I am not sure exactly what I pictured as the Last Thing I might possibly run into in Ghana when I first came to the university in August, but the amorphous and previously ill-defined Least Likely Object arrived immediately and silently last week during a routine shuffle through the front doors of the drama studio, where I was stopped cold by the sight of a poster asking "Did you know that vaginas have brains?"
Of course. But how in the world did an advertisement like this made it onto a campus where the feature play of the fall semester was "The Garden of Eden?" Enter Anya Kandel, a 300-level student from U.C. Berkeley. She's here to work on a directing project and did not pick the easy way out. No, far from it, this girl decided to assemble a group to perform The Vagina Monologues.
In Legon. For the first time in all of Ghana. Was she crazy? A little, but turns out she was onto something. This vagina did have brains.
The script was adapted with a lot of help from the Ghanaian cast to translate ideas more comfortably into Ghanaian society. A new section in Twi was incorporated, along with references that fit the location and embarrassing, but funny, stories related to the cast members' experiences with menstruation. The "My Short Skirt" monologue was scrapped, and a powerful segment of traditional dancing also became part of the new Monologues.
The play was performed two nights in a row to a packed house during the middle of finals period. Not a bad start. People left the theater talking; plenty of men were in the audience. This is encouraging, especially in view of the situation that women in Ghana face today.
Although Ghana is one of the most free and peaceful nations in West Africa, the benefits of this freedom have not necessarily extended to the Ghanaian women, who are, as a population, more poor, less educated, and less likely to participate in government, than the men.
Women comprise 51 percent of the population but occupy only 10 percent of the parliamentary seats. This has serious implications for the priorities of parliament. As a result, practices that violate women's rights both physically and emotionally are often allowed to continue unabated. The Ministry of Women and Children's Affairs was established by the current administration in 2001 with the express purpose of dealing with these issues, but it is also dominated by men and lacks teeth. Legislation against domestic violence was eventually passed in parliament and endorsed by this ministry; however, local authorities do not enforce these laws and the government has done little to remedy the situation.
At the same time, there are other, more disturbing activities that violate women deeply and have still not been fully addressed. For example, according to Dr. Amoah of the Religious Studies Department at the University of Ghana, it is acceptable that in some areas, under the guise of keeping up a tradition for sharing and expressing other communal values, one man may offer his wife for his friend to sleep with as a sign of hospitality when the friend comes to visit. There are areas where people still cut the clitoris from girls at a young age, so that they are unable to derive pleasure from sexual activities.
Dr. Amoah indicated that there are men who believe it is possible to purge one's body of HIV by raping a young girl. In other areas, it is traditional that a woman must wear red and white waist beads to indicate when she is menstruating and the husband cannot have sex with her. It is considered grounds for a divorce if she wears the beads too often.
There are plenty of people living in this communalistic, affectionate and friendly society that do not violate women's rights and have worked hard to bolster the role of women in the world, but it is undeniable that Ghanaian men enjoy relatively greater sexual freedom and power as compared with women.
Eve Ensler's play seeks to redress this inequity by giving women a source of pride in their own sexuality and by providing an impetus to combat practices that may compromise their sexual freedom, or subvert their needs to the sexual needs of men. In this way, the play may succeed in partly filling a void that the government has left unattended. Thanks in part to the cast's thoughtful adaptation of the script, the play was well-received by the audience and will in all likelihood have an impact that reaches beyond people shuffling through the front doors of the drama studio on campus.
