The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

In the first chapter, the author sets up many of the themes that dominate the rest of the book. The author introduces the ideas of social and political impotency when he describes how the bus “moved uncertainly” and notes that “its confused rattle had given place to an endless spastic shudder, as if its pieces were held together by too much rust ever to fall completely apart” (1). There are other similar examples of bureaucratic stagnation, such as the K.C.C. Receptacle. The government put a great deal of effort into the cleanliness campaign, and the people still use the boxes, which are few in number and rarely emptied. The man notes that people use the boxes without going up to them anymore, as the garbage has accumulated in an ever-growing heap overflowing from the boxes. The description of the outside of the Railway & Harbour Administration Block is also an analogy for the bureaucratic ineptitude of the state:

[T]he corners of 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 (11).

The walls of the building are covered in layers of dirt, dust, and grease which slowly and inevitably accumulate. The inevitability of the walls—and the futility of trying to stop the addition of new coatings of dirt—stands as a symbol for the social and political stagnation, futility, and waste present in post-colonial Ghana. In the first chapter, the author also introduces the important theme of filth / waste. The book documents many scatological details—from the bus driver’s “generous gob of mucus” (1) to the rotting banister, whose defects have been polished over to no significant effect. The man notes the effect of human hands on the banister as well, offering detailed, vulgar descriptions of hands that are still sullied from bathroom visits and blown noses lunch touching the wood.

The slow, gradual deterioration of the wood and the accretion of dirt and grime is a way the author portrays the inevitable “rotting” of Ghanaian politics and society in the post-independence era. The focus on scatological, gruesome details is also a metaphor for the author bearing witness to the unsavory side of postcolonial Ghana.

In Chapter 2, the dominant themes are futility, stagnation, and the exhaustion of living in a never-ending cycle of hope, decay, and the gradual loss of hope. At the railway administration building, the man notes that “always the same old things not working” (16). The things that are broken in the office have always been broken—and the same is true of Ghanaian society. Even after winning independence from Britain, the “new” Ghana is still suffering from many of the same problems. The man notes the extreme fatigue of working in a place where the problems never get fixed and nothing significant changes: “the work of the day ended the talk, and even those who had little to do were reduced to silence because the rising heat was itself a tiring thing” (19). The oppressive heat and silence mirror the immobility and stagnation of Ghanaian society at large.

In Chapter 3 the author emphasizes the fatigue, exhaustion, and paralysis of workers like the man. He describes the heat in the office again, portraying the railway administration building as a site of stagnation and rote, unfeeling actions:

“So the sea salt and the sweat together and the fan above made this steamy atmosphere in which the suffering sleepers came and worked and went dumbly back afterward to homes they had earlier fled” (20).

The author uses words like “sleepers” and “sleepwalkers” frequently in this section to describe the lack of hope, motivation, and ambition of many of the office workers. Having learned that they cannot expect a change in their circumstances, these workers sleepwalk through life in a state akin to limbo, or paralysis. The man uses similar language when he describes the people he knows who have sunk into hopelessness and despair—he calls them “the living dead” (22) because there is nothing meaningful left in their lives. The man also notes that perhaps even the people who are struggling not to join the living dead are living “another, more frustrating kind of living death” (22). These themes of sleepwalking/living death also connect to the themes of rot and decay. Even as things in this society are functioning in life, they are rotting and dying from the inside—an inevitable process of decay and degradation that cannot be halted.