Ayi Kwei Armah

Ayi Kwei Armah (born 28 October 1939) is a Ghanaian writer best known for his novels including The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Two Thousand Seasons (1973) and The Healers (1978). He is also an essayist, as well as having written poetry, short stories, and books for children.

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968)

 * Alone, i am nothing. i have nothing.we have power.but we will never know it,we will never see it work.unless we come together to make it work.


 * Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.


 * So in a way the thing was new. Yet the stories that were sometimes heard about it were not stories of something young and vigorous, but the same old stories of money changing hands and throats getting moistened and palms getting greased. Only this time if the old stories aroused any anger, there was nowhere for it to go. The sons of the nation were now in charge, after all. How completely the new thing took after the old.


 * In the intervals, between successive layers of distemper, the walls were caressed and thoroughly smothered by brown dust blowing off the roadside together with swirling grit from the coal and gravel of the railroad yard within and behind, and the corners of the walls where people passed always dripped with the engine grease left by thousands of transient hands. Every new coating, then, was received as just another inevitable accretion in a continuing story whose beginnings were now lost and whose end no one was likely to bother about.”

Two Thousand Seasons (1973)

 * Of unconnected consciousness is there more to say beyond the clear recognition this is destruction's keenest tool against the soul?


 * She spoke of those needing the white destroyers' shiny things to bring a feeling of worth into their lives, uttered their deep-rooted inferiority of soul, and called them lacking in the essence of humanity: womanhood in women, manhood in men. For which deficiency they must crave things to eke out their beings, things to fill holes in their spirits.


 * A people losing sight of origins are dead. A people deaf to purposes are lost. Under fertile rain, in scorching sunshine there is no difference: their bodies are mere corpses, awaiting final burial.


 * It is not easy to hide any kind of love and young love loathes disguise.


 * Dishonest words are the food for the rotten spirits.


 * Purpose lends wings to the traveller.


 * To them that know their destination fatigue is a brief stranger merely passing in the glare of day.


 * Isanusi sees Abena and, thinking she is alone, despairs. When the other 19 members of the community are revealed, Isanusi asks about Tawi and invites everyone to his small shelter. Isanusi asks them about their motivations for returning. They explain that they view their project as the “necessary work of preparation against destruction.
 * p. 243


 * Two thousand season, a thousand going into it, a second thousand crawling maimed from it, will teach you everything about enslavement, the destruction of souls, the killing of bodies, the infusion of violence into every breath, every drop, every morsel of your sustaining air, your water, your food. Till you come again upon the way.