[In the following essay, Wright traces the use and ritual significance of numbers in several of Armah's works.]

Numbers have a customary importance in the proverbs, folk-myths, modes of divination, and seasonal ritual observances of traditional African societies, so the numerological neatness of much West African writing comes as no surprise. The days of the week, months of the year, or years in a given period may acquire magical significances and correspondences in drama and fiction in the light of numerological traditions.

For example, in Soyinka's early tradition-oriented play The Strong Breed （1963）, the hero Eman is guilty of twelve-year dereliction of his ancestral duty as hereditary carrier of the village community's sins, and this is made to correspond to another village's sins of twelve months, which it becomes his fated task to remove and to which events lead him inescapably back. Thus the annulment of the time of a single year—and, it may be, of many years of ritual malpractice in the corrupt society of the play—simultaneously effaces his own twelve-year apostasy. Numbers have the same fatalistic propensities in the parallel circular return to a lost self and a forsaken obligation by the protagonist Amamu in the more modern setting of Kofi Awoonor's poetic novel, This Earth, My Brother. … （1972）. Amamu reassumes symbolically the burden of suffering of his childhood cousin Dede, whose death from malnutrition in 1944 is made to mark exactly the centenary of the colonial invasion of Ghana and to serve as the culmination of a century of imperial pillage and neglect; thus the personal and historical burdens borne by Amamu and Independent Ghana become one and the same. In similar fashion, in Soyinka's adaptation of Euripides' Bacchae （1973） the old year which is violently purged by the sufferings of an aged slave, in the role of carrier, is symbolically equated with the whole political era of King Pentheus' evil reign.

A writer whose work has shown an especial fondness for calendrical structures is the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah. The action of his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born （1968）, is played off against an annual purification rite and in his third novel, Why Are We So Blest? （1972）, the hero's sacrificial death occurs after his twelfth diary entry and twelve days from the end of the year, at the start of what, in the traditional societies referred to by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return, is the changeover period of recreative chaos between the old and new years.¹ Armah's second novel, Fragments （1970）, is divided by its thirteen Akan-titled chapters into the thirteen lunar months of the traditional Akan year, which is brought full circle by the circumscribing narrative of the protagonist's blind, dying grandmother Naana; and these lunar divisions are in turn played off against the monthly phases of the moon, to which the Akan words Awo （birth） and Gyefo （redeemer） additionally refer. At the end of this momentous year Baako, the persecuted artist transfigured metaphorically into a sacrificial carrier, is hounded like the hero of The Strong Breed, only here it is by his own materialistic family and into the mental exile of madness rather than physical banishment. “A been-to, returned only a year ago,” comments one of his captors.² After running his pursuers into exhaustion in a quasi-ritualistic, circular chase across Accra, in which he symbolically takes over the burden of communal frustrations, repressions and neuroses, Baako“stopped running and walked deliberately down the remembered path of his first day back home” （p. 235）, as if his run has, by some precise magic, exorcised the torments of the whole of the past year. The figurative carrier's mind is “a whirling torture” as he tries “in vain to grasp some substance out of the blighted year behind” （p. 187）.

The symmetry of Armah's calendrical patterns is correspondingly evident in his numerological structures. One notable instance of this is the considerable play which the early novels make with the mystical Akan number seven and the less auspicious number five. Seven is symbolic of the Akan world's seven abosua clans, which in turn correspond with the seven heavenly bodies of traditional cosmology,³ whilst five, because it is sacred to the supreme being Onyame in traditional belief, is a taboo and therefore unlucky number in Akan lore.⁴ Ritual numbers, like other elements of ritual process in Armah's work, have much to do with the natural passage and proper experience of time, one of the properties which it is their function to measure. Naana, in Fragments, lives in a world of sacred numbers—seven days for an outdoored child, twelve hours of sunlight, five a “jinx” quality not to be tempted—and this world is ruled by natural time cycles measured in months, weeks, days and hours. It is upset by the artificial numberings of pay cycles, as when an outdooring ceremony for a newborn child is brought forward to coincide with pay-day, and by modern technology's reversal of night and day, which causes her to lose her sense of time: “Have two nights passed? Or is it two whole weeks that have passed me by? … And then they became and broke my peace, saying I had been sitting out there in the cold for hours” （pp. 1–2）. “Or have I lost count of my days all over again?” she asks her grandson Baako on the morning of the premature outdooring （p. 138）.

In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born the seven years of a prodigic child's passage from life to death symbolically match the insane rush of the first Independent government through an accelerated life in which too much happens for the significance of anything to be properly understood. Meanwhile, for the woman Maanan the same seven years measure out of the painful path to madness, paved by bitter disillusionment with her Messiah, Nkrumah, and the loss of her political faith. In Fragments sevens abound in the hollow posturing rhetoric with which Westernized Accra surrounds a pseudo-indigenous art and culture. The ancient regalia of the seven clans glitters gaudily in a “surfeit of brightness” from the gold-leaf grille of Ghana Bank, where Fifi Williams uses his office to pick up good-time girls who speak like Hollywood actresses （pp. 95–97）. The permanently non-functioning, phantom buses of the new Ghana's transport service are timed, traditionally, to arrive every seven minutes. At the level of the novel's myth-structures which are opposed to the empty sham of this material world, reference is made to the figure of Mammy Water, the Woman of the Sea or Sea-goddess who, in West African mythology, has magical revitalizing powers and who, after they have spent seven years in the sea, sends back her faithful lovers as visionary healers and her betrayers and deserters as madmen.⁵ In Fragments, Mammy Water is represented by the Puerto Rican psychiatrist Juana who comes from across the sea to Ghana in the seventh year of her failing marriage and, after making love with Baako in Mammy Water's element, listens with him to a fisher-boy's “seven separate songs” which rhythmize the sea's giving up of its nourishment （p. 184）. Juana is a more authentic Mammy Water than Maanan in the first novel: her lover's betrayal and desertion of her values during her absence leads, appropriately, to his madness, which only she can heal—at the end of the book Juana returns to rescue Baako from the asylum and the clutches of his acquisitive family—whilst in the earlier novel it is the healer, not her faithless lover, who is spurned and punished by madness and becomes one of the altered, not the alterer of consciousness. Sevens and fives figure again in Armah's two historical novels, Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers （1973 and 1978）, which are divided, respectively, into seven chapters and seven parts, and in which the unity of the seven Akan clans is splintered by royal intriguers and by colonial incursions and traditional values are kept alive by enclaves of guerrillas and healers exiled to fifth groves.

More central to the ritual fabric of Fragments is the custom of outdooring the newly born only after seven complete days have passed. The ordained period is crucial: firstly, because of the traditional sacredness of the number eight to the fertility goddess of the Akan earth,⁶ and, secondly, because of the traditional West African belief that the natural cycle of one week must go round before the child can be fully admitted and initiated into its full life cycle on the earth. The completed week represents the whole life cycle in microcosm and, beyond this, the whole cycle of birth and death since the newly born is understood as being on loan from the other world, to which it will return along its “circular way” sooner or later. During the course of this perilous initiatory cycle the child is a thing of two worlds: it is, in Naana's words,“only a traveller between the world of spirits and this one of heavy flesh” and is still “in the keeping of the spirits” （pp. 138–39）. The guardian spirits who accompany it will not retreat to the other world and abandon it to earthly care until this trial period comes to an end with the completion of the seventh day of life. “The seventh night, deep deep night of the black black land of gods and deities they will come out. … If they insist then I shall die the death of the blood,” says Awoonor's Amamu of their Ewe counterparts.⁷ Seven as the number of fertility, healing regeneration and continuing life seems also to be bound up with the belief that spirit-children—variously called abiku, ogbanje, and amomawu—are contracted to the spirit world to come and go to the same mother a total of seven times before being persuaded to resume a normal life cycle.⁸ In Fragments the behaviour of Baako's mother Efua and his sister Araba, the child's mother, seems least likely to persuade the reluctant child to remain in this world, and their departure from traditional practice is significantly indexed by the general commutation of the hallowed seven into the ominous five. Allowing the pay cycle to override the ordained weekly cycle, the family brings the outdooring ceremony forward from seven to five days—this, moreover, for an already premature baby who finally arrives after five miscarriages and whose coming is linked by the mother with the parallel home-coming, after five years abroad in the “other world” of America, of her brother Baako, who is himself Efua's fifth child.

There is more at stake here than numerological sanctities, however, and more than the ritual order's traditional alliance of religious feeling with practical common sense, which is demonstrated in Naana's question: “They have lost all belief in the wisdom of those gone before, but what new power has made them forget that a child too soon exposed is bound to die?” （p. 284）. The implications are more far-reaching and lead to the moral center of Armah's numerology. In the unbroken eschatological cycle of traditional beliefs like Naana's, the newly born are watched over by the ancestors from whose spirit world they have just arrived and may even reincarnate some of their characteristics; the children will later repay the debt by guaranteeing to elders who are about to become ancestors a “personal immortality” in their own living memories.⁹ The inability of Araba's child to get born until after the fifth attempt is proportionate to the exclusion from the family of the grandmother. The refusal of a dignified, revered old age to Naana implies also the denial of her personal immortality since she is forgotten even before her death. The neglect of one end of the cycle interferes with developments at the other: the circular continuum of death and birth, the ancestors and the unborn, is abruptly broken, and the wheel on which, in Naana's words, “everything goes and turns around” （p.1）, is halted. The five years of Araba's miscarrying children, one for each year of Baako's exile, are also the five years in which Naana's position in the family is permitted to deteriorate from that of a family elder who retains the authority to assert her superior rights at a libation ceremony （at Baako's departure） to that of one who, now blind and ignored, has no rights at all （Naana at Baako's return）.

The traditional purpose of ritual and its precise numerological functions is to hold in place, in a finely calculated balance, the walls of a sacred cycle of being. Measured libations and prayers, which in Fragments are forgotten by all but Naana, maintain the contiguity of the cycle's interdependent phases of birth, growth and death, arrival and departure, childhood and spirithood, in the light of the belief that a going in one world is always a coming in another. The different meanings of the word “Naana”—grandparent, grandchild and ancestor—establish a verbal continuum between the three which registers their actual interconnectedness in the cycle. Prayers to the ancestors for intercession in matters of fertility testify to the power of the dead over birth and, proportionately, of outgoing over incoming lives. The not yet born turn in a wheel of dependency with the not yet dead. The numerological symmetries of Armah's second novel reflect the fine balance in which this wheel is held by ritual observance and stress the paramount importance, in traditional belief, of its cycle's undisturbed continuity.

Notes

1. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return （Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974）, 2nd edition, pp. 62–73.

2. Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments, 1970 （London: Heinemann, 1974）, p. 248. Further page references, taken from the 1974 edition, are given in parentheses in the text of the article.

3. Eva Meyerowitz, The Sacred State of the Akan （London: Faber, 1951）, p. 27.

4. Ibid., p. 95

5. Kofi Awoonor, Interview with John Goldblatt, Transition 41 （1972）, 44.

6. Meyerowitz, p. 76.

7. Kofi Awoonor, This Earth, My Brother … （London: Heinemann, 1972） p. 13.

8. Christie C. Achebe, “Literary Insights into the Ogbanje Phenomenon, Journal of African Studies 7, 1 （1980）, 36

9. John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy （London: Heinemann, 1969）, pp. 24–26, 82–84.