‘The worst thing was the fear of the return’, he said … ‘The member of the family who goes out and comes back home is a sort of charmed man, a miracle worker. He goes, he comes back, and with his return some astounding and sudden change is expected.’
Armah, Fragments, 102-3When we first encounter the protagonist, Baako Onipa, in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments, he is waiting. In the Paris airport and en route from studying abroad in the United States, Baako ‘avoided the initial stampede of passengers in a hurry’ (38). Titled ‘Awkwaaba’, the Akan word for welcome, the chapter pits the excitement and eagerness of other ‘been-tos’ returning from abroad against Baako's increasing anxiety that his arrival will be disappointing for his family, who expect ostentatious displays and distributions of wealth. Armah's novel has been called ‘the most fully developed, artful usage of the been-to convention in all West African fiction’ (Lawson The Western Scar: 70), a theme that is both a ‘recognized cultural reality, and a repeated literary convention’ (2). Been-tos leave their native countries to be educated abroad, and then return home to assume powerful or lucrative jobs. This theme, of course, is not limited to West Africa, but is taken up in African literature from across the continent. Like the native intellectual in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Baako dreams of returning to Accra and awakening the masses to their exploitation by the educated elite. Instead, he becomes discouraged by the general malaise and stagnancy he observes across the country. As Baako's grandmother Naana adeptly observes in the novel's final chapter, Baako crumbled under the pressure of others’ ‘heavy dreams and hopes filled with the mass of things here and of this time’ (Armah Fragments: 198, emphasis added). Fanon cautioned of a ‘time lag, or a difference of rhythm, between the leaders of a nationalist party and the mass of the people’ (107), and in fact Baako's return evinces these arrhythmias, as he feels out of step with both the masses and the new nationalist elite. Indeed, the dissonance between the temporalities engendered by national development and ‘progress’, disillusionment and deferral, Akan time and tradition contribute to Baako's eventual mental breakdown and his institutionalization in a mental asylum.