[In the following essay, Lazarus draws connections between the thought and writing of Frantz Fanon and Ayi Kwei Armah, focusing on Armah's first three novels.]

Ayi Kwei Armah's first three novels—The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Fragments (1970), and Why Are We So Blest? (1972)—are all set in postcolonial Africa. Any attempt to delineate the conceptual horizon of these three novels must take the work of Frantz Fanon as its point of departure. Armah's intellectual debt to Fanon is profound, and freely acknowledged. Unless Fanon is understood, Armah himself wrote in “Fanon: the Awakener,” a 1969 essay, “we'll never get where we need to go. We may move without him, but only blindly, wasting energy.”¹ Specifically, we must return to Fanon's theorization of the African revolution.

In outlining the terms of this theorization in chapter 1, I drew attention to two rather contradictory strains in Fanon's writing. There was his “partyist” orientation, in terms of which the problems of articulating a revolutionary avant-garde with an oppressed and resistive but unorganized mass of the colonized population were considered in compellingly dialectical fashion. And there was his “messianism,” in terms of which the moments of (revolutionary) consciousness and (spontaneous) resistance were telescoped together in a prophetic register that made it sound as though the hour of revolution in Africa had already announced itself and needed only to be recognized in order to sweep away all obstacles to its successful realization. I will now consider these “tendencies” in Fanon's work a little more closely, examining them through the lens of independence in Africa.

In his “partyist” aspect, Fanon is quite unambiguous about African independence. Independence involves merely a placing of colonial social relations onto a new, and more mediated, basis, that of neocolonialism. Nothing essential changes at independence. Above all, “[t]he national economy of the period of independence is not set on a new footing. It is still concerned with the groundnut harvest, with the cocoa crop and the olive yield. In the same way there is no change in the marketing of basic products, and not a single industry is set up in the country. We go on sending out raw materials; we go on being Europe's small farmers, who specialize in unfinished products.”² The nationalist bourgeoisies, which, all over Africa, assume power in the ex-colonies that now thrust themselves into the international limelight as sovereign independent states, represent a wholly parasitic social fraction. From the perspective of liberation, in fact, Fanon describes them as “literally … good for nothing … When [the nationalist bourgeoisie] has vanished, devoured by its own contradictions, it will be seen that … everything must be started again from scratch … since that caste has done nothing more than take over unchanged the legacy of the economy, the thought, and the institutions left by the colonialists” (WE 176).

This seems perfectly clear, if distressingly bleak. The suggestion is that independence functions to perpetuate imperialist domination while throwing the national liberation forces off balance. Thus when, in his 1969 essay, Armah presents Fanon's thought to us, he reaches what would seem to be the appropriate conclusion:

Africa under white European power was divided into a number of colonies for easier control. The entire economy of the continent was planned to serve not the African people but the European and American masters.

Independence did not mean that this enslaving arrangement was destroyed. On the contrary, in place of white governors working to keep the African people down we have African heads of state and their parasitic élite maintaining the same old exploitative system in which the economy served European and American needs. The African ruling classes do not rule in the interests of African people. If they function at all, they function as agents of white power.³

Unexplained to this point, of course, is the question of why imperialism should have been obliged to elaborate the “strategy” of independence in the first instance. Why, to use a recent metaphor of Armah's, was it necessary to shift “the colonial machine shredding Africa into neocolonial gear”?⁴ Fanon's answer to this question is that, if it is appropriate to interpret independence as an exercise in imperial legitimation, functioning to throw the national liberation forces off balance, its ideological precondition must be seen to consist, paradoxically, in the weakening of colonialism as a mode of imperialist governance, consequent upon the anticolonial militancy of the decolonizing years. As a mode of governance, colonialism had become indefensible—not morally, for this was not a particular concern of the colonizing powers, but politically and economically. In the era of independence, however, “[c]olonialism, which had been shaken to its very foundations by the birth of African unity, recovers its balance and tries … to break that will to unity by using all the movement's weaknesses” (WE 160). In other words, if independence is to be regarded as an imperialist “ploy,” it must be viewed as a ploy mandated by the “upward thrust of the people” (WE 164), by “the people's” ultimately irresistible mobilization for liberation.

In speaking of “the upward thrust of the people,” of their “will to unity,” Fanon provides us with a number of concrete examples, drawn from the years of the “liberation struggle” in Algeria. We are invited to observe the fruits of a purposive dialectical interaction between the revolutionary cadres of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) and “the Algerian people.” Fanon suggests, thus, that

One of the greatest services that the Algerian revolution will have rendered to the intellectuals of Algeria will be to have placed them in contact with the people, to have allowed them to see the extreme, ineffable poverty of the people, at the same time allowing them to watch the awakening of the people's intelligence and the onward progress of their consciousness. The Algerian people, that mass of starving illiterates, those men and women plunged for centuries in the most appalling obscurity have held out against tanks and airplanes, against napalm and “psychological services,” but above all against corruption and brainwashing, against traitors and against the “national” armies of General Bellounis. This people has held out in spite of hesitant or feeble individuals, and in spite of would-be dictators. This people has held out because for seven years its struggle has opened up for it vistas that it never dreamed existed. Today, arms factories are working in the midst of the mountains several yards underground; today, the people's tribunals are functioning at every level, and local planning commissions are organizing the division of large-scale holdings, and working out the Algeria of tomorrow.

[WE 188]

In spite of their ethical power, it is precisely in such passages as these in Fanon's work that the problem of messianism arises. Briefly, Fanon's evocations present us with a revolution in the making. The masses have been “awakened.” Through struggle and through organization they have “come to know themselves. They have decided, in the name of the whole continent, to weigh in strongly against the colonial regime” (WE 164). Through struggle and through organization, they have become “an adult people, responsible and fully conscious of [their] … responsibilities” (WE 193). Admittedly, the road to liberation is a long one, and the journey is not only not concluded at independence but is, rather, only latterly begun. But that it has begun, and that its momentum is growing and irreversible, seems to Fanon indisputable. It is not for nothing that he refers to a “coordinated effort on the part of two hundred and fifty million men to triumph over stupidity, hunger, and inhumanity at one and the same time” (WE 164).

Attractive though they might seem, the insufficiency of these premises has been exposed brutally by history. Fanon's examples are drawn from the struggle in Algeria, he tells us,

not at all with the intention of glorifying our own people, but simply to show the important part played by the war in leading them toward consciousness of themselves. It is clear that other peoples have come to the same conclusion in different ways. We know for sure today that in Algeria the test of force was inevitable; but other countries through political action and through the work of clarification undertaken by a party have held their people to the same results. In Algeria, we have realized that the masses are equal to the problems which confront them.

[WE 193]

The verdict of history mocks these brave words. Fanon died in 1961. In 1962, independence came to Algeria, after a war against the French colonial forces that had lasted for eight years and claimed a million Algerian lives. By the mid-1960s, however, the “revolution” had, as Ian Clegg narrates, already run demonstrably aground:

In just over five years the Algerian revolution ha[d] been recuperated, institutionalized, and then emasculated by a new bourgeois elite firmly entrenched in the state and party. The comités de gestion had been suppressed or existed in name only. Autogestion, once so proudly proclaimed as Algeria's contribution to the construction of revolutionary societies in the Third World, had given way to a banal state capitalism. The original leaders, of whatever political complexion, had been replaced by previously unknown careerists and bureaucrats.⁵

Far from proving “equal to the problems which confront[ed] them,” the masses of the Algerian population were once again disenfranchised in independence. Far from continuing to build upon their achievements of the anticolonial war, to intensify their militancy, and to speak “in the name of the whole continent,” they found themselves once again divided and unheeded. Far from demolishing the patriarchal domination of women in Algerian society by securing “the birth of a new woman,” they failed quite categorically to fuse “the destruction of colonialism” with the question of women's emancipation.⁶

Given Fanon's revolutionary optimism, how are these “setbacks and defeats” of the postcolonial era to be accounted for?⁷ It is worth repeating that, for Fanon in his “partyist” aspect at least, the moment of independence is not to be confused with that of revolution. It would be wrong, therefore, to suggest that his theorization of the African revolution is rendered invalid by the failure of postcolonial regimes to effect a revolutionary transformation of Algerian society. But it would not be wrong to raise the question of consciousness, to ask whether the wholesale demobilization of “the masses” in the postcolonial era can possibly be reconciled with Fanon's portrait of a disciplined and progressively unified force that, during the struggle against the French, had stood proof against tanks and torture and terrorist raids. It is precisely this question, indeed, that Ian Clegg asks in advancing his critique of the “fallacies of Fanonism”:

Fanon … is at pains to emphasize the effect that participation in revolt has on the development of consciousness … In L'an V de la révolution algérienne he prophesies that the participation of Algerian women in the struggle against colonialism foreshadows their liberation from traditional male dominance. The fact that this liberation was not achieved after independence is symptomatic of the underlying fallacies of Fanonism. Neither the peasantry nor the subproletariat played any other than a purely negative role in the events after independence. Involvement in the revolt against the French did not transform their consciousness. Fanonism … lacks a critical and dialectical analysis of the process of the formation of consciousness.⁸

The explanation that Fanon offers in The Wretched of the Earth for this dissipation of mass militancy after independence turns on the role allegedly played by populist leadership. Writing before Algeria and most other African colonies had attained independence, but with the example of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (whose postcolonial policies he had been able to examine first hand during numerous visits to Accra between 1957 and his death four years later) firmly if implicitly in mind, Fanon speaks of a dynamic leader, a “man of the people,” who will have “behind him a lifetime of political action and devoted patriotism,” but whose objective historical role in the independence era it will become to “constitute a screen between the people and the rapacious bourgeoisie” (WE 167-68). This leader might play his role wittingly or unwittingly; but play it he must. During the anticolonial struggle it may have been possible for him to represent the interests of “the people” while working within the party structures of the national bourgeoisie. After independence, this practice will become impossible. Increasingly, his new class situation will render this leader's ideological pronouncements on behalf of “the people” actively hypocritical.⁹ It will then become his preeminent task not to lead but to “pacif[y] the people”:

For years on end after independence has been won, we see [the leader] incapable of urging on the people to a concrete task, unable really to open the future to them or of flinging them into the path of national reconstruction, that is to say, of their own reconstruction; we see him reassessing the history of independence and recalling the sacred unity of the struggle for liberation. … During the struggle for liberation the leader awakened the people and promised them a forward march, heroic and unmitigated. Today, he uses every means to put them to sleep, and three or four times a year asks them to remember the colonial period and to look back on the long way they have come since then.

[WE 168-69]

This theorization of the duplicitous role of populist leadership in the era of postcolonialism is conceptually mandated, in Fanon's work, by the need to account for the fragmentation of the national liberation forces after independence. It is, as such, only necessary to the extent that the national liberation forces—“the people”—are seen to have acted as a revolutionary class in the anticolonial struggle. And this, of course, is precisely where Fanon's messianism is implicated. Fanon calls upon us to interpret the mobilization of “the masses” during the struggle against the French colonial forces as a mature and responsible taking up, on their part, of the burden of revolution. Yet he also asks us to accept that, at independence, these newly mobilized “masses” will allow themselves to be “demobilized,” that is, to be disarmed (even if only temporarily), by the empty promises of the new leadership. The contradiction between these two claims is merely softened, not dissolved, by the insertion of the populist “man of the people” between leaders and led in the postcolonial society.

The most plausible explanation for the fragmentation of the national liberation forces after independence remains invisible to Fanon: namely that, far from “splintering” after independence, these forces had only seemed to be united before it. Fanon speaks adamantly of the “awakening” of “the people,” of their “intelligence and the onward progress of their consciousness.” One is led increasingly to the conclusion that what is at issue here is either an intellectualist romanticization of “the people” as spontaneously revolutionary or, more likely, a messianic misreading of their political bearing during the anticolonial struggle. For if the numerous studies of the Algerian war against the French colonial forces have tended to any single conclusion, it is, as Clegg has observed, that “[t]he involvement of the population of the traditional rural areas in the independence struggle must be clearly separated from their passivity in face of its revolutionary aftermath. The peasants were fighting for what they regarded as their inheritance: a heritage firmly rooted in the Arab, Berber, and Islamic past. Their consciousness was rooted in the values and traditions of this past, and their aim was its re-creation.”¹⁰ In taking up arms against the French, in other words, the Algerian peasants were fighting a traditionalist fight to reestablish a way of life that colonialism had decimated. In spite of the proselytizing work of revolutionaries like Fanon, the peasants were not aiming their actions at the “Algeria of tomorrow,” but seeking, rather, to restore that of yesterday.

If this critique seems decisive, it is, nevertheless, worth emphasizing the integrity of Fanon's position. Having previously suggested (however erroneously) that in struggling against the French colonial forces, “the masses” were on their way to making a revolution, Fanon does not reverse himself in speculating that after independence they will allow themselves to be lulled into quiescence or conformism. On the contrary, he maintains that their belated “awakening” in the anticolonial era is irreversible. Having been “awakened,” they will never again permit themselves to be “put back to sleep.” The populist leader's attempts to pacify them by telling them that the battle has been fought and won, and that they have come such a long way in so short a time, will ultimately be made in vain:

Now it must be said that the masses show themselves totally incapable of appreciating the long way they have come. The peasant who goes on scratching out a living from the soil, and the unemployed man who never finds employment do not manage, in spite of public holidays and flags, new and brightly colored though they may be, to convince themselves that anything has really changed in their lives. The bourgeoisie who are in power vainly increase the number of processions; the masses have no illusions.

[WE 169]

The disarming of “the masses” after independence by the screening maneuvers of populist leaders will prove only temporary. Sooner or later, they will “see through” the screen: “the masses begin to sulk” (WE 169); “slowly they awaken to the unutterable treason of their leaders”; “a decisive awakening on the part of the people, and a growing awareness that promises stormy days to come”; “[a]t one and the same time the poverty of the people, the immoderate money-making of the bourgeois caste, and its widespread scorn for the rest of the nation will harden thought and action” (WE 167). To the extent that independence constitutes an imperialist “ploy,” in other words, functioning to secure the continuation of colonial relations by other means, its immediate ideological effect will be to retard the forward movement of the revolution. But once set on track, the train of the revolution cannot permanently be derailed. “The awakening of the whole people will not come about all at once; the people's work in the building of the nation will not immediately take on its full dimensions (WE 193). But that “the whole people's” “awakening” will come about in due course, Fanon leaves us in no doubt. In this affirmative vision lies his power as a theorist of revolution.

.....

Fanon's thoughts about national liberation and independence are construed, sharpened, stretched, and ultimately turned against themselves in the thought of Ayi Kwei Armah. Armah was born in Sekondi-Takoradi in Ghana (then the colony of the Gold Coast) in 1939. This brief statement already implies a disposition: for Sekondi-Takoradi was a major port city, with a large, relatively proletarianized, and politically active population; Ghana was the “Black Star” of Africa, the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve political independence from the colonial powers; and the year of Armah's birth, as Robert Fraser has noted, “place[d] him within a generation whose experience of the political development of West Africa [was] unique.”¹¹

The resonance of these skeletal biographical details was to be amplified in the course of Armah's education. His secondary and sixth-form schooling were completed at Achimota College, just outside Accra.¹² Achimota had been established by the colonial government shortly after World War I with the express mandate to educate future leaders of the colony. It was to be to the Gold Coast what Eton and Harrow were to England. Among its early recruits had been Kwame Nkrumah, who had graduated from Achimota in 1930.¹³ By the time Armah entered the school, in the early 1950s, its reputation as “one of the finest secondary schools in all Africa” was solidly grounded.¹⁴ At the same time—and unavoidably, since a disproportionate number of the leading nationalist politicians in the colony were its graduates—it had become also a highly politicizing institution in a sense not anticipated by its colonial founders. Students attending Achimota found themselves thrown into a passionately charged ideological atmosphere, where questions of “Self-Government” and nationalism were debated on a daily basis. Achimota's students rode the crest of the wave of anticolonialism during the 1950s. Those who had committed themselves to Nkrumah's cause advanced from one triumph to another as his Convention People's Party swept all before it in the years leading up to independence. Armah was unambiguously to be numbered among this party's members. In 1957, at the time of Ghana's independence, he was seventeen years old.

In 1959, after a brief apprenticeship at Radio Ghana, Armah left Africa for the United States. He spent a year at Groton, a prepratory school in Massachusetts, before entering Harvard in the fall of 1960. He never completed his degree at Harvard. Armah had entered the university proposing to major in literature. Before the end of his first year, he had switched his concentration to the social sciences; his “centre of interest,” as he himself has recently explained, had “shifted from the contemplation of arrangements of symbols, images and words, to a scrutiny of the arrangements of the social realities buried under those words, images and symbols.”¹⁵ This shift bespeaks a further radicalization of Armah's intellect, a radicalization that would have been prompted more by developments outside the university than within it. He observes, for instance, that his decision to switch the focus of his study was deeply motivated by the need he felt to comprehend the implications of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese anticolonialist leader who (rather like Nkrumah in Ghana) “had worked to create a unified national movement in a fragmented land, had come to power through democratic elections, and, to judge by all he said, aspired to move together with all Africans from a servile to an independent, self-reliant status.”¹⁶

Nor could Armah have remained uninfluenced by events on the domestic American front. It must be remembered that the early 1960s saw a burgeoning of political activism throughout the United States. Robert Fraser provides a succinct assessment of the radicalizing effect of this activism on Armah's thought. Armah's years in the United States, he writes,

correspond almost exactly to the most turbulent period in recent black American politics. It was then that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations felt the full brunt of the Civil Rights Movement which did so much to induce self-respect and political solidarity among people of African descent. The experience of confrontation of a more stridently racial variety combined with the candid rhetoric of revolt can be seen to have affected Armah's thinking positively. To summarize, this is observable in two ways. First there is his deep ingrained suspicion of the self-defensive antics by means of which a white élite attempts to bolster up its supremacy … Secondly, there is the strongly embedded belief that black people must carve out their own destiny independent of the corrosive influences of white contact. Historically, this insight derives from the writings of the Jamaican thinker Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), a man whose philosophy also influenced Nkrumah. There was, however, a marked revival of such thinking in the 1960s, finding its ultimate expression in the Black Muslim Movement.¹⁷

In these terms it is perhaps not surprising that by the beginning of his final year at Harvard, in 1963, Armah had reached the decision not to complete his undergraduate studies. He writes that “such matters as academic kudos, social status and professional careers had already come to seem profoundly irrelevant to me.”¹⁸ This decision ought not, however, to be interpreted in the light of a spurious protest against the formalities of academia. Armah did not “drop out.” Rather, “I'd been trying to decide what my lifework was to be. … I had decided, if possible, to work with the liberation movements in southern Africa, all involved, from my perspective, in the same fundamental process. I left Harvard on receipt of what, after preliminary contacts, seemed to me a clear signal that those I sought to work with were ready to welcome me.”¹⁹

If we “freeze” Armah's intellectual outlook at the point of this decision to leave Harvard and America for the southern African liberation front, we are presented with a specific and clearly demarcated constellation. The young supporter of Nkrumah has become a (pan) African revolutionary. He identifies himself “not simply as an Akan, an Ewe, a Ghanaian and a West African, but most strongly and significantly as an African.”²⁰ Ethnic, linguistic, national, and regional ties are not denied, but are considered secondary to an overarching political consciousness of self as an African, an identity neither strictly continental nor strictly racial, but strongly implicated in both taxonomies. It is, moreover, in these terms that Armah calls for revolution: the task as he sees it is to overthrow not simply colonialism, but imperialism, to create the conditions of possibility of what he has often called “creative” African leadership.

These twin instances of “Africanity” and revolutionism, already present in 1963 as the pillars upon which the young Armah had elaborated his political philosophy, have continued to undergird his thinking ever since. The African revolution is still held to be an indispensable necessity, the sine qua non of liberation. Yet this formulation will not in itself enable us to understand the conceptual universe of Armah's fiction. For between the outlook with which the young student had set out in 1963 and the outlook of his first three novels, published between 1968 and 1972, there is an immense difference of perspective. The student's outlook had been an affirmative vision, modeled on the writings of Fanon. Armah had decided that his “lifework” would be revolution. Revolution, Fanon's African revolution, had seemed to him not only necessary, but also a practical possibility. Indeed, it had seemed not merely possible, it had seemed actually to be taking place while Armah himself was spending his time—under the circumstances, dallying—in America. Fraser has described this cast of mind extremely well:

For Armah, as for many at this period, the African revolution was a matter of strict necessity. So much was axiomatic and time has done little to mitigate its force. However, in the heady atmosphere of that time, it must have seemed not only necessary, but also imminent. Schooled as Armah was on Nkrumah's peremptory and effective demands for “Self-Government Now” together with the teachings of men like Malcolm X that the bastion of white supremacy was fatally breached and about to fall, it must have appeared that the hour of reckoning was night. To adapt the title of his first novel, the “beautyful ones” seemed not only to be born but actually storming the battlements.²¹

In his third novel, Why Are We So Blest?, Armah describes what he calls the “initiation” of a young African man, Solo, who returns to Africa after studying abroad for a few years, eager to enlist in the forces fighting for the liberation of his homeland from Portuguese colonialism. Traveling to the front, Solo discovers to his unimaginable horror that the “revolution” is being corrupted by its leaders even as it is being waged. “What if you find inequalities within the struggle to end inequality?” he asks, and to him the question seems unanswerable. Recoiling from what he has seen, he suffers a breakdown:

The initiation was a quick death of the hopeful spirit. For days my body shook with the realization. Refusing to renew itself, rejecting sustenance, it threw out life already stored in it. All my apertures ran with fluid, living and dead, escaping a body unwilling to hold them: blood, urine, vomit, tears, diarrhea, pus. This particular place I had come to was no place of sharing. No sharing, but the same struggle for privilege, going on in this terrain of my dreams with a biting intensity inside the attempt itself to overturn privilege. More. Here privilege meant life, immediate survival; at the other end, men filled with hope came to fight for life, and unprotected, found a stupid death.²²

Armah's itinerary seems to have been similar to Solo's. Armed only with what proved to be illusions about the new world that the “coordinated effort” of Fanon's 250 million wretched of the earth were supposed to be in the revolutionary process of bringing into existence, he traveled 7,000 miles over four continents in less than a year in a desperate and unavailing exercise to find “the terrain of [his] dreams”:²³

Nine months after I'd left Harvard, I found myself with only one exit. It led back to the world I'd sought not simply to abandon but to work actively against. Less importantly, my health, till then always excellent, had been destroyed by months of malnourishment, poor accommodation and sheer uncertainty. For the first time in my life I was ill enough to be hospitalised, first in Algiers, then in Boston. It's an understatement to say I had a nervous breakdown: it was my entire being, body and soul, that had broken down.²⁴

Armah's experiences in Africa, Asia, and Central America, truncated though they had been, had convinced him that the “really creative work” of “changing [the imperialized world's] social realities for the better” was nowhere being conducted.²⁵ Everywhere, as in Algeria, so-called revolutions were being recuperated and institutionalized, and new regimes were moving smartly to enthrone themselves in the very positions of power and privilege only lately vacated by departing colonial administrations. Worse, even the progressive forces that had supposedly been responsible for the retreat of colonialism seemed to have been dissolved or destabilized by the smokescreen of independence. Armah, at least, could discern no resistive agencies to which his revolutionary commitment might meaningfully be given. If revolution, thus, remained indispensable, it also came to him to seem impossible.

This insight brings us up against the horizon within which Armah's three novels of postcolonialism take shape. The African revolution is essential but impossible; it must take place but it cannot. The enigma is raised as a unanswerable question in The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, his first novel: “The future goodness may come eventually, but before then where were the things in the present which would prepare for it?”²⁶ The novels set themselves the task of accounting for this agonizing historical contradiction, by way of combating it. They are predicated on failure, against which they struggle. Ideally, it seems, Armah would prefer not to be a writer. Indeed, in an article published in 1984, he distinguishes categorically between intellectualism and revolutionism, observing that “[a] revolutionary is a participant, in actual praxis, in a movement that overturns an oppressive social system, replacing the oppressive rulers with the oppressed. By this definition Lenin, Mao, Giap, Ho, Fanon and Cabral were revolutionaries.”²⁷ But by his reckoning the universe of postcolonialism looms as profoundly unpropitious for revolutionary practice. And in such times and under such circumstances, he speculates, creative writing might be defended as a mode of activity, even if only negatively so. Thus it is that Armah presents us, in “One Writer's Education” (1985), with the following autobiographical apology for the vocation to which, in the days and months following his breakdown in 1963, he reluctantly committed himself:

The physical damage alone took months in hospital to repair. After that a worse problem remained: how to work up some semblance of motivation for living in a world dying for change, but which I couldn't help to change. I knew I could write, but the question that immobilised me then remains to this day: of what creative use are skillfully arranged words when the really creative work—changing Africa's social realities for the better—remains inaccessible … In the end, I waited till I felt marginally strong enough, then made the inescapable decision: I would revert to writing, not indeed as the most creative option, but as the least parasitic option open to me. When I returned to Ghana in 1964, there was nothing at home so unexpected as to shock me. Rather, I was in the position of a spore which, having finally accepted its destiny as a fungus, still wonders if it might produce penicillin.²⁸

.....

This final image of the self-conscious spore hoping against hope that its existence will not prove wholly parasitic, is densely suggestive. And yet, if we pause to examine the presuppositions upon which it is based, we encounter fundamental difficulties. In general, these difficulties can be said to derive from Armah's initial construal, and subsequent attempted revision, of Fanon's theory of the African revolution.

The young (pan)African revolutionary of 1963, calling for the overthrow of imperialist social relations, believing this to be a task already taken up and discernible in the “wind of change” sweeping through Africa in the decolonizing years, was patently guilty of that dramatic conflation of independence and revolution that, with respect to Fanon, we have characterized as messianic. Of course, this was before Armah's “initiation,” before his disillusioning travels in search of revolution, and before the nervous breakdown that followed these travels. To the extent that his misadventures in 1963 exposed Armah only to the prospect of the euphoria of independence faltering into the hardship and sterility of neocolonialism, one might suppose that they served to “cure” him of his messianism, to imbue him with weary cynicism and despair.

They did not, however. Although it becomes the burden of Armah's writing to account for the setbacks of postcolonialism, he never quite abandons his initial messianic conception of decolonization as a time of revolutionary uplift. The conflation of independence and revolution is never finally overcome in his work. Thus when, in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, for instance, Teacher thinks back to the days of Nkrumah's anticolonial campaign, and characterizes them as “days when men were not ashamed to talk of souls and of suffering and of hope,” there is not the slightest trace of selfconscious doubt on his part—or, behind him, on that of Armah's authorial intelligence—as to the validity of this assessment.²⁹ By the same token, Armah never moves to question the sufficiency of Fanon's messianic perception of the situation in Algeria in the decolonizing years. On the contrary: as late as 1969 he is still able to state that to read Fanon's A Dying Colonialism is to witness “the new Algerian nation in motion.” It is to “find a whole society, once hopelessly fragmented, coming together, reshaping itself. In that process we see slaves achieving their own humanity through their own planned, thought-out action: beaten things becoming men, beaten things becoming women.”³⁰ The fact that Armah had himself visited Algeria six years before writing these words and had, even then, found not a shred of evidence of the revolutionary unity celebrated by Fanon, is suppressed altogether here. Fanon's representations are evidently to be affirmed even where subsequent developments have savagely undermined their plausibility.

Yet Armah does inevitably move to take some distance from Fanon's formulations. Ultimately, given the ubiquity and the enormity of the setbacks of postcolonialism, it would have been impossible for him not to do so. We know that Fanon had argued that in the period immediately following independence, the “upward thrust of the people” would be temporarily retarded by the emergence of a populist leader whose objective role it would be to “pacify” those fighting for “genuine” national liberation. In attempting to follow Fanon here, Armah finds himself increasingly incapable of sustaining Fanon's revolutionary optimism. For as the 1960s unfold, and the memory of independence recedes, it becomes more and more difficult to construe the retardation of the “upward thrust of the people” as merely temporary. This retardation, in fact, begins to look suspiciously like permanent arrest.

Casting around for an explanation for this state of affairs, Armah is too much a Fanonist to revise his messianic presuppositions, to consider whether decolonization had in fact marked the occasion of an “upward thrust of the people.” Instead, he moves to harden the terms of Fanon's analysis of decolonization. First, he radicalizes the Fanonian reading of independence as nothing more than a disguise under which imperialism continues to conduct business as usual. The consequences of this radicalization are, unfortunately, the reverse of enabling: for where Fanon had been concerned to decipher ideological meanings on the basis of the effects of specific political developments, Armah tends from the outset to view politics in psychological terms. Thus where Fanon, reading independence as a disguise, had spoken of its objective functioning as such, Armah tends to the imputation of conspiracy. Independence for Armah emerges gradually as a trump card in the hand of imperialism, deliberately mobilized to produce strategic effects. The passage from a more or less “orthodox” Fanonian to a conspiracy theory can be traced in the transition from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) to Why Are We So Blest? (1972). Yet the tendency to think conspiratorially is always embryonically present in Armah's writing, merely becoming more explicit as the 1960s lengthen into the 1970s and Africa's neocolonial dependence upon the West seems to advance exponentially rather than recede.

Having recast independence in rather reductive terms as a weapon in the arsenal of empire, Armah proceeds also to restate the Fanonian critique of bourgeois nationalism: “In the colonial situation, the Europeans occupied the apices, the seats of power. The primary aim of post-World War II nationalist agitation was not to overturn or to break down this structure, but to push the white occupiers out of their commanding positions and to install Africans in their place. It may be argued that this was a necessary step towards the restructuring of the ex-colony, but the point here is that the first objective was the removal of the white top from the colonial bottle.”³¹ This reading is very close to Fanon's own. But when it comes to theorizing the ideological contours of populism, Armah tends increasingly to flatten the difference that Fanon had maintained between it and bourgeois nationalism. Fanon had spoken of a populist leadership, composed of men who “came from the backwoods, and … proclaimed, to the scandal of the dominating power and the shame of the nationals of the capital, that they came from the backwoods and that they spoke in the name of the Negroes” (WE 168). These anticolonial leaders, “men of the people,” would, after independence, be placed in alliance with the national bourgeoisie and would come, ineluctably, to represent the interests of their new class position:

These men, who have sung the praises of their race, who have taken upon themselves the whole burden of the past … find themselves [after independence] … alas, at the head of a team of administrators … which proclaims that the vocation of the people is to obey, to go on obeying, and to be obedient till the end of time.

[WE 168]

It is precisely from this Fanonian perspective that The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is written. The novel is obsessed by the slippage between Nkrumah's stance in the decolonizing years and the position he comes to assume as president of independent Ghana. Its ethical resonance derives from the fact that Nkrumah's anticolonial radicalism is not interpreted as mere rhetoric, but is taken as it presented itself and as it was experienced. The novel turns, in fact, on its insistence that Nkrumah betrayed his radicalism in the postcolonial era. Thus it evokes his fiery campaign against colonialism and allows itself the bitter lament, “If he could have remained that way! But now he is up there, above the world, a savior with his own worshipers, not a man with equals in life.”³²

If The Beautyful Ones is Armah's most Fanonian novel, this is because its messianism—its intellectualist, class-determined overestimation of the emancipatory potential of independence—derives directly from the Fanonian universe. Armah's bitterness, resonating in the novel's question, “How long will Africa be cursed with its leaders?” never diminishes.³³ Increasingly, however, the novelist moves to argue that the ideas of men like Nkrumah, populists or “African socialists,” were not only always latently compatible with those of the bourgeois nationalists, but were in fact directly representative of bourgeois nationalism. “African socialism,” he thus asserts baldly in his 1967 essay on the subject, is “the best articulated expression of post-World War II African nationalism on the level of political and philosophical theory.”³⁴ “African socialism,” in short, comes to be viewed as the postwar avatar of bourgeois nationalist anticolonialism, its leading edge, and not remotely differentiable from it. This reductive reading emerges as an intensifying tendency in Armah's three novels of postcolonialism. Thus by the time he comes to write Why Are We So Blest? the self-proclaimed radical anticolonialism of such individuals as Ignace Sendoulwa, “Premier Militant” of the People's Union of Congheria, is presented as a pack of lies from the outset, designed only to sustain the credibility of the UPC in the international community as the official voice of the Congherian “revolution.”

A contradiction presents itself in Armah's thinking at this juncture. “African socialists” like Nkrumah are subjected to scathing criticism on the grounds of hypocrisy. In their public pronouncements, Armah charges, these postcolonial leaders “take a manifestly evolutionary situation and … pretend that it is revolutionary.”³⁵ They represent independence, which signifies merely a staging-post in the struggle for national liberation, as national liberation itself. Yet Armah also follows Fanon in accusing these leaders of treason, where what is indicated by this term is that revolution has been undermined from within, turned back, betrayed. In other words, such leaders are castigated for misrepresenting an evolutionary situation as revolutionary at the same time that they are vilified for stopping a revolution in its tracks, betraying it in process. The “African revolution” is thus simultaneously construed and denied.

This contradiction is never definitively resolved in Armah's work. For every passage lamenting the postcolonial leadership's betrayal of the revolution, and insisting that the decolonizing years were marked by the “beauty” of “the waking of the powerless,”³⁶ it is possible to find a passage, like the following from “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?” in which “the powerless” are cast as being only now on the verge of awakening, which is to say sleeping still:

What is so far lacking is a wide-spread consciousness of connections between socio-economic inequalities and the structures of the social order. This consciousness cannot be taught … It has to grow out of the visible, audible and sensible facts of life in each society, especially when these societies have hordes of poor people and yet enjoy politico-economic systems that encourage the growth of a propertied, prosperous minority. When this happens, the naturally growing consciousness of the people may be compared to a fuse. And it is only then that it makes sense for the revolutionary agitator to talk of striking a spark.³⁷

Yet we should not overstate the equivalence of these “Fanonian” and “post-Fanonian” impulses in Armah's work. For it seems that increasingly in his three novels of postcolonialism, and thus more intensively in Fragments (1970) and Why Are We So Blest? (1972) than in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), it is the force of the latter kind of passage—the bleaker, less affirmative—that preponderates. In the universe of these novels, Fanon's revolutionism is upheld, but his optimism is disavowed. Armah hints at the terms of this disavowal in “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?” when he suggests that “the truth about Fanon's work is that for all its scholarship and its sense of immediacy, it is not an empirical study of the here and now. Its value is quite plainly that of prophecy.”³⁸ To speak of revolution in the era of postcolonialism, it seems, is to speak out of turn. The conditions of its possibility, the conditions of possibility for “genuine” national liberation, no longer exist. There is a yearning for revolution among “the masses” and the radical intelligentsia, but this yearning is abstract only, and unrealizable. Fanon's prescriptions are prophetic, and his revolutionism indispensable, but his immediate utility consists not in anything affirmative but rather in his evocation of the totality of oppression. Thus Armah, tracing in reverse the course of Fanon's own intellectual development, finds himself identifying less and less with the revolutionary positivity of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and turning more and more intensively to the 1952 text, Black Skin, White Masks, with its subjectivistic depiction of existential unfreedom:

We are not free. We're not even able to achieve our humanity, says Fanon. We're damned souls, aborted creatures suffering in hells created by white people to sustain their crass heaven. The central fact of our lives, the central statement in all of Fanon's work is simply this: we're slaves.³⁹

.....

We're slaves; revolution is necessary but impossible; “the masses” lack awareness of the causes of their oppression; independence is a fraud knowingly conceived and executed by imperialism; African leaders are the puppets of empire. As even this brief enumeration must make clear, Armah's “regression” through Fanonism in his first three novels does not find a terminus at Black Skin, White Masks. On the contrary, the novelist moves quite categorically to disavow the appeal to a universalistic “new humanism”—on the “other side” of colonial racism—with which Fanon had concluded that work. I shall argue below that the perspective that informs Why Are We So Blest?—and, to a lesser extent, Armah's fourth novel, Two Thousand Seasons (1973)—and that can be seen to be unfolding immanently in The Beautyful Ones and Fragments is a functionalist and savagely disenabled (not to say disenabling) one. At this point, however, it is necessary only to observe that its full emergence marks the point of Armah's definitive break with Fanon's revolutionary ethic, whatever allegiance to Fanonism he might continue to claim. It is no accident, therefore, that Why Are We So Blest? should be set partially in Algeria. The novel is conclusively “post-Fanonian” in its assumptions. The enigma that persecutes Armah—that revolution is at one and the same time an imperative necessity and a practical impossibility—is not one that would have been recognizable to Fanon. From Armah's perspective, moreover, his distance from Fanon is to be regarded as reflecting not a difference of intellectual temperament but a change in the social conditions that inform theory. What was never less than possible for Fanon has become, for Armah, writing a few short years later, categorically if agonizingly unattainable. Why Are We So Blest? is ultimately founded, thus, less on Fanon's social vision than upon its perceived ruins.

.....

In chapter 1, I contrasted Fanon's thought with that of Georg Lukács, by way of exploring the implications of his messianism. Perhaps this analogy can be extended here: in thinking about the relationship between Fanon and the “post-Fanonian” Armah, it might be useful to refer it to the relationship between Lukács and a “post-Lukácsian” Western Marxist theorist like Theodor W. Adorno. Certainly, the categorical differences between Armah and Adorno would need to be specified: Adorno's thought is relentlessly Eurocentric, and his mandarin defense of European high culture is uncompromisingly committed to precisely those ideological forms that Armah ranges himself equally uncompromisingly against. These categorical differences are also overdetermined in the present instance by Armah's truculent critique of Marxism as a plank in the oppressive platform of what he has called “Western hegemonism.”⁴⁰ Moreover, I have no desire here to open myself to the charge of “Larsony,” a Eurocentric mode of criticism one of whose racist propensities, as Armah has outlined them, is to “discover” behind every African creation the European creation that supposedly predates or otherwise informs it.⁴¹

Ultimately, however, the similarities between the politico-ideological positions assumed by Adorno and Armah remain striking. (To speak of politico-ideological positions is already to overcome “Larsony,” since what is being compared are less ideas viewed as the “property” of those who first articulate them than ideas viewed as appropriate to, and the effects of, specific social circumstances of which it would be meaningless to say that their manifestation in one part of the world rather than another at any time signified social “advancement” or “retardation.”) Like Armah, Adorno proceeds from the perception that it is necessary to revolutionize society, but that the recent “attempt to change the world [has] miscarried.”⁴² Where Armah is obliged to reckon with the failure of the “African revolution,” thus, Adorno struggles to come to terms with the ossification of the Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union and the turning back of proletarian militancy in Europe during the 1920s. Where Armah moves to distance himself from the most articulate champion of this “African revolution”—Fanon—Adorno moves similarly to distance himself from Lukács, the most articulate Western Marxist theorist of his generation. Both Adorno and Armah, moreover, raise the question of the “pacification” of “the masses” in the “post-revolutionary” era; both regard intellectual labor as irremediably “guilty”—defensible, at best, in negative terms as the least parasitic option available in the degraded world of the present; and both emphasize the need, as Helmut Dubiel has written of Adorno and other members of the “Frankfurt School,” for dissenting intellectuals to remain on the “outside [of] all institutionalized forms of social influence” and to “conduct a radical struggle against the dominant understanding of social conditions. They consider their own theoretical orientation to be both the critical truth about the social structure from which they distance themselves and a utopian anticipation of a future mass consciousness.”⁴³ On the basis of such similarities as these, it seems to me helpful to bring the universe of Adornian intellectualism to bear on Armah's work. In the chapters that follow, accordingly, I have not hesitated to do so on occasions where such interpolations seemed appropriate and illuminating with respect to Armah's ideas. Few radical intellectuals this century have been able to suggest the difficulties and implications of writing in extremity in as subtle and profound a way as Adorno. As a theorist of resistance and marginality, recuperation and radical intellectualism, hope in seemingly hopeless times, his work seems to me of direct relevance to that of Armah, for all its ultimate incompatibility with it.

Notes

1. Ayi Kwei Armah, “Fanon: The Awakener,” Negro Digest 18, no. 12 (Oct. 1969): 5.

2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 151-52. Further references to this work (hereafter WE) will be given parenthetically in the text.

3. Armah, “Fanon: The Awakener,” 40.

4. Ayi Kwei Armah, “Our Language Problem,” West Africa, 29 April 1985, 831.

5. Ian Clegg, “Workers and Managers in Algeria,” in Robin Cohen, Peter C. W. Gutkind, and Phyllis Brazier, eds., Peasants and Proletarians: The Struggles of Third World Workers (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 235-36. See also the conclusions about the Algerian war drawn by Eric R. Wolf in his Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 246-47.

6. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 107. Fanon argued that the restrictions under which women had for centuries been obliged to labor had been “knocked over and challenged by the national liberation struggle. The unveiled Algerian woman, who assumed an increasingly important place in revolutionary action, developed her personality, discovered the exalting realm of responsibility. The freedom of the Algerian people from then on became identified with woman's liberation, with her entry into history. This woman who, in the avenues of Algiers or of Constantine, would carry the grenades or the submachine-gun chargers, this woman who tomorrow would be outraged, violated, tortured, could not put herself back into her former state of mind and relive her behavior of the past; this woman who was writing the heroic pages of Algerian history was, in so doing, bursting the bounds of the narrow world in which she had lived without responsibility, and was at the same time participating in the destruction of colonialism and in the birth of a new woman.”

7. See Basil Davidson, Modern Africa (London: Longman, 1983), 95.

8. Clegg, “Workers and Managers,” 239.

9. Cf. WE 166: “In spite of his frequently honest conduct and his sincere declarations, the leader as seen objectively is the fierce defender of these interests, today combined, of the national bourgeoisie and the ex-colonial companies. His honesty, which is his soul's true bent, crumbles away little by little. His contact with the masses is so unreal that he comes to believe that his authority is hated and that the services he has rendered his country are being called in question. The leader judges the ingratitude of the masses harshly, and every day that passes ranges him a little more resolutely on the side of the exploiters. He therefore knowingly becomes the aider and abettor of the young bourgeoisie which is plunging into the mire of corruption and pleasure.”

10. Clegg, “Workers and Managers,” 239. Clegg goes on to assert, in rather dogmatic defence to received Marxist wisdom on this matter, that “[r]evolution, as a concept, is alien to the peasant consciousness, while the peasants' relationship to the environment remains one of passive endurance rather than active transformation.” For considerably more reflexive treatments of this question, see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) and T. O. Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

11. Robert Fraser, The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980), 3.

12. See Ayi Kwei Armah, “One Writer's Education,” West Africa, 26 August 1985, 1752.

13. See Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 20.

14. David E. Apter, Ghana in Transition (New York: Atheneum, 1966), 73.

15. Armah, “One Writer's Education,” 1752.

16. Ibid.

17. Fraser, Novels, 5.

18. Armah, “One Writer's Education,” 1752.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Fraser, Novels, 6.

22. Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974), 114-15.

23. Armah, “One Writer's Education,” 1753.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981), 160.

27. Ayi Kwei Armah, “Masks and Marx: The Marxist Ethos vis-à-vis African Revolutionary Theory and Praxis,” Présence Africaine 131, 3d quarterly (1984): 36.

28. Armah, “One Writer's Education,” 1753.

29. Armah, The Beautyful Ones, 62.

30. Armah, “Fanon: The Awakener,” 35.

31. Ayi Kwei Armah, “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?” Présence Africaine 64, 4th quarterly (1967): 26.

32. Armah, The Beautyful Ones, 86.

33. Ibid., 80.

34. Armah, “African Socialism,” 8.

35. Ibid., 28.

36. Armah, The Beautyful Ones, 85.

37. Armah, “African Socialism,” 29.

38. Ibid.

39. Armah, “Fanon: The Awakener,” 5.

40. See Armah, “Masks and Marx,” 40.

41. See Ayi Kwei Armah, “Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction,” New Classic 4 (1977): 38. In “Larsony,” Armah offers a ferocious symptomatic reading of an influential essay written by Charles Larson, an American critic, on Armah's own novel, Fragments. Armah exposes the tacit Western cultural supremacism of Larson's critical practice, and concludes his demonstration by suggesting that the term “Larsony” be pressed into service to refer to Western critics who follow Larson's example.

42. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 3.

43. Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985), 5.