Ayi Kwei Armah

Ayi Kwei Armah (b.1939) is a Ghanaian writer, novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist. He is known for anticolonialist views (against both white and black colonialism). He is considered to be a major figure in development of contemporary African literature. His notable novels include "The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born" (1968), "Two Thousand Seasons" (1973) and "The Healers" (1978).

Wisdom & Quotes

• How horribly rapid everything has been, from the days when men were not ashamed to talk of souls and of suffering and of hope to these low days of smiles that will never again be sly enough to hide the knowledge of betrayal and deceit.

- The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born

• The beauty was in the waking of the powerless. Is it always to be true that it is impossible to have things strong and at the same time beautiful? The famished men need not stay famished. But to gorge themselves in this heartbreaking way, consuming, utterly destroying the common promise of their greed, was that ever necessary?

- The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born

• When you can see the end of things even in their beginnings, there's no more hope, unless you want to pretend, or forget, or get drunk or something.

- The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born

• "Poets are bandleaders who have failed?"

"Something like that."
- The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born

• That is all anyone here ever struggles for:

to be nearer the white man. All the shouting
against the white man was not hate. It was love.
Twisted, but love all the same.
- The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born

• Blessed are they who neither see their painful yesterdays

nor their tomorrows filled with despair:
They shall rest in peace.
- Ramblers' song, Fragments

Shelagh Delaney