[In the following essay, Petrie argues that Armah's intent in writing The Healers “is not to provide practical instruction in revolution, but to promote a body of ideals to inspire and guide meaningful and lasting change that includes, but goes well beyond, the realm of the political.”]

Critics of Ayi Kwei Armah's most recent novel are unanimous in recognizing the central opposition between inspiration and manipulation that both structures the novel and constitutes its philosophy,¹ and in identifying the essential idealism of the novel's scheme. Most critics, however, consider The Healers seriously flawed and find the source of its deficiencies in the very fact of its idealism. The novel's weakness, the arguments go, is that the utopian ideals of the healers are incapable of enactment in the temporal, historical world. Although the root assertion of such arguments is nearly undeniable, the judgment that that fact spells the novel's failure depends upon a misreading of Armah's goals. The novel does indeed assert the healers' ideals as the only true basis for African sociopolitical regeneration, but it simultaneously questions the degree to which those principles can successfully be translated into real sociopolitical action. The novel is founded upon Armah's realization of a paradox: any social movement, if it is to result in anything more than mere exchange of one regime of manipulation for another, must begin at the level of ideals, even though full achievement of those ideals in sociopolitical terms is impossible. The Healers makes its appeal through its idealism, seeking to win as wide an audience as possible to a motivating belief in the principles of inspiration. The novel's purpose is not to provide practical instruction in revolution, but to promote a body of ideals to inspire and guide meaningful and lasting change that includes, but goes well beyond, the realm of the political.

The duality between the ideals of inspiration and the realities of manipulation is so central to both the novel and its criticisms that little need be said here to elucidate its major tenets. The philosophical vision of the novel is most cogently spelled out in the chapter entitled “The Inspirers,” in which the Healer Damfo answers the eager questions of his future protégé, the youth Densu. In summary, the vision is: Having lost the knowledge of an original “wholeness” in the universe, black Africa is now divided between “two forces, unity and division. The first creates. The second destroys; it's a disease, disintegration” （82）. The people have lost their sense of spiritual interconnectedness with themselves, with others, and with the physical environment. The Healer attempts to restore that sense by learning to “read signs” （80） of wholeness in the natural world, to heal the sick by “restoring a lost unity to … body and spirit” （82）, and to work against the “disease [of] the breaking up” of “the community of all black people” （84） into nations, tribes, and classes. The means by which those goals are to be met are peaceful and contemplative. Damfo's root definition of a Healer's work is that “it's seeing. And hearing. Knowing” （79） a unifying truth that transcends temporal existence. “He who would be a healer,” Damfo continues, “must set great value on seeing truly, hearing truly, understanding truly, and acting truly. … The healer would rather see and hear and understand than have power over men. Most people would rather have power over men than see and hear” （81）. Where the world works by political coercion, the healer works by spiritual insight.

If I'm not spiritually blind, I see your spirit. I speak to it if I want to invite you to do something with me. If your spirit agrees it moves your body and your body acts. That's inspiration. But if I'm blind to your spirit I see only your body. Then if I want you to do something for me I force or trick your body into doing it even against your spirit's direction. That's manipulation. Manipulation steals a person's body from his spirit, cuts the body off from its own spirit's direction. The healer is a lifelong enemy of all manipulation. The healer's method is inspiration.

（81）

The philosophy of The Healers, then, asserts an egalitarian ideal of lost African community in total harmony with the natural and supernatural worlds, and healership is the work of restoring that lost community through a mystical faith in this true universal order.²

Critics consistently fault Armah for the putative naiveté of his novel's idealistic philosophy. Derek Wright, for example, asserts:

The egalitarian, life-respecting power he theorizes about, though perfectly at home in an ideal social order, is no more immediately graspable or translatable into practical actions and lived social realities in the existing order, than the abstraction of racial reunification that Damfo proposes to achieve with it.

（262）

Similarly, Ode S. Ogede writes that “the absence of an interventionist political ethic among the healers constitutes a weakness in Armah's novelistic vision as it denies his revolutionary socialist idealism a necessary organizational framework with which to achieve the revolution” （46）. Other critical comments follow suit. Bernth Lindfors, although disavowing any intention “to belittle the novel's importance,” does nevertheless define the book as “juvenile adventure fiction,” “good cops-and-robbers, cowboys-and-indians stuff” that “falsifies far more than it authenticates” （95）. Y. S. Boafo grants Armah the right to “his hopes, wishes, and dreams” but faults “Armah's healing prescription” for being “difficult to translate into meaningful action （in terms of [its] practicability）” （333）. Even Simon Gikandi, who acknowledges Armah's “fabular mode” of characterization, identifies as a “contradiction” the fact of “the detachment of its characters from the vagaries of common experience” （37）. The common thread in all these comments is that Armah's novel is too idealistic, that it fails to imagine realistic characters who are able to enact healer principles in life as lived by the common majority.

Criticisms along those lines arise from the mistaken assumption that Armah intends to write realist historical fiction, when in fact his approach to history and to character is unwaveringly visionary, mystical, and （in Gikandi's term） fabular. Lindfors, for example, reveals the prorealist basis of his argument when he aligns his criticism of Armah with Mark Twain's criticism of James Fenimore Cooper on the grounds that a Cooper hero “never gets his hair mussed and never farts” （95）. Twain's critique is a realist's dismissal of romanticism. But neither Cooper nor Armah has any intention of creating realistic characters; their reliance upon stereotyping and romantic idealization in no way precludes the status of their novels as serious treatments of cultural issues, as recent criticism of Cooper forcefully demonstrates. If Armah's fiction seems contrived when evaluated according to realist standards of probability and accurate observation, it—like Cooper's Leatherstocking novels—works perfectly well on its own terms, as a popular novel of social ideals.

Most of the other negative criticisms or critical reservations about the success of Armah's novel stem from similar expectations that the novel's use of Asante history to comment upon Africa's contemporary situation must entail the goals and methods of realism. But, as Neil Lazarus rightly notices, “Armah's technique in The Healers moves outside the compass of realism. For the growth, development, and even physical appearance of characters in The Healers acquire their resonance not … by their sociological authenticity, but by their value-disclosing ideality” （490）. It is true, as Robert Fraser asserts, that The Healers is a historical novel, but one that presents a thoroughly idealized version of history and is primarily concerned with articulating a philosophical ideal to motivate and guide those who would dedicate themselves to the reformation of African society. As an assertion of informing principles, Armah's book is only peripherally concerned with the realists' task of showing how social ideas get enacted on the plane of historical reality; that subsidiary concern is firmly subordinated to the novel's main goal of promulgating its motivating philosophical ideal.

Armah is fully aware that the healers' methods, if measured by standards of political pragmatism, are not particularly efficient ways of fomenting revolution. “A healer needs to see beyond the present and tomorrow,” explains Damfo. “He needs to see years and decades ahead. Because healers work for results so firm they may not be wholly visible till centuries have flowed into millennia” （84）. For reformers or revolutionists who measure social action by its efficacy in temporal terms, the prospect of a millennial duration for their efforts would be horrifying, as indeed it is even for some healers. “The disease has run unchecked through centuries,” notes Damfo. “Yet sometimes we dream of ending it in our little lifetimes, and despair seizes us if we do not see the end in sight” （84）. But the healers can admit no short cuts to revolution, because the ends they seek encompass the means employed to achieve them; the ends cannot justify the means, because the means become part of the ends, once they are achieved. A social revolution established by violence would violate the very goals it sought to establish, and thereby guarantee the need for further revolution.

There is no danger, Armah seems to be saying, that the violent and coercive methods that are usually used to bring about social change will be abandoned any time soon. It is certain, however, that the use of such manipulative means guarantees further manipulation. Even the healers themselves have trouble accepting this lesson. As Damfo, the only one of the eastern forest healers unsullied by political dabbling, notes, “The healers are also confused, not about the aim of our work, but about the medicines we may use and about what may look like medicine but may end up being poison” （84）. The confusion he identifies becomes fatal later in the novel. Healer attempts to become involved directly in Asante politics—even in the interests of furthering goals of social regeneration—represent a violation of healer principles of nonmanipulation, and end in disaster. Having abandoned the principles of inspiration by openly backing Asamoa Nkwanta, the healers' village is burned and the healers are slaughtered by operatives of the Asante royals, who “think that what healers want is to make themselves into a new kind of aristocracy to replace the old” （294）. Although the healer discipline of abstention from political manipulation does not exempt them from victimization by political manipulators, their abrogation of their own principles virtually assures their destruction at the hands of those more skilled in the use of political power; healers who choose to become manipulators will be destroyed by those more practiced in the arts of manipulation. For healer ideals to retain what inspirational power they do have in the “real” world of power relationships, their idealism must be rigorously maintained.

Armah's novel proposes that the only hope for escaping the vicious circle of political reaction is to reform judgement of human actions to accord with an order that transcends history, by a mystical faith that places adherence to informing ideals above concrete and immediate political goals. Insofar as the novel does address issues of enactment of inspiration ideals in the real political world, Armah seems nearly as pessimistic in The Healers as he did, for example, in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. The “good guys” are as thoroughly thwarted and defeated in the fall of the Asante empire as they were in the fruitless coup that ends Armah's first novel. True, Damfo has avoided the general slaughter of healers, Densu has been rescued from wrongful execution, and the villain Ababio has been deposed and awaits trial for murder. But the restoration of black community and the egalitarian reform of the African tribes seem more distant than ever, and the English grip on West Africa has been strengthened by their defeat of the Asante empire. At the novel's end, the “beautyful ones” of this tale gather at Cape Coast, having survived the English holocaust, but they seem as powerless to effect the course of political events as any of the righteous in Armah's earlier novels.

The Healers includes two characters, Asamoa Nkwanta and Densu, whose experiences demonstrate the novelist's doubtful （at best） attitude toward the possibilities for enactment of inspiration principles in the real political world. Armah's development of these characters is evidence not of naiveté, but of his acute awareness of the problems involved in acting in accord with philosophical ideals rather than with political pragmatism. Neither character is a healer, but both are allied with healers and healing principles. Densu has begun the discipline of training for healership but delays his preparation in order to act as spy and messenger in Asamoa Nkwanta's bid to defeat the invading English army. Asamoa Nkwanta retreats to the healers' village from his place at the head of the Asante army when the ritual killing of his favorite nephew throws him into severe depression and loss of identity. His restoration to healthy selfhood under the guidance of Damfo includes the partial acceptance of healer's utopian ideals of a classless, royalless, and slaveless society. Both Asamoa Nkwanta and Densu are admirable characters whose appeal derives in large measure from their sympathy with the ideals of inspiration. But it is essential to notice that neither man is himself a healer. Asamoa Nkwanta is only partially in accord with the principles of inspiration. Although he accepts healing at the hands of Damfo, and although he comes to recognize that the self-serving politics of the Asante royalty are at odds with the interests of both the army and the people, as a military commander he can never subject himself to the healers' disciplines of nonviolence and separation from royal politics. As Damfo recognizes when he parts ways with the other eastern forest healers,

Asamoa Nkwanta is a good man. He is also a valuable man, one of those highly skilled in the pursuit of a vocation. But all his goodness has been spent in the service of Asante royalty. Among our people, royalty is part of the disease. Whoever serves royalty serves the disease, not the cure. He works to divide our people, not to unite us, no matter what he hopes personally to do.

（269）

Asamoa Nkwanta's mistaken hope that he may serve the people by defending them against invasion while simultaneously avoiding royal political entanglements （after having openly threatened them with civil war!） leads to his betrayal by the royals into defeat by the white invaders. The general enlists reader's sympathies by taking a principled stand for the Asante people, against the arrogant invaders, and （implicitly） distinct from the evil royal hierarchy. But his fate indicates the degree to which Armah doubts that much, if any, good can come from the means of political manipulation, whatever its stripe.

The general's story is the primary locus of Armah's doubts about the relation of healer principles to political action. As Robert Fraser notes, Asamoa Nkwanta's story raises “the essential philosophical question of the validity of war as an instrument in the service of patriotic ideals” （89） （by which I assume he means the healers' ideals）. Damfo explicitly notes that it is not the goal of the healers to convert everyone to healership （80–81）, even though the healers envision a society in harmony with inspiration ideals. Damfo （as Fraser notes） justifies his healing of an individual whose vocation is war by invoking the healers' calling to restore the “true selves” of those psychically out of balance. The fact that Asamoa Nkwanta's true self is the “Soul of the Army” seems to indicate that a place exists for war in the society envisioned by the healers, even though violence is proscribed for the healers themselves. Further, the general makes a philosophical distinction between the justifiable use of the army for defense and its wrong use for royal self-interest （179–182）, but such a distinction, as we have seen, cannot be maintained either philosophically or practically. The general's precarious philosophical position demonstrates both Armah's awareness of the need to find modes of political action harmonious with inspiration and his pessimism about the possibility of doing so.³

Densu, too, enacts the author's doubtful attitude about the question of ideals and actions. Densu expresses an even stronger attraction to inspiration ideals, and may even possess the “healer's nature” （80） requisite to join them, but he does not become a healer within the span of the novel. As Damfo introduces “the novice” （92） to the first order of the rules of healership, the young man voices important differences between the healers' rules and his own convictions. For instance, Damfo articulates the fundamental principle of nonviolence: “The learner wishing to be a healer does not use violence against human beings. He does not fight.” Densu immediately posits self-defense as a possible justification for the use of violence, even, if necessary, to the death; “If the healer is attacked, surely he defends himself,” he reasons, because a man turned killer is less human than beast.

“As one learning to be a healer,” Damfo asked, “what would you do in such a case?”

“I would stop him.”

“Violently?”

“Violently.”

“Without killing him?”

“If that's possible.”

“If it's impossible?”

“I would kill him,” said Densu.

“That goes against the rule,” the healer said.

“Not against its meaning, I don't think.”

“What do you think is its meaning?” the healer asked.

“Respect for life.”

“How can you kill out of respect for life?”

“If what I kill destroys life,” Densu answered.

（92–93）

Readerly sympathies with the utter pragmatism of self-defense, as well as the privilege apparently granted Densu's position by its receiving the last word in this exchange, may lead us to accept Densu's ideas as compatible with healer principles, particularly because Damfo makes no final rebuttal. But neither does Damfo grant an exception to the rule against violence. The healers' mode of spreading their ideals is “inspirational” rather than coercive; Damfo states the rules and then seeks to have Densu realize the truth through open-ended dialogue, rather than to subdue him with an argument or an invocation of authority. The strict construction of the principle of nonviolence stands, at least for the healer.

A similar exchange occurs over the principle of strict avoidance of all who trade in manipulative political power. Densu, the pragmatist, questions the wisdom of forswearing involvement in all politics.

“Can healers live and work without social power always?” Densu asked.

The healer said: “Healers need to work with social power, but that power must not be diseased.”

“Does any such power exist?” Densu asked.

“It may not exist,” the healers said, “but it should be possible.”

（94）

In response to Densu's skeptical （and perfectly reasonable） questions about the practicability of healer power, Damfo reasserts the ideal of a “possible” nonmanipulative power that “may not exist” yet in the temporal world and that, as Densu notes, will take “ages” （94） to develop. Damfo insists on the healers' reliance on “a healthier source of power” （95） than that practiced by the royals, even should that mean delaying the realization of the healers' goals into “the distant future.” “Meanwhile?” Densu doubtfully asks.

“Meanwhile the healer heals the individual sick,” Damfo said.

“That is all?”

“Healers work to create a power based on respect.”

“Where?” Densu asked.

“Wherever they see possibilities.”

（95）

Densu's reservations about the healers' separatism are no less sensible, pragmatically considered, than were his objections to the principle of nonviolence. But the rhetorical shape of this passage does not mask, as did the previous exchange, the fact that healer's principles stand firm, regardless of the revisionary efforts of the apprentice Densu. The learner's positions on key healer principles represent practical adjustments to seemingly impossible ideals, but Densu's opinions are not pure expressions of healer principles. Like many of the critics of Armah's novel, Densu cannot fully accept a philosophy that seems incapable of immediate application in the sociopolitical world.

Significantly, Damfo sends Densu back to Esuano for a year of leave and reflection, rightly fearing that Densu's decision for healership may be motivated more by his disgust with the realities of manipulation than by his love of the principles of inspiration. When Densu returns to Damfo, he does so not as an accepted healer candidate, but as a fugitive from Ababio's injustice and as one in need of healing himself. Having lost his friend and kindred spirit, Anan, to Ababio's machinations, Densu comes perilously close （not for the last time） to losing his will to live. When Densu agrees to act as a spy and messenger for Asamoa Nkwanta, he acts as a free agent; he cannot act as a healer while working for the army.

Through Densu and Asamoa Nkwanta, the possibilities for political action along the lines of inspiration principles are narrowed nearly to the vanishing point, and the story's ending is notably ambiguous about the probable future course of Densu, the novel's single remaining figure of principled action. Upon his acquittal and release, Densu rejoins Damfo, Araba Jesiwa, and Ajoa, but the novel does not indicate whether he intends to resume his novitiate as a healer or to choose some other, unnamed course. What can he do? Most of the healers are dead, having proven the inefficacy of healer's principles for producing immediate political change. The defeat of Asamoa Nkwanta leaves the novel with no remaining representation of ethically governed exercise of power for Densu to emulate. As critics have often complained, the prospects for productive translation of the principles of inspiration into immediate sociopolitical action are indeed dim.

But despite Armah's pessimism about the immediate possibilities for inspiration-driven action in a world of manipulation, the novel wins our approval for characters who attempt to enact those ideals. Characters like Asamoa Nkwanta and Densu win readers' admiration through their personal integrity and their dedication to principled action. If Armah doubts the efficacy of compromise between inspiration and manipulation, he nevertheless asks us to approve the intangible qualities that drive people to seek a more inspirational social order. Asamoa Nkwanta, Densu, Anan, Nsaako the Cape Coast interpreter, and even Sakity, the novel's single example of a good king, are measured not by their ability to effect revolution, but by their rigorous integrity in attempting to live according to anti-manipulative ideals. Their appeal derives not from what they accomplish but from their effort and intention to work for inspiration. Similarly, the novelist's approval of the healer Damfo occurs on the plane of motivating ideals rather than tangible accomplishments. The novel does not ask us to accept healership as the only acceptable mode of action; it does, however, make its main healer an appealing and compelling character on the same terms of integrity and idealism as the other positive characters. Characters who make good-faith efforts to act in accord with higher ideals are designed to win our approval and admiration, but they do so in ideal rather than practical terms.

The main focus of The Healers is not upon the exigencies of political action, but on the principles that underwrite those actions. The novel acknowledges the “real world” necessity to translate philosophical ideal into political action but asserts the need for subscription to an informing ideal, despite the fact that the defeat of that ideal in historical terms seems almost a foregone conclusion. Armah is not fooling himself with a false and shallow optimism. The metaphoric reunification of the black community in the novel's closing scene does not overlook the fact that it is accidental, brought about by the triumph of anti-African English power, a parody of the kind of unity the healers seek to achieve. The novel freely admits this point. Significantly, though, the final perspective belongs to a healer, Ama Nkroma, who points out the irony of the fact that the triumph of the whites has brought about the symbolic regathering of the subjugated tribes. From the perspective of power politics and its analysis, the scene is a weak promise of an end to the black diaspora, deferred “until centuries have flowed into millennia.” But the scene is narrated from the perspective of the healers and demands that its readers decide which perspective—inspiration or manipulation—they will choose.

The novel's ending is no naive glossing over of hard facts; it is a willful assertion of dedication to the ideal as a moral imperative and as the only hope for true and lasting reform, even in the face of indefinitely deferred success in historical terms. If Armah's pessimism in his early novels was existential, so too is his new-found optimism in The Healers. The message of this novel is that the relation of ideal goals to concrete political action is necessarily paradoxical and that any political movement not driven by impossible ideals is doomed to repeat an endless cycle of manipulation. Armah's goal is neither to provide a practical handbook for revolutionaries nor to deny the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to practical change along inspiration lines. Instead, The Healers sets itself the task of instilling in a mass audience the motivating ideals that alone may result in a revolution deeper and more lasting than any mere exchange of political institutions.⁴

Notes

1. Following the precedent set by earlier critics of this novel, I have adopted the words philosophy and philosophical to denote the full range of social, political, ethical, psychological, medical, cosmological, religious, and mythological ideas included in inspiration, even though inspiration is much more than a philosophy, strictly defined.

2. Just as the healers' philosophy gains its fullest expression in Damfo's conversations with Densu, the counter-philosophy of manipulation is articulated, less extensively, in the arch-manipulator Ababio's interviews with Densu. See especially 112, 299–301.

3. Asamoa Nkwanta defines just war as war against whites, and Armah leaves unclear whether the basis for this justification occurs on grounds of self-defense or on grounds of race. In fact, the place of nonblack humanity in the healers' cosmology is ambiguous.

4. Two Armah-written essays, published in Présence Africaine in 1967 and 1984, respectively, are particularly germane to the issues of ideal and action raised by The Healers. “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?” （64.4: 6–32） and “Masks and Marx: The Marxist Ethos vis-à-vis African Revolutionary Theory and Praxis” （131.3: 35–65） both concern （in part） the relation of indigenous communistic ideals to contemporary social and political life. Those articles present complex and instructive counterpoints and continuities with each other and with The Healers, but further investigation lies outside the scope of the present essay.

Works Cited

Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Healers. London: Heinemann, 1978.

Boafo, Y. S. “The Nature of Healing in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Healers.” 1986. Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah. Ed, Derek Wright. Three Continents P, 1992. 324–334.

Fraser, Robert. The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah: A Study in Polemical Fiction. Exeter, NH: Heinemann, 1980.

Gikandi, Simon. Reading the African Novel. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987.

Lazarus, Neil. “Implications of Technique in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Healers.” Research in African Literatures 13 （1982）: 488–498.

Lindfors, Bernth, “Armah's Histories.” African Literature Today 11 （1980）: 85–96.

Ogede, Ode S. “The Rhetoric of Revolution in Armah's The Healers: Form as Experience.” African Studies Review 36 （1993）: 43–58.

Wright, Derek. Ayi Kwei Armah's Africa: The Sources of His Fiction. New York: Zell, 1989.