Ayi Kwei Armah’s writing career can be said to have been marked by two
phases. The first phase started with the publications of his first three novels,
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Fragments and Why Are We So Blest
in which he paints a bleak picture of the African continent and the incapacity
of the would-be saviours to lead the people towards better morrows. The
second phase showed a paradigm shift in Armah’s vision about the way to
address the issues that hamper the development of Africa. Thus, in Two
Thousand Seasons and The Healers, Armah calls for a Pan-African response
and a return to the sources in an attempt to bring the continent out of its current
predicaments. A return to the sources means that Black people should seek to
know who they really are instead of blindly accepting what others have told
them. The same invitation is repeated in Osiris Rising and KMT: in the House
of Life, where the author explicitly makes Egyptology his prime source in
retracing the continent’s forgotten history. The present article aims to follow
the paths of two women in their quest for meaning and the self, namely Ast
and Lindela, the respective protagonists in Osiris Rising and KMT: in the
House of Life. The study seeks to show how through the two characters’ search
for meaning and self, Armah wants every African to understand that any
viable project of development goes through a clear vision of who they are and
where they come from. The study will be carried out through the prism of
post-colonialism. It will consist of a literary analysis relying primarily on the
two novels under study.

Quest, identity, self, Egyptology