SOURCE: Lazarus, Neil. “From Frantz Fanon to Ayi Kwei Armah: Messianism and the Representation of Postcolonialism.” In Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction, pp. 27-45. Westport, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Lazarus draws connections between the thought and writing of Frantz Fanon and Ayi Kwei Armah, focusing on Armah's first three novels.

Ayi Kwei Armah's first three novels—The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Fragments (1970), and Why Are We So Blest? (1972)—are all set in postcolonial Africa. Any attempt to delineate the conceptual horizon of these three novels must take the work of Frantz Fanon as its point of departure. Armah's intellectual debt to Fanon is profound, and freely acknowledged. Unless Fanon is understood, Armah himself wrote in “Fanon: the Awakener,” a 1969 essay, “we'll never get where we need to go. We may move without him, but only blindly, wasting energy.”¹ Specifically, we must return...