Ayi Kwei Armah

Ayi Kwei Armah (born 1939, Takoradi, Gold Coast [now Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana]) is a Ghanaian novelist whose work deals with corruption and materialism in contemporary Africa. In particular, Armah’s novels are concerned with the widening moral and spiritual chasm that exists between appearance and reality, spirit and substance, and past and present in Ghana.

Education and teaching career

Armah’s father was descended from a royal family of the Ga in Ghana. A dispute over royal succession led to the family being exiled to Dahomey (now in Benin), and Armah’s father eventually moved to the port city of Takoradi on the Gold Coast (now Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana). Armah’s mother was Fante. Armah was educated in local mission schools and at Achimota College (near Accra) before going to the United States in 1959 to complete his secondary education at Groton School in Massachusetts and his bachelor’s degree in sociology at Harvard University. He thereafter worked as a scriptwriter, translator, and English teacher in Paris, Tanzania, Lesotho, Senegal, and the United States, among other places.

Novels

In his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Armah showed his deep concern for greed and political corruption in a newly independent African nation. In his second novel, Fragments (1970), a young Ghanaian returns home after living in the United States and is disillusioned by the Western-inspired materialism and moral decay that he sees around him. The theme of return and disillusionment continued in Why Are We So Blest? (1971), but with a somewhat wider scope and featuring an Algerian setting. In Two Thousand Seasons (1973) Armah borrowed language from the African dirge and praise song to produce a chronicle of the African past, which is portrayed as having a certain romantic perfection before being destroyed by Arab and European despoilers.

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The Healers (1979), Armah’s fifth novel, explores a young man’s quest to become a practitioner of traditional medicine while the Asante empire falls to British forces. Armah took an extended break from publishing before releasing Osiris Rising in 1995. The novel examines the struggles of independent Africa and the lingering effects of colonialism. His later books include KMT: In the House of Life (2002), about a grieving woman who seeks life’s answers in ancient Egyptian texts, and The Resolutionaries (2013), a satiric work that addresses the predominance of colonial languages in contemporary African writing.

Nonfiction works and other projects

In the 1960s, while living in Paris, Armah worked as a translator and editor at Jeune Afrique, a pan-African French-language magazine. In the 1980s he founded Per Ankh, a publishing collective based in Popenguine, Senegal (near Dakar). He also published The Eloquence of the Scribes: A Memoir on the Sources and Resources of African Literature (2006), which blends childhood reminiscences with his intellectual and political perspectives, and Remembering the Dismembered Continent: Seedtime Essays (2010).