The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah

First published: 1968

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: 1965-1966

Locale: A coastal city in Ghana

Principal Characters:

• The Man, the unnamed protagonist, a traffic control clerk for the Ghanaian railway
• Oyo, his wife
• Teacher, his mentor
• Joseph Koomson, a Minister in the Nkrumah government, a former classmate of the man
• Estella Koomson, his wife

The Novel

The events of the novel take place between Passion Week in 1965 and February 25, 1966, the day after the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president. On the political level, they describe the failure of a purportedly socialistic government, which is, in fact, as capitalistic as the white colonial regime it replaced. The new black leaders with white souls have, according to Ayi Kwei Armah, used their positions of power for personal gain. The corruption has filtered down to all levels of society, all economic relationships being based on intimidation, bribery, and fraud. What makes the society appear so bleak is that Armah reports it through the eyes of a rare individual who has retained his integrity: the man, an unnamed protagonist, has failed professionally because he has been too soft; he has been unable to play the bribery game. The only heroes in the society—that is, the only ones who succeed—are the hard ones who no longer feel moral or emotional hypocrisy. For the man, who speaks for Armah, the leaders of society are no different from the old African chiefs who sold their people in the slave trade for the trinkets of white society.

The novel divides neatly into two large parts. The first, which moves at an agonizingly slow pace, traces the daily routine of the man through a typical working day, beginning with the usual bus ride to the railway administration building where he is a traffic control clerk. The day is boringly uneventful, but Armah punctuates his narrative with depressing descriptions of the environment, sights and smells of human excrement, spittle, filth, and graffiti, relieved only occasionally by the beauty of some natural phenomenon, the sky or the sea, as yet uncontaminated by man’s touch. In the afternoon, a timberman comes to offer the man a bribe, but he leaves unsatisfied. After work the man meets an old acquaintance from school, now a government Minister, Joseph Koomson, and his wife, Estella. Koomson is one of the hard ones who have succeeded. The man invites the Koomsons for dinner the following Sunday evening. (The visit will initiate the events in the second part of the novel.)

The man’s return home on the bus completes the workday but hardly ends the day for him. Relations with his wife, Oyo, are strained because his integrity has kept her and her three children from experiencing the good life. The tension, as is apparently quite common, drives him from the house and to the sympathetic home of his former teacher, also nameless, who is in the same agonizing situation as the man, except that he is single and has not “immersed” the self in “loved ones.” He, too, has refused to follow the easy path to material comfort. Armah devotes a lengthy chapter to Teacher’s monologue about his past experiences, his youthful hopes and his growing despair. His function in the novel is to substantiate the man’s dilemma; his function for the man is to provide an anchor and temporary reassurance. This visit, however, ends with an unexpected hopelessness. The man returns to his wife seeking sexual solace but is repelled by the ugly Caesarean scar left by the birth of their third child.

The first part of the novel ends with a one-chapter account of the following workday. The man awakes from a nightmare in which he is threatened with complete isolation. He moves about the silent house getting ready for work, decides to take the train instead of the bus, and prepares for another routine day at the desk, but is offered unexpected relief: A young colleague, eager to learn the trade, volunteers to take his place. He uses the afternoon off to walk along the sea and the wharf, experiencing the freedom of nature, which momentarily puts him in touch with hope and beauty.

The last two-fifths of the novel center on the man’s relationship with Koomson. The visit of Koomson and Estella is a disappointment. The motive of the visit is totally utilitarian: Koomson intends to use Oyo and her mother as the official purchasers of a fishing boat—a business venture inappropriate for a Socialist Minister. The man, realizing not only that the purchase will be made with corrupt money but also that his wife and mother-in-law will never actually own the boat, refuses to participate in the transaction. He does, however, go with her later to the Koomson’s house, in the wealthy district of the city, to sign the necessary papers. By this time the wife, too, suspects the truth, but she continues to believe and thus continues to resent her husband’s skepticism.

The climax comes suddenly. Kwame Nkrumah’s government falls and Koomson loses everything. He comes to the man’s home in order to evade arrest. The man is able, in the only exciting dramatic action of the novel, to usher him out the back way while the military police are entering the front. He and Koomson must, however, exit through the stool of the outhouse; they escape, reeking of excrement, along the beach to the recently purchased boat, by means of which Koomson is to leave the country. The man swims ashore from the boat, justified in his morality and now respected by his wife, but realizing that he will find no lasting comfort, no relief from the pain of living day-to-day in a corrupt society. The new government will be no different from the last. Not even Teacher can be his stay in the future.

The Characters

The characters are variations of the two types of people who make up Ghanaian society in the 1960’s, the “hard” and the “weak,” at least as that society is perceived by the man and his Teacher. The man continually berates himself for being among the weak, yet knows that his inability to join the corrupt, successful ones is not entirely a failure of nerve. Still, the novel is not primarily an account of his inner struggle between the two impulses, the one toward the “gleam” of wealth and power, the other toward the clarity and purity of the moral life; rather, it is a lament over the existential situation. He knows the gleam is a false beacon; it will offer no satisfying solution but will instead kill the soul. Yet he sees the entire society fascinated by it, drawn to it, and lulled morally to sleep by it. To be honest in the eyes of society is to be not only stupid and naive but also uncooperative. ungracious, and insensitive to the needs of others. The man’s understanding of the topsy-turvy value system is never in question, but his ability to maintain his integrity is. For one thing, he begins to wonder if, in fact, the world offers any evidence of “corruption” being “unnatural.” Perhaps his inner sense of moral distinctions is an illusion and the most grotesque aberrations of nature are part of the order of things. He feels himself caught up in the never-ending cycle of birth and decay, during which only one brief instant produces something beautiful. What makes the stress almost unbearable, however, is the pressure he gets from his wife, Oyo. She is a victim of the gleam. His soul is not free; it is morally bound up in another person and must make decisions that affect her and the children. Her judgment of him means that he never has a “home” to which he can return.

The final act of the novel, however, changes both her and him. When she sees Koomson reduced to a whimpering, timid, immobile bundle of blubber, she looks at her husband with pride and respect. Her look and Koomson’s fall reaffirm the man in his sense of moral superiority to the society. His final act of courage in helping Koomson escape is an act of heroism, virtue in action. Afterward, while looking at a sign on the back of a bus, “THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN,” he himself is perhaps settling for that faint hope in a better future. Ironically, however, by the standards of the novel itself, he is a “beautyful one”; he has exhibited inner courage in resisting the gleam and outer courage in risking imprisonment by the new authorities in the state.

The other “weak” character, Teacher, occupies the center portion of the novel. His monologue, a kind of lesson by example, traces his life from the end of World War II to the novel’s present. Like other Ghanaians who had fought abroad, he was depressed when he returned home to find that the war had done nothing for Ghana. He was acutely sensitive to the effects of colonial occupation. When Kwame Nkrumah entered the scene, he along with others thought that their savior had come. Nkrumah, however, went the way of other leaders; they were really in love with the white man and eventually lost their socialistic ideals. The promise gone, Teacher grew more and more depressed, alienated from the society. Now he spends his time naked in bed, with the lights on, exposed and vulnerable to anyone who cares to look. His only contacts with the outside world are the radio, on which he occasionally hears songs that tell him that he is not alone in his sadness, and books written by sympathetic minds. The Teacher has given up hope of ever finding an audience for his thoughts. Only the man comes to listen. His is a living death, but at least he has not destroyed his soul by giving in to the gleam.

Both the man and the Teacher had known Joseph Koomson before he turned hard and joined the corrupt leadership. The man was his classmate; Teacher knew him on the docks after the war. Neither knows exactly what happened to make him change. When he appears briefly early in the novel, he is self-confident, full of self-importance, and patronizing. His wife, Estella, sits in the backseat of their Mercedes like a bored, delicate kitten. Both have grown so accustomed to luxury that they have become desensitized to human suffering. They have forgotten the filth and decay out of which their luxuries come and to which they return. Their home on the hill is a picture of comfort and gadgets. When the coup deprives them of their many trinkets, Koomson is not only exposed as an ordinary human being but, moreover, reduced to his opposite, a chaos of putrid matter, a man who is all intestines, making the man’s bedroom reek of gas. If the novel records the struggle and victory of the man, it also records the illusory success and fall of Koomson. While the man offers some evidence that moral values are not a fanciful dream, Koomson’s individual failure does not mean the end of moral corruption. The new regime will simply produce more Koomsons.

Critical Context

Like most African novels of the 1960’s, this one attacks both the colonialism that controlled the Sub-Sahara for a hundred years and the black leadership that replaced the white administrations after Independence. The new governments seemed little different from the old, and the European influence had not departed. The promise of self-rule soon gave way to disappointment. Armah’s own version of the new situation reflects the Ghanaian setting but more particularly his personal reaction, colored by his experiences in America. The racial aspect of the problem is highlighted, even in this first novel, but becomes more intense and emotional in succeeding novels: Fragments (1969), Why Are We So Blest? (1972), and Two Thousand Seasons (1973). Armah insists that the answer to Africa’s problems must come from blacks, not whites. In the language of the novels, in any case, the evils of Western civilization are inseparable from whiteness.

Each of Armah’s novels is a progression toward a solution. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born offers only an occasional vision of hope sparked by something within the individual. By the time of Two Thousand Seasons, Armah had achieved a historical perspective, tracing the fall of Africa from the tenth century to the recent past. The Healers (1978), his fifth novel, through a scenario similar to that in Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy (1973), posits a community of freedom fighters hidden away in the forests. For both Soyinka and Armah, the values underlying the community are traditionally African, but they exist in a mythical, romantic realm; they are part of a secular vision (as Soyinka would call it) that holds promise but has not yet made a lasting impact on the fallen African society.

Bibliography

Fraser, Robert. The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah, 1980.

Larson, Charles. The Emergence of African Fiction, 1971.

Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature, and the African World, 1976.