It’s hard to think of anyone better qualified to talk about Africa than the playwright, poet, political prisoner, fearless critic of oppression, and the first African winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Wole Soyinka. In his optimistic new book, Of Africa (Yale Univ., $24), Soyinka brings his encyclopedic knowledge, wide-ranging interests, and insight into the history and cultures of the continent to bear on the question of what Africa has to offer the world today, and how best to respond to the traumas of the past. Soyinka believes in Africa as a resource of “hidden” values—especially spiritual values—an alternative to the “alien binaries” and hegemonic bipolar dichotomies of the past, be they in the political sphere (Communism versus Capitalism), or in the religious fissure between Christianity and Islam. He presents the Yoruba religion, for example, as a “hidden” tradition that “could never have produced… the Inquisition.”
