Yaw O. Agyeman Big Elephant Has Been Killed

Annotation

A Big Elephant Has Been Killed is a deeply moving and gripping narrative that interweaves stories of ordinary friendships and love's lost promises with a discussion of society and politics in contemporary Ghana. Although Ghana provides the setting, the novel foregrounds a range of issues relevant to Africa and the black Diaspora as a whole. Badly disillusioned from their years of youthful idealism, a group of friends clings with fleeting solace to their vision for their country through their discussions on poverty, pan-Africanism, underdevelopment, religious identity, social revolution and Africa's relationship with the West. But the challenges of their daily existence compel them to question the ethics and relevance of their idealism, and eventually lead to the desperate decision to steal from the "Big Elephant" in the penultimate gamble to empower themselves as agents of social transformation.