Two Thousand Seasons
Two
Thousand Seasons is a novel by Ghanaian novelist Ayi
Kwei Armah. The novel was first published in
1973 and subsequently published a number of times, including in the influential
Heinemann African
Writers Series. It is an epic historical novel,
attempting to depict the last "two thousand seasons" of African
history in one narrative arc following a Pan-African approach.
Themes
The
novel focuses on the complicitness of African people to the enslavement of
their people to intruders, first represented as Arabs than as European whites.
In doing so, the novel emphasizes the continued complicitness of African
leaders in furthering the oppression of other African peoples. For Armah, the
intervention of outside cultures violates a past "African ideal [...]
egalitarian philosophy" which can help guide the recovery of, what critic
Chinyere Nwahunanya calls a "lost African Eden".
Reception
Criticism
of the novel is mixed. Chinua
Achebe, in a 1987 interview, described Two
Thousand Seasons as "unacceptable on the basis of fact, and on the
basis of art. The work is ponderous and heavy and wooden, almost embarrassing
in its heaviness."
The
reviewing site Complete Review
gave the novel a B+ rating, noting that it is an "often strong but
ultimately too simplistic picture of Africa -- past and future". The
review focuses on Armah's oversimplification of the African continent's
"actual sad history".
Gloria
Steinem in a 2016 article for T: The New York
Times Style Magazine chose Two
Thousand Seasons as one of her 10 favourite books and said of Ayi Kwei
Armah: "He not only redefines history, but how history is told."
References
· "Two
Thousand Seasons by Ayi Kwei Armah". The Complete Review.
· · Nwahunanya, Chinyere
(1991). "A
Vision of the Ideal: Armah's Two Thousand Seasons". MFS Modern Fiction Studies. 37 (3): 549–560. doi:10.1353/mfs.0.0615. ISSN 1080-658X.
·
"My Bookshelf, Myself – My 10 Favorite Books:
Gloria Steinem",
T: The New York Times Style Magazine, 22 January 2016.
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