AFRICAN DRAMA KOBINA SEKYI: The Blinkards. To what extent is Mrs. Borofosem a blind imitator of the English ways of life?

Answer Details

Mrs. Borofosem is the chief comic target of Kobina Sekyi's The Blinkards, and she is very largely a blind imitator of English ways. Her very transformation from a contented Fanti wife into a fussy, over-anglicised lady dramatises the satire announced in the play's title, though Sekyi also allows moments that qualify the picture.

The extent of her imitation is great.

• Dress and appearance. She abandons comfortable native clothing for tight, unsuitable European fashions, corsets and hats, suffering discomfort in order to look "civilised". Her insistence on English attire, even where it is impractical in the climate, marks the depth of her mimicry.
• Language and manners. She strains to speak English and to observe imported rules of etiquette, correcting others and putting on airs. Her artificial gentility is precisely the kind of empty imitation the play mocks.
• Customs and social life. She adopts English forms of courtship, entertaining and household conduct, treating everything African as inferior and everything English as the mark of refinement. Her whole scale of values has been turned upside down by the craze for foreign ways.
• Rejection of her own culture. In her eagerness to be English she looks down on traditional practices and companions, showing the self-contempt that Sekyi identifies as the disease of the "blinkards".

Some qualification. Mrs. Borofosem's Anglomania is partly learned from her husband, Mr. Borofosem, the returned "been-to" who first brings English tastes into the home; she imitates to please and match him. There are also moments when her native temperament breaks through the borrowed manners, and her comic discomfort in European dress betrays that the imitation is a costume rather than a true conversion. To that limited degree she is a follower carried along by fashion rather than a deliberate schemer.

Overall judgement. Nevertheless, these qualifications do not rescue her from the charge. Her adoption of English dress, speech, manners and values, and her scorn for her own culture, are thorough and unreflecting. She copies without understanding, discomfort and absurdity notwithstanding.

Conclusion. To a very large extent Mrs. Borofosem is a blind imitator of English ways. Sekyi makes her ridiculous precisely so that the audience may laugh at, and be warned against, the mindless mimicry of the coloniser that she embodies.