SOURCE: Berger, Peter L. “Out of Africa.” Commentary 102, no. 6 (December 1996): 70, 72.

In the following review, Berger asserts that, despite some stylistic flaws, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis is both an “useful and moving” work.

This book, by the Nigerian playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, is a cry of the heart. Based on three lectures given by Wole Soyinka at Harvard, The Open Sore of a Continent is neither particularly well-organized nor even well-written; but its anguish—or rather, its very great anger—is palpable, and easy to sympathize with.

The greater part of the book consists of a passionate denunciation of the present Nigerian regime, led by Sani Abacha, which came into power after the annulment of the elections of 1993 and the imprisonment of the man who won them. But Nigeria's plunge into autocracy and brutality hardly...