Ayi Kwei Armah

Author

• Born: 1939
• Place of Birth: Takoradi, Gold Coast (now Ghana)

GHANAIAN NOVELIST

Biography

Ayi Kwei Armah is among the most acclaimed yet controversial West African writers. Born in 1939 to Fante-speaking parents at Sekondi-Takoradi, in the western region of Ghana, Armah received his early education at Achimota College, near Accra. In 1959, Armah traveled to the United States on a scholarship, studying for one year at Groton School in Massachusetts and later at Harvard University, where he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in sociology. Armah returned to Ghana in 1964 and worked briefly as a scriptwriter for Ghana Television. In 1967, he traveled to the United States on a grant from the Fairfield Foundation to participate in the graduate writing program at Columbia University in New York City. After his studies at Columbia, Armah went to Paris and worked as an editor-translator for Jeune Afrique. In 1968, he returned to the United States and took a teaching post at the University of Massachusetts. Four years later, he traveled to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where he accepted a teaching job. Armah’s works exhibit Western influences, as they show the plight of alienated heroes in search of values in a society seemingly devoid of meaning.

Set in Sekondi-Takoradi, one of Ghana’s major port cities, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) chronicles the life of a railway clerk who routinely must make hard choices between easy money that would enable him to provide more adequately for his family and his own conscience, which disallows his acceptance of bribes as a means of getting ahead. Armah considers corruption and opportunism as responsible for the failure of the nationalist movement since newly elected leaders, once they have risen to power, become no less predisposed than their colonialist predecessors to secure their own positions through unethical means or at the expense of the masses they were elected to serve.

The despair that results from dashed hopes also pervades Armah’s second and third novels. In Fragments (1974) and Why Are We So Blest? (1975) Armah depicts insular individuals, or artist-heroes, whose aspirations are thwarted by a grasping, acquisitive society. The artist-hero Baako Onipa in Fragments suffers from guilt because he falls short of familial expectations that he will enrich the lives of family members by supplying them with modern luxuries from abroad. The guilt of his perceived failure ultimately leads him to a nervous collapse. Armah’s Why Are We So Blest?, set in Algiers, also features an artist-hero whose spiritual pursuits eventually lead him into self-imposed exile.

Armah’s fourth and fifth novels, Two Thousand Seasons (1979) and The Healers (1979), depart from his earlier works. Instead of being set in post-independence Africa, they span several centuries before the colonization of Africa. The author intends to probe the source of the corruption identified in earlier novels and, in doing so, to provide hope for Africa’s redemption. The two novels are, therefore, more optimistic than the first three, whose artist-heroes are described as islands of virtue in a wasteland of greed and corruption. In Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers, Armah relies upon the collective wisdom of traditional storytellers, or griots, whose solidarity and grounding in communal or traditional values effectively counter destructive forces.

Osiris Rising (1995), Armah’s sixth novel and his first in seventeen years, tells the story of Ast, a young Black American Egyptologist who travels to Africa for her roots and a sense of belonging. She also follows Asar, her college lover, who has returned to his African homeland to fight the injustices of the post-independence puppet regimes. Significantly, the country to which she travels is never named directly. Armah’s traditional themes are again in evidence: pan-African unity, historical consciousness, intellectual nonconformity, and disgust with the corrupt African leadership. The Osiris and Isis myth provides an important symbolic background for this otherwise realistic text.

Armah's fascination with Ancient Egypt continues in his seventh novel, KMT: In the House of Life (2002). The novel follows a young woman seeking solace for her grief over losing a friend in history research. She searches for the meaning of her life and solutions to Africa's current problems in secret hieroglyphic texts. Once again, in this novel, Armah looks to Ancient Egypt as a model for a modern pan-African society.

His next novel, The Resolutionaries (2013), is a political satire aimed at the African leaders who resolve to solve problems (hence "resolutionaries"), but never take action. It also addresses Africa's language issues, espousing the controversial position that rather than continuing to use colonial languages or returning to the old Indigenous languages, the African people should invent a lingua franca of their own, and satirizes African writers and intellectuals like Ngugi wa Thiong'o who take pride in writing in African languages that are not widely spoken.

Criticism of Armah’s later novels was predictable, since it corresponded with that of his earlier works—that his characters too often lack human dimension. The characters in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born were criticized for being mere mouthpieces for the author; politicians were made the epitome of corruption. Their negative portrayals, combined with what some consider to be Armah’s obsession with offal, led them to equate the novel with exaggeration and distortion that reflected the author’s own rage at what he considered a betrayal of nationalist hopes. Others have argued that such criticism is unfounded since it stems not from considering the work as an art form but rather from the work’s unpopular views.

Despite the controversy sparked by Armah’s first novel, the writer remains at the forefront of African literature and has been credited with helping usher in the coming of age of the African novel. Unlike his literary predecessors, whose novels were comparable to anthropological treatises detailing the customs of African society, Armah’s novels are more carefully crafted and stylized. More important, however, is that Armah’s novels are more introspective. Unlike earlier writers, who were content to dramatize the clash between African and Western cultures, Armah not only delved into the root causes of the conflict but also, in his later novels, succeeded in providing hope for its amelioration.

In addition to his fiction, Armah has published a memoir, The Eloquence of the Scribes (2006), and a book of essays on African history, Remembering the Dismembered Continent (2010). He has also published essays, children’s books, short stories, and poetry. Armah established his own publishing housePer Ankh: the African Publication Collectivein Popenguine, Senegal, near his long-time home in Dakar. Although he has not published any works since 2013, his significant contributions to African literature are well-documented. 

Bibliography

Farahnakian, Ella. “Wisdom and Words: Ayi Kwei Armah '60 and the Impact he Made Through Writing.” The Circle Voice, 20 May 2022, thecirclevoice.org/6087/features/wisdom-and-words-ayi-kwei-armah-60-and-the-impact-he-made-through-writing. Accessed 9 July 2024.

Fraser, Robert. The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah: A Study in Polemical Fiction. London: Heinemann, 1980.

Lazarus, Neil. Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.

Mami, Fouad. "Ayi Kwei Armah's Intellectuals of the African Renaissance." Cadernos de Estudios Africanos, vol. 21, 2011, pp. 163–91.

Niemi, Minna. "Revising Postcolonial Trauma: Multidirectional Identifications in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments and Nuruddin Farah's Maps." Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 51.3, 2015, pp. 283–95.

Nunziata, Daniele. “Ayi Kwei Armah.” Great Writers Inspire, 21 May 2021, writersinspire.org/content/ayi-kwei-armah. Accessed 9 July 2024.

Ogede, Ode. Ayi Kwei Armah: Radical Iconoclast. London: Heinemann, 1999.

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Palmer, Eustace. “Negritude Rediscovered: A Reading of the Recent Novels of Armah, Ngugi, and Soyinka.” International Fiction Review, vol. 8, 1981, pp. 1-11.

Sackey, Edward. "Ayi Kwei Armah's The Resolutionaries: Exoteric Fiction, the Common People & Social Change in Post-Colonial Africa—A Critical Review." African Literature Today, vol. 32, 2014, pp. 47–57.

Wodajo, Tsegaye. Hope in the Midst of Despair: A Novelist’s Cures for Africa. Trenton: Africa World, 2004.

Wright, Derek. Ayi Kwei Armah’s Africa: The Sources of His Fiction. London: Zell, 1989.

Wright, Derek, editor. Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah. Boulder: Three Continents, 1992.

Yankson, Kofi E. The Rot of the Land and the Birth of the Beautyful Ones: The World of Ayi Kwei Armah’s Novels. Accra: Ghana UP, 2000.