Review by Choice Review
"What," Soyinka asks, "does the continent known as Africa possess that the rest--or a greater part--of the globe does not already have in superabundance?" In this slim volume he provides multiple responses to that question. Divided into two parts--"Past into Present" and "Body and Soul"--the eight essays look at critically contemporary debates, their historical precedents, and future anticipations regarding the "continent known as Africa." In considering, for example, the current relevance of the map of Africa, (mostly) drawn in Berlin in 1884-5, with reference to Herodotus, Shakespeare, 19th-century colonial (and anti-colonial) writers, and 20th-century human rights advocates (with specific reference to Rwanda and Darfur), Soyinka reminds his readers that the ritual of the "tree of forgetfulness" must be watered if historical remembrance will survive. In part 2, Soyinka revisits the story of Africa, the one continent that "no one actually claims to have "discovered," in terms of the place and its peoples, their own struggles over the colonial and post-/neo-colonial centuries "between fundamentalist ruthlessness and secular excess." Soyinka concludes "optimistically," however, that the "new Scramble for Africa" might yet "confer on [the continent] an unaccustomed status--the vital role of a Global Culture Recourse and--Arbiter." Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers. B. Harlow University of Texas at Austin
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Among the Africans who deserve some kind of secular sainthood is Wole Soyinka. Although best known as a playwright, he has also written poetry, novels and nonfiction; the luminous world evoked in his memoir "Aké: The Years of Childhood" sticks with me decades after I read it. Moreover, Soyinka has always been a passionate defender of human rights. For trying to negotiate peace during the Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s, he spent two years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement; some 30 years later, as an opponent of a later generation of military dictatorship, he had to escape Nigeria on a motorcycle and was sentenced to death in absentia. His commitment to freedom has always been absolute. He staunchly opposed Soviet repression in Eastern Europe, but also, in his 1986 Nobel Prize lecture, eluded President Reagan for intervening in Nicaragua. He has nothing but scorn for the claim that African and Asian countries should be judged differently on human rights issues because their cultures are non-Western. He joined an investigative mission to Darfur that was denied access by the government of Sudan. Just weeks ago, he and two fellow Nobel laureates from Africa, Nadine Gordimer and Desmond Tutu, wrote an open letter criticizing the Commonwealth of Nations for proposing a new democracy and rule-of-law charter that lacked provisions for implementation and redress. With the venerable Soyinka now 78, I wish I could report that his new volume of sweeping reflections is of the same stature as his best work, but sadly it is not. The book is vague, ponderous and awkward. Soyinka never says "house" when he can say "habitation," "native" when he can say "autochthon," "dominant" when he can say "hegemonic." Phrases in quotation marks float free of any source. When he makes broad generalizations and criticisms he sometimes expects the reader to mentally provide specific examples. (Do you remember exactly what President Obama said in Cairo in 2009? I had to look it up.) The book abounds in passages full of 10-dollar words that have to be read two or three times to figure out what they mean. About contentions in Christian theology, for example, he says: "These all-consuming debates and formal encyclicals are constructed on what we may term a proliferating autogeny within a hermetic realm - what is at the core of arguments need not be true; it is sufficient that the layers upon layers of dialectical constructs fit snugly on top of one another." When a fine writer and a good man writes of "proliferating autogeny," it is probably not just because he is having a bad day. The strained language in "Of Africa" may reflect a struggle inside Soyinka himself. The book has its origin, he tells us, in contemptuous remarks about Africans he has heard over the years: "You must admit that there is something of a problem about your peoples - look what's just happened in . . . / look at the scale of corruption in . . . / with just a fraction of Africa's natural resources, compare . . .," culminating in a comment someone made to him in Germany that Africans "are inherently inferior. You must be, or other races would not have enslaved you for centuries." Soyinka felt deeply stung by this, as anyone would, and tired of being labeled as someone "exceptional . . . from a zone of dread and avoidance." In response, part of him understandably wants to defend Africa to the world. Yet at the same time his clearsighted integrity, what Orwell called the "power of facing unpleasant facts," makes him acutely aware that Africa certainly does have more than its share of homicidal warlords, child soldiers, larcenous dictators, outbursts of genocide and more. And in few places have things been worse than his native Nigeria. This, I think, is the clash of feelings that agonizes Soyinka. Great scars in African history, for example, have been left by the experience of being plundered, first by slave traders and then by European colonizers. But Soyinka is so honest that he cannot deal with the first without also talking about the role of African slave dealers in the trade. And he equates an unctuous cardinal's 1939 glorification of "France's colonizing mission on the black continent" with the imperiousness of present-day despots who violently assume for themselves, or their ethnic groups, the divine right to govern. He calls the Janjaweed, the murderous militia backed by the Sudanese government, "the Ku Klux Klan of Darfur." How, then, does Soyinka defend Africa against its condescending critics? The main thing he offers up is "Africa's spirituality." In contrast to aggressively proselytizing Christianity and Islam, with their Crusades and Inquisitions, jihads and fatwas, African religions are "accommodative," non-evangelizing and aware, in their incorporation of traditional herbal healing, of the connection between body and soul. Priests are not a superior caste. There is no excommunication or ferocity toward infidels. African spirituality has been attractive and hardy enough, Soyinka points out, that it has thrived in the Western Hemisphere (here again the reader has to fill in examples, because he does not give them): Voodoo in Haiti, Candomblé in Brazil and Santería in Cuba. Well, maybe. These tolerant faiths certainly sound better than Crusades and jihads. But for those of us who know little of African religion to begin with, it is hard to understand more when we run into passages like this: "The understanding of the nature of existence is thus one of complementarity, an osmotic relationship in which states of consciousness, transformed or influenced by progressive knowledge, flow into one another, taking from and giving back, replenishing the universal store of vitality from which consciousness takes form and motion. ... In such a conceptual universe, how can the gods themselves fail to remain earthed, evolving even as transcending?" If I'm right about the inner conflict reflected in Soyinka's contorted prose, one thing I wish I could say to him is that perhaps he takes Africa's woes too much to heart Yes, Africa has too many corrupt strongmen, but such figures blight countries everywhere, from Afghanistan to Belarus. Yes, many African societies are deeply scarred by that heritage of masters and slaves, but so is Russia: some 150 years ago, most people there were serfs. And from reading "Of Africa," one would never guess that for all the continent's troubles, democratic elections are today far more common there than in the states of former Soviet Central Asia or the Arabian Peninsula. Or that Africa's rate of economic growth has, for more than a decade and a half, been far higher than Europe's. Of course vast injustices remain, but the continent is lucky to have fearless men and women of conscience, like Soyinka, who are so acutely aware of them. Adam Hochschild's most recent book is "To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918." Women await food distribution in West Darfur, Sudan, February 2008. Soyinka possesses a clear-sighted integrity, what Orwell called the 'power of facing unpleasant facts.'
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 11, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
In this essay collection, Nigerian writer Soyinka, the first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, examines the meaning of Africa as a concept and a category, an enigma and an imperative. His goal, however, is less to define Africa than to reject those who would limit it through externally imposed categories; he seeks instead to retrieve a few grains for germination from the wasteful threshing floor of Africa's existential totality. His essays thus query how Africa's history continues to impose limitations on its present: probing, for example, the continued consequences of artificial national boundaries imposed by Europeans centuries ago, or the legacy of European failed efforts to will ideas about what Africa is, or what Africa could be, into reality. Soyinka does not deceive himself about the profound problems that Africa faces today. But the overall tenor of this selection is optimistic, emphasizing Africa's capacity to inspire authentic spirituality (the continent, he reminds us, is filled with religions that point the way to the harmonization of faiths) and resilient, life-embracing humanity.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer and activist offers a fascinating, urgent appraisal of Africa's relationship to the world, with Africa functioning as a conceptual construct as much as specific geopolitical, economic, or cultural realities. At a time of global crisis, Soyinka (Ake: The Years of Childhood) sees unique potential for Africa to act as a conduit for peace. Soyinka uses the 2001 Millennium Commission report on Africa spearheaded by former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan as a springboard to both assess critical problems and challenges-high-level corruption, interethnic fighting, famine, disease, religious and racial violence, and postcolonial economic dependency-and muse on a broader imperial discourse ("the past `fictioning' of Africa") that brings both Africa and, in particular, the West into a mutual, tenuous definition. If Africa's contributions to history have been diminished in the cultural and intellectual valuations of outsiders, it remains an untapped resource of human material, intellectual, and spiritual energies capable of contributing to a world beset by violent binaries. Pitched to a general reader but with implications for specialists as well, this is necessarily big thinking laced with the subtle insights and analogies of a gifted writer, and a stirring defense of the "spiritual aspirations" of human beings for freedom and peace. Agent: Melanie Jackson Agency. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The Nigerian 1986 Nobel Laureate (Literature) offers a slender, hopeful volume about his native continent's potential for healing the world's spiritual ills. Now nearing 80, Soyinka--playwright, novelist, poet, memoirist (You Must Set Forth at Dawn, 2006)--writes that a "truly illuminating exploration of Africa has yet to take place." And so he commences one, though he does not gloss over the continent's sanguinary history--or present. Currently, he sees boundary disputes and "the honey-pot of power," as well as the enduring issues of race and fundamentalist religions imposed from the outside, as damaging to Africa's potential. He conducts a quick journey through history, showing readers the Africa envisioned by the actual (Herodotus) and the fictional (Othello) and the Africa whom outsiders insisted on viewing as populated by inferiors. Soyinka argues that the abuse of Africa and Africans (i.e., the slave trade) belongs in company with the Holocaust and Hiroshima in the museum of human inhumanity. He also wonders why, in 2006, the global media obsessed over some Danish cartoons insulting to Islam while virtually ignoring the vast slaughter in Darfur. He argues most strenuously against fundamentalist religions (especially Christianity and Islam), which, he says, subjugate both body and spirit. He identifies them, dispassionately, as "destabilising factors," more harshly as "resolved to set the continent on fire." Soyinka offers a hopeful solution: the more gentle, encompassing, tolerant beliefs of the Yoruba. He offers anecdotal accounts of non-Western medical achievements and paeans to a more accepting, less intrusive, nonviolent set of spiritual beliefs encompassed by the Yoruba deity Orisa. A brief but eloquent plea for peace. Perhaps it takes a Nobel Laureate to see hope as the beating heart in the body of despair.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
