AFRICAN DRAMA KOBINA SEKYI: The Blinkards. Comment on the comportment of the cosmopolitan club members

Answer Details

In Kobina Sekyi's The Blinkards, the cosmopolitan club members are among the sharpest targets of the playwright's satire. Their comportment, their manners, speech and conduct, embodies the affected, imitative elite whose blindness to their own culture the play condemns.

Slavish imitation of European manners. The club members model their behaviour on English high society. They adopt European dress, etiquette, dances and forms of greeting, striving to appear as cultivated as their colonial masters. Their comportment is a performance of Englishness rather than a genuine expression of their own identity.

Affected and pretentious speech. They pride themselves on speaking English, often stilted or broken, and look down on the vernacular. Their conversation is full of pretension and social posturing, and Sekyi mocks the way they mangle the language they are so eager to flaunt.

Snobbery and class consciousness. The club is a bastion of snobbery. Its members regard themselves as superior to ordinary people who keep to native ways, and they measure prestige by how thoroughly one has been Anglicised. Their comportment is marked by condescension and a craving for social status.

Superficiality and hollow display. Their gatherings are concerned with appearance, fashion and show rather than substance. Beneath the polished manners lies emptiness, for their refinement is borrowed and imitative. Sekyi exposes the shallowness of a culture built on mimicry.

Cultural blindness. Above all, the club members are "blinkards," blinded by colonial dazzle to the worth of their own heritage. Their comportment illustrates the central theme of the play: that the educated elite have surrendered their identity in exchange for a hollow imitation of Europe.

Satiric function. By presenting the club members as figures of comedy and ridicule, Sekyi holds their comportment up for the audience's laughter and criticism, using them to drive home his nationalist warning against cultural self-contempt.

In conclusion, the comportment of the cosmopolitan club members is imitative, pretentious, snobbish and superficial. Through their affected conduct Sekyi satirises the colonial elite and condemns the blind imitation of European ways at the expense of authentic African identity.