WEST AFRICA REVIEW ISSN: 1525-4488 Issue 7 (2005) POLITICS AND CULTURAL MEMORY IN WOLE SOYINKA’S THE BURDEN OF MEMORY, THE MUSE OF FORGIVENESS

Sanya Osha

After having distinguished himself as a formidable literary artist, Wole Soyinka, over a considerable period has applied himself--although not exclusively--to political commentary. Consequently, he has become one of Africa’s most visible public intellectuals. Commitment a la Jean-Paul Sartre is often deemed a necessity within the African continent because of the continuing entrenchment of underdevelopment (the development of underdevelopment), the crises of various modes of politics and the structural disequilibria in the economic field which she suffers. As Nadine Gordimer avers, the artist in Africa must not only but must make an art and if possible a science of commitment. Soyinka’ personal and intellectual trajectory is finely attuned to this postulate. Critics of Soyinka such as Chinweizu et al in Towards the Decolonisation of African Literature give an extremely parochial reading of Soyinka’s political value and relevance. Their charge that Soyinka practices art for art’s sake in retrospect and in the final analysis turns out to be an exercise in conceptual banalization and ill- intentioned journalism.

Rather, I would argue that Soyinka’s art is not only enduring but he has indeed transformed the art and act of commitment into a science.¹ In terms of lived experience, in terms of consistently engaging the public sphere and then in terms of his value as a creative agent, we continually have to discover new parameters by which to evaluate his work. By extension, there is the need to constantly reexamine his formulations- both theoretical and pseudo-theoretical- on the nature of contemporary politics in Nigeria in particular and Africa in general. For enterprising scholars, this should prove to be a worthwhile engagement because of the consistency and resilience by which he articulates his views on the seemingly unending dimensions of the African political crises.

There has been a growing strand of pan-africanism in Soyinka’s thought lately. Perhaps this point requires some clarification. Pan-africanism has always been present in his thought. Before the emergence of the technologically-driven information revolution, the pan-africanist ideology inherent in his worldviews appeared to be splintered by the realities and setbacks of undertechnologization, by the expansiveness of space and the invincibility of time and the lack of projection all these factors (engendered by the pre-digital age) generate. Soyinka obviously battled with these adverse forces but his successes in those battles only became glaringly evident with his commodification as a public intellectual, his skillful cultivation of diverse publics, his understanding of the contemporary dynamics of postmodern iconization and the global localization of his intellectual labor. His unremitting critique of the local through the lens of globality mocks conventional assumptions of both the local and the global. It is all about knowing the fluidities and ruptures within and around the local and the global. It is all about a new way of reading locale, context and content. Indeed, it is about a new awareness of the politics of identity, representation, place and belonging in a world buffeted by a bewildering welter of fundamentalisms on the one hand, and the alluring promises of multiculturalism on the other.

Soyinka’s unquestionably indefatigable critique of the African continent in general and Nigerian society in particular is increasingly becoming a critique of whatever is left or possible for universal human values. At the limits of history, he has become a rare kind of humanist who bypasses conventional traditions and approaches and who employs instead an eclectic blend of vocabularies.

A way of examining how he universalizes his critique of humanity is to address the manner he appropriates the contemporary discourse on truth and reconciliation not as mere metaphors but as fundamental concepts for global sociopolitical engineering. Within a global frame of reference, Soyinka addresses the imperatives of truth and reconciliation in South Africa which he calls a “zone of state engendered anomie” just as they apply to Argentina, Chile, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia and of course Nigeria. Soyinka’s thesis in this regard is that “one of the pillars on which a durable society must be founded- Responsibility. And ultimately- Justice” (1999: 26-27). It is also noteworthy that he reiterates his famous maxim, “justice constitutes the first condition of humanity” (1999: 31).

History remains central to Soyinka’s concerns just as the travails of the late M.K.O. Abiola, the Nigerian businessman who died struggling for the recognition of his presidential mandate in 1998. On the historic import of the Atlantic slave trade, Soyinka argues:

The Atlantic slave trade remains an inescapable critique of European humanism. In a different context, I have railed against the thesis that is was the Jewish Holocaust that placed the first question mark on all claims of European humanism- from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment to the present-day multicultural orientation. Insistence on that thesis, we must continue to maintain, merely provides further proof that the European mind has yet to come into full cognition of the African world as an equal sector of a of a universal humanity, for, if it had, its historic recollection would have placed the failure of European humanism centuries earlier- and that would be at the very inception of the Atlantic slave trade (1999: 38-39).

Soyinka goes on to remind us that “much of the division of Africa owed much more to a case of brandy and a box of cigars than to any intrinsic claims of what the boundaries enclosed” (1999: 40). Soyinka is not merely being dismissive here. Instead he is drawing attention to colonial forms of arbitrary territoriality and the destructiveness they have caused in postcoloniality. The Organisation of African Unity is blamed because it “formally consecrated this act of arrogant aggression” (1999: 40).

Undoubtedly, the Atlantic slave trade and the subsequent colonization of Africa further entrenched the master-slave relationship between the continent and the West. In formulating a conception of humanism, Soyinka evokes the trauma caused by this relationship. However, he constantly draws attention to the generalized mismanagement of the continent by despots of all shades. In isolating the origins of the Atlantic slave trade and the dialectic of enslavement that transcends the moment of political liberation, he writes:

There are slaves in gilded cages and the world knows of others dangling on the gibbet, rotting on the magnolia tree. There are slaves as studs and slaves as victims of castration. There are married slaves and merely breeding slaves. And there are trusted slaves, keepers of the master’s purse, commercial representatives who travel long distances on their master’s business and return to give dutiful account. There are the virtual spouses, the signares of Senegal, whose status was no less than that of the mattress of the house. We have known slaves who, after manumission, aspire to inherit the kingdom of their erstwhile masters, sometimes even acquiring slaves in turn. But they have never been masters of their own existence, nor have they plotted their own destiny (1999: 71-72).

This quote encourages a Marxist and Hegelian re-reading of the realities of slavehood within the postcolony and a rethinking of the dialectic of enslavement beyond analyses at the macrolevel. Instead, we require microlevel studies where as feminists have demonstrated the politics to be arguably more poignant.

For Soyinka, the struggle against continued African enslavement is a task that begins on African shores. Soyinka’s view on this issue is that “reparations, like charity, should begin at home, and the wealth of the Mobutus, the Babangidas, the Abachas, but also the de Beers, Shell Surrogates Incorporated, etc. of the continent should be utilized as down payment, as internal moral cleansing, that would make any claims for worldwide reparations irreproachable” (1999: 86). Soyinka’s ultimate proposition to contemporary global problems is “a marriage of the two contending tendencies that will produce a healing millennial trilogy: Truth, Reparations and Reconciliation” (1999:92).

Unquestionably, Soyinka broaches vital issues that relate to Africa’s survival. However, his conceptual architecture is something that deserves a great deal of scrutiny. What are his major conceptual and cosmological referents? A bit of W.E. B.Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah and also large does of African (Yoruba) spirituality constitute this eclectic conceptual scheme. And where does this fascinating grid lead? It is quite difficult to tell.

Soyinka correctly criticizes the European scramble and balkanization ( the 1884 Congress of Berlin) of the African continent. As mentioned earlier, he derides the complicity of the Organisation of African Unity in legitimating the European-drawn boundaries of the African continent. However, what must be thought through is how to cope with the existing geographical structure. It is not enough to offer such a virulent critique and not be able to transcend the limitations of the present structure. Here, Soyinka raises a very important issue but he does not bring his considerable knowledge of African sociopolitical realities to bear on how to construct more acceptable forms of territoriality.

To return to his eclectic assortment of conceptual referents which is indeed a curious analytical blue-print. For instance, how does one inscribe intimations of Martin Luther King Jr. within the current formation of global capitalism and within the context of a post-theological universe? This is not to undermine the seriousness of the issues that Soyinka raises but to question some of his basic methodological assumptions. The phenomenon of global oppression has transcended the binarisms of that particular structure his critique. Soyinka, in many ways, is a product of the new global political economy and continues to indicate new possibilities of the globalized public intellectual and the new forms of posturing that go with that status. But along with this status and the power and visibility it confers, we have to determine what is possible and truly transformative and what is merely a stylized gesture meant for global media appropriation. If the current manifestations of global oppression are fluid and digitalized then how does one construct a counter-discourse that is equally global and virtual in its flows and is one that does not succumb so easily to hegemonic articulations? At this juncture, what needs to be studied is how the global media vitiates Soyinka’s commitment to political activism and how global fame creates it own very real disconnections to that commitment.

The demands of being a public intellectual of global stature are quite enormous. Being able to address an audience from a global pedestal has shortcomings of its own. Soyinka frequently intervenes in issues of local politics that are ostensibly re-configured as moral questions of universal significance. For example, when Jacob Zuma, the former deputy president of the Republic of South Africa was forced out of office over allegations of corruption, Soyinka promptly let it be known that we should welcome the era without “sacred cows” in power. Now this intervention is quite problematic judging by its timing. Zuma’s trial for corruption had only begun and was far from being resolved. Second, the matter was transformed into a loaded moral affair that had been relayed and linked by the popular consciousness to the violence of apartheid. What appeared to be an issue of transparent and universal moral dimensions was being stripped down to an ontological level by the imperatives of the local. The exigencies of South African history, political struggles and lives became the benchmark by which the fate of Jacob Zuma was to be decided and not the wisdom of a public intellectual of global renown. Not even if he intellectual happened to be Soyinka. The complexity of the South African politics is informed by its uniquely dehumanising racial past and the problems of coming to terms with the legacies of that past. Soyinka’s intervention in the Zuma affair is an uncustomary simplification of the process of de-racialisation.

Soyinka’s critique of the widespread dehumanization of the human race requires more conceptual refinement. Soyinka’s first major public articulation of his conception of humanism can be found in his prison memoirs, The Man Died. In discussing concepts such human rights, he does not draw systemically on Yoruba mythology or culture nor does he enunciate the particular traditions of Western humanism he espouses. Such a methodological approach would introduce the daunting tradition/modernity aporia. Indeed Soyinka never quite unpacks the concept of humanism within the context of this ever-present aporia. And so in the absence of sustained analytical engagement with the concept, one can assume that when he refers to European humanism in both direct and oblique ways, we must also remember that he refers to the Europe of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault who in The Order of Things following the example of Nietzsche and Malraux proclaims the death of man. How does Soyinka’s assessment of European humanism stand within the Foucauldian thesis of death of the Western man? Or how does it stand in relation to fascism and modern totalitarianism? We must remember that these modern political evils are central to project of Western moderntity and the idea and cult of humanity.

Obviously, Soyinka’s understanding of European humanism is framed by the event of the Enlightenment and not by postmodernity even if his appeal, range and effects are decidedly postmodern. In another vein, he is promoting the cult of Ogun in ways that a pre-modern traditionalist would applaud. This is just one of the identitarian contradictions that his status, work and posturing can sometimes reveal. In other words, the ways in which Soyinka employs the concept of humanism is very problematic and is never quite clear. In a way, an understanding of humanism is linked to startling forms of political terror. After the indignities and suffering of the Holocaust, it became necessary to re-examine the condition of the human, to re-state its relevance even when the state deems it necessary to carry out elaborate schemes of extermination. Thus an important conception of humanism confronts the need to engage the terror that is always latent at the heart of the state.

At the level of raciology as understood by Paul Gilroy, humanism is stretched to mean cosmopolitan democracy which from Gilroy’s perspective entails the de-ghettoization and de-particularization of the black experience and subjectivity in the face of constant exceptionalism. Soyinka has constantly employed a universal understanding of humanism on the one hand, also relentlessly promoted the values of African culture but he has not evolved a rigorous mode of analysis that links these separate domains of discourse in ways that synthesize their discordant elements-modernity/pre-modernity, individualism/communalism globality/locality etc. Not having done so often turns out to be quite problematic.

To overcome the limits Soyinka’s invaluable work forces us to confront not only is a critique of global capitalism essential, we also have to carry political activism into the realm of virtuality. As Martin Thomas argues, it has become necessary to “fight against capitalism within processes of globalization, and for processes of working-class globalization.” Deepening globalization has resulted in ever more divisive forms of polarization. For Samir Amin, “the real challenge now facing humanity is to build a new world society upon principles which allow the disastrous effects of such polarization to be gradually erased.”

Soyinka addresses a broad range of regional crises around the globe. What is now required is a structural exegesis of these crises within a rigorous conceptual framework since he has consistently demonstrated that these are issues that genuinely concern him. If he is able to accomplish this, he would succeed where many African social scientists fail and where other literary artists would rather avoid.

In The Burden of Memory, there is a significant discussion of culture, a turf one has reason to believe Soyinka has somewhat neglected because of his numerous political concerns. And the cultural epoch he dwells upon is one he knows so well. Leopold Sedar Senghor, the grand old man of African letters, who is Soyinka’s old intellectual adversary maintains a central place in the latter’s cultural preoccupations. Two chapters in the book on culture, “L.S. Senghor and Negritude” and ‘Negritude and the Gods of Equity” are definitely important reflections on historic moments of colonial and postcolonial cultures, the ideological contexts from which they emerged and the cultural vanguard that defined them through thought and practice.

Even if Soyinka has enduring reservations about Senghor’s cultural universe, that universe has provided a foil for his own wide-ranging cultural interventions. Soyinka writes, “Leopold Sedar Senghor is a priest- but a failed one” (1999: 97). He claims part of the reason for the failure is that: “Senghor appears compelled to query deep into the humanism of the oppressed to escape the undeniable pressure of history, counter its imperatives in the present with an excursion into pristine memory, and forge from within its parity and innocence, an ethos of generosity whose lyrical strength becomes its main justification” (1999: 105). Senghor’s failings are then juxtaposed against the efforts of his other equally important contemporaries. For example, Leon Damas of Guyana whose response to his return to his native land as part of a research mission by the French Museum of Ethnography was summed up in his report, Report de Guyane which, according to Soyinka was;

the unwelcome result was a searing sociological indictment of French colonial politics on his native island and its consequences on the populace. France, he claimed, had reduced Guyana to a “cesspool,” for no other purpose but the protection of his own national health. These were all artist-intellectuals whose activities closely intertwined: together, they were the midwives of Negritude (1999: 110-111).

Soyinka reads Senghor and his contemporaries with uncommon sensitivity and with an impressive knowledge of the different cultural ramifications and cadences involved. Some of Soyinka’s own contemporaries also come under the same penetrating scrutiny. Of Tchikaya U’Tamsi, the Congolese poet, he writes, “an occasional apostle of reconciliation, at least on a preliminary- and implicitly undesired- exercise in self-induced amnesia” (1999: 120). He continues:

Tchikaya U’Tamsi shares with Aime Cesaire the same temperament that stamps criminalities on their source, and questions the social foundations- in religion or philosophy- of their perpetrators. Tchikaya does not hestitate- albeit in the anguished accents of a lapsed adherent- to apportion blame to a failed deity, accuse him of betrayal or, at least, neglect. (1999: 122)

Another important African poet, Rabiarivello, is restored to his true stature with the same peceptiveness Soyinka directs at Senghor, U’Tamsi and Damas. He writes:

We point to Rabiarivello- and Surrealism- only as a productive instance of the many tributaries that flowed into, and the branches that sprouted from, a movement that was not quite homogenous as many critics sometimes present as being. Rabiarivello’s true mentors and models were Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, with whom he shared, in the words of Ulli Beier, “disgust of reality (1999: 173).

However, it is the ideology of Negritude that receives Soyinka’s most enduring analysis. Due to his descriptions, we are reminded of the different ideological tendencies by which the ideology as a philosophy of consciousness was conceived and concretized. In this regard, “Jacques Roumain, Etienne Lero, Rene Depestre Tchikaya U’Tamsi are not too well known but, without question, this trio- and also some of the better known names- represented the non-negotiable sector in the province of Negritude” (1999: 164).

These views more or less form the gist of Soyinka’s interventions on Senghor, the ideology of Negritude and other related cultural matters. Soyinka’s focus on that moment of African cultural history returns him to a terrain which his more mature reflections illuminate with a discursive vividness very few of his contemporaries from the African Anglophonic divide can muster. These often piercing cultural commentaries return us to the worlds evoked by figures such as Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes who have also accomplished similar results with Latin American literary and cultural history.

Soyinka’s creative and intellectual itinerary has for decades been marked by an astonishing combination of political and cultural concerns: a leading figure of African letters, an indefatigable champion of African culture, an analyst of the politics of identity, a political commentator and social activist among other things. Very few other African writers have this range of gifts. As pointed out at the very beginning of this discussion, politics is often made out to be a necessity for artists in Africa. Consequently, Soyinka has had to contemplate the conditions of possibility of the concepts of justice, truth and reconciliation. These concepts are issues that demand a considerable degree of theoretical systematicity and perhaps also, conceptual distance and Soyinka being such a formidable social activist has probably not had the time to cultivate these qualities. His writings on politics are urgent, visceral, vitriolic and often impatient. Thus, in a way, the distinctions between theory and praxis often become blurred. Perhaps this is one of the reasons he has not made the impact in the social sciences even though he addresses concerns that are so central to them.

Culture, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether. The specific expanse Soyinka dwells upon even though narrow is covered with great penetration. He recuperates for Anglophonic sensibilities what had hitherto been a boon for mainly Gallic tastes. By re-reading figures such as Jacques Roumain, Etienne Lero, Rene Depestre, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Tchikaya U’Tamsi within the context of Negritude and the general movement of black letters, Soyinka makes a courageous attempt to fill in a gap in the Anglophone conception of traditions of Francophone forms of literary expression. Indeed, it can be argued that a difference of tastes is discernible between Francophone and Anglophone forms of intellectual production. For instance, in African philosophy, the modes of textuality adopted by Paulin J. Hountondji and V. Y. Mudimbe are different from those of Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye for the simple reason that the French and British forms of colonialism were marked by different accents in their modes of indigenous penetration. While the in the former French colonies there were serious attempts to develop and problematise the concept of Negritude, no significant corresponding movement occurred in the Anglophone world (even though there were attempts to develop the concept of the African personality, it was not quite the same). As a result, the complexions of the traditions of intellectual production in the British and French colonies differed in subtle but quite significant ways. The twin concerns of his productive life- politics and culture- so exclusively discussed in The Burden of Memory illustrate the successes, setbacks and challenges of African forms of subjectivity, necropolitical destruction in the postcolony and the inspiring promise of cosmopolitan humanism.

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Note

Citation Format:

Sanya Osha. “Politics and Cultural Memory in Wole Soyinka’s The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness,” West Africa Review: Issue 7, 2005.

Copyright © 2006 Africa Resource Center, Inc.