Chris Dunton THE BURDEN OF MEMORY, THE MUSE OF FORGIVENESS by Wole Soyinka (Oxford University Press) In Africa Wole Soyinka sees a ”diabolical continuity” between the crimes of the slave trade and colonial period – crimes he describes as ”unimaginable” in their scale and depth – and the crimes of the present, that is, those the continent now ”commits against her kind”. It is consciousness – informed especially by memory – that must address these crimes and identify the means to deal with them. And those means available include forgiveness. Hence the key terms – memory/forgiveness – whose dynamic interrelations, and related topics, form the substance of this book. Soyinka notes that most African societies have over centuries developed social processes that enable the restoration of harmony after (often cataclysmic) disruption. But are notions of simple forgiveness truly viable as a means towards social healing? In a wide-ranging argument (the book is made up of lectures delivered three years ago at Harvard) South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) provides Soyinka with his starting point. ”Truth as prelude to reconciliation,” he acknowledges, ”seems logical enough; but Truth as the justification, as the sole exertion or condition for Reconciliation?” As an alternative model, Soyinka proposes ”Truth and Restitution”, and much of the first half of his book is taken up with an exploration of the implications of the difference between Reconciliation and Reparation (Soyinka here scrutinising both the TRC and the debate on reparations for the slave trade). Unexpectedly, initially, in the second half of the book the focus turns to poetry. Analysing (mostly) the work of the n’gritude poets, Soyinka asks how adequate this has been to the task of resolving the crux memory/forgiveness/restitution.
Writing here on L’opold Senghor – and, as always, relentlessly probing the reliability of the Senegalese poet’s work – Soyinka begins with a comparison, Senghor’s stand on grievance, knowledge and love being set against that of Martin Luther King. While King wrestles with his opponent (the racist, the coloniser), Senghor ”appears to be … within his embrace”.
Not all Soyinka has to say is overwhelmingly convincing. At points his occasionally orotund discursive flow takes on too easily a life of its own, and arguments escape that are slack and ill-considered (his wishing ”ideally”, for example, that Augusto Pinochet share the fate of Samuel Doe – that is, video-recorded mutilation and dismemberment: this act not an obvious good in itself, and one whose benefit to Liberia has been far from clear). Mostly, though, this is work from a master debater, a tireless (though not unpartisan) teaser-out of truths. It is also – though much of this book is calm and sober – the work of a fine satirist: witness the way Soyinka segues from a partly sympathetic account of the argument against slave trade reparations into a caustic swipe against Sierra Leone’s former military supremo, ”glamour boy” Valentine Strasser, and the cluster of alienated, ill-informed African-American elites who constituted the dictator’s fan club. What these, Strasser and his supporters, lacked – to a risible degree – was the ability to face up to both the burdens and the benefits of memory. What is needed for that, Soyinka argues, is to care for the spiritual and material means by which memory is nurtured. And this is crucial to the present and future. How fully apparent is this in South Africa? Is that insight now obscured and if so, is the act of obscuring it negligent or wilful?) ”Memory – of what has been, of acts of commission or omission, or a responsibility abdicated – affects the future conduct of power in any form. Failure to adopt some imaginative recognition of such a principle merely results in the enthronement of a political culture that appears to know no boundaries …”