Ayi Kwei Armah

Ayi Kwei Armah, born in 1939, Ghanaian novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, considered one of Africa’s most important writers. Armah also is one of the sharpest interpreters of the condition of African nations—past, present, and future.

Armah was born in Takoradi in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). He came of age amid a growing continent-wide nationalism that brought independence to Ghana and other African nations. He was educated at the Achimota School in Ghana and in 1959 received a scholarship to the Groton School in Massachusetts. Armah earned his B.A. degree from Harvard University and received an M.F.A. degree in writing from Columbia University in 1970. In the 1960s he worked as a scriptwriter, editor, and translator. He has also taught literature in Ghana, Lesotho, Tanzania, and the United States.

Armah’s first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), delivers a strong critique of corruption in newly independent African states and remains highly controversial. In the novel, he uses images of filth, slime, excrement, and rot to convey the greed, bribery, and fraud that threaten to strangle the best qualities of a new African nation. Armah’s second novel, Fragments (1970), is considered partly autobiographical. It deals with a young African man, Baako, who returns home after study in the United States to find his family caught up in material acquisition. The novel’s symbolism is embedded in the story of a traditional “outdooring”ceremony for a newborn. The family speeds up the ceremony to reap the gifts that accompany it, resulting in the child’s death. Why Are We So Blest? (1972) is a portrait of three would-be revolutionaries in a fictional north African country, each struggling with the loss of their idealism.

Perhaps Armah’s most stunning achievement is Two Thousand Seasons (1973), a historical novel set in precolonial Africa. It deals with migrations of peoples, enslavement of Africans by both Arabs and Europeans, and the possibility of resistance to colonialism. Armah creates a griot (a traditional storyteller-historian) from an ancient African community to tell the history of the struggle of Africans. The Healers (1978) continues this theme, returning to Africa’s precolonial past and the dissolution of the Ashanti Kingdom in the 1800s to examine causes of contemporary political ruin. The later novel Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future (1995) adds another volume to Armah’s commentary on African history.