Wole Soyinka’s last volume, ”The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis” (1996), the Nobel laureate lamented the fact that the democratically elected leader of his country, Moshood Abiola, was languishing in jail, while Gen. Sani Abacha, the dictator who had imprisoned Abiola (and also confiscated Soyinka’s passport), continued to rule unopposed. Three years on, both Abiola and Abacha are dead, and Soyinka has returned to Nigeria. But he is still addressing issues related not only to Africa but to the diaspora as well. In ”The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness,” his new volume of three essays, Soyinka squares up to the vexing question of whether the West owes those of African origin reparations for centuries of ill-usage.

The first essay, ”Reparations, Truth and Reconciliation,” states its case boldly. While he is observing the hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it occurs to Soyinka that the problem with the method being employed is that it allows the defendants to be questioned as though they were not criminals, relieving them of any onus to take responsibility for their past actions. Soyinka is adamant that justice is not ”served by discharging the guilty without evidence of mitigation — or remorse.” His indignation at having detected the lack of a moral ingredient in this process leads him to speculate about the concomitant lack of a material ingredient.

Soyinka builds his case for reparations by arguing that without a material payment for the crimes committed against African people, the resentment and hatred engendered by the original actions will simply continue to simmer. ”Where there has been inequity, especially of a singularly brutalizing kind, of a kind that robs one side of its most fundamental attribute — its humanity — it seems only appropriate that some form of atonement be made, in order to exorcise that past. Reparations, we repeat, serve as a cogent critique of history and thus a potent restraint on its repetition.”

While Soyinka offers no real evidence that cash or other forms of payment can seriously disrupt the often cyclical patterns of history, he does admit that there are grave problems that surround the question of how much, and whom, to pay. He once addressed executives from the World Bank and suggested to them that the slaving nations simply annul the debts of the African world and the African nations would, in turn, wipe clean the slate of injustice from the wounds of the past. The executives were not impressed, and Soyinka quickly realized the impractical nature of his own suggestion. However, his present-day plea for reparations is equally flawed.

Soyinka points to recent evidence of the practice of reparations and wonders why the African world is being left out of this ”fever of atonement.” He identifies the rehabilitation of the victims of the 1692 Salem witch hunt; the Japanese apology and compensation fund for Korean women forced into prostitution during World War II; the Spanish Government’s acknowledgment that the 1492 edict evicting the Jews from Spain was wrong. However, these seem to be particularly unconvincing examples when set against the huge and complicated problem of how to compensate a continent and its diaspora abroad for centuries of exploitation, some of which they contributed to themselves. In the end, it is clear that the task of formulating a strategy for reparations lies beyond the scope of this single essay and, for all his political acumen, beyond the brief of Wole Soyinka, writer.

”L. S. Senghor and Negritude” and ”Negritude and the Gods of Equity,” the two essays that make up the remainder of the volume, find Soyinka exploring the philosophical impulse that he feels impels those of the African world to seek a premature closure to their travails by freely forgiving their victimizers. In the life and work of the great poet of negritude, former President Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Soyinka locates the literary equivalent of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The term negritude was first coined by the Martinican poet Aime Cesaire, and it was very much a Francophone response to such American black-consciousness poets as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and James Weldon Johnson. The negritude movement assumed that culture was racially specific, and that the culture of African peoples, rather than being something to be ashamed of, should be celebrated. However, this did not mean that French culture was to be rejected; far from it. Senghor, who became the first African member of the French Academy, eventually replaced his affection for negritude with a vigorously expressed affiliation to what he termed metissage, or cultural cross-fertilization, in which French culture symbolized the apotheosis of human civilization. These assimilationist Francophone writers fascinate Soyinka because he sees them as the progenitors of this desire to lay down the burden of memory and embrace the muse of forgiveness, which, in his view, taints Africa and Africans.

When Soyinka yokes the literary to the political, and explores the reasons why negritude never took hold in the English-speaking world, he is both inspiring and original. He reflects upon the manner in which Africa has been viewed from the diaspora as either ”past continuous” or ”nostalgic past,” depending upon whether one is observing the continent from the United States or from the Caribbean, and as he does so it becomes clear that the free-ranging form of the essay is perfectly suited to Soyinka’s restless mode of thought and his incantatory style of delivery. The essay form, however, also brings out the worst in Soyinka, for it encourages him to wallow in excessive imagery that draws attention to the language employed rather than to the point that he is trying to make.

Soyinka’s analysis of the 20th-century problem of memory and forgiveness in the African world is both timely and important. Africa cannot afford to endure another century of accommodating the West and at the same time failing to discipline its own so-called leaders. It cannot afford another century in which it slips easily from acknowledged ”truth” to convenient ”reconciliation” without adopting a more rigorous form of self-examination and a more confrontational attitude toward its former colonial masters. Soyinka’s analysis of the problem is an initial volley in what will surely become a 21st-century debate.