Extremely Popular Play "This Is Our Chance" Revisited
This Is Our Chance, is arguably the first full-length play by an African author in the English language. Written while Ene Henshaw was a medical student in Dublin, Ireland, This is Our Chance, has undergone many reprints, and has been extremely popular in West Africa since its first production by the Association of Students of African Descent in Dublin in 1948.
Since its publication in 1956, it has gone on to become one of the classics of African literature, read widely and performed in schools and colleges across the English-speaking Commonwealth.
Princess Kudaro and Prince Ndamu have been sent by their fathers, Chief Damba of Koloro and Chief Mboli of Udura, to be educated in a big city. Despite the fact that their communities have been long-standing rivals and venomously hate each other, they fall in love and enjoy the care-free anonymity of city life. However, both are simultaneously called back home to their villages.
Princess Kudaro is tutored in her father’s palace by Bambulu, an intelligent though self-important
and pompous character who has had a Western European education. Their quarrelsome relationship propels the central theme of the play, the tug between modernity in the western sense and traditional African customs and tradition. While Kudaro blindly and impetuously reacts to the stifling ways of life in the village, Bambulu argues for change, though his prescription verges around the more superficial aspects of western habits and conduct.
When Kudaro elopes with Ndamu, Bambulu becomes the scapegoat for her insurrection. He is arrested and threatened with death. Eventually, Kudaro falls into the hands of Mboli’s soldiers and in an ironic twist, Prince Ndamu is captured by Damba’s troops. Both chiefs, stubborn and fiercely proud, wrestle with the conflicting weights of tradition, enmity and parental love.
Common sense prevails and Damba releases Prince Ndamu with a message of peace to his father, Chief Mboli.
The themes and issues covered in This Is Our Chance: the tug between tradition and modernity, inter-tribal enmity, forbidden love and the challenges of leadership are as pertinent today as they were when the play was published.
