The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born begins with a detailed description of a bus driver. As the bus has stopped, the bus driver is no longer driving the bus. Thus, the account doesn’t focus on what should be the main part of his job (driving a bus) but on other matters. These matters revolve around money. The conductor thinks about how easy it is to collect money from the passengers during Passion Week. The conductor then considers how much more “satisfactory” is it to amass money in the “swollen days after pay day.”
The conductor’s preoccupations symbolize the way the Ghanaian government mistreats its people. A lot of people in the government seem more concerned with extrajudicial payments or bribes than with performing their job. Like the policemen, the lottery officials, and so on, it seems like the main point of the conductor’s job is to fleece regular Ghanaians....
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Nominally, the conductor holds a different job title than a policeman or a lottery official, yet they all symbolize the same basic feature of Ghana—corruption. They treat the people of Ghana not as people they’re supposed to serve but as sources for additional cash.
At first, the central character—“the man”—appears to watch the bus conductor’s avarice closely. The surveillance makes the bus driver feel ashamed of his excitement over the money. Although the man observes the driver intensely, the man doesn’t say or do anything. Normally, heroes are people of action. They’re figures who visibly stand up to bad actors. The man is not a person of action. As it turns out, the man wasn’t even keeping tabs on the conductor. As the narrator reveals, “The watcher was no watcher after all, only a sleeper.”
When the bus driver discovers the sleeping man and his spit around his mouth, he gets angry. He curses the man and orders him to leave. As the man exits, the driver spits on him. The man neither fights back nor rebels. He doesn’t espouse any normative heroic deed. Instead, he quickly walks away.
The conductor’s spit reinforces the mistreatment of the Ghanaian people. It amplifies the underhanded, transactional component of Ghana. If a person doesn’t participate in corruption, they can be discarded and treated like trash.
How does the bus conductor treat the protagonist in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born?
At the beginning of Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, the bus conductor is extremely disrespectful to the protagonist. The conductor senses the man is watching him as he smells the cedi, and the narrator says that the man’s eyes frightened him. After a minute though, the fear fades and the conductor goes to offer the man a cigarette. “How had he so frightened himself into thinking of the watcher as the bringer of his doom?” the narrator asks. But as the conductor gets closer he realizes the man has been asleep the whole time and is filled with a “savage indignation” when he sees the man drooling on himself. He proceeds to scream at the man and shame him for acting in what he sees as a disgusting, childish manner. He then kicks him off of the bus.
This seemingly micro-level interaction can actually be read as symbolic of the rule in Ghana that Armah is commenting on in this book. The conductor represents the elite in society who look down on those who perform acts of resistance. The way the man drools on himself while sleeping on the bus comes off as unnatural and unacceptable in the eyes of the conductor. The conductor responds to the action by lashing out and making the man’s life harder. This is symbolic of the way the post-colonial Ghanian government mistreats its people, particularly those who act in ways that resist or do not align with the government’s rule. The intensity of the conductor’s reaction suggests that the behavior of elites is inappropriate and over-the-top in comparison to the actions of the lower classes.