Wole Soyinka
irony, ambiguity and paradox, all figures and strategies which make for
deliberate over-elaboration of a theme, for visionary intuition, and for
epiphanic insight. Nowhere is this more apparent in the book than in the
great demands made on the reader to keep abreast of the bewildering,
but ultimately fruitful range of meanings and inflections that Soyinka
gives to the two enigmatic terms in the title of the book – “the burden of
memory”; “the muse of forgiveness.” “Meaning” in both cases is far less
a condition apprehensible through isolable facts and realities than a way
of being-in-the-world and being-with-othersin extremis. In this respect, it
could be validly argued that Soyinka in this book is responding to the
fact that neither “forgiveness” nor “restitution” has ever been a simple
matter to work out between former oppressors and their victims.
But beyond this, Soyinka is in this courageous book responding also
to what would seem to be two African peculiarities which enormously
complicate the settling of accounts between former colonizers and colo-
nized, former slave holders and the progeny of their manumitted slaves –
especially their progeny. One of these is the extensively documented fact
that perhaps more than any other “racial” group in the modern world,
African peoples tend more to forgive their erstwhile oppressors and de-
humanizers, foreign and indigenous. The other point is no less porten-
tous: the claims of Africans for restitution and reparations from their
historic oppressors are considerably morally compromised by the fact
that African tyrants and despots have visited on their own kind atrocities
and oppressions almost on the scale of those visited on them by foreign
settlers and conquerors. These presumed “African” exceptionalisms defy
the equivocations of diplomats, the hypocrisies and expediencies of rulers
and politicians, and the opportunisms and simplifications of racial purists
and demagogues. For this reason, in arguing against notions of simple
forgiveness, statutes of limitation on restitution for slavery, and degrees
and forms of enslavement, Soyinka in this book is as uncompromising as
his arguments are irrefutable in his denunciation of such rulers, diplomats
and demagogues.
Are Africans in particular and Black people generally more readily
forgiving toward their historic enslavers and oppressors? And corre-
spondingly, is their memory of oppression, of dehumanization by for-
eign and local oppressors tragically short? If this is the case, are these
the expressions of a unique African psyche, a unique African spiritual-
ity? Is love of one’s enemy a supreme virtue or the ultimate folly? What
is the legacy of reflections on these matters in autochthonous African
orders of knowledge and belief systems and what residual contemporary