Towards African Renaissance: A Linguistic Study of Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons

Abstract

This study focuses on the exploration of Africa concept of a dream world – a continent marching towards a rebirth, towards that utopia that Joseph Edoki wrote about in The Upward Path (Edoki, 2008). This Africa concept of rebirth does not believe in jumping the gun to get to the utopia, but rather beams the searchlight on the opportunities, challenges and prospects that are littered all along the trajectory of the journey to that utopia Africans look forward to. For long, Africa as a continent was captured in slavery and this took its toll on the people as they developed inferiority complex, low self-esteem, no love loss, among others. Thus, at the expiration of colonialism, so much damage had been done. Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (Armah, 1979) warns against a repeat of the cause of the desolation in the first place, and then illustrates that the only escape route is to return to “The Way” which Africans have lost. Thus, the text is about a people depressed, a people neglected, and a people striving to recover their identity even from the hands of their own people. This paper is a linguistic study of Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons set to investigate the novelist’s level of success in the employment of the creative linguistic features aimed at driving home his message about African struggle for survival on the one hand, and highlighting the difficulties encountered in the course of pursuing rebirth on the other hand. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Approach has been adopted in this work.