[0:00]Let's make a deal. You, you return everything. All the treasures you've stolen from the African continent and then we'll forgive you.
[0:07]Uh, I think that's fair enough question, don't you think? I had a chat with Wole Soyinka, the playright, poet, and political activist, who became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in literature back in 1986. But first I wanted to ask what he made of the recent UN vote that labeled the transatlantic slave trade "the worst crime against humanity" and pushes countries to talk about paying reparations. It's a good move all together, but I wanted to be very holistic. Some of our own people participated in, in the dehumanization of their own kind. But the structuring, the racist regarding of the African peoples, the black peoples, that burden of guilt is something which the external world has to expiate. Because it means, uh, coming to full intelligence about other people. At the same time, however, uh, it is not wrong to think in terms of some element of materiality, because a lot of material was taken away from the African continent with violence. Let's make a deal, you, you return everything and then we'll forgive you. So it's a good thing both for us and for the perpetrators of this heinous crime. Another theme Wole Soyinka has returned to again and again is his relationship between truth and power. And in today's world where misinformation and deep fakes abound, truth has become much harder to pin down. So I asked him how we can still tell truth from lies. Information technology has become a two-edged sword and not merely on the high level of leadership, but even with citizenry. We have to ferret the truth out somehow. And I think it's by making sure that one doesn't have just one source of information, and then deciding for oneself what one believes.
