For Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, Africa is a land of shifting loyalties and shifting boundaries. Of Africa offers a well-conceived vision for the potential healing of the continent.
He begins with a critical analysis into the sources of conflict that have torn his homeland apart: colonial forces that sought to plunder resources, the slave trade (which Soyinka views as comparable to Hiroshima and the Holocaust) and internal power struggles resulting in mass genocide. In recent years, dictatorial theocracies have threatened to further erode the psyche of the continent, as fundamentalist sects draw lines of war between Africa's many ethnic groups. "Religion, or profession of faith, cannot serve as the common ground for human coexistence," Soyinka warns, "except of course by the adoption of coercion as a principle and thus the manifestation of its corollary--hypocrisy."
Next, Soyinka concentrates on African contributions to literature, art, alternative medicines and spirituality, which he sees as unifying and redemptive. He identifies the Yoruba traditions of Orisa and Ifa as accommodative and tolerant viewpoints that can counteract the polarizing pulls of Christianity and Islam. Orisa is "the very embodiment of tolerance," he says, and "tolerance, in its own right, is at the heart of Ifa, a virtue worth cultivating as a foundational principle of humanistic faith."
Soyinka's inquiry arrives at one impassioned plea--tolerance. Africa's various sects, he tells us, must come to the collective bargaining table with an embrace of its tradition and innate differences in order to truly become whole. --Nancy Powell