Ayi Kwei Armah is one of the most acclaimed, yet controversial, West African writers. Born in Takoradi, Ghana to Fante-speaking parents in 1939, with his father’s side Armah descending from a royal family in the Ga tribe, his work deals with corruption and materialism in contemporary Africa.
After attending a colonial boarding school in the future capital of Accra, Armah studied in the US and achieved a degree in Sociology from Harvard University in 1963. He later travelled between Ghana, Algeria, and France, often working as an editor or translator for various Francophone publications, including Jeune Afrique. It was during this time that he read the anti-colonial works of Frantz Fanon who became a significant source of inspiration to Armah’s future writing.
Following his successful completion of a degree in Creative Writing at Columbia University in 1970, Armah began teaching across Tanzania, Lesotho, and the US. In the village of Popenguine, about 70 km from Dakar, he established his own publishing house, Per Ankh: the African Publication Collective, through which his own books are now available.
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.
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. 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 included KMT: In the House of Life (2002) and The Resolutionaries (2013).
Belonging to the generation of African writers after Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, Armah has been said to “epitomize an era of intense despair.” Armah’s later work in particular has evoked strong reaction from many critics. While Two Thousand Seasons has been called dull and verbose, or the product of a “philosophy of paranoia, an anti-racist racism – in short, Negritude reborn” Soyinka has written that Armah’s vision “frees itself of borrowed philosophies in its search for unifying, harmonizing ideal for a distinctive humanity.”
As an essayist, Armah has dealt with the identity and predicament of Africa. His main concern is for the creation of a pan-African agency that will embrace all the diverse cultures and languages of the continent. Armah has called for the adoption of Kiswahili as the continental language. In addition, all of Armah’s works were concerned with the widening moral and spiritual chasm that existed between appearance and reality, spirit and substance, and past and present in his native Ghana.
