The Fanonian dialectic: Masters and slaves in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Abstract

The polemical social commentary of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has understandably been the focal point of numerous critical interpretations. Such readings, however, tend to neglect the significance of the other, interpersonal dimension of the text that positions individual characters in relation to one another in interactions that mirror and amplify Armah’s larger social concerns. This article undertakes a reading that, by tracing Armah’s intellectual heritage from Frantz Fanon, through Alexandre Kojève, to Hegel’s master−slave dialectic, simultaneously accounts for the novel’s political agenda and its more nuanced portrayal of the everyday plights of its characters. A distinctly Fanonian iteration of the master−slave dialectic, which is manifested in the highly stratified structure of Ghanaian society and in the desire for recognition that characterizes all social and economic interactions within that society, is proposed as a unifying theme by which the novel’s socio-political and interpersonal dimensions can be understood as complementary rather than oppositional or unrelated facets of the text.

In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Ayi Kwei Armah’s first novel, the plight of Ghanaian society in the years after independence is examined from the perspective of a frustrated and disillusioned character referred to only as “the man”. Given Armah’s projection of his own radical politics onto the text – an exemplary case of what Fredric Jameson (1986: 69) has called a “political dimension in the form of national allegory” – it is not surprising that critical interpretations have occupied themselves, to varying degrees, with an exploration of the polemical social commentary at work in the novel. Undoubtedly, the highly stratified Ghanaian society that Armah portrays is illustrative of his own interest in the socioeconomic circumstances of his native country, and as such has been the subject of a number of Marxist analyses. Neil Lazarus, for instance, strikes a Gramscian note in assessing the “gleam”, the obsessive pursuit of imported luxuries that pervades social and economic life in Armah’s Ghana, observing that its

ultimate goal is to impose its own imperatives upon the world absolutely. Having already achieved hegemonic status, it now endeavors also to shatter the opposition of those who deny its rationality, who resist its proselytization, and who flee from its deceitful embrace. (1987: 157)

Derek Wright, in his broad study of Armah’s novels, likewise examines the depiction of Ghanaian society through a Gramscian lens. Armah’s portrayal of the pervasive materialism of all classes of Ghanaians, he writes, “produces a socio-cultural monolith, in which the bourgeoisie, instead of provoking into existence an antagonistic proletarian counter-culture, absorbs into itself…a wholly emulative, sycophantic and bureaucratized working class” (1989: 36). John Lutz (2003), meanwhile, undertakes an unambiguously Marxist reading in analyzing the operation of commodity fetishism and conspicuous consumption in the novel.

Other responses have, of course, approached the text from different perspectives, but even in cases where the reading itself does not rely on an overtly Marxist interpretation, there seems to be a certain proclivity to dwell on the sociopolitical overtones of Armah’s writing at the expense of any in-depth examination of the characters whose lives are situated against that backdrop. Robert Fraser exemplifies this tendency in a single, overly broad assertion that Armah is “concerned with the salvation of the people in toto, the reformation of the public will, rather than the redemption of the private soul or mind” (1980: xii). Though he renders a more sensitive treatment of The Beautyful Ones later in the same volume, Fraser’s conclusion that “the man is a victim of history” (1980: 25) nevertheless conforms to a critical strain that is more interested in the sociopolitical, sociohistorical, and socioeconomic implications of Armah’s writing than his treatment of the individual consciousness struggling within and against those forces. Even Kwadwo Osei-Nyame Jr (1998), whose proper subject is the role of women in Armah’s fiction, implicitly projects a Marxian superstructure on Armah’s portrayal of the family unit. In his assessment of the man’s troubled marriage, Osei-Nyame Jr argues that “Armah represents the familial dialectic as an important site for comprehending the anxieties, tensions and types of ideological consciousness which subtend the national liberation struggle” (1998: 103). Thus, even Armah’s sensitive portrayal of emotional crisis becomes merely a subservient dimension to the larger political questions. Whatever greater or lesser virtues these arguments may possess, none succeeds in addressing the novel in its totality. Moreover, as Lutz notes, “Armah himself has unequivocally made it clear that he views Marxism as a Eurocentric discourse inapplicable to the social, economic, and cultural contradictions that characterize postcolonial struggles for autonomy” (2003: 95). Of course, any lack of Marxist intent, however definitive, needn’t preclude the possibility of a Marxist reading of the novel. It does, however, beg certain questions that it may be instructive to ask: first, might Armah’s own rejection of Marxism point to an alternative reading of the unambiguously polemical facets of the text? And second, how is one to account for the story of romantic redemption in The Beautyful Ones that follows a parallel arc, and indeed is inextricably bound, to the larger social developments at work in the novel?

No less than his ambivalence towards Marx, Armah’s intellectual debt to the writings of Frantz Fanon is well documented, a fact that escapes none of the aforementioned critics. Osei-Nyame Jr specifically examines the link between the two, finding “an ideological conjecture between Fanon’s political theory and Armah’s novelistic itinerary” (1998: 98). Armah himself has acknowledged this debt in a lengthy essay entitled “Fanon: The Awakener”, in which he emphasizes the importance of Fanon to the future of postcolonial Africa. “Without understanding him”, Armah writes, “we’ll never get where we need to go. We may move without him, but only blindly, wasting energy” (1969: 5). In his influential assessments of racism and colonialism in general, and the psyche of the colonized individual in particular, Fanon, in turn, draws upon the dichotomy between master and slave in Hegel’s essay on “Lordship and Bondage” (1807). Employing the vernacular of Hegel’s dialectic, Fanon develops a much-scrutinized interpretation of Hegelian recognition to examine the perpetual existential crisis of the black man, who is relegated to a position of slavish objectification by his white “masters” (Gibson, 1999; Gordon, 1995; Penney, 2004; Sekyi-Otu, 1996). I would propose, then, that The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born can be read, both on the societal and on the individual level, as a postcolonial and distinctly Fanonian manifestation of Hegel’s master−slave dialectic. Moreover, and contrary to Wright, who claims that “the Fanonian influence on Armah’s work…increases the fiction’s polemical thrust as it dilutes its artistic power” (1989: 50), I would contend that The Beautyful Ones operates precisely on the basis of a synergy between Fanonian polemics and artistic power, according to which the emotional journey of the main character plays upon, and is enhanced by, the highly politicized depiction of a post-independence Ghanaian society mired in corruption and economic stagnation.

Like Hegel, Fanon understands the desire for recognition as central to the asymmetric relationship of master and slave. For Hegel, “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (1807: 111). It is this play of mutual recognition that reveals to the individual consciousness its own, non-central position in the world, what Robert R. Williams calls “an I that is a We, and a We that is an I” (1992: 2). In its earliest stages, though, self-consciousness exists in a state of solipsistic uncertainty, “simple being-for-self, self-equal through the exclusion from itself of everything else” (Hegel, 1807: 113). This prompts a crisis when another self-consciousness – an “Other” – is encountered. In order to achieve the truth of their respective self-certainties, the two self-consciousnesses engage in battle, which both will survive only if one surrenders to the other, resulting in a master−slave dichotomy. For Fanon, this dichotomy is fundamental, continuing to influence race relations in his own time. But in Hegel’s dialectic, it is a merely temporary condition on the way to “pure being-for-self” (1807: 117). The master finds that recognition from the slave is not reciprocal, and therefore unsatisfactory, whilst the slave, in doing the master’s work, discovers his own ability to exert his will upon the natural world and, as a result, his own “being-for-self”. Thus the desire for recognition, though not abandoned, transcends the primitive conditions of master and slave.

Fanon’s reading of Hegel, as much application as interpretation, can be characterized as an analysis of the mechanisms of the master−slave dialectic as they function in a tangible and specific historical situation. As such, it seems to be deeply informed by Alexandre Kojève’s politicized and controversial interpretation that, through Kojève’s many distinguished students, enjoyed a position of prominence in the French intellectual climate of the postwar period (Roth, 1985: 294). For Kojève (1947), the dialectic undergoes an historical−anthropological shift: humanity elevates itself from an animalistic state by virtue of its desires – the desire for that which others desire, and, ultimately, for the recognition of others. But this desire for recognition, initially emerging in a still primitive state of development, first manifests itself in a violent confrontation:

Without this fight to the death for pure prestige, there would never have been human beings on earth. Indeed, the human being is formed only in terms of a Desire directed toward another Desire, that is—finally—in terms of a desire for recognition. (1947: 7)

Rather than approaching the encounter and subsequent battle according to Hegel’s own terms, then, Kojève positions the events in an historical context, tracing the ascendancy of man above all other animals to the historical consciousness gained in this confrontation. Consequently, his understanding of master and slave is likewise altered, becoming lived historical moments, characterizations, however abstract, of relationships actually engaged in by men throughout history. Thus it is with Marxian flourish that Kojève brings the account to its conclusion, not, as in Hegel, with the self-consciousness of the slave arising through work – though that step is critical for Kojève too – but with a critical second conflict:

In transforming the World by this work, the Slave transforms himself, too, and thus creates the new objective conditions that permit him to take up once more the liberating Fight for recognition that he refused in the beginning for fear of death. (1947: 29-30)

Kojève’s interpretation, though undoubtedly influential, has been criticized for its narrow reading of Hegel and its exaggerated emphasis on the master−slave dialectic (Kelly, 1966; Williams, 1992). While not strictly inaccurate, such objections reduce Kojève’s project to mere interpretation. As Michael Roth has persuasively argued, however, Kojève “was well aware of the personal or even violent nature of his reading of Hegel” (1985: 299). Like Fanon, “Kojève finds in Hegel a language he can appropriate in order to speak to the philosophical issues that most concern him” (Roth, 1988: 96). That Kojève’s reading constitutes a departure from Hegel is therefore indicative not of misinterpretation, but rather the deliberate, even forced, opening of discursive opportunities. For Fanon, that forced opening provides a method and vocabulary with which to undertake an historical, psychological, and existential examination of the lived experience of racism.

Though it has not gone entirely without mention (Bulhan, 1985: 102), the considerable evidence of a Kojèvian influence at work in Fanon has received remarkably little scholarly attention. Fanon himself might be to blame. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he refers to Hegel repeatedly, without a single word for Kojève. That omission has been propagated in numerous critical examinations of Fanon as well. Irene Gendzier, for example, relates Fanon’s formative encounter with Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean Hyppolite (1973: 23), but declines to mention the profound influence that Kojève had on all three. Gendzier goes on to observes that “three elements dominated Fanon’s discussion of Hegel, which was limited to an analysis of the section in Phenomenology on ‘Lordship and Bondage’: recognition, reciprocity, and struggle” (1973: 23). It is left to the reader to recall that it is that section, and those elements, that were precisely Kojève’s concerns as well. Similarly, Malini Johar Schueller contends that Fanon “radically reformulated both Hegel and Lacan by rethinking the concept of recognition from the perspective of the colonized and raced other” (2009: 248). Like Merleau-Ponty and Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan is known to have attended the series of lectures Kojève gave on Phenomenology in the 1930s (Roth, 1985: 294), but again, this salient fact goes without mention. Nevertheless, an examination of Fanon’s thought reveals that the parallels with Kojève are more than circumstantial, and indeed, though the influence of Sartre in particular cannot be dismissed, the philosophy that is born in Black Skin, White Masks, concretized in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and ultimately adopted and employed by Armah in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, is a profoundly Kojèvian interpretation of the master−slave dialectic.

Fanon’s handling of the master−slave dialectic begins with a section in Black Skin, White Masks entitled “The Negro and Hegel” (1952). Having offered a brief introduction to the dialectic, Fanon proposes a major departure: “There is not an open conflict between white and black. One day the White Master, without conflict, recognized the Negro slave” (1952: 217). But Hegel describes no such conflict arising after the opposing self-consciousnesses have found themselves in the roles of master and slave. Tellingly, Fanon, quoting directly from Hegel, is unable to find a passage supporting the requirement for a second struggle. Instead he contents himself with an invocation of the necessity of reciprocity drawn from the inaugural paragraphs of the dialectic, before the initial struggle, and before the still ambiguous relationship between the two self-consciousnesses has resolved itself into one of lordship and bondage (1952: 217-219). Only according to Kojève is a second fight for recognition called for, and thus the departure posed by Fanon is not from Hegel, but from Kojève. It is this departure that simultaneously problematizes Fanon’s interpretation and provides the foundation for his subsequent adaptation. Without conflict, the slave cannot overcome the master. Thus the Negro, according to Fanon, has yet to transcend his condition of slavery; he is merely “a slave who has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master” (1952: 219). For Fanon, the issue is rooted in the abolition of slavery, an act of white men, undertaken according to white values, which acknowledged the evil of slavery but stopped short of recognizing the human dignity of the enslaved.

The upheaval reached the Negroes from without. The black man was acted upon. Values that had not been created by his actions, values that had not been born of the systolic tide of his blood, danced in a hued whirl round him. The upheaval did not make a difference in the Negro. He went from one way of life to another, but not from one life to another. (1952: 220)

Thus, even in the post-slavery era, the black man remains fixed in the position of the slave, and the white man has not relinquished the role of master, a distinctly Fanonian condition that neither the phenomenology of Hegel nor the historicism of Kojève anticipates. And this new condition of slavery, in Fanon’s understanding, is more sinister than anything Hegel imagines. “For Hegel there is reciprocity. Here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work” (1952: 220). Again, however, Fanon’s reference to Hegel is mistaken, for in Hegel’s dialectic, it is precisely through work that the slave’s need for recognition finds its satisfaction. That the pursuit of recognition should continue beyond the realization of the self through work is a strictly Kojèvian development.

Fanon’s adaptation of the master−slave dialectic is further developed in his most famous work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in which the dialectic is applied specifically to the colonial situation. In the chapter “On Violence”, he prescribes a single, fundamental condition for the colonized to dialectically overcome his historical condition of slavery: “The last shall be first” (1961: 2). That prescription, as far as it goes, does not constitute a significant departure from either Hegel or Kojève, both of whom emphasize the paradox that the initial roles assumed by master and slave will ultimately be inverted (Hegel, 1807: 117-118; Kojève, 1947: 20). But whereas Hegel postulates this inversion as the logical and inevitable outcome of the asymmetrical relationship between master and slave, Fanon, echoing Kojève, returns to the necessity of a second, violent confrontation, in which the dialectic will have to play itself out in a way that it did not in the abolition of slavery,

for the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists. This determination to have the last move up to the front, to have them clamber up (too quickly, say some) the famous echelons of an organized society, can only succeed by resorting to every means, including, of course, violence. (1961: 3)

The subject of The Wretched of the Earth is the effect of the colonial situation on the psyche of the colonized, and the means by which that situation may be brought to an end. Fanon completed the book in 1961, and died later that year, not living to see his adopted Algeria achieve independence in 1962. Nor was he witness to the disillusionment that followed the wave of decolonization that swept Africa in the 1960s. Armah, composing The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born in the latter half of that decade, was thus in a position to apply Fanonian thought to a situation that Fanon himself did not live to see. It is startling, and in a sense redemptive of certain of Fanon’s apprehensions, the degree to which Armah’s depiction of postcolonial life in Ghana corresponds to Fanon’s specifically pre-independence adaptation of the master−slave dialectic. Lazarus (1990) identifies the influence of Fanon in the pessimism of The Beautyful Ones as well. Discussing Fanon’s forebodings about the role of the new national bourgeoisie in the postcolonial era, Lazarus observes that “what Fanon had posed as a potential threat is taken by Armah unambiguously to have come true” (1990: 56).

The Beautyful Ones opens with a stark exposition of the consequences of the Pyrrhic victory that independence had belatedly turned out to be. A conductor sits alone in a bus, reconciling the day’s fares with the number of tickets sold. He is frustrated that the majority of passengers have paid with exact change, depriving him of the opportunity to shortchange them. One customer though, apparently eager to show off his momentary affluence, had paid with a cedi note, a sum, the reader is given to understand, that is substantially greater than the fare. On receiving the note, the conductor

had looked into the face of the giver, and sure enough, the eyes had in them the restless happiness of power in search of admiration. With his own eyes the conductor had obliged the man, satisfied his appetite for the wonder of others. (1968: 2) ¹

Of course, in obliging the passenger, the corrupt conductor also bilks him, knowing that the passenger’s vanity will not allow him to expose himself by verifying whether he has received correct change. Thus, conductor and passenger are mutually engaged in what amounts to a game of recognition, an exchange from which each will derive certain benefits, if only in the short term. The conclusion of the episode, meanwhile, uses the introduction of the novel’s main character to illustrate the broader negative consequences of a society built on such exchanges. Noticing suddenly that one passenger, the man, has remained on the bus, seemingly watching him with eyes wide open, the conductor briefly becomes alarmed that his corruption has been observed, before discovering that the man is “no watcher after all, only a sleeper” (5). Indignant, the conductor orders the man off the bus amidst a flurry of vile insults, and the driver, who has been smoking a cigarette just outside the door, spits on his face as he passes. Thus we are introduced to the cynical social dynamics of post-independence Ghana. Armah’s situating of this episode at the opening of the novel serves to suggest its typicality. Indeed, the game played between the conductor and the passenger, and the indignation heaped upon the man for his failure to take part in that game, will be characteristic of all the novel’s social interactions.

These interactions take place on two levels, the personal and the societal, and are invariably portrayed through the man’s uneasy relationship with the world around him. That world is characterized by damage and deprivation, but also by aspiration. Walking to work in the morning, immediately after the incident on the bus, the man contemplates the iconic image of the Atlantic Caprice, “its sheer, flat, multistoried side an insulting white in the concentrated gleam of the hotel’s spotlights” (10). The Atlantic Caprice is a luxury hotel, a playground for the country’s elite, but it is that gleam, first mentioned in this passage, that occupies the man’s thoughts:

Perhaps then the purpose of this white thing was to draw onto itself the love of a people hungry for just something such as this. The gleam, in moments of honesty, had a power to produce a disturbing ambiguity within. It would be good to say the gleam never did attract. It would be good, but it would be far from the truth. (10)

The gleam represents the unfulfilled desires of the impoverished people: desires for things with no utilitarian purpose, for things beyond their comprehension, for things, ultimately, that derive their value from nothing more than the fact that others – the rich postcolonial elite, or the white colonial masters – have possessed them and declared them valuable. As such, the gleam recalls Kojève’s contention that “it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. Thus, an object perfectly useless from the biological point of view…can be desired because it is the object of other desires” (1947: 6). The scope of the gleam is not merely economic, however. As Lutz notes, the commodity fetishism that it engenders “shrinks the sphere of human activity to the exchanges of the marketplace and, in doing so, negates any singular or autonomous human activity struggling for articulation” (2003: 103). In the pervasive appeal of the gleam, then, we find social and economic life in Ghana, in terms of its aspirations, values, and motivating forces, structured according to the terms of Kojèvian desire.

The man at once sits outside this Kojèvian structure, and is nevertheless deeply subject to it. In his social conduct, he is most notable for his struggle to resist the allure of the gleam, wary of its callous one-upmanship and reckless mania for conspicuous consumption. By existing apart from the dominant social pursuit, the man is able to recognize its mechanisms at work, and thereby serve as a vehicle for Armah’s social commentary. Conversely, the man’s personal relationships are profoundly affected by his desire for recognition, a fact that provides the framework for the novel’s narrative arc. Indeed, what Lazarus, borrowing a phrase from Georg Lukács, identifies in the novel as an “adventure of interiority” (1990: 46), can alternately be understood as a dialectical quest for recognition. Lazarus, continuing to apply Lukács’ words, characterizes The Beautyful Ones as “the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them and, by proving itself, to find its own essence” (1990: 46). Lazarus’ reading here is a mere variation on Hegelianism, a fact that is underscored by his assessment of the novel as “preeminently a dialectical work” (1990: 46). The outstanding difference is the emphasis on interiority – according to the dialectic, there must be an exterior “Other” offering recognition in order for the soul to “find its own essence”. As the evolution of the relationship between the man and his wife, Oyo, will show, this is exactly the process that is played out in the novel.

If the exchange between the conductor and passenger establishes the moral climate of the novel, the passage in which Oyo is introduced represents the formal staging of the central conflict that will govern its events. Arriving home from work,

the man walks into the hall, meeting the eyes of his waiting wife. These eyes are flat, the eyes of a person who has come to a decision not to say anything; eyes totally accepting and unquestioning in the way only a thing from which nothing is ever expected can be accepted and not questioned. (41)

In this introduction, we see that Oyo cannot at this point be a partner in reciprocal recognition for the man. She doesn’t recognize his virtues, and the couple have consequently become emotionally estranged from one another. In the ensuing conversation, it emerges that it is precisely the man’s resistance to the gleam – his unwillingness to do, like his countrymen, whatever is necessary to secure the trappings of Western-style affluence – that is responsible for their alienation from one another. Specifically, the man matter-of-factly reveals to his wife that he has turned down a bribe. Oyo’s values, however, are configured toward the gleam, and consequently her husband’s wilful refusal of means to that end can only be baffling to her. With this gulf between them, the man and Oyo are mutually incapable of offering one another the recognition upon which each depends.

This mutual lack of recognition forces, predictably, a mutual retreat – Oyo to her naïve mother, and the man to his likeminded friend Teacher. Like the man, Teacher is resistant to the gleam, having withdrawn to a life of austerity and solitude. From the man’s perspective, this stance is enviable, as it seems to have freed Teacher, not only from the pull of the gleam itself, but from the loved ones who complicate the man’s own attempts to resist the gleam. In a telling exchange, the man expresses as much to Teacher:

“I think of you as the freest person I know,” said the man.

“Then everyone you know is a slave.”

“You have escaped the call of the loved ones, as you say.”

“Yes, but I am not free. I have not stopped wanting to meet the loved ones and to touch and be touched by them. But you know that the loved ones are dead even when they walk around the earth like the living, and you know that all they want is that you throw away the thing in your mind that makes you think you are still alive, and their embraces will be a welcome unto death”. (55-56)

This passage is revealing on multiple levels. First, and most obviously, Teacher has employed the lexicon of the dialectic in his identification of the man’s loved ones and acquaintances as “slaves”. His use of the word is not merely a rhetorical means of emphasizing his own lack of freedom; rather, he quite literally identifies himself as a slave, in terms of the dialectic, on the very simple and obvious grounds that he is not a master. He has made choices upon which he has based his life, but, in Fanon’s words, he has gone from “one way of life to another, but not from one life to another”. Or, as Armah himself argues, “culture is the environment we function in. If we made it for our own needs, then it’s our culture. If someone else made it and imposed it on us for his own purposes, what we have is a slave culture” (1969: 36). Also telling is the nature of Teacher’s longing. It is significant that he says he wants “to touch and be touched” by his loved ones. That longing suggests a desire for mutual recognition – a recognition he knows is impossible, because his loved ones are not merely slaves, but slaves willfully oblivious to their own condition. As such, in a situation that parallels the stalemate between the man and Oyo, they are unable to offer him the recognition he craves.

The morning after his visit with Teacher, the man sees the dialectic played out in yet another manner. Reaching the door to his office in the morning, the man encounters the building watchman:

The man searches for the railwayman’s pass in his pocket, but the watchman indicates that he recognizes him, and holds the door open for him. Then, for no reason the man is aware of, the watchman says, “Thank you, massa”. (104)

In this brief, seemingly unremarkable exchange, we see the need for recognition gratified in the watchman. The exchange does not affect the man, who merely contemplates the watchman’s strange use of the word “massa”. But for the watchman, who must be assumed to be of a distinctly lower class than the man, the man’s preemptive attempt to identify himself constitutes the bestowal of recognition. It is, as the watchman’s choice of word suggests, the same kind of recognition the slave desires from the master.

The man and Teacher both embody the pursuit of recognition on the personal level, but stand as mere observers to the larger manifestation of the dialectic in Ghanaian society as a whole. The dialectic on that level is represented in abstract by the gleam, and personified by the man’s former schoolmate Koomson, a corrupt government minister. Once an idealist and revolutionary leader, Koomson has discovered in power a taste for creature comforts quite at odds with the African Socialism that is the nominal policy of his government. In the description of Koomson’s home, to which the man and Oyo have come to discuss an underhanded boat purchase for which the minister requires their cooperation, we see the novel’s strongest reinforcement of Fanon’s concerns about the fate of postcolonial Africa:

The two, left alone, were at first too busy taking in the sight of the room they were in to say anything to each other…There were things here for a human being to spend a lifetime desiring. There were things here to attract the beholding eye and make it accept the power of their owner. Things of intricate and obviously expensive design. (144)

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon provides a description of the envy of the colonized that is perfectly and disturbingly consistent with the reaction of the man and Oyo to the riches they behold: “The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist’s sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession…The colonized man is an envious man” (1961: 5). The two passages are so much akin to one another that Armah’s could be mistaken as a mere reworking of Fanon’s, except for one tremendous difference: while Fanon’s subject is the attitude of the colonized subject to the colonist, Armah’s is that of one African toward another in independent Ghana. The great tragedy of the comparison, and the crux of the social criticism embedded in The Beautyful Ones, is the dispiriting realization that nothing has changed. The Fanonian phrasing of that disillusionment constitutes an almost epiphanic moment in which the devastating force of Armah’s criticism is realized. In presenting the postcolonial situation in such obviously Fanonian terms, Armah implicitly argues that the condition of slavery, far from being extinguished upon independence, continues to characterize Ghanaian society in the postcolonial period.

That the condition of slavery did not end with independence would appear to contradict Fanon, but in fact the potential for that very failure is specifically addressed in The Wretched of the Earth. Considering the massive socioeconomic changes that would have to be implemented in order to achieve anything like a functioning, prosperous society, Fanon contemplates the possibility that

the huge effort demanded of the people of the underdeveloped nations by their leaders will not produce the results expected. If working conditions are not modified it will take centuries to humanize this world which the imperialist forces have reduced to the animal level. (1961: 57)

In fact, according to Fanon, so much would have to be done right, so much would have to change, and so resistant to those necessities the new powers would be, it emerges as almost an inevitability that independence should bring disappointment. The new postcolonial elite, what Fanon terms the “national bourgeoisie” (1961: 24), presumes to undertake the impossible – to simply step in and take over where the colonists left off. “But independence, which literally forces it back against the wall, triggers catastrophic reactions and obliges it to send out distress signals in the direction of the former metropolis” (1961: 98). Thus the achievement of independence, which calls for a complete reworking of the socioeconomic complex, comes instead to reinforce the status quo, necessarily dooming the experiment to failure.

Armah’s derision of Ghana’s economic performance likewise points to the continuing condition of slavery beyond the end of colonialism. If Ghanaian society may be figuratively understood as the slave trying to escape his bondage and attain, as Kojève puts it, a “subjective human reality” (1947: 25), we see in Armah’s portrayal of that society a fundamental failure, ensuring the continuing slavery of Ghana, not only beyond independence, but in perpetuity. The problem, once again, is one that Fanon anticipates. The emergent national bourgeoisie, he argues, “possesses neither industrialist nor financiers. The national bourgeoisie in the underdeveloped countries is not geared to production, invention, creation, or work. All its energy is channeled into intermediary activities” (1961: 98). Without producing – without, that is, the benefit of the industrialists that it lacks – the postcolonial society cannot transcend the conditions of its colonial economy. This is precisely the ailment from which the Ghana of the novel suffers – an ailment for which Armah offers a succinct diagnosis in the form of a conversation between the man and a taxi driver:

It was a new kind of car altogether, and when they were inside and it had started moving off, he asked the driver about it.

“They call it a Toyota,” said the driver. “Japanese.”

“They have done well, the Japanese,” the man said.

“You have said it, brother,” answered the taxi driver. “The way things are going, it seems everybody is making things now except us. We Africans only buy expensive things”. (140)

A society that consumes, but does not produce, is necessarily relegated to a subservient position in its international economic activity. It may act as a middleman, supporting the economy of the former colonial power while enriching the new national elite, but such exchanges offer no mechanism for escape from the Manichaean terms of the dialectic. Indeed, the state, by virtue of economic necessity, remains slavishly bound to its old colonial overlords, while within society, the process does nothing but establish a new class of compromised masters. These are not men who have achieved the status of the former colonists; they are merely a lesser class of masters that has been relativized, empowered from outside to be disdainful of the impoverished masses beneath them, but still deferential to their former colonial masters who remain, in the postcolonial era, several notches above them in the global socioeconomic hierarchy.

This relativizing of the roles of master and slave engenders a sense of social paralysis that is pervasive in the novel, even in the face of apparent change. That sense is most profoundly articulated in the man’s pessimistic assessment of the prospect for improvement in the aftermath of the coup that sweeps Kwame Nkrumah’s government from power:

Someday in the long future a new life would maybe flower in the country, but when it came, it would not choose as its instruments the same people who had made a habit of killing new flowers. The future goodness may come eventually, but before then where were the things in the present which would prepare the way for it? (160)

As the example of the coup illustrates, whatever permanence the relativization of power lends to society’s condition of slavery, it introduces upheaval on the individual level. Thus Koomson, once untouchable, ceases to be a master, falling even below the level of the slave to that of the hunted when events suddenly spiral out of control. In the midst of this turmoil, the novel closes the circle that was opened with the introduction of Oyo and the lack of recognition between husband and wife. Walking home from work on the day of the coup, and feeling unusually elated, the man leaps up the steps to his front door to find that

the single leap had almost ended in a collision with Oyo. She was standing just outside the hall door, and when he could see her face properly the man judged that she was confused. She was looking as if something tremendous were disturbing her, but at the same time the man could see in her eyes something he could only think of as a deep kind of love, a great respect. He continued his forward movement until he had pushed his wife back very gently against the wall to the side of the door. Though the movement and the sudden tenderness in himself surprised him, he knew it was true, and he put all his fingers deep into her hair and held her head, pressing against her and letting her feel his desire for her. She raised her eyes in a motion of soft unbelief, and she looked like a young girl afraid she may be doing something wrong. (160)

It is revealed that Koomson, fearing for his life in the wake of the coup, is cowering inside, his safety dependent upon the charity of the man. The revolting spectre of the fallen minister, a dramatic exposition of the hazards that are attendant to the siren’s call of the gleam, has finally brought Oyo back to her husband. Thus figuratively transformed, Oyo is now equipped to offer the man the recognition he so badly needs, and he, in turn, finds once again in Oyo the strength and love that allow him to reciprocate. Their mutual recognition, only implied to this point, is consummated shortly thereafter when the man, momentarily taking leave of Koomson,

went back into the hall and stood quietly beside Oyo. She held his hand in a tight grasp. Then, in a voice that sounded as if she were stifling, she whispered, “I am glad you never became like him.”

In Oyo’s eyes there was now real gratitude. Perhaps for the first time in their married life the man could believe that she was glad to have him the way he was. He returned the increasing pressure of her hand. (165)

Oyo’s statement, almost a confession, is the declaration of her recognition of the man. In the squeezing of the hands we see the reciprocity of the sentiment, the ultimate gratification of the desire for recognition that has characterized the man’s psychological journey.

Commenting on the final reconciliation of the man and Oyo, Lazarus observes that it

serves to give the novel an immediate and potent edge of optimism that it could not otherwise have realized. The reader cannot help being encouraged by the thought that, however difficult their lives will continue to be in a material sense, Oyo and “the man” will be considerably happier in their shared future than they have been in their divided past. (1990: 75)

Though pursuing a different interpretation of the novel, Lazarus in this passage seems to reach an Hegelian understanding of the process by which the man and Oyo have dialectically overcome their alienation from one another. For Ghana, though, Armah offers no such immediate prospect of happiness. The emergence of Ghanaian society from the shroud of slavery continues to be problematic, and Armah, if cautiously optimistic, presents no straightforward path toward that end. In the man’s freshly sanguine disposition, however, we see what may be the first saplings of a new national consciousness. As the novel moves to its conclusion, the man watches a bus driver bribe a police officer, recalling the opening scene and thus closing the larger circle that frames the action of the novel. “The driver must have seen the silent watcher by the roadside, for, as the bus started up the road and out of the town, he smiled and waved to the man” (1968: 183). Lazarus, again, interprets the scene in conspicuously Hegelian terms:

It is not so much that “the man” recognizes the humanity of the bus-driver. It is rather that he recognizes the driver’s fellow-humanity, which is to say, his own as well as that of the driver – indeed, his own through that of the driver. (1990: 78)

As the bus pulls away and the titular inscription it bears is revealed, the significance of this exchange is magnified. Contrasted with the man’s wretched encounter with a different bus driver at the beginning of the novel, we see in this moment of recognition a hint at what “the beautyful ones” of the title may be: a promise of the future, perhaps, but more than that, an embodiment of the mutual respect and dignity that this last encounter exemplifies. Sartre’s idealistic reading of Fanon seems to intersect with Armah’s at this point: “the day when our human race has fully matured, it will not define itself as the sum of the inhabitants of the globe, but as the infinite unity of their reciprocities” (1961: lix). “The beautyful ones”, by this standard, are not simply some future group of people, but a spirit within the people – a spirit that may arise at any time, but that, in the Ghana of the late 1960s, had yet to be born.