ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine Arendt’s idea that a morally responsible citizen must acknowledge his or her responsibility to try to restore civic order in situations of political instability, and further analyze this Arendtian political alignment in connection with Armah’s The Beautyful Ones, which soberly presents the pains of postcolonial reality in a fictionalized version of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana in the 1960s, a space marked by corruption and infidelity to the ideals of the decolonization movement. In Armah’s novel, the nameless protagonist, capable of moral judgment, decides to “dirty his hands”—or to become complicit in the nondemocratic system—in order to pave the way to a more democratic future in the country. He does not withdraw from the public world in order to retain his moral standards, but instead “embraces” his complicity as a means to further responsible action. My comparative review of Arendt and Armah’s ideas—an approach not taken by any other critics of the novel—shows how Arendt’s political philosophy helps to shed light on this political alignment in Armah’s novel, and, in turn, how the latter offers an alternative to postcolonial disillusionment.
