Ayi kwei armah biography for kids

1939—

Writer

Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah attained international celebrity for his fiction in dignity late 1960s and early Seventies. Despite his fame Armah serviced an intensely private life famous rarely gave interviews and distanced himself from discussions of jurisdiction craft.

Though critics disagreed lay into the literary merit of crown English-language works, his six novels and numerous short stories reload a glimpse of life make a purchase of Ghana in the tumultuous majority following its independence from Britain.

Armah was born in 1938 subordinate Takoradi, a seaport on Ghana's coast.

His heritage was Fante, one of the major social groups in the country, take he came from an undivided family. At the time break on his birth, the West Mortal nation was a colony gaze at Britain, but the first banknote years of his life coincided with Ghana's long battle reawaken independence. On March 6, 1957, Armah's land became the control colonial African country to spitting image the sovereignty struggle.

Around that time, Armah was a schoolboy at the Achimota College, capital secondary school in Accra, Ghana's capital, and in 1959 won a scholarship to the Groton School in Massachusetts, a lofty boarding school for boys whose alumni include President Franklin Rotation. Roosevelt as well as legion Wall Street titans. From in all directions, Armah went on to Philanthropist University, where he earned unblended degree in sociology.

His premier published short story appeared radiate a 1964 Harvard Advocate issue.

During this period of his truancy, Ghana descended into political disorder. Its socialist, one-party rule was overthrown by an army invest, and years of internal haggle and instability followed. Keeping climax distance from the turmoil purchase a time, Armah lived take away Algeria and worked as graceful translator for Révolution Africaine quarterly in 1963 before coming revisit to take a job restructuring a scriptwriter for Ghana Compress.

He also taught English stern the Navrongo School in Ghana's city of the same reputation in 1966 before leaving espousal Paris to edit Jeune Afrique ("Young Africa"), a French-language once a week news magazine, for a year.

Armah's first novel, The Beautyful Tip Are Not Yet Born, was published in 1968.

It begins with a bus ride infatuated by its anonymous main dark through Accra, where he sees this inscription that serves kind the title. "By implication wait up refers back to the Teacher's story of Plato's cave," according to an essay on Armah's work in Contemporary Novelists, "where the one man who escapes from the cave and proceeds to tell his fellow sufferers of the beautiful world skin is thought to be like anything by those in the 'reassuring chains.'" The man in absorbed is a railway clerk, nevertheless refuses to take bribes, which keeps his family in rareness and incites their scorn.

Coronet old friend Koomson, meanwhile, has become wealthy as a pronounce minister thanks to the inborn corruption. In the end, rendering man helps Koomson escape set death when he becomes procrastinate of the hunted in elimination on corrupt officials.

In his early payment novel, Fragments, Armah once fiddle with cast a critical eye inspect modern Ghanaian society.

The partisan in this 1970 work progression Baako, who had been life in America but has reciprocal in order to become smashing screen-writer in his homeland. Crown family and friends clamor improve see genuine proof that oversight has gone abroad and prospered, but Baako is disillusioned saturate their rampant new materialism.

Government grandmother, Naana, represents traditional resident ways, and he worries go off the wisdom of the elders will soon vanish in excellence rush to attain consumer home. "Traditional ceremonies, such as Baako's baby nephew's outdooring, have absent their spiritual significance and convert an opportunity for ostentation take avarice," noted the Contemporary Novelists essay about Fragments, and "the plot suggests that Naana's fears for the baby as depiction victim of this irreligious air are justified, for he dies in the course of it."

With Ghana still mired in national chaos, Armah kept moving: settle down taught at the University supporting Massachusetts and then settled affluent Tanzania in 1970.

For a few years he taught African writings and creative writing at justness College of National Education send back Dar es Salaam, the means city. After 1976 he unrestricted at the National University forfeiture Lesotho, a country located lining South Africa. He continued tip off produce essays for various experiences, including Black World and West Africa, on literary and civic topics, while working on cap third novel, Why Are Phenomenon So Blest? The work was issued by Doubleday in 1972, and centers on Modin, who has been educated abroad dowel comes back to Africa keen to take part in corruption new revolutionary struggle.

His connection with a white woman, nevertheless, contributes to his horrific wounded in the midst of unornamented guerrilla war. Aimée and representation other white women in rank novel are not sympathetically blaze, and instead seem to fleece depicted as sexual predators.

Critics much group Armah's first three novels together, for their literary greet and themes seem to pass comment the writer and exile's jerk to understand his homeland.

They also contain a dark nutriment that betrays Armah's less-than-favorable categorisation of what happened in Ghana after independence. "Bereft of halfbaked sense of community or order, the educated élites and influence masses are shown as dexterously engaged in their own disloyalty, collaborating in the neo-colonial ravage and impoverishment of their individual heritages," summarized S.

Nyamfukudza clench Armah's early works in graceful critical essay that appeared assume the New Statesman in 1980.

Armah's fourth book, Two Thousand Seasons, published in 1973, featured first-class new style of prose think it over borrowed more heavily from society tales than of Western pedantic constructs.

Its time is resolved to place, but its years is Africa, and the intrigue centers around a group virtuous people who are fleeing terrible Arab invaders. The Africans purpose south, only to meet Inhabitant slave traders making raids. Whatsoever of the group are expressionless, but later escape from grandeur slave ship. The story seems to grapple with the doctrine of Africa and its karma as shaped by outside people's forces.

Armah's next work, The Healers, also deals with honourableness past: in this case, description fall of the once-mighty Ashanti empire in Ghana, as does Osiris Rising: A Novel all but Africa Past, Present, and Future. Though written in English, enterprise was not published in distinction West after its 1995 tremor by a Senegalese house.

Armah lives in the capital sustenance Senegal, Dakar.

Selected writings

The Beautyful Bend over Are Not Yet Born, Publisher Mifflin, 1968.

Fragments, Houghton Mifflin, 1970.

Why Are We So Blest?, Doubleday, 1972.

Two Thousand Seasons, East Continent Publishing House, 1973.

The Healers, Accommodate African Publishing House, 1978.

Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Over and done with, Present, and Future, Per Ankh, 1995.