Armah’s Linguistic Mythopoeisis

Abstract

Ayi Kwei Armah is one of Africa’s most ideologically committed writers. His writings, which consist of a bitter attack on all colonial institutions and activities, reveal a social vision for Africa. Through his diatribe, he shows how Africa could set herself on the path of renaissance and development. This paper, based on Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons and Osiris Rising with occasional references to The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, examines one of Armah’s tools for the construction of this social vision: mythopoeisis. Two Thousand Seasons is based on the myth of Anoa through which Armah tells the story of Africa’s continued resistance to colonial oppression, exploitation and the slave trade. Osiris Rising is a complete transposition of the events of the myth of Osiris from its Ancient Egyptian setting to modern Africa. It is a story of Africa’s dismemberment and its eventual re-memberment and resurrection. An aspect of Armah’s mythmaking is the conscious effort to give new semantic denotations and connotations to the word pairs black/white and way/road. Armah gives positive attributes to the colour black and pejorative significations to white. He also opposes ‘way’ to ‘road’. Armah points Africa back to ‘the way’, a set of principles, which according to Armah, made Ancient Egypt, a great African civilization. The paper concludes that the solution to Africa’s problems lies not in demonizing everything white and accepting everything black but in carefully selecting what is good in both cultures.