Ama Ata Aidoo is a Ghanaian playwright who focuses mainly on gender and postcolonialism in her plays.

Her 1970 drama, Anowa, not only reflects both of these fields of study but seeks to intertwine the two – perhaps in order to show that gender issues and the postcolonial situation are often very much connected to each other – through her presentation of the protagonist, Anowa.
The play is a significant one not only because of its focus on important themes that are relevant to African and Caribbean societies (in fact, all postcolonial societies) but also because the play departs from the traditional European approach to theatre and is one of several works in a special area of theatre (including the plays of Derek Walcott and Dennis Scott) which uses traditional storytelling tropes and other aspects of African culture to create theatre. In a way, such playwrights write in an attempt to solve the many questions and problems that arose during colonialism and they also use the form of the plays they write, not just the words within the play, to accomplish their goals. It is an important lesson that must definitely be taught to all students and practitioners of theatre. The forms of theatre that emerged from Europe are not the only theatre-types available to us.
Aidoo’s play is rooted in African traditions and folklore and contains poetry, proverbs and the use of African musical instruments. The play also comprises of elders who narrate the story to the audience – in much the same way that in the ancient days, the older folk in the village would relate stories to the rest of the people. Aidoo, however, does not stop there. She gives this elderly couple in the play the ability to function as a sort of chorus (in the same way the ancient Greeks used the chorus) to comment on the action and decisions of the main characters. Aidoo, by doing this, proves that employing theatre-techniques that are more traditional does not necessarily mean that one should entirely discard the features of Western theatre from one’s work. If anything, she is able to fuse the African features of theatre along with the Western features and make their use stronger than if the elderly couple were to just function solely as narrators or solely as the chorus.
The main subject of the elderly couple’s scrutiny is Anowa, the heroine of the play. Throughout the work, Anowa comes to stand for many things. However, the one strand of interpretation that is most evident and, perhaps, most important is the way the playwright uses her life as a mirror for the events of Africa, slavery and the slave trade. The Anowa we see in the beginning of the play represents the idyllic beauty and purity of Africa before the arrival of the white man. Her marriage to the slave trader Kofi Ako makes an important parallel between marriage, slavery and the postcolonial relationship between masters and slaves. The Anowa we come across at the end of the play, haggard, half-mad, dirty and ready to be discarded, in more ways than one presents her to be a symbol of both the slave and of African itself, after they have been exposed to the mindset of the colonialist, as represented by Kofi Ako and his actions. The feminist stance of the play is revealed in this storyline as we watch Anowa move through life – from young, carefree girl, to hard-working wife, to a woman who has been wronged and takes action at the end, when it is already too late.