CHAPTER II

THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN:

Man, Society, and the Communal Vision

Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is one of the

most successful novels of post-colonial African literature. During this

period the novelists were less preoccupied with cultural and

sociological matters than with the exposure of corruption and

incompetence widespread in the African political system. With its

uniqueness and by a reflection of the traditional African forms and

concerns, The Beautyful Ones marks the advent of a major talent on

the African literary scene. In fact, in a sense the novel marks the

realization of the fuller potential of the African artist to write about

African reality. It registers Armah’s revulsion against corruption in

his native Ghana. Dominated by a mood of total disillusionment, the

novel uses the imagery of sickness to characterize the Ghanaian

situation.

Like Soyinka in The Interpreters, Armah in The Beautyful

Ones Are Not Yet Born1 presents a work of fiction about the

undermining effects of corruption. His satire is interspersed with

symbolic passages which explore the situation deeply. As Eldred Jones

25
quite rightly points out, “the narrative has the remorseless quality of

rendering the African reality. Its darkness as also its labyrinthine

world of dark dingy surroundings act both as symbol and real life

pictures.”2 The Beautyful Ones is at once a bitter satire against the

political reality of Ghana in particular, and the bizarre political reality

of the Third World in general. Pointing towards the Ghanaian reality,

the narrative raises certain fundamental questions about the

development in the recently liberated Afro-American countries with a

boldness of commitment. Eldred Jones, in his review of the novel,

considers the dominant mood of the novel as one of “hopeless despair”

with the author’s “almost Swiftian preoccupation with the bodily

secretions.” He concludes by saying, “Armah has taken the

predicament of Africa in general, Ghana in particular, and distilled its

despair and its hopelessness in a very powerful, harsh, deliberately

unbeautiful novel.”3

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born tells the story of a

simple railway clerk during the regime of Kwame Nkrumah at the

time when Ghana gained independence from Britain. But the story

could take place in almost any new nation of Africa, since it deals with

that handmaiden of fledgeling African sovereignty: corruption in

people’s governments.4 The social, economic and political absurdities

in the post-colonial situation quite tragically reinforce the very values

of exploitation and elitism. What prompts Armah to portray decay and

26
degeneration is a deep-rooted feeling of pain and hurt. As a result, we

are compelled to see that African history is a continuous story of

exploitation and betrayal, first by the colonial masters and later on by

their post-colonial followers. The pungent satire in this novel is

directed particularly against the latter category whom Fanon

describes as “black skins, white masks” and whom Armah himself

treats as “Black Masters, White Shadows.” Fanon’s theory of neo­

colonialism has far reaching implications and his perceptive comments

help us put the novel in its proper perspective:

The national bourgeoisie of underdeveloped

countries is not engaged in production, nor in
invention, nor building, nor labour; it is completely
canalized into activities of the intermediary type.
Its innermost vocation seems to be to keep in the
running and to be part of the racket. The
psychology of the rational bourgeoisie is that of the
businessman, not that of a captain of industry.5

Decay and rot are so blatant in contemporary Ghana and its

corruption is so rampant that one is consistently drawn to Fanon’s

portents. Armah realizes that Fanon’s prophecy true with a

devastating effect. Armah also decries the rationalist leaders for their

greed and acquisitiveness. He says:

African politicians love flashy scenes and high-

flauntin’ words. That is only a partial exploration.
More important is the historical fact that in a very
27
 radical sense the nationalist leaders of Africa have
found themselves sucked into the role of
hypocrites, actions involved in a make-believe
situation.6

Armah’s view is that, in a way, post-colonial life is only different in

form, but not in its content. Only the alien rulers of exploitation are

replaced by the native rulers who are systematically chosen by their

own people. It would have been very easy to protect people from the

colonial rulers, but it is very difficult to decolonize the corrupt minds

and corrupt practices of these “native rulers.” The new leaders are the

direct heirs of the chiefs of the past, concerned chiefly with privilege

and consolidation of their power and not with progressive leadership

and accountability. The Nkrumah regime in Ghana which started off

on a note of promise slided into a mire of corruption and degeneration.

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is not so much a novel about

an individual as it is a novel about a society. It is in fact, a merciless

attack on political corruption. Armah presents in this novel the

leading politicians of the corrupt African nation - a modern wasteland

transformed into contemporary Africa, post-independent Ghana prior

to Nkrumah’s fall.

The protagonist in the novel is unnamed and Armah simply

calls him as “the man” - whose anonymity represents everyman, the

ordinary Ghanaian citizen. Throughout the novel the man is identified

28
as “the watcher,” “the giver,” and the “silent one.” The terra by which

he is designated suggests both his social obscurity and, partially, his

representative nature. Eustace Palmer views the novel as a symbolic

moral fable and writes thus:

Indeed, the temptation to compare this work with

Everyman or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is
very strong. The characters are important not for
what they are in themselves, but for what they
represent. Most of them are vaguely particularized
and indicated by generalized terms... Ghana is
itself symbolically presented, one of the
consequences being that Accra is much less vividly
described the Lagos of Achebe or Ekwensi. But this
deliberate vagueness makes it similar to
Everyman’s 'Field Full of Folk’ or Tutuola’s 'Land
of the deads.’ Most of the inhabitants of the
country walk like dead men in a land which is
morally and spiritually dead.7

The man is an ordinary railway clerk in the Ghana Railway

Corporation at Takoradi. His work is dull and unrewarding. He leads

his life as a railway clerk because he carries the terrible burden of

principle in a climate that permits advancement only under the table.

He struggles against odds to keep his soul clean. He has his moments

of frustration, loneliness, defeat, and despair but remains firm to the

end in his resolve. He suffers public disgrace and family ridicule. His

wife is indifferent to him and his mother-in-law is openly hostile. But

29
he is a man of unquestioned integrity. Although he and his family live

in utter poverty and he constantly has to endure the silent accusation

of his wife and children, he resolutely refuses to accept bribes. His

family, frustrated by poverty and deferred expectations, grow

resentful. He drags himself mournfully through each working day with

little to anticipate in the evening but the accusing eyes of his wife and

children and their nagging envy of those whose financial position is

sound.

The man is, however, is set apart from others by his two

redeeming qualities. In the first place, he is sharp and perceptive and

invested with “a mind and body which together form the nerve-centre

of a radio-active kind of search light.”8 This sensitive perception

enables him to closely observe men and manners helps him in his

judgement of the beautiful and the ugly and the moral choice between

good and bad. Secondly, the man is aware of social realities,

particularly the problem of corruption which is not only rampant but

seems ineradicable in the given context. He prefers to keep aloof from

the mad crowds who are on the look-out for personal gains and

comforts at any cost. He is unwilling to take part in the “national

game” (129) of corruption and self-promotion.

The society with its decaying moral values appears like a hell

to the man who is humble, honest, and sincere. He is a wrong person

30
in a society in which nothing but corruption exists. He is caught

between accepting bribery as a common method of Ghanaian upward

mobility and retaining his personal values and communal allegiance

with his neighbours. Larson, while discussing the novel in The

Emergence of African Fiction, compares the man with Ellison’s

unnamed protagonist in his Invisible Man: “Like Ellison’s Invisible

Man, Armah’s goes on a journey through hell, though unlike Ellison’s

protagonist, who only slowly comes to know that it is his society that is

out of joint, Armah’s man knows all along that his society has lost its

values and that he is the lone center of value in a society which has

long since traded its soul to the devil. It is this awareness from the

very beginning makes the man’s voyage excruciatingly painful’’ 9

The man’s journey begins and ends with a bus ride. In the

opening sequences, the man is a mere object, not even the centre of

attraction at first. He is a tragic spectator as also a narrator of the

declining moral and ethical standards. He is never allowed to emerge

completely from the impersonality which is his representative quality.

We meet him through the eyes of the bus-conductor for the first time.

There is a subtle reference in the description to the indigenously

produced goods which are not on par with their imported counterparts.

The bus itself doesn’t look like a vehicle but appears as a bundle of

rust. The money that the conductor handles is old and rotten, rather

31
emitting bad smell. Armah satirically points out that, just like the

rotten money, the society is also rotten and its foul smell is associated

with corruption. The most striking feature of the novel is the strength

of the author’s moral earnestness. On almost every page, Armah

expresses his aversion towards unhealthy atmosphere he sees

everywhere in unusually vigorous and realistic language. It is this

language that captures the attention of every reader. As Lemuel

Johnson points out, “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is

rather more concentratedly bitter and plain-speaking. The novel

representatively establishes a vision which eschews irony, casualness

and the oracular when it parallels the thrust of the selections from

Hayden and Montejo. The contemporary political and moral

understanding of the issues involved is as a result unequivocally

presented in the novel’s unhappy sense of historical symmetry.”10

Armah expresses his disgust by exploiting the potential of a

central symbol - that of filth, putrefaction, and excreta. Throughout

the novel, the odours of excreta, effluvia, and vomit assault our sense

of smell. All these aspects of the novel are presented in the first

powerful scene in the bus. The conductor knows pretty well that it is

highly impossible for him to make money in usual corrupt practices

because it is “passion week” - the last week of the month. The

passengers in the bus seem like walking corpses or sleep walkers for

32
him. The man gives him a cedi, and the conductor gives short change

as usual:

The cedi lay on the seat. Among the coins it looked

strange ...Then a vague but persistent odour forced
itself on him and he rolled the cedi up and
deliberately, deeply smelled it... Fascinated, he
breathed it slowly into his lungs. It was a most
unexpected smell for something so new to have: it
was a very old smell, very strong, and so very
rotten that the stench itself of it came with a
curious, satisfying pleasure.(3)

When the conductor notices that the man is actually sleeping rather

than watching and that his spittle is soiling the bus seat, a wave of

indignation fills him:

Then a savage indignation filled the conductor...

he saw, running down from the left corner of the
watcher’s mouth, a stream of the man’s spittle.
Oozing freely, the oil like liquid ... descended with
quiet inevitability down the dirty, aged leather of
the seat itself, ... The watcher was no watcher at
all, only a sleeper. (5)

As the conductor quickly discovers that the watcher is really a

“sleeper,” in an instant he was moved from abject submission to

violent attack:

33
 6 You bloody fucking son of a bitch! Article of no
commercial value! You think the bus belongs to
your grandfather?”

‘‘Are you a child? You vomit your smelly spit all over
the place. Why? You don’t have a bedroom?

4 So countryman, you don’t have a hand-kerchief too.1’

The man did not answer...
As he got to the bottom step, the conductor sitting
down on a seat next to one of the windows, looked
out of the bus and shouted his farewell to him, 'Or
were you waiting to shit in the bus?’'(6)

What happens in the bus is a parable of what happens in the country

as a whole. The bus, like the state, is in a state of decay, its pieces only

held together by rust. The passengers represent the ordinary citizens

and the driver and conductor are the authority attempting to defraud

the citizens, and if caught, to bribe them into silence. The

“brotherhood” can exist only in the cosy and secure relationship of

briber and the bribed.

The man in the novel is presented as an anti-hero. Armah, far

from idealizing the hero, demonstrates his passive impotence and

weakness. The man possesses high ideals but he could not champion

an anti-corruption movement. He could not even explain convincingly

why he refuses to take bribes. He drifts aimlessly through a colourless

life of poverty. Each day he makes the dreary journey from his loveless
34
home through filth, slime, and insults to his tedious job in the

decaying Railway Administration Block. Far from being heroic, the

man is a pathetic figure weakened by his consciousness of failure. He

lacks the guts to reply or to defend himself even against the worst

insults. Many people - the bus conductor, the wolfish-teeth timber

merchant, and his mother-in-law, insult the man. Furthermore, the

man himself is conscious of his impotence and lack of will: “I have been

walking along paths chosen for me before I had really decided, and it

makes me feel the way I think impotent men feel” (60). At the office,

the merchant with the wolfish teeth tries to bribe the man so that he

can get his timber loaded on a train. But the man refuses to accept the

bribe to play the national game. He feels like a criminal, the guilty

one, for refusing the bribe:

The man was left alone with thoughts of easy slide

and how everything said there was something
miserable, something unspeakably dishonest about
a man who refused to take and give what everyone
around was taking and giving: something
unnatural, something very cruel, something that
was criminal for who but a criminal could ever be
left with such a feeling of loneliness? (31-32)

But the man is unable to say with enough courage why he must refuse

the bribe. His reply to the merchant’s “but what is wrong?” in

accepting bribe, is a weak “I don’t know.” He becomes increasingly

35
conscious that the world regards him as a fool. He is caught in

dilemma whether to accept bribe or remain firm. Although the man

overcomes the dilemma when the corrupt Nkrumah is overthrown,

little actual change occurs. This conflict between the hope for change

and the betrayal of that hope by his nation’s leaders is central to

Armah’s fiction. Neil Lazarus, in his aptly titled essay, “Pessimism of

the Intellect and Optimism of the Will,” quite rightly points out that

the novel is a voyage of discovery and a predominantly dialectical work

and states that “its reciprocity is first heralded in the resonant

cadences of its style and is most clearly demonstrated in the complex

relationship between the affirmative vision that is implicit in the

man’s search for authentic values and the blasted landscape within

which the novel’s action is staged.”11

The portrayal of three more contrasting characters other than

the man holds the vital fictional interest. They are Oyo the man’s wife,

the Teacher, the man’s friend, and Mr.Koomson, the man’s classmate,

now a leading politician. If Mr.Koomson and Oyo appear mutual

accomplices in the glorification of wealth, the Teacher is something

like a debating conscience of the man. He singularly dramatizes the

troubled conscience and cynical helplessness of the man in full

measure. The Teacher is also an alienated individual like the man, but

he has withdrawn from life, from family and work, and advocates

passivity and negation - “the mystic path,” - as an alternative to the

36
inevitable corruption. The anonymous man could not accept this as a

solution, or rather he has no alternative to reject it, since as he tells

the Teacher, "... you know it is impossible for me to watch the things

that go on and say nothing. I have my family. I am in the middle.” (93)

The predicament of the man is strikingly contrasted with the

rapid fortunes of his childhood friend, Koomson. Koomson reads the

pulse of the people and exploits the prevailing situation to his fullest

advantage. His success story, from that of a dock-worker to the

position of a minister through manipulative skills, testifies to his

belief in easy gain. Koomson represents a total violation of ethical

standards and everything his party stands for. His money-making

schemes prompt him to declare that socialism is a “nuisance” (136).

The hypocrisy of the regime is brought out when he confesses that “the

old man (Nkrumah) himself does not believe in it” (136). With all his

moral depravity, Koomson comes to symbolize the ethos of a whole

nation in the given context.

The man encounters Koomson on his way back home in the

night. Armah introduces Koomson as the black-white man. He is the

white man because he possesses white suit gleaming through a

darkness into which his body merges. Armah writes, “he is literally

the gleaming clothes he stands up in.” Gareth Griffiths says about

Koomson: “The black-white man is invisible because he is merely a

37
caricature. He has no social or economic reality, no personal identity.

His reality is defined solely by the objects with which he surrounds

himself, and from which he builds his personality.”12

The man is amazed at the “flabby softness” of the hand of

Koomson when he shakes hands with him and wonders whether such

“ideological hands” of revolutionaries “leading others into bold

sacrifices” should not have become “even tougher than they were when

their owner was hauling loads along the wharf?” (131). It reminds him

of the age-old betrayal by the native cripples. He comments:

And yet these were the socialists of Africa, fat,

perfumed, soft with the ancestral softness of chiefs
who had sold their people and are celestially happy
with the fruits of the trade. (131).

The man’s encounter with Koomson is brief. When he reaches

home and mentions this to his wife and the bribe he has refused, his

wife attacks him for his inability to succeed in the same way as

Koomson. She calls him an “Onward Christian Soldier” for not

accepting the bribe. Oyo belongs to the world of acquisitive tendency.

For her, corruption and other practices are legitimate and she tells the

man that refusing the bribe is absurd when everyone is practising it.

Oyo, struggling under poverty, is convinced that the man should

accept bribes to supplement his meagre salary. She explains this

striking analogy:

38
 Life was like a lot of roads: long roads, short roads.
Wide and narrow, steep and level, all sorts of roads
and the human beings were like so many people
driving their cars on all the roads. Those who
wanted to get far had to learn to drive fast ...
Accidents would happen but the fear of accidents
that never keep men from driving, and Joe
Koomson had learned to drive. (58-59)

Koomson is Oyo’s ideal person and she points out her husband’s

inability to earn money like Koomson. She bluntly tells him: “Maybe

you like this crawling that we do, but I am tired of it. I would like to

have someone drive me where I want to go” (44). She asks the man

what name he can give to people who were afraid to drive fast or to

drive at all. The man gets so much irritated at the attitude of his wife

that he says, “I am asking myself what is wrong with me. Do I have

some part missing? Teacher, this Koomson was my own classmate. My

classmate, Teacher, my classmate. So tell me, what is wrong with

me?” (57).

Oyo wants to lead a better life and she is very much dissatisfied

with her husband because the man does not want to earn money in

“other” ways. The result is that the man is an alienated one, from the

family and the society. Regarding Estella, Koomson’s wife and the

luxurious life that she leads, Oyo says, “It is nice. It is clean., the life

Estella is getting” (44). She fails to understand him when the man

39
tells her that he cannot do the same thing, because, “one of that kind

of cleanness has more rottenness in it than the slime at the bottom of

a gax-bage dump”(44). She responds to him by telling him that he is

like chichidido that eats worms but hates excrement: "... the

chichidido is a bird. The chichidido hates his excrement with all its

soul. But the chichidido only feeds on maggots, and you know the

maggots grow best inside the lavatory’” (44). The man leaves home to

escape the nagging pressure of his wife and begins to walk to his only

friend, the Teacher.

On his way, he begins to muse on a figure he had once known

called Ramakrishna, a Ghanaian, who “had taken that far off name in

the re-incarnation of his soul after long and tortured flight from

everything close and everything known, since all around him showed

the horrible threat of decay” (48) is closely related to the actual

Teacher whom the man proceeds to visit.

Ramakrishna’s flight has been a failure. He attempts to live

outside the corrupt cycle of eat and be eaten. His attempts to supplant

the killing of living things for food by a diet of honey and vinegar. This

has resulted not in serenity but in decay. His ultimate solution, “the

one way” to salvation that he discovers near the end is a “rejection of

life.” In an attempt to avoid corruption and decay, he rejects women,

and through yoga he attempts to rejuvenate his brain by standing on

40
his head. In spite of his efforts, corruption and decay overtake him. He

is rotting inside and when he dies his heart is seen to be “only a living

lot of worms gathered together tightly in the shape of a heart,” and the

man reflects. “And what would such unnatural flight be worth at all in

the end? And what kind of sound the cry of the chichidido could be, the

bird longing for its maggots but fleeing the feces which gave them

birth?” (49). The man’s lack of conviction about the wisdom and

rightness of his stand is powerfully communicated here. He thinks, in

striving so earnestly to avoid corruption and decay, he may also

inevitably end up more corrupt and decayed like his friend. This

uncertainty makes him such a weak, unheroic opponent of corruption.

It is only towards the end, when the terrible conditions are

demonstrated in Koomson’s ruin, that the man feels his position

finally vindicated. Commenting on the man’s confusion, Robert Fraser

points out, “Like the young sweeper Bakha in Mulk Raj Anand’s novel

of Indian life Untouchable, he is the product of long process that has

left him and his kind stranded far from hope, from the simple human

fulfilment their common sense of dignity teaches them to demand. The

man’s confusion is but another result of this process.”13

When the Teacher is finally introduced, he is naked. The

Teacher and Koomson are a contrast to each other, for if Koomson’s

life has reduced him to a mere suit of clothes, the Teacher’s life has

had a reductive effect. They both represent two extremes which fail to
41
meet the requirements of reality that the ideal and sordid should be

seen to exist in the same universe and in the same compass of

experience. The Teacher’s nakedness is a pure symbol of innocence.

The Africa to which the Teacher is attuned is an idealised Africa, the

Africa of self-conscious purity. The music he plays is “at once very far

away and very African.”:

Those who are blessed with the power

And the soaring swiftness of eagle
And have frown before.
Let them go.
I will travel slowly
And I too will arrive. (51)

The Teacher, is both a figure from the past and the character existing

in the novel's present. He is Ramakrishna, the lost friend, and the

Teacher, the present comforter. The man analyzes his depression, his

inability to play the national game in spite of his familial pressures.

He explains his feelings to the Teacher:

“I feel like a criminal. Often these days I find

myself thinking of something sudden I could do to
redeem myself in their eyes. Then I sit down and
ask myself what I have done wrong, and there is
really nothing.”
“You have not done what everybody is doing,” said
the naked man, “and in this world that is one of
the crimes. You have always known that.” (54)

42
But the comfort and understanding he has always found in the

Teacher is no longer what it was. The Teacher’s withdrawal has

ultimately no answer to challenge the decay and corruption. Because

of this he has become a figure without hope. The man realizes that the

Teacher too is slowly being destroyed by the society around him. All

that is left of him now is depression and an irretrievable loss of faith

in everything. He can only see all around death, the living death. He

informs the man: “It is not a choice between life and death, but what

kind of death we can bear, in the end. Have you not seen there is no

salvation?” (56). He says that he died long ago. He explains his social

withdrawal as a reaction to misunderstanding: 'No one wants what I

happen to have. Its only words after all’ (79). The Teacher’s statement

serves to identify him as a failed writer, unable to communicate his

message. Here is a conversation between him and the man:

'If we can’t consume ourselves for something we

believe in, freedom makes no difference at all. You
see, I am free to do what I want, but there is
nothing happening now that I want to join. There
used to be something, and you know what I mean.’
'I know,’ the man paused ...he said, 'You’re still
hoping, aren’t you, Teacher?’
'Hoping for what?’
'Anything, an end to this ... a beginning to
something else. Anything?’
'No, not anymore. Not hope, any how, I don’t feel
much. When you can see the end of things even in
43
 their beginnings, there’s no hope, unless you want
to pretend, or forget, or get drunk or something.
No, I also one of the dead people, the walking dead.
A ghost. I died long ago. So long ago not even the
old libations of living blood will make me live
again.” (61)

Now the Teacher is clearly identified with the old sources of African

culture. As Gareth Griffiths observes, “Teacher is symbol of a kind of

experience, a symbol of the timeless, non-technological, romantic and

anthropological African experience. He is juxtaposed to Koomson, the

blaek-whiteman, the modern elitist, the hatchet man of the consumer

revolution.”14

The man and the Teacher are less energetically rebellious than

Soyinka’s “interpreters” but feel themselves paralysed by their

isolation. They cannot live with others in the corrupt world, and on the

other hand, they cannot live without them. The man returns to society

just at that moment when he has escaped from it. The naked Teacher,

who has stripped of all social ties, still knows that he cannot live fully

without love and with the guilt of having rejected his “loved ones.”

The Teacher cannot live fully without hope because he is a

realist. But without hope and without a vision of a better life in

Ghana, he only escapes into the life of books and music. For society

crushes the spirit of such individuals because it does not allow them to

fulfil their relationships with others. The Teacher narrates the story of
44
Aboligo the Frog and has shown a book of oddities in which they could

see the peculiar picture of a “man-child.” It was shown that the

peculiar man-child completed the entire cycle of birth, growth, and

death in a short span of seven years. Just as the man-child is not

destined to its full potential, the contemporary Ghanaian situation

portends a life-negating and self-annihilating streak.

Yet another image that reflects the prevailing situation is

Plato’s Cave. The Teacher frequently narrates the story of the people

living in the darkness of the cave. The people cannot believe that

brightness really exists. The person who goes outside the cave and

experiences the light outside the world turns out to be a misfit among

the worshippers of darkness. Groping in darkness, they dismiss him as

mad and his outside experiences of brightness as untrue. Like the men

in Plato’s Cave, the society forces the man to review his position and

throws open its options: “When all around him the whole world never

tired of saying there were only two types of men who took refuge in

honesty - the cowards and the fools? “Very often these days he was

burdened with the hopeless, impotent feeling that he was not just one

of these, but a hopeless combination of the two” (51). The novel, in

these terms, becomes an extended metaphor of Plato’s Cave. Margaret

Folarin who interprets the novel in the light this recurrent motif says:

“The cave image finally serves as a nucleus which holds together

positive meanings”15 of the novel.

45
 In the sixth chapter which is pivotal to the novel, we are

presented with a symbolic history of the childhood and youth of the

man and the Teacher. In this chapter the narrative view-point moves

between the Teacher and the man. The figures and events in this

chapter are not merely aspects of an autobiography, but aspects of a

historical process and a general cultural experience. The story of a life

and the story of a nation are fused. The reminiscences and memories

the chapter six are not merely flashbacks in the story of a life, but they

are also the images of the colonised, through oppression to liberation

and experience and on to disillusion and decay. The liberation

movement seemed to offer a new beginning, but that too was subject to

decay.

The man debates within himself the validity of present actions

in the sixth chapter. Here we notice that the tone is more that of an

essay than of fiction or an autobiography. The man reflects the

happier moments of his youth. The reminiscences are the most

memorable part of Armah’s novel relating the childhood experiences of

stealing the white man’s mangoes at a time prior to independence.

While conversing with the man, the Teacher remembers in a flashback

his two old friends who shared his revolutionary fervour - Maanan,

the prostitute, and Kofi Billy, the dock worker who had lost his leg

while doing work. They smoked “wee” together and “swallowed all the

keen knowledge of betrayal” (65). But even these memories are tainted
46
with violence and terror. The white man’s dog chases him as he steals

the mangoes. Kofi Billy hangs himself and Maanan goes mad, as the

whole society begins to break away from its roots. Armah reflects the

effects of the colonising process on the psychic life of the African. As a

novelist he has dramatized the experience of the people, their tangled

hopes, and their feeling that perhaps such decline and such premature

destruction of their dream is natural and inevitable.

Armah points out that materialism becomes the new religion

and money the new god. He is of the opinion that materialism and

westernization worked hand in hand with the continuation of political

corruption. Armah asks how long Africa will be cursed with her

leaders: “we were ready for big and beautiful things, but what we had

was our own black men hugging new paunches scrambling to ask the

white man to welcome them on to our backs" (80-81). And the new

African leaders are simply darker shadows of the white man:

There is something so terrible in watching a

blackman trying at all points to be the dark ghost
of a European, and that was what we were seeing
in those days... We know then, and we know now,
that the only real power a black man can have will
come from black people. We knew also that we
were the people to whom those oily men were
looking for their support (81-82).

47
Independence thus brought little change and the Teacher comments,

“there is no difference... No difference at all between the whiteman

and their apes, the lawyers and the merchants, and now the apes of

the apes, our party men. And after their reign is over, there will be no

difference ever. All new men will be like the old. Is that then the whole

truth?” (89) Maanan, even in her madness, is concerned with the

plight of the people. She is last heard saying: “They have mixed it all

together! Everything! They have mixed everything” (180). Armah

shifts his attack directly on the President of Ghana, Nkrumah:

Life has not changed. Only some people have been

growing, becoming different, that is all. After a
youth spent fighting the whiteman, why should not
the President discover as he grows older that his
real desire has been to be like the white governor
himself, to alive above all blackness in the big old
slave castle? And the men around him, why not?
What stops them sending their loved children to
kindergartens in Europe? And if the littlemen
around the big men can send their children to new
international schools, why not? That is all anyone
here ever struggles for: to be nearer the whiteman.
All the shouting against the white man was not
hate. It was love. Twisted, but love all the same.
(92)

48
 For the man, work becomes almost unbearable. There is nothing

but filth everywhere around him, and he slips on vomit. Everywhere

black people are trying to be white:

The office fills up as the day clerks enter, first the

small boys and messengers, then other clerks.
About nine thirty the Senior Service men come in
each with his bit of left over British craziness. This
one has long white hose, that one colonial white.
Another has spent two months on what he still
calls study tour of Britain, and ever since has
worn, in all the heat of Ghana, waistcoats and
coats. (109)

Walking by the sea is the only thing that gives the man any mental

peace, and he wonders why the ocean too is not much dirtier than it is.

The story now shifts to a more prolonged encounter with

Koomson. Since by law, the politicians cannot own property, Koomson

wants to own a fishing-boat through the man’s family. At first, the

man warns the family against the purchasing of a boat in which

Koomson sees possibilities of furthering his own prosperity. But the

family would not pay any respect to his advice. Gradually, despite his

attempt to remain as negative as possible in the transaction, he is

drawn to a scheme which his wife and his mother-in-law initiate to aid

the corrupt minister Koomson. On the refusal of the man to sign the

papers, his wife signs it. But ultimately it is Koomson who owns the

49
boats. The state is supposed to be socialistic, but the corruption by the

politicians has made it thoroughly capitalistic. The man and his wife

invite Koomson’s family to their house and in the evening, as the final

preparations are made for Koomson’s visit, the man watches Oyo

painfully straighten her hair:

“That must be painful,” he said. Immediately, he

was wishing he had not said it.

Oyo put the comb back among the coals,

then lifted up her head and said, “Of course it is
painful. I’m just trying to straighten it out a bit
now, to make it presentable.”

“What is wrong with it natural?’

“It’s only bush women who wear their hair
natural.”
“I wish you were a bush-woman, then,” he said.
(128-29)

Here the reader is made depressingly aware of the similarity between

contemporary Ghanaian life as presented in this novel and the lives of

the black people in the United States. Both groups have been forced to

forgo their identities into a lighter shade of the white man’s world. Oyo

comes to know that Mrs.Koomson wears a wig and so she too wants to

make her hair look like a wig. Oyo’s final comment on her hair is that

if she had a wig, there would be no problem, “'If you had a wig,’ the

man muttered, 'I’d be in jail’” (129).

50
 Koomson and his wife arrive at the man’s house. Estella,

Koomson’s wife, does not want to drink the local beer that the man

offers her. She says, “Really, the only good drinks are European

drinks. These make you ill...” (132). Koomson wants to go to the toilet,

but the toilet in the complex where the man lives is so foul that once

Koomson sees it, he changes his mind. Armah comments, “It was

awful, was it not, that the rich should have this effect on the poor,

making them always want to apologize for their poverty, and at all

times to sacrifice future necessities just so that they could make a

brief show of the wealth they could never hope to have” (131), The

following week-end Oyo signs the papers but the man refuses even to

touch the papers.

In their dealing with Koomson, the man and his family do not

get anything profitable. There is, of course, no real change in their

lives. Occasionally Koomson sends them some fresh fish, but the

registration of the boat in Oyo’s name has not brought the riches she

and her mother expected. The man gets so much disgusted over the

hypocrisy of Koomson that he rejects even to eat the fish sent to him

by Koomson. The man realizes that “the net has been made in the

special Ghanaian way that allowed the really big corrupt people to

pass through it. A net to catch only the small, dispensable fellows,

trying in their anguished blindness to lead and to attain the gleam

and the comfort the only way these things could be done” (154).
51
 At work, presumably some months later, the man learns that

there has been a coup, and when he gets home later that day, he finds

Koomson there, fleeing the police and the military who have taken

over the government. In the man’s mind there is a diffuse uncertainty:

“what, after all, could it mean? One man, with the help of people who

loved him and believed in him, had arrived at power and used it for

himself. Now the other men with the help of guns, had come to this

same power. What would it mean?” (157). However, he knows that

there will not be very much of a change: “In the life the nation itself,

maybe nothing really new would happen...there would only be a

change of embezzlers and a change of the hunters and the hunted”

(162). Koomson is now in the darkened room of the man’s house. He is

now thoroughly corrupt and his spiritual rottenness is indicated by the

foul smell emanating from his body. Here we notice that Armah

cannot resist repeating a motif central to his novel:

His mouth had the rich stence of rotten menstrual

blood. The man held his breath until the new smell
had gone down in the mixture with the liquid
atmosphere of the partyman’s farts filling the
room. At the same time Koomson’s insides gave a
growl longer than usual, an inner fart of personal,
corrupt thunder which in its fullness sounded as if
it had rolled down all the way from the eating
throat thundering through the belly and the guts,

52
 to end in further silent pollution of the air already
thick with flatulent fear. (163)

Out in the hall, Oyo tells her husband, “'I am glad you never became

like him” (165). We notice a change in Oyo now and it is one real note

of change in the story - the relationship between the man and his

wife: “In Oyo’s eyes there was now real gratitude. Perhaps for the first

time in their married life the man could believe that she was glad to

have him the way he was” (165).

The increasing sense of the inevitability of the corrupting

process culminates in the third section of the novel in the visit of

Koomson, now deposed and fleeing arrest. The sound of the police van

is heard and the man realizes that the only escape that is possible is

through the latrine hole which leads into an alley behind the housing

complex. The descent through the latrine hole symbolically represents

the lowermost echelons of hell. The most ironical thing is that this is

the same filthy lavatory that nauseated Koomson when he first visited

the man’s house. And now he and the man must climb through the

latrine man’s hole, through the foul wetness itself. Koomson is too fat

to crawl through the hole at the back of the latrine. After stripping

him of his coat, however, the man manages to push him through:

’Push!’ the man shouted, before he had thought of

the nearness of the searchers, or of the fact that his
companion could not hear him anyhow. Quietly

53
 now, he climbed on to the seat, held Koomson’s legs
and rammed them down. He could hear Koomson
strain like a man excreting, then there was a long
sound as if he was vomiting down there. But the
man pushed some more, and in a moment a rush of
foul air coming up told him the partyman’s head
was out. The body dragged itself painfully down,
and the man got ready to follow into the hole. (168)

Though we are aware of Koomson’s corruption we do feel some sort of

sympathy for him as he struggles like a frightened animal to squeeze

his enormous body through the putrid lavatory hole used by the night

soil man. This struggle through the putrid hole enables Koomson to

experience the conditions of the life of ordinary men and women whose

trust he has betrayed. The lavatory is really the place where Koomson

belongs in the end: its putrefaction shows his spiritual rottenness. The

man and Koomson walk “along the latrine man’s circuit through life”

(170) heading toward the ocean and to the boat registered in Oyo’s

name. The physical, psychological, and moral degeneration of

Koomson is brilliantly brought out in the rapid transformation of his

bearing. As Charles Nnolim observes:

Symbolically, Armah’s Ghana is Dante’s Inferno,

and much of the events take place in the circles of
the avaricious, the gluttonous and the lustful,
which contains sinners who are aptly appeared
with dirt and filth and who stink in the mire of
their own corruption.56
54
Armah juxtaposes the plight of the once powerful person with the

relaxed condition of the man. That is how he is able to unveil his moral

vision.

The degeneration of Koomson is complete after his journey

through the latrine hole. They seek the help of a boatman to cross the

shore. But the boatman is unwilling to take them to the shore. The

fear on the face of the boatman is “unmistakably the fear of one weak

man in the presence of another just as weak” (173). Koomson is unable

to speak and he cannot speak in the manner of a master. His voice is

subdued now and his tone is much softer than that of a straight

bargainer:

'You know what had happened,’ Koomson said.

'Yes’. The boatman’s eyes were growing harder,
and he smiled a little. Koomson tried to look
straight into his face.
'You used to repeat a certain proverb,’ said
Koomson.
'When the bull grazes, the egret also eats. Do you
remember?’
The boatman replied with a surely 'yes,’ as if to
indicate that time and change ought to modify the
truth of all such proverbs.
'If you can help me,’ Koomson said to the boatman,
'half the boat will be yours.’
'Where are we going?’ the boatman asked.
'Will you go then?’ asked Koomson.
Another grudging 'yes.’ (174)
55
Thus, finally the “Ex-Minister” also plays the “National Game.” He

bribes the boatman and also the watchman to reach the boat and

plans to leave for Abidjan, the place where his wife’s relatives are

living. Just at that moment when it appears that Koomson’s escape is

possible, the man jumps into the water to come out afresh:

It was cold. The man left himself drop deep down

into the water. He stayed there as long as he could,
holding his breath. He held his breath so long that
he began to enjoy the almost exploding inward
feeling that he was perhaps no longer alive. (178)

Symbolically, the man has been cleansed by the sea. This is a

significant passage of the narrative and we are reminded that the man

has had the desire for cleansing and the subsequent longing for rebirth

in each of his walks along the sea. And, indeed, when he awakens on

the beach the next morning, it looks as though it will be more than a

day of reckoning: “when he awake he felt very cold in the back, though

already the sun was up over the sea, its rays coming very clean and

clear on the water, and the sky above all open and beautiful” (180). In

the distance, the man notices a long figure slowly advancing. He

recognizes the figure as Maanan and calls her with that name,

'Maanan,’ who is quite mad now:

The woman laughed at the name, with a

recognition so remote that in the same cold
moment the man was certain he had only deceived
56
 himself about it. Then she walked away toward the
sun with her shadow out in front of her colouring
the sand, leaving the man wondering why but
knowing already that he would find no answers,
from her, from Teacher, or from nobody else. (181).

While walking home, the man notices a police barricade in the

distance, and he is playing the role that he has played all along - that

of the witness, the voyeur, but not the participant. The man watches a

small bus, looking very new and neat in its green paint. It is stopped

by a policeman for a road check. The driver of the bus asks the police

man for an early clearance saying that his passengers are in a hurry.

Then the policeman raises his right hand pointing to his teeth in a

slow gesture - a signal for a bribe. The man has seen this gesture

before several times:

The driver understood. Without waiting to be

asked for it, he took out his license folder from his
shirt pocket, brought out a cedi note from the same
place, and stuck it in the folder. Then with his back
turned to the people waiting in his bus, the driver
gave his folder, together with the bribe in it, to the
policeman. (182-183)

On the back of the bus the man notices that the green paint is

brightened with an inscription, carefully lettered to form an oval

shape:

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

57
In the centre of the oval, there is a single flower, solitary,

unexplainable, and very beautiful.

The man realizes that nothing has happened, nothing has

changed. The police are the same; bribery and corruption are still the

national game. A critic gives three interpretations to the title: 'The

Beautyful Ones’ - those sea-green incorruptibles are not born but will

be born in future; the 'beautyful ones’ are not born and will never be

born; the 'beautyful ones’ are born everyday but are inevitably drawn

into the cesspool of corruption.

The title The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, is endorsed

in the novel by its bleak conclusion. The coup occurs, but corruption

continues, and although the man undergoes a symbolic cleansing in

the sea, it is only a personal cleansing, unrelated to what goes on in

the larger world around. When the new regime begins, there is no

false optimism. “New people, new style, and old dance” (157). The man

knows pretty well that this is all that he can expect. And he walks

slowly to his home. He realizes that the change of regime may not

show all that bleakness either. The man is prepared to wait. When the

future unholds, it will not take the present models as its beautiful

ones. This is summed up by the man himself:

... he was not burdened with any hopes that new

things, really new things, were as yet ready to
come out. Someday in the long future a new life
58
 would may be flower in the country, but when it
came, it would not choose as its instruments the
same people who had made a habit of killing new
flowers. (159-60).

What holds good about this passage is also true of the novel and

Armah’s view in general. Soyinka accurately strikes a positive note in

his response to the novel w.hen he says:

The vision of The Beautyful Ones is perhaps no

more than an aspiration, a pious hope symbolized
in that final image of the novel - 'a single flower,
solitary, unexplainable, very beautiful,’ in the
centre of the inscription on the back of a Mammy
wagon which reads: THE BEAUTYFUL ONES
ARE NOT YET BORN. This pessimistic
suggestion bears the possibility of its own hopeful
contradiction, an accurate summation of society
only too well understood by Armah and expressed
in the main action of the book through the solitary,
beleagured representative of moral possibilities,
the central character.17

In any case, the narrative ends in despair. The man’s cynical

helplessness is rendered quite significantly through the inscription on

the van.

Structurally, the narrative throws up the more contemporary

political reality into focus. Aesthetically, the “anonymous man” once

again wanes into insignificance. His life is routine and casual. As

59
usual, he continues his walk. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet

Born is a richly evocative work. Its publication placed Armah in the

forefront of the new generation of African writers. Armah has created

a deeply disturbing picture of the foibles of all decadent political

systems. The novel traces the “African image” in realistic terms

through a straightforward exposition of everyday life and culture.

Margaret Folarin, while discussing the Beautyful Ones, compares it

with Soyinka’s The Interpreters: “If The Interpreters is more

explorative and ambitious than The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet

Born, the latter novel seems almost more revealing of the same

processes at work. Once again the writer presents a work of fiction

about the undermining effects of corruption, not simply on economic

and political, but also on spiritual life. Again the book is concerned

with the individual, who demanding deep aesthetic and ethical

satisfaction from life, is pushed to live by and unto himself. Again the

satire is interspersed with poetic and symbolic passages which allow

the writer to explore the situation in depth”.18

The most striking feature of the novel is the employment of

'human excreta’ as a metaphor to display the political reality and

moral decay of the Ghanaian society, and by extension, of Africa. The

overriding images of the novel are the refuse, mucus, filth, shit, and so

on. The extent to which Armah relies on human waste to symbolize

60
the decay of personal integrity is significant. Commenting on the

imagery employed in the novel, Charles Miller remarks:

This is literary talent? You bet it is. And I say that

as one who finds most scatological prose not only
disgusting but badly written. It calls for no small
gift to expound on excreta and neither affend nor
bore, even greater ability if this unlovely topic is to
be made valued within the context of the novel.
Armah brings it off, by highlighting his
protagonist’s uncompromising ethical rectitude
through personal fastidiousness. To the clerk,
going to the toilet is a nightmare, not only because
the public lavatories which he uses happen to
violate every rule of hygiene but because they also
represent in a very physical sense, the moral
contamination which surrounds him - sometimes
even tempts him in its foul way - and against
which he must always be on guard. Armah has
treated a most indelicate function with remarkable
skill - and force.19

Generally, in the traditional African novel pioneered by Chinua

Achebe, metaphor is something that is usually within the limits of

proverb, fable, and folk tale. In Armah’s The Beautyful Ones, the

special quality is that the narrative is absorbed into the metaphor.

The ancient rot of the staircase banister, the caked excrement in

latrines, the aged mud on the shore line, and many more dead and

rotten things act as metaphors in the novel. According to Derek

61
Wright, “In the atmosphere of total corruption provided by Nkrumah’s

Ghana, Armah’s excremental master-metaphor tirelessly constipates

voices, flatulates breath, turns aspiration into urination (a bribe-prone

bus-conductor is caught “aiming high” on the clean-your-city garbage

can) and ambition into excretion”.20

The harmful effects of corruption and the difficulty of being

engulfed by it are suggested in the novel by a number of powerful

analogies and images. The first of these is the rot on the banister of

the Railway Administration Block. In the end, it was the rot which

won. But the conscious activity of men is inevitably associated with

this natural rot and decay:

And the wood was not alone. Apart from the wood
itself there were, of course, people themselves, just
so many hands and fingers bringing help to the
wood in its cause towards putrefaction. Left-hand
fingers in their careless journey from a hasty anus
sliding all the way up the banister as their owners
made the return trip from the lavatory downstairs
to the office above. Right-hand fingers still
dripping with the after-piss and the stale sweat
from fat clothes. The callused palms of messengers
after they had blown their clogged noses reaching
for a convenient place to leave the well-rubbed
moisture. Afternoon hands not entirely licked clean
of palm soup and remnants of KENKEY. The wood
always win (12-13).
62
In a real sense, the physical decay which the book details is the result

of people’s conscious neglect. The inability of the governing class to

maintain hygienic conditions, the inadequacy of the plumbing

facilities, the discrepancy between the promises of the anti-litter

campaign, and clean your city campaign and the failure of

implementing them, are all responsible for the rotten culture. But

beyond this, Armah symbolically exposes filth as a necessary condition

of life: “Out of decay and dung there is always a new flowering” (85). In

this regard we can assume that Armah is anticipating a better

tomorrow.

The predominant metaphor is that of eating and excretion. This

metaphor is common in African writing and is linked to the theme of

corruption and bribery through oral usage. Money is food. The

metaphoric link is an illustration of the primitive economic nature of

even the wealthiest of the West African states. This phenomenon of

corruption is also evident in the bankrupt policies of the government,

such as running a lottery. Here is a conversation between the man and

the messenger who has won a lottery:

'You look happy’, the man said to him.

The messenger continued to smile, in the
embarassed way of a young girl confessing love.
'I won something in the lottery,’ he said.
'Lucky you,’ the man said, 'How much?’
The messenger hesitated before replying.
63
 'One hundred cedis.’
'That’s not very much,’ the man laughed.
'I know,’ said the messenger, 'But so many people
would jump on me to help me to eat it... I hope
some official at all lottery place will take some of
my hundred Cedis as a bribe and allow me to have
the rest.’ The messenger’s smile was dead.
'You will be corrupting a police officer.’ The man
smiled.
'This is Ghana,’ the messenger said, turning to go.
(18-19)

Although the messenger wins the lottery, he is not sure of getting the

prize amount as he is not in a position to bribe the officials concerned.

Nor it is possible for him to take the support of the police. The sad

truth of this is very well summed up by his own comments when he

says: “It costs you more money if you go to the police.” This metaphor

of eating helps to structure the book. Just as food must issue excreta,

such consumption must issue in bribery and corruption.

But the action taken against the process of corruption and

bribery seems to be meaningless. To refuse bribe is not to foil

corruption; there is always another waiting eagerly to take it. The

timber merchant, on the refusal of the man to accept the bribe, goes to

another allocation clerk and gets his work done by the same process.

He says to the man, you don’t want me to eat, contrey? Okay. Take

yourself. I get the man who understands. Ei, my friend, why you want

64
to play me wicked?” He again shouts at the man, “You, you are a very

wicked man. You will never prosper” (107). This is very common in

Ghana. Armah puts the society’s attitude as follows:

Everyone you ask will say the timber merchant is

right, the allocation clerk is right, and you are a
fool, and everyone is right the way things are and
the way they will continue to be. The foolish ones
are those who cannot live life the way it is lived by
the flowing river and disapprove of current. There
is no other way, and the refusal to take the leap
will help absolutely no one at any time.” (108)

But the man is increasingly aware that he is behaving unnaturally by

not accepting the bribe, and that he is out of joint with his society. As

he reflects, “It is no normal all this, that the point of holding out

against it escapes the unsettled mind” (108)

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has made a strong

impression on the readers of African novels. Though its central themes

are familiar, its treatment shows a striking originality, especially in

the use of image and metaphor. Armah is a writer of decadence

identifiable with Walter Pater, Paul Verlaine, and Joseph Conrad, fin

de siecle symbolists whose works revealed their fascination with

decay, corruption, and with the smell of charnel houses. Chinua

Achebe calls The Beautyful Ones as a “sick book’.’ It deals with the

65
sickness of Ghana but with the sickness of the human condition. He

writes:

The hero, pale and passive and nameless - a

creation in the best manner of existentialist
writing, wanders through the story in an
anguished half-sleep, neck-deep in despair and
human excrement which we rather see a lot in the
book ... But his Ghana is unrecognizable. This
aura of cosmic and despair is foreign and unusable
as those monstrous machines Nkrumah was said to
have imported from European countries. Ayi Kwei
Armah imposes so much foreign metaphor on the
sickness of Ghana that it ceases to be true.22

Ama Ata Aidoo, while commenting that “the details in the novel

are incredible,” says that “this type of purgative exposure, however

painful it is, is absolutely necessary, depending upon whether or not

one believes that truth as represented in writing can be in any way

effective in helping social change.” She is of the opinion that the

novel’s tone is a positive one. “What he (Armah) does proclaim is that

he thinks of us... Perhaps the beautiful ones, when they are born and

let’s prey it will be soon, will take care of everything and everybody

once and for all time. The least we can do is wait.”23 The man realizes

that the change of regime may not bring any real change in the

structure of the society. Future does not hold all that bleakness either.

The man is prepared wait. When the future unfolds, it will not take

66
the present models as its beautiful ones. This is summed up by Armah

himself:

... he was not burdened with any hopes that new

things, really new things, were as yet ready to
come out. Someday in the long future a new life
would may be flower in the country, but when it
came, it would not choose as its instruments the
same people who had made a habit of killing new
flowers. (159-60)

This is true of the novel and Armah’s vision in general. What Ayi Kwei

Armah sets out to show is the experience of living in a corrupt

atmosphere. He creates a deeply disturbing picture of the foibles of all

decadent, political systems.

Thus the social and political corruption of contemporary Ghana

are seen to be a legacy even before acquiring independence. The man,

by remaining isolated, retains an essentially communal and social

vision. The effects of isolation are further explored in Armah’s next

novel Fragments.

67
REFERENCES:

1. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,
London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1969. All page
references are to this edition.
2. Eldred Jones, “Review” of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet
Born, African Literature Today (London: Heinemann), 3, 55.

3. Eldred Jones, 56.

4. Charles Miller, Saturday Review, Vol.LT, No.35, 1968, 24.
5. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin
Books, 1967), 120.

6. Ayi Kwei Armah, “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?”

Presence Afrieaine, No.64 (1967), 28.
7. Eustace Palmer, An Introduction to the African Novel
(London: Heinemann, 1972), 129-130.
8. Ama Ata Aidoo, “No Saviors,” African Writers on African
Writing (Essays), ed., G.D. Killam (London: Heinemann,
1973), 14.
9. Charles Larson, “The Novel of the Future,” The Emergence of
African Fiction (London: Indiana University Press, 1971), 258.
10. Lemuel A. Johnson, “The Middle Passage in African Literature:
Wole Soyinka, Yambo Ouologuem, Ayi Kwei Armah,” African
Literature Today, No. 11, 1980, 63-64.

11. Neil Lazarus, “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will:

A Reading of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones,”
Research in African Literatures, Vol.18, No.2 (1987), 137-
138.
12. Gareth Griffiths, “Structure and Image in The Beautyful
Ones,” Studies in Black Literatures 2.2 (1971), 3.

13. Robert Fraser, The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah (London:

Heinemann, 1980), 25.

14. Gareth Griffiths, “Structure and Image in The Beautyful

Ones,” Studies in Black Literatures (1971), 4.

68
15. Margaret Folarin, “An Additional Comment on Ayi Kwei
Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” African
Literature Today, Vol.5 (1971), 122.
16. Charles E.Nnolim, “Dialectic as Form: Pejorism in the Novels of
Armah,” African Literature Today, No. 10, 1979, 210.
17. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), 116.
18. Margaret Folarin, “An Additional Comment on Ayi Kwei
Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” African
Literature Today, (1971), 117.

19. Charles Miller, “The Arts of Venality,” Saturday Review, Vol.

LT, No.5, August 31, 1968, 24.
20. Derek Wright, “Totalitarian Rhetoric: Some Aspects of
Metaphor in The Beautyful Ones,” Critique, 30, Spr. ’89, 210.

21. Kolawole Ogungbesan, “Symbol and Meaning in The

Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” African Literature
Today, Vol.5 (1971), 122.
22. Chinua Achebe, 'Africa and Her Writers,’ Massachusetts
Review, XIV, 1973, 624-25.

23. Ama Ata Aidoo, “No Saviors,” African Writers on African

Writing (Essays), ed., G.D.Killam (London: Heinemann,
1973), 18.

69