Literature and Morality

Abstract

The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born reveals Armah as a moral writer who cares to bring to the fore Ghana's past ethical values, those which can form the basis for a sound nation to be built after independence. Through a scatological imagery which employs the conventional symbol of dirt, the Ghana of the 1960's is described by Armah as a country that has gone astray, and has sunk into corruption. The latter overwhelms the whole Ghanaian society and is basically related to the political system adopted by the ruling factions. Armah's attacks on Nkrumah's socialism are essentially meant to show the misuse of a political system supposed to protect the underprivileged and to stress the need for political morality. Notwithstanding his harsh criticism of Ghanaian politicians and citizens alike, however, Armah insists on the negative impact of the colonial experience on Ghanaians. Colonialism is shown to have destroyed the serenity of a once stable and coherent society, and to have planted the seeds of corruption in it. Armah's modernist treatment of the theme of corruption is certainly loaded with symbolism. In effect throughout the novel runs the leading symbol of dirt and ugliness for corruption, and that of cleanliness and beauty for morality. This is to illustrate Armah's assertion that ``the beautyful ones are not yet born'', and Ghana is not likely to be a genuine democracy in the forseeable future. Even the coup that closes the story fails to reveal such ``beautyful'' individuals, a fact that reflects the failure of the change in the structural character of society to end corruption, and which shows an authorial scepticism about the theory of social morality.Nor does the theory of personal morality -the regeneration of the individual - however promise much. Armah, at the end of the novel, posits that even the cleansing of the man in the sea does not turn him into one of the Beautyful Ones. Beauty, according to Armah, belongs to the past and the promising future of Ghana depends on its return to this past. Armah's solutions for the Ghanaian predicament reside in the lost ``union'' which used to exist in the past before colonialism. Armah sees that this idea of ``union'' - the `Ibibirman', that is the gathering of all black people- should be implemented. The move towards the realization of a communal society forms Armah's moral message. Evidently, the idea of `egalitarian society' appears clearly and as early in Armah's writing career, in such an essay as `African Socialism, Utopian or Scientific?