The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness by Wole Soyinka OUP 208pp, ??? in UK
Three attempts to achieve closure on past injustice have been to the forefront of world news over recent years. The three are the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Pinochet extradition case, and compensation by Swiss bankers for looted Jewish wealth.
What distinguishes the first of these from the other two is that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered forgiveness to its witnesses in advance, notwithstanding the fact that many of the crimes they choose to confess were crimes under Apartheid, let alone in its aftermath. For Wole Soyinka this poses a huge ethical difficulty: "Are we, then, perhaps moving too far ahead of our violators in adopting a structure of response that tasks us with a collective generosity of spirit, especially in the face of ongoing violation of body and spirit?"
The Pinochet extradition case (to which he does not refer) is an attempt to achieve closure on past injustice by affording the possibility of restitution through making a perpetrator accountable. Restitution is a difficult issue and can - as in the case of the "first coming" of Ghana's Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings - result in the kind of mob justice which Soyinka witnessed at that event. But the absence of restitution is the ethical element which Soyinka considers to have fatally flawed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The South African process, he says, lacked any "built-in mechanism for a mandatory reciprocity". It consequently left itself open to "the enthronement of a cult of impunity". Offering a practical example, he asks if a process similar to the South African one would be just in post-Abacha Nigeria or post Mobutu Zaire? More importantly, he asks how such an expedient approach to justice implicates "both the present and the future".
The third attempt at historical closure - Swiss Holocaust reparation - raises a number of significant ethical and historical issues. Soyinka rejects strongly the presumption that "it was the Jewish Holocaust that placed the first question mark on all claims of European humanism". Political failure over most of Africa in the post-colonial period has been above all a consequence of slavery. The issue of slavery is one which cries out for restitution just as much as does Swiss plunder of Jewish possessions. What matters is not the recentness of events, rather that they have continuing historical consequences.
Switzerland's reluctant self purgation is a precedent which those economies which were built on slavery might follow by offering Africa practical restitution. African debt to the European banks might be written off and art treasures looted from Africa returned (Soyinka does not mention the likely fate of collections of non-African art bought with income from South African gold mine exploitation: Africa's claim on such collections would be a strong one).
"Slave" may be an over-indulged word, but in Soyinka's phrase "there is a psychological mutilation of the human entity that no other word appears to be able to capture". Given that the word "slave" indicates a denial of freedom of action, modern Africa can be said to be still in slavery. Kenule Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Nine died leading what is in essence an anti-slavery movement. Yet the multinational primarily responsible for their deaths remains unscathed.
Soyinka regards the approach of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as one which was foretold by the writings of the principal figure in the negritude movement, L.S. Senghor. Soyinka has long been a critic of the movement and here ascribes to Senghor's Catholicism a belief that overcoming one's hatred of the enemy takes precedence over confrontation with the slaver - the concept for which he finds the Commission ethically deficient.
Yet it is towards art that he looks for recovery of a common humanity. Art, though born of conflict, says Soyinka, is uniquely healing, "giving off its own statement of harmony and resolution that constitutes both its reality and innate contradictions". Human resilience and affirmation of a common humanity offer a space where the impulse of forgiveness may lodge, where a lost innocence may be regained.
Soyinka's search for the muse of forgiveness grows out of the burden of Nigerian and African memory. His redeeming hope for a universal humanity has not been easily won.