Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

Two Thousand Seasons (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0435902180/ref=nosim/theorderofthesel/103-9256851-4303022) By Ayi Kwei Armah

To Me this book is about the past, the present, and the future. History written in an oral tradition, and it spoke to me instead of inundating with a bunch of names, dates,and attempts to pinpoint exact moments in time that shaped the course of history. That would have  distracted from the essense of what the author has to convey. This is not a book that is exclusive to any one side of the story, it explores the dualistic nature of humanity.

The Basic reason for humanities disconnectedness, seems often to be repeated using different circumstances, however the message always seems to be the same.

"There is one cause - all else are branches: you have lost the way. You have forgotten the way of our life, the living way. Your ears have stopped themselves to the voice of reciprocity. You yourselves have become a spring blindly flowing, knowing nothing of its imminent exhaustion, ignorant of replenishing reciprocity."  

Useful insights I feel as a good course of reversal follow.

"Creation calls the utterer to reach again the larger circle. That communication must be the beginning of destruction's destruction, the preparation for creation's work. That, not an incestuous, unproductive, parasitic gathering, is our vocation , that our purpose. We will not betray this rememberance: that all unconnected things are victims, tools of death.

The disease of death, the white road, is also the unconnected sight, the fractured vision that sees only the immediate present, that follows only present gain and separates the present from the past, the present from the future, shutting each passing day in its own hustling greed.

The disease of death, the white road, is also unconnected to hearing, the shattered hearing that listens only to todays brazen cacophony, takes direction from that alone and stays deaf to the whispers of those gone before, deaf to the soft voices of those yet unborn.

The disease of death, the white road, is also thinking, the broken reason that thinks only of the immediate paths to the moments release, that takes no care to connect the present with past events, the present with future necessity.

Our vocation goes against all unconnectedness. It is a all to create the way again, and where even the foundations have been assaulted and destroyed, where restoration had been made impossible, simply to create the way."  

The story flows with the rythym of history as it unfolds. To me, the importance of this book became the realization that no matter how many times history has been distorted, misinterpreted, it cannot be destroyed, history has a way of telling itself to the self.

(http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0435902180.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg) (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0435902180/ref=nosim/theorderofthesel/102-1107696-5916108)

In my opinion, this is one of the most important books ever written by and for an Afrikan.