Ayi Kwei Armah's secular egalitarian Africa: an authentic vision or a utopian dialectic

ABSTRACT

Conscious of the socio-political degeneration of the African continent, most African writers have embraced political theories in their artistic speculation on the future of Africa. Authors like Osmane Sembene and Ngugi wa Thiong'o have offered Marxist views in their writing whereas others like Wole Soyinka and Kofi Awoonor have favoured African traditional worldview as useful framework for a more coherent African cultural and political regeneration. Nevertheless, one author who stands out in the artistic search for the ideal vision for a better future Africa is Ayi Kwei Armah. Armah's discontent with Africa's present socio-political condition and his obsession for a radical change in Africa results in, what I will argue as, his adoption of utopian literary form to formulate an alternative “vision of a [better] future” (KMT 140) Africa. In Osiris Rising and KMT: In the House of Life, Armah rejects the practices of social class and religion in Africa and proposes secular and egalitarian values for adoption in a future pan African commonwealth. In this article, I examine Armah's vision for future Africa through the critical perspectives of literary utopia and argue that his vision, though plausible and desirable, retains brazen idealism in the present established world order.

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Jerome Masamaka

Jerome Masamaka is assistant lecturer at the Department of English, University of Ghana. The principal areas of his teaching are Classical and English Literatures. His research interests include Utopia Studies, Ecocriticism, Psychoanalysis and Postcolonial Narratives. He is currently working on “nature writing” practices in African poetry (for his future PhD research), psychoanalytical interpretations of the gender rhetoric in the works of Chimamanda N. Adichie (a joint research with Professor Helen Yitah, former Chair of the Department of English), and the postcolonial poetics of “Dis/Placement” in the roots reggae lyrics of Joseph Hill. The latter, a short-term research, attempts to read postcolonial discursive modes into the pan-African liberationist dialectics of the lyrical outputs of Joseph Hill, a major roots reggae artist. This project has won a conference travel grant from the African Literature Association Conference to be held at Yale University in June 2017.