The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

“So in a way the thing was new. Yet the stories that were sometimes heard about it were not stories of something young and vigorous, but the same old stories of money changing hands and throats getting moistened and palms getting greased. Only this time if the old stories aroused any anger, there was nowhere for it to go. The sons of the nation were now in charge, after all. How completely the new thing took after the old.”

One of the major themes of the novel is stagnation: even when society goes through great political upheaval, nothing really changes except for who is reaping the rewards at the top. This is a duality that is explored in the book—at the same time, there is rapid change and a complete lack of significant change. The man frequently expresses his disappointment that the new Ghanaian leaders have become so similar to the old British colonizers.

“In the intervals, between successive layers of distemper, the walls were caressed and thoroughly smothered by brown dust blowing off the roadside together with swirling grit from the coal and gravel of the railroad yard within and behind, and the corners of the 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.”

The layering of dirt and grime on the railway administration building represents the slow accretion of corruption and social decay in Ghana. It can also be interpreted as a symbol of the British colonial legacy: layers of dirt and grease that can never be fully stripped away.

“The wood underneath would win and win till the end of time. Of that there was no doubt possible, only the pain of hope perennially doomed to disappointment. It was so clear. Of course it was in the nature of the wood to rot with age. The polish, it was supposed, would catch the rot. But of course in the end it was the rot which imprisoned everything in its effortless embrace. It did not really have to fight. Being was enough. In the natural course of things it would always take the newness of the different kinds of polish and the vaunted cleansing power of the chemicals in them, and it would convert all the victorious filth, awaiting yet more polish again and again and again.”

Rot is used as a symbol of corruption throughout the book—as something on the inside that slowly dies away. The wood on the banister is deteriorating and adding polish onto it is a futile endeavor. Equally futile is changing Ghana’s leaders without changing anything beyond the superficial. Corruption, power, and greed—the author portrays these elements as the rotten core at the heart of Ghanaian politics and social life.

“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. There was really no doubt that it was like that in all their homes, everywhere save for those who had found in themselves the hardness for the upward climb. And he was not one of those.”

The man describes the wetness and oppressive heat of the railway administration offices as being a result of both the outer, physical environment and the internal struggle of people who must constantly fight to stay afloat. This corresponds with the novel’s motif of the difference between external reality and internal condition—for example, rotting wood and political corruption; or garbage heaps and social stagnation and despair. The “sleepers” are the average Ghanaian citizens who find themselves stuck in cycles of work and life that are devoid of meaning or satisfaction.

“What in his breeziness he had yet to know was this: that his dream was not his alone, that everyone before him had crawled with hope along the same unending path, dreaming of future days when they would crawl no longer but run if they wanted to run, and fly if the spirit moved them. But along the streets, those who can soon learn to recognize in ordinary faces beings whom the spirit has moved, but who cannot follow where it beckons, so heavy are the small ordinary days of the time. The unwary freedom of the young man and the realization that it was time to do filled the man with an undefined fear of things that had not yet come.”

Although the main character has for the most part accepted his meager status in life, he still has feelings of frustration, disappointment, and bitterness when he thinks of the promises the new leaders of Ghana made to the people—promises which were quickly forgotten or broken. Learning how to live in an exhausting, oppressive, frustrating society is a huge burden for all ordinary Ghanaians. The man has learned that what grinds a person down in the end is the drudgery and monotony days upon days upon days without hope of change.

“The man walks into the hall, meeting the eyes of his waiting wife. These eyes are flat, the eyes of a person who has come to a decision not to say anything; eyes totally accepting and unquestioning in the way only a thing from which nothing is ever expected can be accepted and not questioned. And it is true that because these eyes are there the air is filled with accusation, but for even that the man feels a certain tired gratitude; he is thankful there are no words to lance the tension of the silence. The children begin to come out of the room within. […] It seems their eyes also are learning this flat look that is a defense against hope, as if their mother’s message needs their confirmation.”

Throughout the novel, the main character attempts to hold out on the different pressures which compel him to participate in an economy of greed and corruption. The most challenging pressure for the man is the disappointment and expectations of his family members. He often wonders whether there is anything really criminal about doing whatever it takes to improve the living conditions of the ones he loves.

“The woman’s mouth opened, but she let it close again. Then she said, ‘It is nice. It is clean, the life Estella is getting.’ The man shrugged his shoulders. Then he spoke, it was with deliberate laziness. ‘Some of that kind of cleanness has more rottenness in it than the slime at the bottom of a garbage dump.’”

Oyo does not understand why her husband cannot find it within himself to become a “big man” like Koomson. She interprets his decision as cowardice or foolishness, and she does not support him. It is only when Koomson and his cronies are pushed out of power that Oyo admits that her husband was right all along. We see here again the appearance of cleanliness with underlying rottenness associated with the current regime in Ghana.

“‘I feel like a criminal. Often these days I find myself thinking of something sudden I could do to redeem myself in their eyes. Then I sit down and ask myself what I have done wrong, and there is really nothing.’

‘You have not done what everybody is doing,’ said the naked man, ‘and in this world that is one of the crimes. You have always known that.’”

Here, the man speaks with Teacher. Although the man has chosen not to participate in a corrupt economy, he never feels like he is making a morally righteous choice. He chooses not to participate, and he remains steadfast in that decision; however, he is constantly barraged by the feeling that it is paradoxically the honest people who are the criminals in this new Ghana.

“Teacher, my wife explained to me, step by step, that life was like a lot of roads: long roads, short roads, wide and narrow, steep and level, all sorts of roads. Next, she let me know that human beings were like so many people driving their cars on all these roads. This was the point at which she told me that those who wanted to get far had to learn to drive fast. And then she asked me what name I would give to people who were afraid to drive fast, or to drive at all. I had no name to give her, but she had not finished. Accidents would happen, she told me, but the fear of accidents would never keep men from driving, and Joe Koomson had learned to drive.”

The man wonders often whether his choice to abstain from bribery and corruption originates in cowardice and/or selfishness. He doubts his choice constantly. Oyo disapproves of his choice, which makes his home life unsustainable.

“‘We all have our dreams,’ the man said. ‘And our troubles, too. How can I think I am doing the right thing when I am alone and there are so many I have run from? Who is right at all? I know I have chosen something, but it is not something I would have chosen if I had the power to choose truly. I am just sitting there, and if you think I am happier than you driving out there, you just don’t know what I feel inside. I had so much hope before...so much hope…’”

The man is unable to feel righteous about making a moral decision not to participate in an economy of greed and corruption because it was not truly his choice—he has been forced into making a choice because of the unforgiving economic conditions in Ghana. The man does not feel that he had the freedom to make a choice because he is trapped in a stagnant, never-ending cycle of disappointment and frustration.

“Why do we waste so much time with sorrow and pity for ourselves? It is true now that we are men, but not so long ago we were helpless messes of soft flesh and unformed bone squeezing through bursting motherholes, trailing dung and exhausted blood. We could not ask then why it was necessary for us also to grow. So why now should we be shaking our head and wondering bitterly why there are children together with the old, why time does not stop when we ourselves have come to stations where we would like to rest? It is so like a child, to wish all movement to cease.” 

In postcolonial Ghana, change has come too rapidly for people like the main character. He often thinks about the terrible pace at which things are changing, and how little time he has for adapting to the new order of things. At the same time, very little about the political reality in Ghana has changed—as the man notes, the same things are broken that have always been broken.

“Let us say just that the cycle from birth to decay has been short. Short, brief. But otherwise not that unusual. And even in the decline into the end there are things that remind the longing mind of old beginnings and hold out the promise of new ones, things even like your despair itself. I have heard this pain before, only then it was multiplied many, many times, but that may only be because at that time I was not so alone, so far apart. Maybe there are other lonely voices despairing now. I will not be entranced by the voice, even if it should swell as it did in the days of hope. I will not be entranced, since I have seen the destruction of the promises it made. But I shall not resist it either. I will be like a cork.”

For the main character, the only way to survive the cycle of thwarted hope and despair is by giving up on hope entirely. He, and other ordinary Ghanaian citizens like him, can only plan to remain like corks, relatively unaffected by those who would otherwise cause them to hope for change that will not come.

“When the war was over the soldiers came back to homes broken in their absence and they themselves brought murder in their hearts and gave it to those nearest them. I saw it, not very clearly, because I had no way of understanding it, but it frightened me. We had gone on marches of victory and I do not think there was anyone mean enough in spirit to ask whether we knew the thing we were celebrating. Whose victory? Ours? It did not matter. We marched, and only a dishonest fool will look back on his boyhood and say he knew even then that there was no meaning in any of it. It is so funny now, to remember that we all thought we were welcoming victory. Or perhaps there is nothing funny here at all, and it is only that victory itself happens to be the identical twin of defeat.”

The man reckons with his memories of childhood in colonial Ghana. Here he remembers the legacy of trauma that Ghanaian soldiers carried home from war—violence and anger that they had no way of reconciling within themselves. These are only some of the factors that have led to the stagnant, inept government of Nkrumah’s Ghana.

“There was no way out visible to us, and out on the hills the white men’s gleaming bungalows were so far away, so unreachably far that people did not even think of them in their suffering. And for those who did, there were tales of white men with huge dogs that ate more meat in a single day than a human Gold Coast family got in a month, dogs which could obey their masters’ voices like soldiers at war, and had as little love for black skins as their white masters.”

The man understands now that in the aftermath of war, Ghanaians felt so distant from the British colonizers living “on the hills” that most did not even think to assign blame. And for those that did, there was the threat of bodily violence and danger to stop them.

“The destructive thing wee does is to lift the blindness and to lift the blindness and to let you see the whole of your life laid out in front of you. […] But its truth is the deep, dangerous kind of truth that can certainly frighten you into a desperate, gloomy act if the life you have been living is already of itself deeply gloomy and deeply desperate. That is the only sensible reason for fearing the thing.”

The man remembers smoking marijuana, or “wee,” with his friends by the seawater. Wee represents the danger of becoming too aware of the reality of one’s own life—he concludes that it is better to be like a “cork,” drifting along on the currents of change while remaining dead to anything that would result in too much understanding at one time. Only by remaining half-blind to his despair and desperation can he continue to go about his day-to-day life.

“‘I see a long, long way,’ he said, ‘and it is full of people, so many people going so far into the distance that I see them all like little bubbles joined together. They are going, just going, and I am going with them. I know I would like to be able to come out and see where we are going, but in the very long lines of people I am only one. It is not at all possible to come out and see where we are going. I am just going.’”

While the relationship between Teacher and the main character is never specified, we know that the Teacher is someone who has given up all hope and expectation. He encourages the man to remain steadfast in his moral decisions, but Teacher has already given up all pretense of morality and free will when it comes to his own life.

“Our masters were the white men, and we were coming to know this, and the knowledge was filling us with fear first and then with anger. And they who would be our leaders, they also had the white men for their masters, and they also feared the masters, but after the fear what was at the bottom of their beings was not the hate and the anger we knew in our despair. What they felt was love. What they felt for their white masters and our white masters was gratitude and faith. And they had come to us at last, to lead us and to guide us to promised tomorrows.”

The man feels bitterly when he reflects on the growing similarities between the Ghanaian leaders—those who had agitated for freedom from the British colonizers, equality, and change—and the white men who used to rule Ghana. He knows now that men like Koomson are just false saviors, prioritizing their own wealth before all else.

“How often had he not said it—that this was the way with all of life, that there was nothing anywhere that could keep the promise and the fragrance of its youth forever, that everything grows old, that the teeth that once were white would certainly grow to be encrusted with green and yellow muck, and then would drop off leaving a mouth wholly impotent, strong only with rot, decay, putrescence, with the smell of approaching death. Yet out of the decay and the dung there is always a new flowering. Perhaps it helps to know that.”

The man rarely feels hope. Living through endless cycles of foiled hopes, disappointment, and despair have led him to be cautious and afraid. Sometimes it helps him to know that there is the possibility for change, but sometimes it only leads to more disappointment.

“There was also, inside the man himself, a very strong happiness whenever he found himself able, no matter for how brief a spell, to do the heroic things that were expected all the time, even if in the end it was only himself he was killing. How was it possible for a man to control himself, when the admiration of the world, the pride of his family and his own secret happiness, at least for the moment, all demanded that he lose control of himself and behave like someone he was not and would never be? Money. Power.”

The man does not feel righteous about his decision to abstain from the economy of bribery and corruption. This is because he feels like he’s been forced into making a choice—thus it isn’t a real choice, made freely—and also because he still feels the acute lure of being able to meet his family’s expectations of him.

“Another black push-baby passed, passing a white and pink carriage. But inside the baby was black as coal, and it was stifling in a lot of woolen finery. The man remembered his friend Teacher’s bitterness when he thought of all this. So this was the real gain. The only real gain. This was the thing for which poor men had fought and shouted. This was what it had come to: not that the whole thing might be overturned and ended, but that a few black men might be pushed closer to their masters, to eat some of the fat into their bellies too. That had been the entire end of it all.”

The man again feels bitterness and resentment when he thinks of how the leaders who brought the new Ghana to fruition have turned out to be very similar to the white British colonizers—all that has changed in Ghana has only produced a new class of elite at the very top of society. The rest of the people languish in the same circumstances.

“The man could have opened his mouth again, to talk of the irony of it all, of people being given power because they were good at shouting against the enslaving things of Europe, and of the same people using the same power for chasing after the same enslaving things. He could have asked if anything was supposed to have changed after all, from the days of chiefs selling their people for the trinkets of Europe. But he thought again of the power of the new trinkets and of their usefulness, and of the irresistible desire they brought. He thought of his own children’s longing for things, and of the satisfaction of Koomson’s little Princess, and he said nothing.”

The man reflects on the “enslavement” of Ghanaians to European ideals of wealth, luxury, and leisure. He thinks that really not much has changed after independence from Britain. People still chase after the same things—and when he thinks of the material differences between his children and Koomson’s, he doubts again whether he is making the right choice.

“The man closed his eyes, and like a piece of twine the thought ran round and round inside his head that it would never be possible to look at such comfortable things and feel a real contempt for them. Envy, certainly, but not contempt. So how was a man ever going to be able to fight against all the things and all the loved ones who never ceased urging that nothing else mattered, that the way was not important, that the end of life was the getting of these comfortable things? For the self, or if not for the self, then for the loved ones, or the children. Nothing else mattered.”

Although the man can think poorly of his leaders who have prioritized their personal wealth over all else, he still finds it impossible to hate the material trappings of a rich, comfortable life. Regardless of what decision he makes about his own life, there will always be part of him that wishes to provide those comfortable things for his family.

“His mouth had the rich stench of rotten menstrual blood. The man held his breath until the new smell had gone down in the mixture with the liquid atmosphere of the Party man’s farts filling the room. At the same time Koomson’s insides gave a growl longer than usual, an inner fart of personal, corrupt thunder which in its fullness sounded as if it had rolled down all the way from the eating throat thundering through the belly and the guts, to end in further silent pollution of the air already thick with flatulent fear.”

When Koomson’s government is forced out of power, for the first time he must confront the consequences of his own corrupt machinations. Here the internal and external are commingled—Koomson’s corruption is physically manifested in his terrible smell, which the man tells Oyo is also due to his fear. The unsavoriness and scatological detail are also symbolic of the inner “rot” of corrupt officials and a corrupt political system.