![]() Filth is everywhere spreading, accreting, encrusting, building up, flowing, pooling, circulating, engulfing. An expensive new bin is soon almost submerged under a pile of refuse (‘banana peels and mango seeds and thoroughly sucked-out oranges and the chaff of sugarcane and most of all the thick brown wrapping from a hundred balls of kenkey’) windows acquire ‘an oily yellow shine which their underlying color’ water stagnates ‘in puddles whose scum visible even in the dark’. ![]() The streets, the rivers, the showers, the latrines: these are the symptoms of an ungovernably reeking and befouled chaos, a social and political putrefaction afflicting Ghana just before the fall of Nkrumah, the country’s first post-independence leader (the novel was published two years after his overthrow). ![]() Dirt, decay, grime and ordure are everywhere, detailed in prose of rhapsodic disgust. ![]() The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is a filthy book. ![]()
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