Book Review: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born Author: Ayi Kwei Armah

 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah published in 1968 and set in Ghana is a story of corruption that can accompany power and captures scenes surrounding the military overthrow of Nkrumah with frightening accuracy. The Times Literary Supplement illuminates Armah’s nameless central character as “…an upright man resisting the temptations of easy bribes … and winning for his honesty nothing but scorn...” The book is about the sense of estrangement that a man may feel from a society that too readily accepts injustice. 

The Guardian, for its part, describes the novel as a moral fable “handling human values without withholding sympathy from the clumsy ones … whom weakness impels to a pursuit of power.” The above observations underpin the inversion of values where the corrupt are idolized in their reckless display of obscene wealth stolen from public coffers. Also, the clumsy ones in their quest for power mask their physical, intellectual, and moral weakness.

The story opens at dawn casting a repulsive image of the bus conductor mistakenly thinking he is alone in the bus, stuffing some money into his bag.  Shocked, he sees a lone passenger (the main character) seated at the back of the bus, ‘watching’ the conductor’s antics. The conductor attempts to bribe him to cover the embarrassment of being caught stealing money, but the man ‘silently stares’ at the conductor and says nothing. Sweat begins to pour over the conductor as he battles with a nagging self-conscience. 

This situational irony climaxes at the discovery that the man in the back seat is a passenger in deep sleep. The conductor rudely wakes him and literally bundles him out of the bus. The bribery scene is again re-enacted when Amankwa, the timber contractor tries to bribe the man in office, but the man rejects it, to the shock of Amankwa “since everyone was busy taking and giving bribe.” Against this background, a pungent smell of rot and decay diffuses every facet of the book, as if corruption stinks.

Armah castigates oligarchies variously as walking dead battered by harsh economic and political conditions. Kofi Billy is a civil servant who loses his leg at work, is not compensated, acquires a wooden leg, and later hangs himself for failing to come to terms with the irony of “freedom of enslaved men” in an independent country.  Billy is a representation of those who carry out victory marches celebrating new regimes and discover, to their chagrin, that victory is not theirs but for the politicians. 

Victory is personified in the flamboyant cabinet minister Koomson, caricatured bearing hollow titles as Minister Plenipotentiary, Member of the Presidential Commission, and Hero of Socialist Labour.  His socialist standing propels him to power having risen as a railway man and dockworker. He is a shadow of his former self for he runs a chain of corporate businesses bearing other people’s names to disguise ownership.  

 Koomson emerges as vain, naïve, and exhibitionist and measures poorly to the intellectual level of the naked man/teacher. Though disillusioned, the naked man denounces it as a hoax and opportunistic Koomson’s socialist credential. In a suit, he drives around his stylish and heavily perfumed wife Estella in a Mercedes. The narrator observes “… that kind of cleanness has more rottenness in it than the slime at the bottom of a garbage dump beneath the blinding gleam of beautiful new houses and shine of powerful new Mercedes cars” an antithesis of the simplicity of the man and his wife Oyo. 

A view is held that in another country, the Koomsons would be in jail but in Africa where the “Attorney General is always drunk” with power and sycophancy, they are heroes. 

 The author explores in this novel the psychodrama surrounding man’s descent to perversion. Armah appears to construct his hero as a rebel after the metaphysics of Jean-Paul Sartre, a French existentialist philosopher, highlighting the meaninglessness of the world and the individual’s indifference, rationalizing order to justify his existence in an absurd society. To Armah, no religious or political authority, also themselves caught up in the same jinx, understands the inscrutable forces at play that shape man’s fate and destiny. 

The man, like Sartre, is an anarchist in that he denounces an unethical construct of power structure that is divorced from utilitarian purpose. But just like Sartre, the man remains simple and reclusive with few possessions to his name, affirming that independence has brought nothing but the baggage of social stratification.  

After the fall of Nkrumah’s government, we see “new people, new style, old dance” and we get the sense that Africa is cursed by its egotistical leaders.  There has been no change in the fundamental sense for the common person though regime change brings only trauma to hangers-on. 

Koomson takes refuge in the man’s dark bedroom and later in the latrine, becoming fretful as he cries.  Whenever he opens his mouth, the narrator says, one is rebuffed by “the rich stench of rotten menstrual blood” and the house is filled with the forbidding stench of the Partyman’s fart.  The author's hyperbole reflects the moral decadence that paints the African politician as a pathetic creature.

 The bus again provides the closing episode of the novel when the bus conductor hands to the new soldiers at the roadblock a bribe, confirming the cynical writing on the bus: THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN casting further gloom over the country. The corrupted spelling of the word ‘beautiful’ on the bus symbolises the ‘dead souls’   yearning for resuscitation from stupor.  Unfortunately, no civil society or church in Armah’s book voices its concern for people’s plight suggesting that the bodies are colonial appendages complicit with the powers-that-be. 

On the whole, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is a powerful indictment of Africa's failure to manage her self-government.