🌹One of my Favorite Books: “The Famished Road" (1991)🌹

🌹Approaching Africa: Powerful Shamans, Creating New Bonds of Meaning🌹

How to we learn from the past?

🌹🌹 The Magical Mantra of Love: How to we learn from the past?

It starts with love. . .

The magical realism of “The Famished Road: (1991)

The Latin American writing style of magical realism enters the realm of African literature with such master writers like Nigerian Ben Okri.

I love magical realism and found this author as a real master of the style.

Read this excerpt about rebirth which won the Booker Award in England.

“In the beginning there was a river. . . .

The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry. In that land of beginnings spirits mingled with the unborn. We could assume numerous forms.. . .”

“Our minds are invaded by images of the future.”

“We are the strange ones, with half of our beings always in the spirit world. We were often recognized and our flesh marked with razor incisions.

When we were born again to the same parents the marks, lingering on our new flesh, branded our souls in advance.

Then the world would spin a web of fate around our lives.

Those of us who died while still children tried to erase these marks, by making beautiful spots or interesting discolorations of them.

If we didn’t succeed, and were recognized, we were greeted with howls of dread, and the weeping of mothers.. . .

I was born not because I had conceived a notion to stay, but because in between my coming and going the great cycles of time had finally tightened around my neck.

I prayed for laughter, a life without hunger.

I was answered with paradoxes. It remains an enigma how it came to be that I was born smiling. “

Understanding Africa

When studying the history of rhetoric, many groups were excluded from participating in power and were used, abused, and written off as inferior.

Even today African nations have not recovered from being exploited by European powers.

Historically, Belgium, France, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, and Portugal divided the continent up amongst themselves. France and Great Britain owned most of the African land.

We still do not study African history fully and examine its richness. It wasn't until the 1960s, that many African nations won their independence.

We can learn much about alternative approaches to rhetoric.

Much of Greek philosophy and rhetoric was influenced by African thinkers.

African Americans like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. pushed the limits of rhetoric and asked that their voices be heard.

What we don't realize is how potent and how powerful such voices have become to people of color around the world. Such historic speakers continue to have a global impact.

End of Slave Trade, BUT NOT SLAVES

Keep in mind there are African Americans in jail now than there were slaves a long time ago. I am part Afro-Carribean.

• 1802 Denmark and Norway
• 1807 British abolition of the slave trade
• 1808 America
• 1813 Sweden

• 1814 Holland, Spain (except to her colonies)
• 1815 France
• 1816 Portugal (North of equator)
• 1817 Spain (except to Cuba)
• 1853 Brazil
• END of SLAVERY, Emancipation
• 1834 Great Britain
• 1847 Sweden

• 1848 France and Denmark
• 1863 United States Emancipation Proclamation and Holland
• 1880 Spain (all colonies except Cuba)
• 1886 Spain (Cuba finally)
• 1888 Brazil’

Thank you for reading. . .

It starts with love. . . Love everyone

Comment 200 times, smile for 3 hours while you stay on the page for at least 30o years ,

Shake it, Shake it, Quake your Booty: Smile, smile, smile, highlight your eyes, comment about the wideness of my butter butt behind: sing it, hit me, and thank you for being a cool you!

I am in a lot of pain from post chemo, bleeding, but smiling. Such is my life. Hugs