SOURCE: Gibbs, James. Review of The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, by Wole Soyinka. World Literature Today 74, no. 3 (summer 2000): 573.

In the following negative review, Gibbs identifies a series of inaccuracies in The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness and faults the collection for its “carelessness.”

During April 1997, Wole Soyinka delivered the Stewart-Macmillan lectures at the Du Bois Institute of Harvard University under the titles “Reparations, Truth, and Reconciliation,” “L. S. Senghor and Negritude—J'accuse, mais je pardonne,” and “Negritude and the Gods of Equity.” By the time the papers were being gathered for publication [in The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness], major developments had taken place: for example, Moshood Abiola and Sani Abacha had died. Nevertheless, Soyinka decided “to leave the lectures as delivered—that is to keep such references in the ‘active sense’ in which they were made.”

The lectures were initially...