A WORD ABOUT WRITER AYI KWEI ARMAH

There is a video of Ayi Kwei Armah where he talks about the awakening of Afrikan people. One particular observation he made really hit home for me. He said that the things we do everyday are more important than the fantastic things we do once in a while. When he said that I looked at myself. Then I looked out into the world. Most of us spend our lives waiting in anticipation of one singular moment to another. That moment could be anything from moving to a new city to kissing the man of our dreams. And in between those moments there is a tendency to diminish. To diminish into a world where beauty is always on the periphery, never quite in reach. Where the mind has become so preoccupied with the development of one story that it ignores the many other stories coming into being everyday.

We do this because we do not understand what real growth or intelligence is. We think growth and intelligence are in the acquisition of things; money, information, power. When really they are about becoming progressively more efficient at accessing and exercising our creative powers. If we would not become so jaded by what is propagated to us as technology, if we would not be so influenced by foolish societies, then we would not see the everyday as mundane, but as opportunity to birth and witness real magic.

Everyone wants to know why the Kemetians were able to create so much that can neither be explained nor duplicated. Well, from what I’ve gathered they were deeply in tune with nature, with magic, and we are so very far away. If we really were as advanced as we think we are, we wouldn’t be falling all over ourselves, trying to escape our own reality. We would stroll through life, basking in creativity.

In magic. In beauty. In love.

We would no longer have to spend our days fantasizing about some extraordinary moment because we would realize how extraordinary a creative life is. As always, I wish to share my progression with you. So as the next big moment or milestone approaches (or gets underway), I challenge myself and you, to heed brother Armah’s words and also the lives of our ancestors. And remember that the goal is for these big moments to fade away. Into a full, beautiful, extraordinary, powerful life.

Giant of an African writer Ayi Kwei Armah, clearly getting conversationally pithy with an acquaintance.  I Goodman Manyanya Phiri beg to confess to owing Armah some serious reading, what  with  the only literary thing to cross my eyes from his metacarpals being his “Why Are We So Blest?” I read “Why Are We So Blest?” while I was still a virgin in 1979, aged 18 years.  And guess what? I found Ayi Kwei Armah to be too raunchy for completion. Of course, I completed some things very nether and biological while reading the book; but I could not complete the book itself and as such never came to know why I am so blessed.  My memory tells me he talked about sex (of which I knew nothing beyond my Biology lessons from a Thembeka Senior Secondary School’s Mr Ngcane who taught me about clitorises and phalluses distended or merely flaccid).  Worse, Mr Armah’s “Why Are We So Blest?” seemed in those 1970s of mine to be talking about sex between an African and a European (of which practice was banned by an Act of Parliament in the Republic of South Africa as an ‘immoral’ act).  But now, at advanced age of 52, I realize Armah is more serious than Eros: he seems to connect the primacy of the larger universe over the earth and its earthlings; he reiterates the dominance of the unseen to the seen, and the originality of humanity in the womb of Africa.  But maybe I am pre-judging and pre-lionizing Armah; let me now read him rather than sing him maybe even prematurely.. This picture is courtesy please click