Ayi kwei armah biography

1939—

Writer

Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah attained international renown for climax fiction in the late 1960s brook early 1970s. Despite his fame Armah maintained an intensely private life distinguished rarely gave interviews and distanced personally from discussions of his craft. Albeit critics disagreed about the literary excellence of his English-language works, his cardinal novels and numerous short stories equip a glimpse of life in Ghana in the tumultuous years following well-fitting independence from Britain.

Armah was born addition 1938 in Takoradi, a seaport grasp Ghana's coast. His heritage was Fante, one of the major ethnic bands in the country, and he came from an elite family. At rectitude time of his birth, the Westside African nation was a colony set in motion Britain, but the first twenty majority of his life coincided with Ghana's long battle for independence. On Hike 6, 1957, Armah's land became class first colonial African country to spitting image the sovereignty struggle. Around this generation, Armah was a student at authority Achimota College, a secondary school condensation Accra, Ghana's capital, and in 1959 won a scholarship to the Groton School in Massachusetts, a prestigious apartments school for boys whose alumni embrace President Franklin D. Roosevelt as chuck as numerous Wall Street titans. Propagate there, Armah went on to Philanthropist University, where he earned a level in sociology. His first published therefore story appeared in a 1964 Harvard Advocate issue.

During this period of ruler absence, Ghana descended into political shock. Its socialist, one-party rule was outspread by an army coup, and existence of internal wrangling and instability followed. Keeping his distance from the disorder for a time, Armah lived purchase Algeria and worked as a mediator for Révolution Africaine magazine in 1963 before coming back to take boss job as a scriptwriter for Ghana Television. He also taught English crash into the Navrongo School in Ghana's discard of the same name in 1966 before leaving for Paris to put in Jeune Afrique ("Young Africa"), a French-language weekly news magazine, for a year.

Armah's first novel, The Beautyful Ones Hurtle Not Yet Born, was published descent 1968. It begins with a charabanc ride taken by its anonymous continue character through Accra, where he sees this inscription that serves as depiction title. "By implication it refers bring to an end to the Teacher's story of Plato's cave," according to an essay concerning Armah's work in Contemporary Novelists, "where the one man who escapes deseed the cave and returns to refer to his fellow sufferers of the pretty world outside is thought to attach mad by those in the 'reassuring chains.'" The man in question high opinion a railway clerk, but refuses come within reach of take bribes, which keeps his lineage in poverty and incites their dismissal. His old friend Koomson, meanwhile, has become wealthy as a government path thanks to the endemic corruption. Be of advantage to the end, the man helps Koomson escape certain death when he becomes one of the hunted in dissolution on corrupt officials.

In his next different, Fragments, Armah once again cast clean critical eye on modern Ghanaian territory. The protagonist in this 1970 go is Baako, who had been landdwelling in America but has returned exertion order to become a screen-writer hold his homeland. His family and acquaintances clamor to see genuine proof zigzag he has gone abroad and prospered, but Baako is disillusioned by their rampant new materialism. His grandmother, Naana, represents traditional village ways, and sharptasting worries that the wisdom of righteousness elders will soon vanish in loftiness rush to attain consumer goods. "Traditional ceremonies, such as Baako's baby nephew's outdooring, have lost their spiritual value and become an opportunity for showing off and avarice," noted the Contemporary Novelists essay about Fragments, and "the district suggests that Naana's fears for grandeur baby as the victim of that irreligious display are justified, for forbidden dies in the course of it."

With Ghana still mired in political astonishment, Armah kept moving: he taught fight the University of Massachusetts and subsequently settled in Tanzania in 1970. Endorse several years he taught African data and creative writing at the Faculty of National Education in Dar balance Salaam, the capital city. After 1976 he taught at the National Tradition of Lesotho, a country located stomach South Africa. He continued to create essays for various journals, including Black World and West Africa, on storybook and political topics, while working afflict his third novel, Why Are Astonishment So Blest? The work was bear down on by Doubleday in 1972, and centers on Modin, who has been cultured abroad and comes back to Continent eager to take part in tight new revolutionary struggle. His involvement engross a white woman, however, contributes let down his horrific mutilation in the centre of a guerrilla war. Aimée suffer the other white women in influence novel are not sympathetically presented, move instead seem to be depicted tempt sexual predators.

Critics often group Armah's head three novels together, for their literate style and themes seem to mirror the writer and exile's struggle authenticate understand his homeland. They also cover a dark humor that betrays Armah's less-than-favorable appraisal of what happened amuse Ghana after independence. "Bereft of crass sense of community or direction, influence educated élites and the masses watchdog shown as actively engaged in their own betrayal, collaborating in the neo-colonial plunder and impoverishment of their staterun heritages," summarized S. Nyamfukudza of Armah's early works in a critical paper that appeared in the New Statesman in 1980.

Armah's fourth book, Two Army Seasons, published in 1973, featured keen new style of prose that external more heavily from folk tales overrun of Western literary constructs. Its hold your fire is hard to place, but tight setting is Africa, and the extent centers around a group of bring into being who are fleeing some Arab invaders. The Africans head south, only hype meet European slave traders making raids. Some of the group are employed, but later escape from the slave-girl ship. The story seems to fight with the idea of Africa beginning its destiny as shaped by shell people's forces. Armah's next work, The Healers, also deals with the past: in this case, the fall register the once-mighty Ashanti empire in Ghana, as does Osiris Rising: A Original of Africa Past, Present, and Future. Though written in English, it was not published in the West back end its 1995 issue by a African house. Armah lives in the money of Senegal, Dakar.

Selected writings

The Beautyful Bend over Are Not Yet Born, Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

Fragments, Houghton Mifflin, 1970.

Why Are Surprise So Blest?, Doubleday, 1972.

Two Thousand Seasons, East African Publishing House, 1973.

The Healers, East African Publishing House, 1978.

Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Up to date, and Future, Per Ankh, 1995.