The Resolutionaries (2013) is Armah’s eighth novel. The word ‘resolutionary’ is his neologism and refers to a group of people who resolve to do things which always remain frozen as resolutions. Specifically, the word signifies Africa’s political leadership and intellectuals who make extensive and serious discussions of subjects in speeches or writings without translating them into realities. They are indefatigable talkers, not doers – innovators. Copycatting is their expertise, sad to say; they are seriously lacking in creativity.
In Armah’s highly provocative autobiographical novel – Why Are We So Blest? (1972) – Solo Ankonam, a translator, an artist and Armah’s second self, subjects himself to an intensive critical meditation on the role of art and the artist in post-independence Africa in the context of Africa’s ‘deep destruction, the most criminal’ by the colonial enterprise (230). Consequently, Armah has resolved to deform the Western novel form in the mode of Solo Ankonam’s resolution to serve the revolutionary interest of contemporary Africa. All things considered, Solo Ankonam firmly resolves:
Why not simply accept the fate of an artist, and like a Western seer, close my eyes to everything around, find relief in discrete beauty, and make its elaboration my vocation? Impossible. The Western artist is blest with that atrophy of vision that can see beauty in deliberately broken-off pieces of a world sickened with oppression’s ugliness. I hear the call of that art too. But in the world of my people that most important first act of creation, that rearrangement without which all attempts at creation are doomed to falseness, remains to be done. Europe hurled itself against us—not for creation, but to destroy us, to use us for creating itself. America, a growth out of Europe, now deepens that destruction. In this wreckage there is no creative art outside the destruction of the destroyers. In my people’s world, revolution would be the only art, revolutionaries the only creators. All else is part of Africa’s destruction. (231)
He resolves to commandeer absolutely his expertise in fiction writing to the total liberation of Africa from its wreckage by Western colonialism.