The Re-Making of Africa: Ayi Kwei Armah and the Narrative of an (Alter)-native Route to Development

Abstract

The paper is a critical exploration of Ayi Kwei Armah’s novels with a view to analysing the author’s perception of and responses to Africa’s contemporary political history. Using The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) and Osiris Rising (1995) for in-depth study, the paper stresses the trajectory of Armah’s philosophical reflections on ‘the trouble with Africa’ as it relates to governance and development. The study is premised on a theoretical assumption that Africanliterary arts, oral and written, are capable of generating the necessary stimuli for change. In its fictiveness, literature proffers different perspectives of existential problems and their solutions. A politically engaged novel, the type that Armah often writes, is an apt canvas for paradigmatic interactions of contending ideas and social forces.