[In the following review, Caute delineates the role of memory in The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness.]

Among the most thriving branches to have sprouted from the fecund trunk of historical studies is the one called Memory. History, of course, is about remembering, but the study of the collective memory—normally patriotic and piously self-justifying in holy texts, poems, museums and memorials—has recently gained impetus from an increasingly fashionable political project: to force a defeated opponent not merely to surrender his pennant but to crap on it in the same motion.

This is done with the most saintly of smiles: it's called Truth and Reconciliation. The victors of Versailles post-1918 and Nuremberg post-1945 had not thought of it: Germans were required to hand over material reparations, cede provinces and offer certain necks to the hangman. They were not, however, required to vow love for their conquerors on the scaffold and adjust their collective memory to affirm their own guilt. More recently, the Federal German Republic brought leading apparatchiks of the defunct GDR to trial without requiring them to denounce Marx, Engels and Lenin. Our SAS snatch-squads in former Yugoslavia deliver ‘war criminals’ to the Hague in anticipation of the normal self-justifying defence.

But another agenda has been surfacing during the half-century since Hitler put an end to himself without a hint of contrition. The collective memories of defeated tribes (whether nations or regimes) must be wrenched from the usual pieties of self-congratulation, the normal bitterness attendant on defeat (‘We were sold down the river’), into a marvellous sacrament of self-loathing and guilt. Young Germans must be ‘educated’ in the sins of their fathers. They must ‘never forget’ the Holocaust. Young Russians must ‘never forget’ Stalinism and the gulag archipelago. No child anywhere must ever be allowed to ‘forget’ what we, not he, remember. Japan must apologise (and pay up). Prominent thugs of the apartheid regime must bare their breasts with a sufficient display of conversion to satisfy the saint of the hour, Desmond Tutu. The ritual is meant to convey a healing, moral symbiosis—but where consent is withheld, as in the case of ex-President Botha, well, gentlemen, what a shame that he should force us to produce the thumbscrews.

Clearly Germans have become addicted to the culture of guilt. Should the Regierunsviertel, the administrative quarter of Germany's restored capital, Berlin, wear the hair shirt of repentance by refurbishing two Nazi landmarks, Schacht's Reichsbank and Goering's Air Ministry, as the new Foreign Office and Finance Ministry? Is it possible to preserve a spirit of collective atonement by forcing passing citizens not to look at architectural eyesores? Should Berlin build a Holocaust Monument, a version of Jerusalem's Yad Vashem, or a Holocaust Museum? The debate rages.

It so happens (as Wole Soyinka points out [in The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness] that the dominant nations, the great moralisers of the 20th century, were up to their elbows in the slave trade for 300 years. So where is their own mea culpa? As a boy I witnessed the self-righteousness of the British officer class and its wives in occupied Germany (BAOR) as they bartered small packets of coffee and a few cigarettes for cut glass and fine china. No one challenged my parents' generation about the African slave trade or asked why it was a crime to conquer non-Aryans as Untermenschen (Hitler) but merely common sense to conquer Africans as ‘savages’ (Montgomery). The Japanese have now apologised and set up a compensation fund for Korean ‘comfort women’, but what about the millions of African women who ‘comforted’ unwelcome visitors from Britain, France, Holland, Germany, Spain and Portugal? Soyinka notes that the fin de millénaire fever of atonement does not extend to African demands for reparations.

He's right, of course, as usual. But could we slave traders, he asks, compensate the heirs of the victims even if we found the will to do so? Who would we hand over the Slave Fund to? The Emperor Bokassa? Idi Amin? Nelson Mandela is a Good Man, but not necessarily a competent accountant. Soyinka reminds us that post-colonial black Africa has not lacked its own gallery of genocidal criminals: Macias Nguema of Equitorial Guinea, the voodoo tyrant; Master-Sergeant Doe of Liberia; the cannibal Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada of Uganda (still alive, apparently, in Saudi Arabia); most colourful of all, Emperor-for-Life Jean Bedel Bokassa. And who should administer the Slave Fund in Rwanda: the Tutsi survivors of Hutu massacres or the other way round?

Soyinka once proposed to a gathering of World Bank executives that the slaving nations should simply annul the debts of the African world. But would this benefit people or governments, most particularly improvident governments? One could also return the looted art treasures of the Continent, now secured in European museums. In an interesting essay on ‘negritude’ and the parting of the ways between francophone and anglophone African literature, Soyinka quotes Aimé Césaire's eloquent plea on behalf of

Those who invented neither gunpowder nor
                    compass,
Those who never knew how to conquer
                    steam or electricity,
Those who explored neither seas nor sky,
But those without whom the earth would not
                    be earth …

But, Soyinka asks, how can one negotiate reparations in any form when dealing with an internal slave-master like Mobutu Sese Seko or Sanni Abacha? How could one ensure that material reparations reached the ‘people’ and did not, like so much ongoing ‘aid’, fall straight into the hands of internal élites no less rapacious than their colonial forebears?

The Burden of Memory is based on Soyinka's lectures at the W. E. B. du Bois Institute at Harvard where he has been a Fellow during his years of heroically outspoken exile from Nigerian fascism. Since giving these lectures, he has seen his native land delivered from the tyranny of Sanni Abacha, ‘the midget lord of the nation that launched a campaign for slavery reparations’. A lucid rage seizes Soyinka whenever he contemplates a Nigeria ‘criss-crossed today by the sycophantic trails of slime along which crawl the erstwhile majesties of obis, obas and emirs in homage to the new slave masters in military uniform’. More than 20 years ago, he was imprisoned by the baby-faced General Gowon; in Nigeria one does indeed ‘imprison Voltaire’—to quote de Gaulle on Sartre—even when the Voltaire is the first black African to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. For Wole Soyinka, himself almost overloaded by memory, the ongoing tragedy of Nigerian politics will remain unfinished business.