The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

In the disillusioned Ghana of the last days of Nkrumah, an unnamed railway clerk, the Man, refuses to take the bribes that everyone around him treats as ordinary, and is despised by his own family for it. Armah keeps the harbour city deliberately unnamed, drawn from Sekondi-Takoradi: the railway control office where the Man works, the port and its coast, the filthy home block, and the room of his disillusioned friend the Teacher; the political rot has its seat far off in Accra.

The Man

The railway control office

Chapter 1

At his desk in the railway office, the Man passes his days resisting the small bribes that flow around him as naturally as breathing, and is regarded as a fool for it. Armah opens on the dense, physical world of the office and the bus that brings him there, the ordinary machinery of a society Armah sees as sliding into rot.

Chapter 1

inferred The Man works as a clerk in the railway control office of the harbour city; the office is drawn from the real railway administration of Sekondi-Takoradi and sited there.

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