All of Aidoo’s creative concerns deal with Ghanaian society. Ghana, formerly known as the Gold Coast, was the first African colony to gain independence from the British in 1957. Nationalism and anticolonial struggles led to independence, and sadly to what Neil Lazarus terms “the mourning after” (Lazarus 1990, 1). Given the historical onslaught of colonialism and the neocolonialism and imperialism that continues today, Ghana, like other postcolonial nations of West Africa, is caught in a long and unhappy transition. Colonial rule introduced a capitalist wage-economy, English law, English language, and English mores where quite different cultural realities existed.1 The colonial interruption of Africa’s history was a violent one—not only in terms of economic plunder, but in the far more devastating and lingering impact of psychological colonization that persisted long after the so-called departure of colonial masters.2

Aidoo’s vision of this history governs all her work. In her two early dramas, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) and Anowa (1970), she spans vast time periods and geographies to describe slavery and colonization. Evocative and dramatic artistic works, these plays boldly raise issues of Europe’s accountability for “underdeveloping Africa,” to use Walter Rodney’s phrase.

One of the major social effects of colonization was urbanization. No Sweetness Here, first published in 1970, is especially sensitive to problems resulting from the shift of rural people to urban centers, the accompanying loss of traditional mores, and the transition to modern ways. Aidoo’s complex vision also recognizes that the notion of “transition” can be a cop-out—a society can be transitioning endlessly.3 In these stories, Aidoo does not escape into easy binary oppositions: tradition/modernity, rural/urban. Rather, she probes the places in which these postcolonial conditions overlap and intersect. Her work traverses the geographies of rural farming environments and urban, sky-lined landscapes, as these locations are often co-inhabited by her characters. Even as “city folk,” they come from rural origins. Often through astute uses of irony, wit, and humor, Aidoo renders both nurturing and destructive collisions when rural folk enter cities and vice versa.

Similarly, Aidoo views modernization as multifaceted, and not necessarily beneficial. Modernization often functions as a sword that the colonizer wields by its handle, leaving the colonized to grasp the blade. One icon of modernization is the building of roads that link villages to cities, and as readers we travel extensively with Aidoo’s characters—from the north of Ghana to the south, from a village near Cape Coast into the city. Aidoo’s dramatic narratives put us as readers on a lorry, breathing the fumes, feeling the road as experienced by an elderly woman undertaking this journey for the first time in her life. The external journeys mirror the interior landscapes of the characters entering new regions geographically and mentally in the alienating world of the city.