An Evaluation of Success of Ayi Kwei Armah’s ‘The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born’ as a political commentary on and analysis of the early post-Independence period

Word Count: 1596

A fictional narrative taking place within a real setting has great potential for describing and evaluating political actions. 'The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born' succeeds in providing a cohesive, engaging argument regarding the post-independence era. In praising such a work of literature, especially in terms of its contribution to the field of political analysis, limitations of the format must be recognised. It would be folly to expect an extensive historical contextualisation, or a detailed economic analysis within the idiom of a novel; and indeed, the inclusion of such material would blunt the force of the argument. The strengths of this format are its ability to go beyond mere description, and fully engage with a reader, to share a reality, to assert the humanity of an individual or a society. It is within these parameters that the most useful evaluation of this novel's success can take place.

	Armah's intention appears to be the following: to create an individual character and story which are identifiably human and empathic in nature, but which also have wider resonance. The hero in this novel is unnamed. The man's lack of a designation could serve to imply his mechanistic participation in broad processes over which he has no control, stripping him of the qualities that make him a human being. However, in this novel, the device functions in a more sophisticated way; the man's attitudes and behaviour are sharply contrasted with what is expect of him in society, more specifically, his own personal integrity vis-à-vis the general tendency in society to reward those who steal and embezzle. This namelessness of the man suggests not alone in this dilemma; he is not an eccentric, but instead a microcosm of a wider value contradiction. At this point it is necessary to consider exactly how far such a model can be stretched; perhaps Armah is describing a situation typical of Accra, or Ghana, or even all of Africa. Evidence in the text seems to point to a broad approach. When reflecting on the failure of the government, the question Armah asks is "How long will Africa be cursed with its leaders?" (80), and the teacher, another unnamed character wonders "whether the rot and the weakness were not after all the eternal curse of Africa itself" (91). Similarly, Nkrumah is only mentioned by name after he loses power, as if it is only then that he regains his humanity, previously existing only as one of many generic African dictators.

	If one accepts this reading of the novel as a description of Africa in general, it must be considered that this broad-brush analysis is a weakness. Herbst adopts a comparative approach, indicating that "similar...populations structures, levels of technological development and stocks of material wealth" (4) justify treating some sub-Saharan African nations as a group. Tordoff also identifies trends that are common to many African states, but he warns that one should not allow their similarity to mask the "important differences between them" (1). The consensus here appears to be that while ignoring the "heterogeneity of Africa" (Herbst: 5) is dangerous, the shared features of much of sub-Saharan Africa do merit a broad level of analysis. A well-argued post-script to this debate is Tordoff's reminder "that man different colonial powers were involve [and that] these powers differed, often widely, in their specific policies and overall approach to colonial development" (31).

	The most crucial task in evaluating Armah's novel is to assess the validity of his arguments. One such argument that has particular virtue is his treatment of the 'apolitical' way the Party men behave, and the consequently apolitical response of the public towards the behaviour. Armah draws attention to how superficially the Party men attach themselves to a political perspective. Both "the socialists of Africa, fat, perfumed, soft with the ancestral softness of chiefs who had sold their people” (131) and the man's superiors at work who, after the coup, worry that "someone who had heard them in their red days would remember their words" (157) have opportunistically attached themselves to the socialist doctrine without any serious allegiance to, or perhaps even understanding of, the philosophy. This echoes Davidson’s observations that politics in the post-Independence period were characterised by "pragmatism" and "a poverty of ideological thought" (165). The response of the people after the coup is one of "confusion and insecure hesitation"  (Armah: 158); their ambivalent response to the news is reflective of an attempt to come to terms with how their own nation affects them. As Cooper asserts, African involved in the colonial struggle, and then later the post-Independent states "were above all, human beings, trying to survive, form relationships, find opportunities and make sense of the world" (38). It is this human reality behind the political events that Armah's personal, yet also universal, perspective articulates so vividly.

	Another theme discussed by Armah is the influence of the white man in Ghana. The white population itself is portrayed as distant, irrelevant from the African way of life: "the white man's gleaming bungalows were so far away, so unreachably far that people did not even think of them in their own suffering" (66). The Ghanaian who acts like "the dark ghost of a European"  (81), however, is not so fortunate in escaping Armah's castigation and ridicule. He argues that while ever they "have white men for their masters" (81), they cannot be truly powerful, "as the only power a black man can have will come from the black people" (82). Perhaps the leaders use the colonial apparatus because, as Davidson argues, "it seemed impossible to reject any significant part of the legacy" (p.163). The motivation for radical changes which would free the independent African states from European influence was lacking, not only because the new leaders failed to "the obstructive nature of the colonial legacy they were going to accept" (Davidson: 182), but because challenging what existed would risk compromising their own positions of privilege. Herbst echoes this argument, noting "despite much rhetoric about recovering the African past, the new leaders rejected the entire precolonial tradition of multiple sovereignties of land over soft borders" (97).

	Armah's novel is bleak, but not completely without hope. Optimism is expressed with reference to a new politician, introduced to the others by Manaan. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this is the emphasis on the charisma of the politician. As Weber asserts, an individual’s "exemplary and personal"  (Weber: 79) qualities can be a source of power, and Armah makes clear that these virtues are possessed by the politician, bluntly so in Manaan's graphically described sexual attraction towards him, as she accepts the suggestion that she "is wetting her womanhood over this new man" (Armah: 87). In a political situation in which the state legitimacy on a legal or traditional basis is uncertain, perhaps it is in the charisma of an exceptional individual that a post-colonial government can "establish the right to rule over culturally diverse societies" (Tordoff: 85).

	Perhaps the biggest theme of all in the novel is corruption. Despite its ubiquity in popular descriptions of Africa, 'corruption' is a term that must be used with caution because it has encoded within it an implicit moral judgement, or at least some kind of normative assumption of how things 'should' be. Perhaps a more accurate term to describe the process is one used by Michela Wrong: 'kleptocracy', or "government by theft" (10). Although Wrong was discussing the methods of Mobutu, it seems that the term is also useful in discussing the behaviour of the Ghanaian party men, in the sense that it opens up the possibility that their use of national resources for personal gain may not be a result of greed or other failings of character, but simply a deliberate, rational way of acting. Armah, however, does not hesitate in criticising; his anger at the ‘corrupt’ is clear: "In any other country they [the ‘corrupt’] would be in jail. Here they are heroes" (p.110). Armah is not directly concerned with its motivations, origins and so on, but instead he seeks to understand its effects. He presents a 'verstehen', or a personal understanding, of the politics of Ghana. With an almost obsessional pre-occupation with excrement and dirt, Armah reminds us of the distasteful nature of theft, and by juxtaposing these images with 'the gleam', that is the incentive of wealth and power which nearly everyone craves, he creates an important metaphor. By explaining the methods and results of theft as opposites, as dirt and cleanliness, he shows that the effect of a kleptocratic state is to open up a contradiction within an individual. Whether or not someone is respected is based not the virtue of his or her actions, but on how successfully they exploit others. This evokes Plato's idea that the character of a state is inexorably linked to the individuals within it: "the States are as the men are...if the constitutions of States are five, the dispositions of individual minds will also be five" (544e).

	 An inevitable consequence of choosing to tell a story from a single perspective is a restriction in the range of his analysis. Seeing the world through the eyes of the man, the story of the woman is not told, and we are given little insight into how their societal position might have been "deformed and devalued in...[the] new context" (Tordoff: 44) of post-independence Ghana. Similarly, as the 'hero' of the novel is an urban-dweller, we are unable to evaluate assertions regarding the rural populations; Hyden's argument that "the state does not really enter into the solution of his [the rural African peasant's] existential problems" (cf. Herbst: 19) goes unexamined in this novel.

	The relatively narrow scope of Armah's political commentary is not, however, a fatal weakness, but a consequence of his literary method, the strengths of which far outweigh the limitations. In producing a direct and engaging account of a single man's view of the world, Armah provides the reader with a rich and searching analysis of many of the political processes and events of the period. However, perhaps most valuable aspect of the book is the reminder to the reader that the most salient and striking perspectives on political events can only originate from the most basic political unit: the single human being.

	 Bibliography

Armah, AK 1988 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Oxford, Portsmouth, Johannesburg; Heinenmann

Cooper, F 2002 Africa since 1940 :the past of the present. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Davidson, B 1992 The Black Man's Burden - Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State Oxford, Harare, Nairobi, Uganda: James Currey, Baobab Books, E.A.E.P, Fountain Publishers.

Herbst, J 2000 States and Power in Africa - Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control :
 Chichester, Princeton: Princeton University Press

Plato 1974 The Republic - Translated with an introduction by Desmond Lee - Second Edition (Revised). London: Penguin Books.

Tordoff, W 1997 Government and Politics in Africa - Third Edition. London: MacMillan Press.

Weber, M 1970 'Politics as a Vocation' in From Max Weber: essays in sociology, translated, edited and with an introduction by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills London: Routledge.

Wrong, M 2001 In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz - Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo. London:  Fourth Estate.