Word: jived
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Copenhagen, he is so busy hustling the world that he has forgotten whether there is anything inside his put-on. Armah's gentle protagonist, Baako Onipa, is a "been-to"-a Ghanaian who has returned from abroad-who finds that, while he has been learning to reject the jive of commercial civilization, the disease has taken corrupting root in his homeland. What links the two disparate men is their common discovery that their insides do not match the externals of their world...
Busy Bed. Since he is a black George Washington, Jiveass naturally can only tell lies. "I jive people if I don't trust them, see," he explains to a friend. And he cannot trust anyone. Distrustful and predatory, he cannot bring himself to tell even one person his right name. What he can bring himself to do is go to bed with everything female he sees. It is his chief way of relating because it is his most effective form of combat. The black lover is a true warrior, he tells himself, and "fighting every day with the foreknowledge...
...ultimately, Baako's refusal to jive that finally confirms his insanity. But what is the alternative? When George Washington decides at the end of his story to return to the U.S., he boasts, "If you're black you don't need to get at anything. You're already there. You can live right out of your insides." But Brown doesn't believe that for a moment, and neither will George after he gets home. The only answer may be the one offered by Baako's blind 80-year-old grandmother...