Self, Nature, and Freedom: Pan-Africanist and Ecocritical Approaches to Ayi Kwei Armah’s Novel, The Healers

• In Event: African Sexualities and Textual Practice

Description for Program

In a 1972 book, Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o writes: “Literature does not grow or develop in a vacuum; it is given impetus, shape, direction and even area of concern by social, political and economic forces in a particular society.” Using late nineteenth-century Ghana as an example, Ayi Kwei Armah, in his 1979 historical novel entitled The Healers, creates universes in which people’s social, political, economic, and cultural alienations stem from their estrangement from both themselves and nature. However, The Healers is also a novel about Pan-African resistance against the social, political, economic, and cultural ills that contributed to the downfall of past and modern African societies. Revisiting the precolonial history of contemporary Ghana which was strongly shaped by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, Armah shows that discord between local states within Ghana during the 1890s rendered these nations vulnerable to European conquest and exploitation. Yet Armah imagines freedom from such chaos by representing self-love and nature as sources of inspiration that can help members of the pre-colonial Ashantee society heal themselves. Moreover, Armah creates within a context surrounded by fight, abuse, and wickedness, a utopian world based on the love of oneself and nature for the salvation of society. Discussing a few of these themes, this paper will show how Armah’s novel has both Pan-Africanist and ecocritical dimensions that are apparent in its rejection of Western materialistic and capitalistic approaches to nature. Alternatively, the book advocates for a just world based on equal sharing of resources without reckless competition and greed. Therefore, as a true Pan-Africanist, Armah creates in his novel alternative universes that help overcome most of the social, political, and economic upheavals facing the black world in both the past and the present.

Author

• Babacar Mbaye, Kent State University