The Rhetoric in Spiritual Dialectic in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons and KMT: In the House of Life

Abstract

The rhetoric of the spiritual dialectic is a recurrent phenomenon favourable to radicalism in the wake of disillusionment in the Postcolonial period in Ghana, as dealt in the novels by the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah Two Thousand Seasons and KMT: In The House of Life. This situation is evident in colonised African societies, where the subversive discourse between some devotees of new religions such as Islam, Christianism and traditionalism, has stimulated contemporary public debate. It also analyses the anti-social relations between newly converted individuals while placing spiritual dialectic in a conflicting context of stigmatisation. The author’s motivation for raising awareness campaigns against religious intolerance stands for a global pan-Africanist strategy. It focuses on the hypothesis that Africans will only achieve freedom of expression if they set aside their separatist ideologies to nurture inclusive discourses in their societies. Drawing on Marxist and Afro-centrist theories, which advocate class equality and respect for African moral values, we will attempt to analyse in the corpus the various forms of conversational influence between co-religionists in the author’s texts. This work aims to edify readers on the nature of the rhetoric that has resulted from the hasty integration of Africans into new-infested theories of some fanatics favouring otherness in society. Eventually, African moral values are more favourable to the concept of ‘living together,’ since they are a mark of true African identity, fostering harmony and social balance.