A compact but forceful work of political and literary reflection, drawn from Soyinka’s Du Bois lectures and concerned with memory, atrocity, reconciliation, and the moral fraudulence that often hides inside calls to “move on.”

He writes through Africa, negritude, reparations, truth, amnesty, and the uses of history, asking what forgiveness can mean when power wants absolution without reckoning. It is less a treatise than a sharpened intervention: essayistic, polemical, historically alert.

It is a book about African political history and postcolonial thought, but also about literature’s relation to public memory and the problem of ethical speech after violence. Soyinka never writes like a dead academic. Even when the argument is dense, there is heat in it. This is the kind of slim serious hardback that appeals to readers of politics, theory, African literature, and intellectual history without needing to be enormous.

Oxford University Press hardback, first edition / first printing, 1999.