The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

The unusual spelling of the above title is consistently ‘corrected’ by conscientious readers and editors. It is from an inscription on the back of a Ghanian taxi-bus which Armah chose to indicate his sardonic vision of the state and society of his country just before, during and immediately after the reign of Kwame Nkrumah.

Among the number of authors from Ghana whose writing is accessible to us in English, Armah is perhaps still the best known, and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born remains his most famous work. It is a text that has aroused the ire of some commentators because of its unremitting, unforgettably vivid concentration on observations of filth, decay and corruption (both physical and moral) in a setting identified as Ghana.

The deep sophistication of the author’s vision and the sheer elegance of his writing, full of references to various philosophers and creeds, but also taking us into street life and (frequently) into stinking and ill-kept lavatories, binds all this together in an urgent quest to find an answer to the query how a decent man can survive amidst the cynical, exploitative, bribe-driven and horrifyingly corrupt society which is (so-called ) independent Ghana. (The novel appeared in 1968.)

Armah’s central character is known only as “the man”, whose very integrity and hatred of corruption form his heaviest burden — in a society where even his wife taunts him for refusing to accept bribes (as if this is ‘unmanly’ and a dereliction of his paternal duty). He is contrasted with his old classmate Koomson, who has crawled or clawed it to the top and to a life of opulence, but who at the end of the novel falls ignominiously when the Nkrumah reign is toppled.

Despite small compensations, “the man’s” life is dreary and burdensome. In this character himself, though, Armah gives us glimpses of that beauty of moral and social integrity that his society must regain. The novel (for all its strangeness) is finally a challenge to Africans to achieve the re-formation of wholesome sociopolitical life-frames.

Unmistakable as is the fury of its author’s indignation against the African nouveaux-riches — the local profiteers and lawyers who merely took over the colonists’ exploitative power — the title and many other details clearly express also his yearning for the birth of a nation that will reward moral courage and turn its back on the “gleam” of luxuries and boastful power.

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