For a long time only polish, different kinds of wood and floor polish, had been used. In places the wood only seemed to have been painted over, but that must have been long ago indeed. They were no longer sharp, the cracks, but all rounded out and smoothed, consumed by some soft, gentle process of decay. And there were many cracks, though most of them did not reach all the way down to the wood underneath. The banister had originally been a wooden one, and to this time it was still possible to see, in the deepest of the cracks between the swellings of other matter, a dubious piece of deeply aged brown wood. By its light it was barely possible to see the banister, and the sight was like that of a very long piece of diseased skin.

There’s a terrific passage about a stair banister with an ‘uncomfortably organic’ touch to it:Ī weak bulb hung over the whole staircase suspended on some thin, invisible thread. 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.

The beautiful one are not yet born