Ayi Kwei Armah

"A thousand seasons wasted wandering amazed along alien roads, another thousand spent finding paths to the living way."

This novel is a treatment of the theme of corruption wrought by poverty. It is the story of an upright man resisting the temptations of easy bribes and easy satisfactions and winning for his honesty nothing but scorn even from those he loves.

The Story of Sanhat, an Official of Kemet SANHAT, among Africa's oldest written literary texts, comes from the time of King Sehotepibre, three thousand eight hundred years ago. Sanhat, an officer returning from Libya after a military expedition, hears messengers summon the prince Senwosret urgently to the capital: The pharaoh is dead. Sanhat overhears other messengers summoning other, younger princes back. Fearing a bloody palace coup, he flees to Palestine. There he prospers. But dreading the prospect of dying abroad, he obtains a royal pardon, and returns to Egypt, bringing his life to a satisfactory close. This tale, over four thousand years old, is here transliterated and translated into French and English by the SHEMSW BAK hieroglyphic study group (Yopreka Somet, Jacques Depelchin, Ayi Kwei Armah) and then translated into Akan, Kikongo, Kiswahili, Portuguese, Wolof and Zulu by freelancers working from the French and English versions

"As a professional interpreter, Nefert works at conferences where Africa's rulers meet not to solve the continent's problems, but to resolve to beg for solutions from past and present masters. ... [She] gets drawn into a circle of highly skilled friends looking, like her, for a key to an African future. Her spirit lifts as the group's research uncovers an ancient way of knowledge and creative work, long suppressed during the centuries of foreign oppression ..."--Back cover.

"1885, Berlin: European and American globalizers set up colonies that impoverished Africans by exporting raw resources to fuel European and American prosperity. 1960s: "Independent" Africa's rulers, far from uniting Africa to create prosperity by processing the continent's fabulous resources, opted to maintain the colonial system in return for loans and grants, while chanting Pan-Africanism at hotel conferences. In this destructive drift, a minority of lucid scholars, spearheaded by Cheikh Anta Diop and Théophile Obenga, argued that instead of following Europe and America, we'd do better to retrieve Africa's own multi-millennial heritage of philosophical and cultural values, the best of which, like Maât, centered on political unity and social justice, would be our surest guide into a regenerative future. These essays show exactly why. They also suggest ways in which we can heed the call of our most creative thinkers, to prepare for the long-postponed rebirth of African society"-- Back cover.