[Olùkọ́ Ọbádélé]

"The white destroyers: what a scene of carnage, what utter desolation they have already left stretching over this land! What a destruction of bodies, what a death of spirit! But the reign of the destroyers cannot reach beyond these two thousand seasons. The predators from the desert, they who found so much to do among us turning living bodies to carrion, what are they now? A bizarre sort of egrets feast impudent on their very eyeballs in other deserts they once called their own. Thirty hundred seasons consumed in the lazy oppression of other people have killed their minds. All they can be now is willing instruments of worse predators than themselves, of destroyers even greedier. And the white destroyers from the sea, the worst there are, what of them? Their reign is surely bound within the two thousand seasons of our oppression. For their greed is preparing deep graves for them; it will raise against them the torrential wrath of all things in the universe, all bodies, all souls still with the seed of life unkilled in them. Were they not on their way to spread death elsewhere when their gluttony brought them here? Their greed is far flung, far beyond our land. Other lands have burned in their insatiate avarice, other peoples have died in the whiteness of their greed. In those other places surely other survivors have awakened from the whiteness of the trance of death. Others devoted to life will surely find that between the creation of life and the destruction of the destroyers there is no difference but a necessary, indispensable connection; that nothing good can be created that does not of its very nature push forward the destruction of the destroyers. And in that urge to live, in that fight against destruction's ashen blight each people of the way will find every other people of the way.

Dangers there will be in the newness of this discovery, dangers like the headiness of too quick, abundant faith from those too long sold to despair, the pull of old habits from destruction's empire; the sour possibility of people helping each other turning in times of difficulty into people using each other to create a selfish ease. Real dangers, but nothing beside the present danger of despair in the face of the illusion, massive, stone-like, of the permanence of this white destruction."

Armah