The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Before Koomson and Estie arrive for dinner, the man watches Oyo straighten her hair. He wonders what the problem is with her natural hair, and she laughs bitterly and says that men would be angry if women didn’t do these new things to be presentable. This short conversation encapsulates many of the book’s themes—social change, pressure to conform, and the fetishization of colonial/European standards of living. Although Ghana is nominally free of its white British colonizers, the standards to which the new leaders aspire are not very different from the standards of the old. This includes the extreme focus on wealth, but also cultural standards like accents, pristine golf courses, and the requirement of straight hair to be “presentable.” The man senses this duality: Ghana has both changed too quickly and not changed enough. Koomson embodies this duality as well. Koomson cannot bring himself to use the dirty latrine, and it deflates him: “Something had gone out of Koomson, and throughout the evening it did not come back” (135). Koomson realizes that he has changed into a man who cannot live like his old friends anymore, and he recognizes this as a loss of sorts. Koomson’s soft, flabby hands also represent the change in him as a type of loss.

When Oyo and the man find out the true details of the fishing boat deal, their disappointment and foiled hopes represent the political situation in Ghana in the post-independence era. The boats are also yet another example of government corruption. When they ask Koomson where the money for the boats will come from, he assures them that “‘the Commercial Bank is ours, and we can do anything’” (136). Because he is part of a socialist government, Koomson cannot use his name as part of a corrupt money-making scheme, so he asks Oyo and the man to sign the documents.

In Chapter 11, the man is confronted with an alternative path for his and his family’s future. When he is forced to come face-to-face with Koomson’s corruption and overwhelming wealth and luxurious life, he wonders whether he is being selfish by not choosing to act to better the lives of his wife and children, even if it means sacrificing his own morals. However, the man is less impressed with Koomson this time—perhaps after seeing how he has changed—and finds the courage to refuse his signature on the fishing boat documents. This chapter also portrays the growing gulf between the man and Oyo, who remains “in amazement and disappointment” (135) at the man’s refusal to accept criminal complicity in return for wealth and power.

By the end of this section, the man is relieved that his family has become resigned to their status in life. He feels relieved that they have accepted his failure, and he says that “there is something at least comforting in the knowledge that people were not choking with expectations of great things from the impotent” (153). This chapter is very brief, but it also has a more sharply bitter and fatalistic tone. The man realizes that there is no great meaning in life, and that when all hopes become disappointment, “there would be no great unwillingness about the final going” (154). He becomes resolved in the belief that there “was never going to be anything but despair, and there would be no way of escaping it, except one” (154).