Social Realities Behind Ayi Kwei Armah’s the Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Author: Aloy Nnamdi Obika PhD Anambra State
Abstract: One day, a professor of English literature from the Akan tribe of Ghana was teaching his students Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. At a point, he said that he did not see why the novelist should splash on almost every page, images of putrefaction and corruption. In view of this, the present researcher had to study some records of what transpired during Kwame Nkrumah’s reign which the novel is all about. When comparing what he found and what the novelist wrote, he discovered that what baffled the professor in the novel are actually the realities in the days of Nkrumah although they were artistically masked and presented. Some of them are extreme corruption and financial mismanagement which at the end, saw the nation being involved in a coup d’etat just after seven years of her being a republic. The actualities of those days are referred to here as social realities. The conclusion is that what Armah wrote was in consonance with actual happenings during the regime of Nkrumah.