I met Ayi Kwei Armah about four years ago.
He came to Nigeria as our guest and read from his most recent works at our monthly meeting in Surulere, Lagos.

Later we discussed about his Per Ankh and his revival of the Golden Age of Africa through the establishment of an African intelligentsia.


[b]"Africans who, like me, grew up under a colonial educational system were encouraged to embrace a type of identity that was supposedly quintessential in Africa - a tribal identity. For individuals born into mono-ethnic families, this may be fine.

"But millions of Africans start life endowed with a more complex identity. I am one of those millions. My father came from a patrilineal background, my mother from a matrilineal one. Both groups supposed I belonged to them. For me there was no sense in thinking I belonged to any particular group.

"My parents had met and bonded across ethnic lines. They had given me a life that made it easy for me to think of a wide range of individuals as closer to me than my blood kin. Blood could not be the only factor determining my identity; it could not even be a determining factor unless I wanted it to be, and I did not.

"Thinking was for me as important as blood, perhaps more important. I had no intention of being a tribal being or a colonial being. I wanted to be an African, to think as an African, to live as an African.

"When I looked into my psyche, what I saw was a consciousness desiring first of all to bond with all Africans, to live out that desirable bond, thinking of the most creative ways in which Africans might be brought together, and bending my work deliberately, consciously, toward that aim. Such an aim is easily reduced to nothing by the realities of a status quo designed to make it seem impossible."

~ Ayi Kwei Armah
in "The Eloquence of the Scribes": (Published by Per Ankh: Popenguine, Senegal. 2006).[/b]

His PER ANKH African Publishing Cooperative offers the best deals in book distribution.
I wanted to accept the lucrative offer under the auspices of my King of Kings Books International, but I have not done so. Because, I don't believe in the religious revival of Per Ankh.

Ayi Kwei Armah is a first class African scholar and very brilliant. He is famous as the author of The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, a novel of great depth. He is currently working on a novel that will make his older novels read like ordinary novels.