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Between Truths and Indulgences
By: Wole Soyinka
Posted: July 21, 2010 at 6:17 AM
Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka on Africa's role in the slave trade and
its consequences.
''Are these the kings of whom the griots sang? Are these their
descendants? We do not know them, but we know from which lines--
between those who resisted, and those who fawned on the presence of
their enslavers--the majority are descended .... If, in a freak
teleological reversal, the world were to follow Napoleon's example and
reinstate slavery after its abrogation ... we recognize among us those
who would be first in line to offer up their own kith and kin; their
genealogy is branded on their foreheads like the mark of Cain.
The righteous armor of demand for ancient wrongs is thus sadly dented.
The ignominious role of ancient rulers, continuing into the present,
serves to remind us of their complicity in the cause for which
reparations are sought''
--The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness
Fifty years ago, on the eve of Nigerian independence, my publishers
entered a full-length play, A Dance of the Forests, for a drama
competition to select a work that would be commissioned for the
national celebration. As it happened, it won. At the last moment,
however, the commission was withdrawn. Why? And what was the play
about?
The action centered on a "Gathering of the Tribes," a grand assemblage
of a people in festive circumstances -- not too difficult to discern
as an "Independence Day"-type celebration. However, the forest
denizens took over the ceremony and brought the humans to judgment for
unexpiated crimes against their own kind. The Independence Committee
felt that this was no piece for expressing the euphoria of a newly
liberated nation, a sentiment with which -- little did they know it --
I did sympathize, but only to a limited extent. I felt that the
insertion of a warning, the recognition of a watershed for candid
introspection, was equally appropriate, indeed essential within the
act of celebration.
The process of the independence struggle had already thrown up ominous
signs of human inequities that would bedevil a newly liberated entity
-- a familiar tendency toward self-attrition, once the external enemy
is gone. I staged the play on the "Fringe," as it were, and still
partook in other events that marked the Great Day. I experienced no
contradiction in all this -- to participate in the insertion of a
landmark event in national consciousness, yet exhume a shameful,
glossed-over history as a warning for the future. That history was
that of African's culpability in the enslavement of her own kind.
Since then, for reasons which must be clear to all observers of
African's ongoing travails, that dark reality of the African past has
become a political reference point, a quasi metaphor, in addressing
the many ills of the continent -- from the most benign forms of
leadership alienation to crude despotism, genocide, internal
colonialism and, indeed, even racism within the acknowledged homeland
of the black race. The enthronement of governance by disdain, of
unapologetic conduct and policies of condescension, threadbare
tolerance and worse by leaders toward our own peoples, inevitably
results in questions such as: What is the difference between then and
now? Between them and us?
Prominent in interventions over ethnic cleansing in Darfur, civil wars
from West Africa to the Congo, through references to internal race
wars in Mauritania and Sudan and the yet unfinished business of
internal slavery across the continent, that self-censored history of
the African past has nonetheless obtruded itself as a recurring
reference point, inescapable as Africa's humanity struggles to
understand why notions such as "independence," "self-governance,"
"liberation," etc., have failed to alter attitudes between one ruling
class and the ruled, between one "master race" and the subservient, be
all such designated by class or race, as products of external
origination or local in-breeding or self-perpetuation.
In a UNESCO address to mark the 200th year of the abolition of the
slave trade in the Haiti, I returned to this theme, evoking the
corruption of sacred African ritualism by slave suppliers and
middlemen for the purpose of obliterating the memory of their own
people as they were herded toward the various Points of No Return--
from Badagry in Nigeria to the coast of Mauritania. This is what I
wrote:
'' ... we know those who would be first-in-line (today) to stock the
slave ships on the African coast. They are the spiritual descendants
of those ancestors, inhuman yet superstitious, who not only waged wars
to keep up the supply of their own kind across the Atlantic, but
devised internal rituals to wipe of their memory, fearful that, if
they died overseas, their ghosts would return and haunt them. They are
scattered all over the continent and known by different names such as
Mobutu Sese Seko, Idi Amin, Macias Nguema, etc., etc. They are the
unrepentant perpetuators of a dismal history that is again turning
Africa into one vast slave encampment.''
Some progress has been made with "coming to terms" with historic
truth. The season of strident denial appears to be fading, but a frame
of mind still exists that resents truth's imperatives. Yes, indeed, we
can pursue truth for its own sake, bloodless, detached, ahistoric,
divorced from current actualities, or we can seek truth as a key to
understanding the present, and identifying the pointers it holds for
the future. Thus, it sometimes appears that the main bone of
contention is: To what end is truth evoked?
Let it be acknowledged that labor in the fields of truth is forever
unfinished -- the Sage Tierno Bokar has, of course, phrased it far
more elegantly. An accidental encounter with a mere glimmering of long-
obscured truths can only provoke an ever-widening curiosity, hopefully
deepening enquiry, and any community of peoples with the slightest
shred of historic sensibility must learn to live with this paradox.
The next question is what, if anything, is to be done with truth--or
uncovered fragments of its tantalizing repletion. I have already
indicated what I have been doing with this in my own works. It is
logical to expect that, within the Diaspora, priorities will be
different. The debate over reparations will undoubtedly form part of
the general attribution list. I have participated in this debate, and
openly confronted some of its ambiguities and contradictions. Such
ambiguities exist, and should be boldly addressed, but they do not
nullify the basic issue of reparations. Nothing is foreclosed. What
constitutes a disservice to our faculty of judgment, however, is to
place obstacles in the way of assembling truth's fragments, remaining
content with a mere one- or two-dimensional projection where a
multidimensional and multifaceted apprehension remains open,
accessible and instructive.
Today, within Nigeria, 50 years following the discomfort elicited by A
Dance of the Forests, the play is being re-commissioned to coincide
with the independence celebrations. I asked the initiator of the
project why he wanted that play specifically, and not a more
contemporary work. I already knew the answer, of course: He wanted the
nation to examine the present after half a century -- in the light of
the warnings that were so explicit in that play at independence.
Tomorrow read part II of Wole Soyinka's take on the role of Africa in
the slave trade.
Wole Soyinka, a native of Nigeria, was the 1986 winner of the Nobel
Prize in Literature.
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