THE POOR ARE RICH IN PATIENCE: A BOOK REVIEW

What was plaguing the post-colonial writers of Africa to write so much about the creeping corruption of the newly independent African states that the political leaders couldn’t see? From Chinua Achebe’s ‘No Longer at Ease to Amu Djoleto’s ‘Money Galore’, the central question of corruption in the national life of the young emergent African states, consistently afflicted the minds of the writers of this early post-independence era.

In the immediate aftermath of the postcolonial era, with the euphoria of the newly-won freedoms of these nations waning, and hopelessness staring in the face of the people with unbridled corruption pervading national life, the people of the nations of Africa came to the rude awakening that the prosperity promised by the anti-colonial movement was going to be another struggle, it is against this background that Ayi Kwei Armah’s book appears.

Ayi Kwei Armah is a Ghanaian writer/essayist born on the 28^th of October, 1939 in the twin-city of Sekondi-Takoradi in the then Gold Coast. Armah attended Achimota School and won a scholarship to study at the presitigious high school, Groton School in Groton, MA. He proceeded to Harvard University, where he graduated with a degree in Sociology.  Between 1968 and 1970, he also studied at the Columbia University where he obtained a postgraduate degree in Creative Writing. He has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Cornell University and at the University of Winsconsin.

The novel, ‘The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born’ is set in post-independent Ghana, and takes place between the passion week of 1965 and February 25, 1966, a day after the military and police coup that toppled Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah.

The protagonist, simply identified as ‘the man’ is a struggling lowly rank civil servant working as a railway traffic control clerk with the railways corporation. ‘The man’ encounters a timber merchant at work one day who offers him a bribe to facilitate the transportation of his timber logs, ‘the man’ refuses this offer of a bribe. On his way home from work, he chances upon an old classmate, Joseph Koomson, who is now a government minister. He is then confronted by his wife, Oyo, who does not understand why ‘the man’ is simply refusing to participate in the bribery and corruption that has pervaded society at the time. Oyo intimates that the man is refusing to help the financial situation of the family by this stance.

This greatly troubles the man, despite the fact that he had not done anything wrong. He pours out his frustrations to his friend, identified only in the novel as ‘Teacher’. ‘Teacher’ debates the issue with the man, encouraging him to remain resolute.

‘The man’ and Oyo host Koomson and his wife, Estella, a meeting which the poor family had to go to extreme lengths to host in order to please the minister and his wife. The minister tells the man of a plan to buy a boat but register it in the name of ‘the man’ in order to obscure its true ownership. ‘The man’ flatly refuses this offer as he recognizes the corrupt nature of the deal. However, Oyo quickly jumps at the opportunity, expressing willingness to put down her name for this deal. Oyo and her mum hope to benefit from this arrangement. Their hopes are however dashed shortly after the conclusion of the deal when they realized they were only used as a pawn by the minister and his wife to carry out their corrupt practices selfishly.

After the regime in which Koomson serves is overthrown, he suddenly finds himself as a target by the military and police officers who staged the coup. He turns to his old friend, ‘the man’ who eventually helps him to escape from the country in order to avoid persecution/prosecution, depending on how one looks at it. It is from this journey that ‘the man’ encounters a character from his past, Sister Maanan, who is now a deranged woman walking across the beach. It is on his way home from the beach, after he had escorted Koomson to escape, that he comes across the encounter between a driver of a bus and a police officer at a police-mounted barrier, he silently observes the bribery transaction between the driver and the police, and watched the inscription behind the bus; ‘THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN’, as the bus goes up the road.

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is a masterpiece of a political satire, using witty language to treat a very urgent matter. The startling beauty of the sentences awes me and places Armah right at the top with the other best African ink benders of all time. Armah’s dexterity in the use of language and almost prophetic take on the evolution of post-independent African societies cannot be grossed over easily. In this novel, he set out to make a bold political statement, which he accomplishes with a staggering solemnity and stands vindicated today.

The character of the protagonist is interesting in many ways. It is obvious he is against bribery and corruption completely and cannot bring himself to participate in a menace that has effectively become a national sport. Yet he takes no active steps in stopping people around him from engaging in it? He says nothing to the allocation clerk when he accepts the bribe from the timber merchant, which he had refused earlier, in order to facilitate the transportation of his logs. Again, though he insisted he would have nothing to do with the boat scheme by Joseph Koomson, he did nothing actively to dissuade his wife from signing when she eagerly expressed interest in doing so. If ‘the man’ was truly against corruption, then why did he assist the corrupt minister, Joseph Koomson, to escape from the authorities when the coup happened? Did he simply decide to be empathetic by helping on old friend escape from justice or he simply did not believe the new regime will deal with Koomson fairly?

What could account for this passive attitude of ‘the man’ in relation with the corrupt practices of those around him? In his internal struggles which were epitomised by his dialogues with ‘the teacher’ and his monologues, he struggles to reconcile himself to the situation he finds himself in. He appears indifferent to the materialism and moral decay around him, yet does not condemn strongly those enamored by its trappings. The disillusionment with the society is palpable but he does not feel inclined to do anything about it.

He appears contradictory in his thoughts and exhibit a level of internal struggle with his society. Had he resigned himself that was the fate of the country of his birth and accepted it as a normal way of life, if even he would not indulge in it, himself? Or was he not entirely certain of his beliefs and stance?

The latter can be answered in his dialogues with ‘the Teacher’. ‘The man’ knows he has done nothing wrong yet he cannot help but feeling strange about the whole issue. He feels like a criminal in the face of the accusation by Oyo that he is the chichidodo. ‘The teacher’ does not help much either in terms of reinforcing the belief system of ‘the man’, he also comes across as been at a place of deep introspection and wondering if really those who have decided to stay away from the pervasive corruption of society are really doing the right thing.

This is indeed a fascinating observation one gleans from the novel and can be linked to our present dysfunctional society where the price of honesty in public service can be highly risky. Armah invites us to question ourselves in the mirror with the fundamental question; ‘Who are we’? This society, who really are we?

Of course, ‘the man’ stands vindicated in his so many ways. He predicted that ‘Koomson is just going to fool them’ when his wife and mother-in-law were eager to go along with Koomson’s plan to use their identity to obscure his ownership of a fishing boat in a mutually beneficial arrangement. And, indeed, Koomson and his wife, surely fooled them which left them terribly broken and disappointed.

The character of Joseph Koomson is symptomatic of the archetypal African politician, especially of the immediate postcolonial era. He was not really bright when he was in school. A man of the docks, he suddenly found himself at the top echelons of the party hierarchy. Even as a government appointed minister of a government that was avowedly socialist, he does not exhibit any inkling or grasp of the ideological direction of the government in which he serves. He poo-poos the socialism of the government in which he serves as a minister of state, when he visited the man and his family at home to discuss the issue of the purchasing of a fishing boat. He calls it ‘a nuisance’ and intimated ‘the old man himself does not believe in it’, of course, the reference to the old man here means the head of state.

The character and scenario described above may some alien or perhaps strange to the non-African observer but for the keen follower of politics in the Ghanaian post-independence political space, this is the cursed reality we have been saddled with. Half-baked ideologues with their Messianic complexes parading as liberators of the people when in reality they had always intended to liberate their desperate state of their own personal finances.

Even more shocking is the attitude of the wife of the minister to the local beer they were served with upon the visit to the family home of ‘the man’. She remarked; ‘this local beer does not agree with my constitution’. Though the man questions her on this remarks, she totally ignores him continuing in her condemnation of locally manufactured beer, commenting further; ‘Really, the only good drinks are European drinks. These make you ill.’

This showed the shameful inferiority complex that afflicted the early emerging middle class and political class of the newly-independent Ghana. Sadly, this is a phenomenon very much in practice even today, some sixty-five years after independence. This penchant for foreign produced products over locally produced alternatives that seems to have beguiled our middle and upper classes have now pervaded the whole of society just as much as the bribery and corruption. The sad result is the absence of any significant manufacturing capacity in the country all these decades after successive programmes of import substitution.

The portrayal of Maanan at the tail end of the novel depict the moral decay and sense of hopelessness that had engulfed the people when reality dawned on them that the prosperity promised them with the winning of political freedoms were just false hopes. Maanan believed vehemently in the message of the messianic figure and could not overcome her disappointment when this figure failed her. It is this disappointment that drove her to the state of mental derangement in the end.

I must confess that this novel was not an easy read for me emotionally because of the knowledge of the fact that much of what Ayi Kwei Armah bemoaned about in 1968 is still with us today. And in some instances, even grown worse. The urgency and relevance of the message of the novel still rings true today and one is left wondering when the beautiful ones will be born. Hopefully, sooner rather than later. How long will Africa be cursed with its leaders?