Nobel Laureate in Literature Wole Soyinka considers all of Africa--indeed, all the world--as he poses this question: once repression stops, is reconciliation between oppressor and victim possible? In the face of centuries-long devastation wrought on the African continent and her Diaspora by slavery, colonialism, Apartheid, and the manifold faces of racism, what form of recompense could possibly suffice? In a voice as eloquent and humane as it is forceful, Soyinka boldly challenges in these pages the notions of simple forgiveness, confession, and absolution as strategies for social healing. Ultimately, he turns to art--poetry, music, painting, etc.--as the one source that can nourish the seed of reconciliation: art is the generous vessel that can hold together the burden of memory and the hope of forgiveness. Based on Soyinka's Stewart-McMillan lectures delivered at the DuBois Institute at Harvard, The Burden of Memory speaks not only to those concerned specifically with African politics, but also to anyone seeking the path to social justice through some of history's most inhospitable terrain.

Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, here analyses the interconnecting worlds of myth, ritual and literature in Africa.

From the first Black winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of our fiercest political activists—this political novel about the dangers of corruption, greed, and the desire for power is the follow-up to his acclaimed debut novel The Interpreters. An African nation's struggle for independence is interwoven with a tragic love story in this compelling novel. When Ofeyi, who writes advertising jingles for the Cocoa Corporation, is sent on a promotional tour of his unnamed country, he arrives at a coastal village whose remote location has long kept it insulated from the corrupt national government. Here Ofeyi discovers a traditional way of life that is still flourishing and he is inspired to spread its life-affirming values to his suffering country. But challenging the forces of greed and exploitation provokes a horrific response, and when Ofeyi’s beloved wife goes missing, he must travel across a war-scarred landscape in search of her. Infusing the myth of Orpheus with his signature lyricism and moral profundity, Soyinka creates a dazzling story about the clash between idealism and reality.

The book examines ways in which Germans struggle with the Nazi past. It is a reflection upon the reasons why German reckoning with the past became a process of contradictions and shows the specific character of German collective memory in relation to the helplessness and moral condition of a nation defending itself in the face of unimaginable evil.

The events that led up to dissident writer Ken Saro-Wiwa's execution in 1995 marked Nigeria's decline from a post-colonial success story to its current military dictatorship. Wole Soyinka, whose own Nigerian passport was confiscated by the Nigerian military in 1994, explores the history and future of Nigeria in a compelling jeremiad that is as intense as it is provocative, learned, and wide-ranging.

In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks across the Ottoman Empire and throughout Egypt, Sudan, the Caucasus, and Western Europe. Unlike the Atlantic trade, slavery in this region crossed and mixed racial and ethnic lines. Fair-skinned Circassian men and women were as vulnerable to enslavement in the Nile Valley as were teenagers from Sudan or Ethiopia. Tell This in My Memory opens up a new window in the study of slavery in the modern Middle East, taking up personal narratives of slaves and slave owners to shed light on the anxieties and intimacies of personal experience. The framework of racial identity constructed through these stories proves instrumental in explaining how countries later confronted—or not—the legacy of the slave trade. Today, these vocabularies of slavery live on for contemporary refugees whose forced migrations often replicate the journeys and stigmas faced by slaves in the nineteenth century.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

This volume of essays examines the forced dispossession caused by the Middle Passage. The book analyzes the texts, religious rites, economic exchanges, dance, and music it elicited, both on the transatlantic journey and on the American continent. The totality of this collection establishes a broad topographical and temporal context for the Passage that extends from the interior of Africa across the Atlantic and to the interior of the Americas, and from the beginning of the Passage to the present day. A collective narrative of itinerant cultural consciousness as represented in histories, myths, and arts, these contributions conceptualize the meaning of the Middle Passage for African American and American history, literature, and life.

This book examines the role that Africa has played on the world stage, the African Union, the African leaders' efforts to take care of their own problems and lessen their dependence on the United States and European countries.