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BURDEN OF MEMORY MUSE OF FORGIVENESS
Nobel Laureate in Literature Wole Soyinka considers all of Africa--indeed, all the world--as he poses this once repression stops, is reconciliation between oppressor and victim possible? In the face of centuries-long devastation wrought on the African continent and her Diaspora by slavery, colonialism, Apartheid, and the manifold faces of racism, what form of recompense could possibly suffice? In a voice as eloquent and humane as it is forceful, Soyinka boldly challenges in these pages the notions of simple forgiveness, confession, and absolution as strategies for social healing. Ultimately, he turns to art--poetry, music, painting, etc.--as the one source that can nourish the seed of art is the generous vessel that can hold together the burden of memory and the hope of forgiveness.
Based on Soyinka's Stewart-McMillan lectures delivered at the DuBois Institute at Harvard, The Burden of Memory speaks not only to those concerned specifically with African politics, but also to anyone seeking the path to social justice through some of history's most inhospitable terrain.
Based on Soyinka's Stewart-McMillan lectures delivered at the DuBois Institute at Harvard, The Burden of Memory speaks not only to those concerned specifically with African politics, but also to anyone seeking the path to social justice through some of history's most inhospitable terrain.
223 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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About the author
Wole Soyinka
225 books1,230 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, known as Wole Soyinka, is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "wide cultural perspective and... poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence", the first sub-Saharan African to be honoured in that category.
Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. In 1954, he attended Government College in Ibadan, and subsequently University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds in England. After studying in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its campaign for independence from British colonial rule. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years, for volunteering to be a non-government mediating actor.
Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian (and African at large) governments, especially the country's many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it". During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria on a motorcycle via the "NADECO Route". Abacha later proclaimed a death sentence against him "in absentia". With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation.
In Nigeria, Soyinka was a Professor of Comparative literature (1975 to 1999) at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ifẹ̀. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. While in the United States, he first taught at Cornell University as Goldwin Smith professor for African Studies and Theatre Arts from 1988 to 1991 and then at Emory University, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and has served as scholar-in-residence at New York University's Institute of African American Affairs and at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. He has also taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Yale, and was also a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Duke University in 2008.
In December 2017, Soyinka was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in the "Special Prize" category, awarded to someone who has "contributed to the realization of cultural events that promote understanding and the exchange of knowledge between peoples".
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, known as Wole Soyinka, is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "wide cultural perspective and... poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence", the first sub-Saharan African to be honoured in that category.
Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. In 1954, he attended Government College in Ibadan, and subsequently University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds in England. After studying in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its campaign for independence from British colonial rule. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years, for volunteering to be a non-government mediating actor.
Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian (and African at large) governments, especially the country's many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it". During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria on a motorcycle via the "NADECO Route". Abacha later proclaimed a death sentence against him "in absentia". With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation.
In Nigeria, Soyinka was a Professor of Comparative literature (1975 to 1999) at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ifẹ̀. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. While in the United States, he first taught at Cornell University as Goldwin Smith professor for African Studies and Theatre Arts from 1988 to 1991 and then at Emory University, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and has served as scholar-in-residence at New York University's Institute of African American Affairs and at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. He has also taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Yale, and was also a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Duke University in 2008.
In December 2017, Soyinka was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in the "Special Prize" category, awarded to someone who has "contributed to the realization of cultural events that promote understanding and the exchange of knowledge between peoples".
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August 7, 2016
‘Mercy to guilty is cruelty to the innocent.'
-Adam Smith
Slavery, Apartheid, Colonalism … What are the oppressed to do once the oppression has stopped and they becomes judges of oppressors? The question was a big one for Africa – with social reforms like those relating to the death of apartheid in South Africa. How are Natives to treat the white population who has enjoyed the benefits of the oppression?
The question is a lot more difficult than it may appear. When those crimes against humanity were committed, they weren’t still crimes in eyes of law. So, they can’t be punished unless a law with retrospective effect was passed.
Soyinka is sure that Africa must answer the question for herself. He doesn’t want to let West, the original source of much of the oppression, be involved. And when question is of political liberty within Africa, the Diaspora in West is also to be excluded, because they aren’t connected enough with their African roots.
Assuming a civilized society, revenge is out of question. While it might appeal emotionally to people who have faced centuries of oppression, the actions are always scored at later on. And everything done in name of vengeance on such times boils down to some opportunists involved in disgusting crimes for personal advantages.
And assuming an intelligent population, the idea of forgetting everything is out of question. How do one create such a mass amnesia in first place! Soyinka is very particular on this point. He appeals to African governments, to not destroy the documents about oppression of their people, even if they are about times one can't remember without pain. Those who don’t remember history…..
Then there is famous forgiveness. Forgiveness should be a matter of personal choice; you can’t group people into a race and expect them all to forgive the oppression they have suffered. And since the oppression has lasted for centuries, who is to forgive for crimes committed against the dead? I don’t think that even children have the right to forgive for the crimes done against their parents.
Also, remember that the oppressors are still enjoying the benefits of the past oppression. They are still rich with money that was earned by oppression.
So what kind of reconciliation is to be expected? Soyinka has a few suggestions to make.
To begin with, the wrong-doers must accept moral responsibility and their guilt followed by an apology. Another measure Soyinka points out as necessary is monetary. While monetary compensation can in no way redeem the centuries of oppression, it is a necessary component for a better future.
The example Soyinka gives is of African Americans who, at the time of civil war, were offered a compensation of ‘forty acres and a mule’ (not enough to begin with)by way of agrarian reform, for having served as slaves for so long. Some land was distributed but only to taken back away later- and all African Americans got was freedom to earn wages. A comparison of income distribution across races in U.S.A. a century and half later, is enough to show us inadequacy of social reforms that are not backed by economic ones.
The reason why I used words oppressed and oppressors rather than westerns and Africans or White and Black; is because they are as close to truth as it gets. Africans were enslaved by Arabs long before they were enslaved by Europeans and Americans. And so on that point, Arabs (including African Arabs) are among oppressors but, when talking about colonialism, Arabs are among victims. There were slave traders within native people, and in Soyinka’s list are also included the present day native tyrants who continue to oppress people – a result of nations created in Berlin conference of 1884 for benefit of colonizers. African Diaspora in West, are among victim on question of slavery and colonization but, not so much, on question of these present tyrants.
The last one-third of the essays is Soyinka taking a look at the Negritude movement in Europe, Africa and America as a sort of Sarte like ‘anti-racist racism’.
January 13, 2017
Eerily relevant today, Wole Soyinka writes in 1999 of the scourge of racism in South Africa and around the globe, along with the unguents of forgiveness, reconciliation, and restitution.
The world may be forgiven for exuding a sense of euphoria when prison gates, which once appeared to enclose the entirety of a nation, give the appearance of being suddenly flung open, but the task remains for us to ensure that they are never again slammed shut! Let us hope therefore that peoples and nations that are yet weighed down by the memories of a recent past understand this. Perhaps the debate that is intended in the following pages may lead to the evolution of mechanisms for the accompanying mission of healing, of reconciling, but also of restitution.
David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan --
What is remarkable about Mr. Duke and his bid to represent the Republican party as a presidential candidate? Simply that many Americans were startled to learn that he was a prominent and still active member of the Ku Klux Klan. He lost at the primaries of course, but his loss in the governorship race was a narrow one, and the fact remains a frightening reminder of the yet unconcluded business of racism, not only in the United States, but in much of Europe and the recently desegregated society of apartheid South Africa. After Mr. Duke's political setbacks in his own country, he cavorted briefly with the neo-Nazis and skinheads in Germany but found that the Germans, eager to renounce and distance themselves from any glorification of their shameful past, wisely kept him -- in the main -- at arm's length.
Now, the country of which Mr. Duke is a citizen -- and president manqué [manqué or manquée: —used to describe what a person could or should have been but never was; past participle of the French verb manquer (to miss, to fail, to lack)] -- has a discriminatory list of human types to which it would not grant entry through its borders -- such a list once included communists (also apartheid South Africa's bogey). Today the list includes drug traffickers, hard-core criminals, and terrorists. Would one exaggerate by claiming that the Klu Klux Klan can be classified as a terrorist organization? Mr. Duke preaches a less virulent form of Klanism, we are informed, but the difference is one of those subtle shades that must be considered lost on actual victims of racism anywhere.
Now, we often hear the United States referred to as a christian nation. What, however, does that religio-cultural parlance disguise within that very nation? The claim may be true, of course, given the fact that the majority of US citizens are indeed christians - practicing or nominal. It is also a fact that this dominant religion is being given a good run for its money by yet another well organized religion - islam - especially among the black, and the black prison population. Both religious facets of a contemporary reality, however, have bonded together to obscure one historical accusation - that the indigenous beliefs of the landmass known as the United States are neither christianity nor islam. Today, the original belief systems and worldviews of the autochhtones (indigenous) exist, for the majority of the inhabitants of the United States, as mere curios, relegated to anthropological studies within protected reservations, and treated just as marginally as the humanity that still observes them.
From the point of view of the Sioux, the Apache, or the Cheyenne, both christianity and islam are alien religions on the land, and it does not surprise them in the least that their adherents interacts with their environment in a way that is, at best, nature-indifferent, or at worst, nature-defiling. The Sioux, Apache, or Cheyenne suffer, however, from the disadvantage of having been turned into a minority on their own continent.
Memory: Conflict and Healing
Every landmark is a testament of history, and in our own indelible instance - from Gorée through the slave forts of Ghana to Zanzibar - every fort and stockade, increasingly turned into museums, is filled with grim evocations of this passage of our history. They are indices of Truth, an essence and a reality that offer any peoples, however impoverished, a value in itself, a value that, especially when rooted in anguish and sacrifice, may dictate a resolve for redemption and strategies for social regeneration. To act in any way that denigrates the lessons, the imperatives of that Truth, for demagogic or other opportunistic reasons, is to pollute a people's Source, and declare a new round of exterior control of a people's heritage.
WEB DuBois:
It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul... it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps in bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its life...
The mockery of history is complete even down to the underground railroad on which hundred travel every day, this author included. Emissaries of this midget slavemaster, Sani Abacha, however, traverse the world in first-class comfort - at least to such places as still grant them audience - preening themselves as men of independent action, even conviction, but what in reality are they? Slaves into the 21st century, mouthing the mangy mandates of mendacity, ineptitude, corruption, and sadism.
Letter from the Birmingham City Jail[King, Jr]
when you suddenly find your tongue
twisted and your speech stammering...
when you have to concoct an answer for
a five-year-old son asking in agonising
pathos: Daddy, why do white people
treat colored people so mean?
The Sosso-Bala [The sacred balafon instrument, known as the Sosso-Bala , has been perceived as the symbol of the freedom and cohesion of the Mandingue community] becomes an unsolicited metaphor for the near intolerable burden of memory, a Muse for the poetry of identity and that elusive 'leaven' in the dough of humanity - forgiveness, the remission of wrongs, and a recovery of lost innocence.
The world may be forgiven for exuding a sense of euphoria when prison gates, which once appeared to enclose the entirety of a nation, give the appearance of being suddenly flung open, but the task remains for us to ensure that they are never again slammed shut! Let us hope therefore that peoples and nations that are yet weighed down by the memories of a recent past understand this. Perhaps the debate that is intended in the following pages may lead to the evolution of mechanisms for the accompanying mission of healing, of reconciling, but also of restitution.
David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan --
What is remarkable about Mr. Duke and his bid to represent the Republican party as a presidential candidate? Simply that many Americans were startled to learn that he was a prominent and still active member of the Ku Klux Klan. He lost at the primaries of course, but his loss in the governorship race was a narrow one, and the fact remains a frightening reminder of the yet unconcluded business of racism, not only in the United States, but in much of Europe and the recently desegregated society of apartheid South Africa. After Mr. Duke's political setbacks in his own country, he cavorted briefly with the neo-Nazis and skinheads in Germany but found that the Germans, eager to renounce and distance themselves from any glorification of their shameful past, wisely kept him -- in the main -- at arm's length.
Now, the country of which Mr. Duke is a citizen -- and president manqué [manqué or manquée: —used to describe what a person could or should have been but never was; past participle of the French verb manquer (to miss, to fail, to lack)] -- has a discriminatory list of human types to which it would not grant entry through its borders -- such a list once included communists (also apartheid South Africa's bogey). Today the list includes drug traffickers, hard-core criminals, and terrorists. Would one exaggerate by claiming that the Klu Klux Klan can be classified as a terrorist organization? Mr. Duke preaches a less virulent form of Klanism, we are informed, but the difference is one of those subtle shades that must be considered lost on actual victims of racism anywhere.
Now, we often hear the United States referred to as a christian nation. What, however, does that religio-cultural parlance disguise within that very nation? The claim may be true, of course, given the fact that the majority of US citizens are indeed christians - practicing or nominal. It is also a fact that this dominant religion is being given a good run for its money by yet another well organized religion - islam - especially among the black, and the black prison population. Both religious facets of a contemporary reality, however, have bonded together to obscure one historical accusation - that the indigenous beliefs of the landmass known as the United States are neither christianity nor islam. Today, the original belief systems and worldviews of the autochhtones (indigenous) exist, for the majority of the inhabitants of the United States, as mere curios, relegated to anthropological studies within protected reservations, and treated just as marginally as the humanity that still observes them.
From the point of view of the Sioux, the Apache, or the Cheyenne, both christianity and islam are alien religions on the land, and it does not surprise them in the least that their adherents interacts with their environment in a way that is, at best, nature-indifferent, or at worst, nature-defiling. The Sioux, Apache, or Cheyenne suffer, however, from the disadvantage of having been turned into a minority on their own continent.
Memory: Conflict and Healing
Every landmark is a testament of history, and in our own indelible instance - from Gorée through the slave forts of Ghana to Zanzibar - every fort and stockade, increasingly turned into museums, is filled with grim evocations of this passage of our history. They are indices of Truth, an essence and a reality that offer any peoples, however impoverished, a value in itself, a value that, especially when rooted in anguish and sacrifice, may dictate a resolve for redemption and strategies for social regeneration. To act in any way that denigrates the lessons, the imperatives of that Truth, for demagogic or other opportunistic reasons, is to pollute a people's Source, and declare a new round of exterior control of a people's heritage.
WEB DuBois:
It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul... it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps in bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its life...
The mockery of history is complete even down to the underground railroad on which hundred travel every day, this author included. Emissaries of this midget slavemaster, Sani Abacha, however, traverse the world in first-class comfort - at least to such places as still grant them audience - preening themselves as men of independent action, even conviction, but what in reality are they? Slaves into the 21st century, mouthing the mangy mandates of mendacity, ineptitude, corruption, and sadism.
Letter from the Birmingham City Jail[King, Jr]
when you suddenly find your tongue
twisted and your speech stammering...
when you have to concoct an answer for
a five-year-old son asking in agonising
pathos: Daddy, why do white people
treat colored people so mean?
The Sosso-Bala [The sacred balafon instrument, known as the Sosso-Bala , has been perceived as the symbol of the freedom and cohesion of the Mandingue community] becomes an unsolicited metaphor for the near intolerable burden of memory, a Muse for the poetry of identity and that elusive 'leaven' in the dough of humanity - forgiveness, the remission of wrongs, and a recovery of lost innocence.
April 29, 2025
Soyinka interrogates whether true reconciliation between oppressor and victim is possible, and at what cost. He is skeptical of facile absolution, arguing that forgiveness without justice risks glorifying impunity and erasing the suffering of victims. Through incisive analysis, Soyinka questions the adequacy of mechanisms like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the notion of reparations, ultimately suggesting that neither vengeance nor forgiveness alone can resolve the deep wounds of collective memory.
Soyinka’s style is both challenging and rewarding, weaving together personal reflection, historical critique, and philosophical inquiry. He does not offer easy answers, instead presenting forgiveness as a value “far more humanly exacting than vengeance,” yet insufficient on its own to restore social equilibrium. The book is demanding in its intellectual rigour, requiring readers to grapple with complex questions about justice, memory, and identity.
Soyinka’s humanist perspective is evident throughout, as he turns to art and cultural memory-symbolised by the ancient Sosso-Bala instrument-as sources of healing and hope. Ultimately, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness stands as a vital, if unsettling, meditation on the costs of historical trauma and the elusive possibility of genuine reconciliation in the aftermath of injustice.
Soyinka’s style is both challenging and rewarding, weaving together personal reflection, historical critique, and philosophical inquiry. He does not offer easy answers, instead presenting forgiveness as a value “far more humanly exacting than vengeance,” yet insufficient on its own to restore social equilibrium. The book is demanding in its intellectual rigour, requiring readers to grapple with complex questions about justice, memory, and identity.
Soyinka’s humanist perspective is evident throughout, as he turns to art and cultural memory-symbolised by the ancient Sosso-Bala instrument-as sources of healing and hope. Ultimately, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness stands as a vital, if unsettling, meditation on the costs of historical trauma and the elusive possibility of genuine reconciliation in the aftermath of injustice.
August 3, 2017
A friend gave me this book many years ago, in the context of the South African truth and reconciliation process. I happened to pick it up just after completion Arthur Manuel's Unsettling Canada, and as I begin to read the report of Canada's truth and reconciliation commission. The relevance of Soyinka's messages remain so pertinent to the questions of truth, reconciliation- reparations faced here with the settler colonial history of this place.
April 21, 2021
Este livro mostra como tem uma parte gigante de conhecimento, cultural, literário, científico, que passa "em branco" por nós. Esse livro fala sobre um movimento chamado negritude, e também a reconciliação/reparação com a colonização/escravização realizada pelos europeus.
Ele comenta uma série de pensadores e poetas dos quais eu pouco ouvi falar e isso torna acessar o conteúdo do livro mais difícil, por outro lado é um contato com esse mundo do qual nunca ouvimos falar.
Ele comenta uma série de pensadores e poetas dos quais eu pouco ouvi falar e isso torna acessar o conteúdo do livro mais difícil, por outro lado é um contato com esse mundo do qual nunca ouvimos falar.
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July 5, 2022From Follett:
A series of lectures delivered at Harvard University in April 1997, in which Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, focusing on the nations of Africa, examines the question of whether reconciliation is ever possible between oppressors and their victims, and considers how such healing could come about.
A series of lectures delivered at Harvard University in April 1997, in which Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, focusing on the nations of Africa, examines the question of whether reconciliation is ever possible between oppressors and their victims, and considers how such healing could come about.
June 28, 2018
A good book. From Negritude to L. S. Senghor of Senegal
July 13, 2018
Hard to read but interesting
December 16, 2024
video book review: https://youtu.be/AS9s98-KjsE
While these speeches of Soyinka assume you know some basics of modern African history, the broad outlines of his argument are still intelligible to those who are not familiar with it.
Even though these speeches were given in 1999, the content is still relevant: how can we get on in a society with recent memories of injustice without confronting the guilty with consequences? How did South Africa's "Truth and Reconciliation" commission fare? What about reparations? Soyinka effortlessly glides through these topics, balancing coolheaded analysis with occasional outbursts of James Baldwin-esque fury.
Necessary reading for those who are serious about thinking through the colonial project, from start to finish.
"This risk-free parade of villains, calmly — and occasionally with ill-concealed relish — recounting their roles in kidnappings, tortures, murders, and mutilation, at the end of which absolution is granted without penalty or forfeit, is either a lesson in human ennoblement, or a glorification of impunity." (p. 29)
"And the reports that emerge — from observers of all races and divergent political tendencies — is that there is very little evidence of remorse at these public confessionals." (p. 35)
"Was an opportunity for internal reparations missed at a crucial moment? It is possible that today's calls for reparations from the African continent would have failed to resonate in America if the freeing of the slaves had been accompanied by a different quality of integration into American society. In all likelihood, the children of the black Diaspora, from their state of infinite contentment, of total harmonization with a new social environment, would have told their kinfolk on the other side to shut up, reminding them that their ancestors shared responsibility for selling them off to European slavers, that any compensation, in any case, should be made strictly to the descendants of those who had endured the horrors of passage and the degradations of plantation." (p. 37)
"Much of the division of Africa owed more to a case of brandy and a box of cigars than to any intrinsic claims of what the boundaries enclosed." (p. 41)
While these speeches of Soyinka assume you know some basics of modern African history, the broad outlines of his argument are still intelligible to those who are not familiar with it.
Even though these speeches were given in 1999, the content is still relevant: how can we get on in a society with recent memories of injustice without confronting the guilty with consequences? How did South Africa's "Truth and Reconciliation" commission fare? What about reparations? Soyinka effortlessly glides through these topics, balancing coolheaded analysis with occasional outbursts of James Baldwin-esque fury.
Necessary reading for those who are serious about thinking through the colonial project, from start to finish.
"This risk-free parade of villains, calmly — and occasionally with ill-concealed relish — recounting their roles in kidnappings, tortures, murders, and mutilation, at the end of which absolution is granted without penalty or forfeit, is either a lesson in human ennoblement, or a glorification of impunity." (p. 29)
"And the reports that emerge — from observers of all races and divergent political tendencies — is that there is very little evidence of remorse at these public confessionals." (p. 35)
"Was an opportunity for internal reparations missed at a crucial moment? It is possible that today's calls for reparations from the African continent would have failed to resonate in America if the freeing of the slaves had been accompanied by a different quality of integration into American society. In all likelihood, the children of the black Diaspora, from their state of infinite contentment, of total harmonization with a new social environment, would have told their kinfolk on the other side to shut up, reminding them that their ancestors shared responsibility for selling them off to European slavers, that any compensation, in any case, should be made strictly to the descendants of those who had endured the horrors of passage and the degradations of plantation." (p. 37)
"Much of the division of Africa owed more to a case of brandy and a box of cigars than to any intrinsic claims of what the boundaries enclosed." (p. 41)
November 11, 2014
After reading about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid SA and the Gacaca courts in Rwanda post the 1994 genocide, I just could not get my head round how such forms of justice could create the basis for real social cohesion in these two countries devastated by deadly forms of racism. Wole Soyinka's lecture on "Reparations, Truth, and Reconciliation' within this book is not a definitive answer to my question but tackles my perplexities head-on. Soyinka states that such forms of tribunals somehow seem to discharge the guilty without reparation and that these kind of projects appear to 'dispense with the principle of restitution in historic accounting [...]' and hence seemed to be flawed at the outset. Is Truth the only condition needed for Reconciliation? A brilliant essay, brilliantly written. But it leaves more questions than answers. The other two lectures in the book are also worth reading - Soyinka's dig at Senghor and his 'accommodative' attitude against the old French colonisers being the highlight for me on the 'Senghor and negritude' chapter. I shall definitely be reading more by this author.
August 2, 2016
coworker recommended i read this book if i wanted to get acquainted with african politics and poetry. since i'm (clearly) not from nigeria, he told me this would be an excellent entrypoint for an outsider such as myself.
soyinka can be a bit bombastic, but then he'll shift right back to calling the craven sycophants terms like "bootlicker" to show his utter contempt for them as individuals. i love the way he puts himself into his writing. i'll be reading more by him in the future.
soyinka can be a bit bombastic, but then he'll shift right back to calling the craven sycophants terms like "bootlicker" to show his utter contempt for them as individuals. i love the way he puts himself into his writing. i'll be reading more by him in the future.
November 12, 2010
In reading this book I enjoyed, among other things, the excerpts from the poems of the Negritude writers; made a mental note to pick them up in the event that I come across some.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews