Gender and symbol in ''Osiris Rising'' by Ayi Kwei Armah

2 
Introduction 
 
The present work focuses on the analysis of Ayi Kwei Armah’s sixth novel, Osiris 
Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future, published in 1995 by the 
Senegalese publishing house Per Ankh.  
The interest for this novel arose mainly from the desire to explore more closely 
the phenomenon of post-colonial literature in West-African Anglophone countries. 
The choice of the author fell on Ayi Kwei Armah for his being one of the most 
celebrated voices of such literary scenario and for his widely acknowledged role as 
one of the founding fathers of post-colonial African literature. The particular choice 
of analyzing Osiris Rising originated from its quite recent date of publication, which 
is supposed to make it a literary product able to provide a closer vision of present-day 
African reality, if compared to the author’s previous works, written in the two 
decades after Ghana’s declaration of independence. As far as the comparison with 
Armah’s previous novels is concerned, the choice of analysing Osiris Rising was also 
determined by its being one of the author’s least explored works by literary criticism. 
The analysis of Osiris Rising has been based on the conviction that this novel could 
be considered a tool through which to get an idea of the perception of the African 
situation in African literature, half a century after the independence from colonial rule. 
In chapter 1 I have outlined a brief introduction to the rise of the post-colonial 
West-African novel in English, presenting its main themes and linguistic choices, 
referring to the works of most celebrated authors such as Chinua Achebe, Wole 
Soyinka, Amos Tutuola and Ben Okri. I have also devoted a section of this chapter to 
an introduction to the author’s biography and the themes mainly explored in his 
novels, providing a more detailed summary of the plot of Osiris Rising. 
The central part of the present work has been devoted to the analysis of the main 
characters of the novel, who have been classified under two different categories: 
female and male characters. I have opted for such gender-based analysis to highlight 
and compare the different roles that the author seems to attach to one category or the 
other. The value of each character has been analysed on the basis of the leading 
thread that informs the whole novel: the author’s hope for a re-unified Africa, free 
from those social evils (i.e. corruption and abuse of power), which seem to constitute 
a legacy that the colonial rule left to the new local dictatorships arisen in the 
aftermath of the independence.
3 
In the first part of chapter 2 I have analysed the characters of Ast, Nwt and Ama 
Tete, paying particular attention to their role as custodians of historical truth, which, 
from the author’s point of view, seems to constitute a necessary basis for the process 
of rebuilding the African continent. I have, then, compared the role of Ras Jomo 
Cinque Equiano’s three wives with that attributed to his fourth wife, considering them 
symbols of two different kinds of approach to the African liberation cause 
(respectively, the passive approach of submission and the active exercise of one’s free 
will), paying also attention to the weak points characterizing both approaches. 
In the second part of chapter 2, I have analysed the role of the hero, Asar, as the 
spokesman of the author and as the emblem of the African intellectual striving to 
promote the pan-Africanistic plan to re-unify the African continent. As opposed to 
Asar, I have focused on the negative role attached to Seth, the symbol of the 
corruption characterizing the new political class that has come to power in the post-
independence period. Starting from the analysis of the composing parts of Ras Jomo 
Cinque Equiano’s name, I have considered his identity crisis and his dismembered 
ego emblematic of the state of fragmentation of the present-day African continent. I 
have also compared Ras Jomo Cinque Equiano’s return to Ast’s, highlighting the two 
different approaches that Africans from the Diaspora are considered to adopt towards 
their motherland: either the active participation in African liberation cause or the 
relapse in the yoke of the corrupted political system.  
In chapter 3, I have focused on the main ideological issues presented in the novel, 
analyzing the importance attached to the African past in the author’s pan-Africanistic 
hope for the reunification of the continent. In such regard, I have highlighted the 
controversial essence of the retrieval of Egyptian civilization as the envisioned tool to 
which to ascribe the historical roots of the whole continent’s identity. I have, then, 
compared this retrieval with Ras Jomo Cinque Equiano’s need to construct his own 
identity and cult of personality upon a revisited and convenient version of history. 
Finally, I have analyzed the direct connection between the past and the present lying 
at the core of both the series of betrayals labelled as the “Cinque syndrome” and the 
reference to Isis/Osiris’ myth cycle in the hero’s symbolic death. 
The main sources employed for the introductory chapter have been Paolo 
Bertinetti’s Storia della letteratura inglese. Dal romanticismo all'età contemporanea, 
le letterature in inglese (2000) and Mary Keith Booker’s The African Novel in 
English: An Introduction (1998) that provided me with a general introduction to the
4 
history, themes and structures of the post-colonial West-African novel in English. For 
the introduction to Ayi Kwei Armah’s biography and novels, the main references that 
I have consulted were M.K. Booker’s book, the encyclopaedia-like volume The 
Companion to African Literatures (2000) by Douglas Killam and Ruth Rowe and the 
critical volume The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah: A Study in Polemical Fiction (1980) 
by Robert Fraser. The main critical sources that I have adopted for the analysis of 
Osiris Rising have mainly been articles taken from journals specialized in the field of 
African Studies, since a critical volume thoroughly devoted to the novel has not been 
published to date. For the analysis of male and female characters and their roles in the 
novel useful sources have been the articles “Armah’s Osiris Rising: Ancient Egyptian 
Mythology and Post-colonial Africa” (2000) by Rachida C. Jackson, “Ayi Kwei 
Armah’s Osiris Rising” (1998) by A.N. Mensah, “Living on the Hyphen: Ayi Kwei 
Armah and the Paradox of the African-American Quest for a New Future and Identity 
in Postcolonial Africa” (2005) by Obododimma Oha. Particularly significant for the 
analysis of the ideological issues explored in Chapter 3 have been the critical essays 
by Kwame Ayivor “The Beautyful Ones Were Murdered” (2003) and Divine Che 
Neba’s “Recycling the Myth and Revisionism in the Post-Colonial Discourse” (2008), 
while the volume Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (1998) by 
Stephen Howe has provided me with precious insights into the practice of retrieving 
Egyptian history as the cradle of Africa’s identity as a whole.
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Chapter 1 
 
The literary context and the author 
 
___________________________ 
 
1.1 The postcolonial West-African novel in English  
 
From the late 1950s, when the first Sub-Saharan African countries started to declare 
their independence from European colonial powers (Ghana was the first British 
African colony to become independent in 1957, excluding the case of South Africa), 
African literature entered a period of great flowering. Indeed, many African writers 
began to apply their literary skills in works reflecting the urgent need to rebuild a new 
Africa, free from colonial ties.  
One of the literary forms available to those writers to express their social, often 
political, message was the novel. Deriving from the Western literary tradition, the 
novel became a borrowed frame within which African writers developed stories on 
and for Africa, to recover the so-called ‘Africanness’ that until that moment had been 
silenced by colonialism. Despite the fact that the novel was a typical Western genre, 
therefore the ‘genre of the enemy’ par excellence, it seems that many Africans writers 
considered it as the ideal literary form to tell their compatriots about the African 
situation.
1
 As Booker remarks, this particular choice seems to agree with Mikhail 
Bakthin’s definition of the novel as  
 
a genre that can change shape and adapt to almost any conditions because it can 
establish a close and direct contact with the contemporary world around it. […] the 
novel by its very nature challenges its own principles and thereby remains ever new, 
ever in touch with contemporary reality. To maintain this dynamic adaptive ability, 
the novel must continually challenge predefined notions of what it should be. 
2
  
 
and as “a genre that is ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its 
established forms to review. Such, indeed, is the only possibility open to a genre that 
structures itself in a zone of direct contact with developing reality.
” 3
 Being 
                                                 
1
 M. Keith Booker, The African Novel in English: An Introduction, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 
Oxford: J. Currey, 1998, p. 21. 
2
 Ibid., p. 20.  
3
 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin, University of Texas 
Press, 1981, p.39; quoted in M.K. Booker, op. cit., pp. 20-21.
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characterized by such intrinsic flexibility, the novel, thus, seemed to represent a 
literary genre that could suitably adapt to the new post-colonial reality, with which 
West-African countries were confronted in the aftermath of their independence.   
Moreover, since the novel was a genre originated from the literary history of the 
oppressors, it constituted an instrument that African writers could adopt, modify and 
reuse to challenge the European colonial tradition that since the 18
th
 century presented 
Western readers with distorted and stereotyped descriptions of African continent and 
people.
1
 
But the recovery of a foreign genre did not result in neglecting the indigenous 
literary traditions, which descended from the remote past and are still alive nowadays. 
Indeed, in several African novels the presence of the oral tradition
2
 is relevant, though 
in different degrees: on the one hand, for example, there is the case of the Nigerian 
Amos Tutuola (1920-1997), an author that largely based his fiction on Yoruba 
traditional tales (as in The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), one of the first post-colonial 
African novels); on the other hand, numerous African post-colonial writers tended to 
combine elements of the oral tradition with the influence of Western canons. Of this 
second category Chinua Achebe, Camara Laye, Cyprian Ekwensi are instances, as 
they reveal the influence of Conrad, Hardy, Dickens, Kafka and George Eliot in their 
works.
3
  
At first sight, the recovery of a Western literary product to convey messages 
addressed to an African audience could be judged as a relapse in the yoke of 
colonialism. Indeed, this process has frequently been called ‘cultural neo-imperialism’, 
parallel to the previous form of political colonialism. But as Kwame Anthony Appiah 
remarks, it is also true that by the end of the 20
th
 century colonialism has gradually led 
to the rise of a transnational, global culture, a phenomenon in which Western and 
African cultures were no longer separate and distinct, but were reciprocally 
influenced.
4
 Even though the literary form chosen for the narration of African facts is 
Western in origin, the differences in themes and language between the Western and 
the African novel are not negligible.  
                                                                                                                                           
 
1
 M. K. Booker, op. cit., p. 21. 
2
 Cf. section 2.1.b.  
3
 Eustace Palmer, The Growth of the African Novel, London, Ibadan, Nairobi, Heinemann, 1979, p. 5. 
4
 Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, London: 
Methuen, 1992, New York: Oxford UP, 1992; quoted in M.K. Booker, op. cit., p. 3.
7 
As far as themes are concerned, the constant background upon which West 
African novels are constructed is the anti-colonial struggle in the post-independence 
period: the author often seems to assume the role of a guide, a teacher that gives voice 
and tries to resolve the problems of his/her own people.
1
 The writer feels the need to 
establish a path to be followed for the construction of his/her ideal society. It is no 
coincidence that many African writers of the post-colonial period put side by side 
literary activity and vivid political commitment and often paid it at a great cost: to cite 
a few, the Kenyan N’gugi wa Thiong’o, the Nigerian Wole Soyinka and Chinua 
Achebe were condemned to prison.  
In order to demolish the erroneous stereotypes about Africa, authors use the novel 
to complain about the colonial power’s fault for leaving the dominated country in the 
dreadful situation that they witness at the very moment of writing. But the writer’s 
sharp criticism does not concern only the colonial power; in fact, it is also extended to 
the misgovernment, the atrocities, the corruption and the savagery generated by the 
new Africans-ruled regimes born in the aftermath of independence. And here, the 
critique becomes even more intense, because the crimes committed by African rulers 
damage and, even, betray their very compatriots.
2
  
Another characteristic that links many West-African postcolonial novels is the 
retrieval of pre-colonial past. For many authors the awareness of their nation’s 
historical roots seems to be a necessary prerequisite for the rebuilding of their country 
and their sense of national identity, in a process that is often referred to as “imagining 
the nation”.
3
 This urgency to remember the past is felt as a way to establish a 
continuum between the state of affairs in which the country was before the 
domination of foreign colonial power and the present situation. It is also a way to 
fight against the attempt made by colonial power to hide or, even, to deny the 
presence of an African pre-colonial political system. It is this the case of books like 
the inspirational work by Chinua Achebe (1930-), Things Fall Apart (1958). The 
novel is set in Nigeria at the end of the 18
th
 century and the story of the protagonist 
Okonkwo interweaves with the rise and expansion of British colonial power in his 
country. After seven years of exile, when Okonkwo comes back to his Ibo village he 
is confronted with a community that he feels no longer his. He finds his people 
                                                 
1
 Paolo Bertinetti, Storia della letteratura inglese. Dal romanticismo all’età contemporanea, le 
letterature in inglese, Torino, Einaudi, p. 330. 
2
 Cf. the character of Seth Spencer Soja in Armah’s Osiris Rising, in section 2.2.b. 
3
 P. Bertinetti, op. cit., p. 325.