma of a Ghost by Ama Ata Aidoo,
Death of the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka, and The Gulf by Femi Euba. I will
use Chielozona Eze’s definition of Afropolitanism. According to Eze, an
Afropolitan is a human being on the African continent or of African descent who
has realized that her identity can no longer be explained in the purist,
essentialist, and oppositional terms or by reference only to Africa. Therefore,
an Afropolitan cannot claim to be either A or B but rather, he or she is A+B+C.
Their identity is already intermixed with the identity of the others, and it is
not possible to go back to their native place since they are all culturally and
even sometimes biologically jumbled.
