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Round Table: Dialogue among Civilizations United Nations, New York, 5 September 2000 Provisional verbatim transcription

Address by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)

Mr. Soyinka: I see this meeting first of all to be largely a preparatory encounter. It is obviously impossible to speak on such a wide subject as the dialogue of civilizations. Perhaps the value of going step by step as you have done is that it enables us to identify the many directions in which the very concept of civilization can be approached, and the areas of neglect. We still want to focus on the purely historic aspect of civilization X what happened in the past and how has it defined our present X and then move on to ask what does the essence of intervening in the past or recovering the past really mean in terms of human progress. That would have been, I suspect, the real meaning, the focus of a dialogue of civilizations. In other words, it should not be just an academic inquiry, for example, of what various tributaries have flowed into the present stream of civilization, what I would call globalization and others would call civilization X which I disagree with by the way. I do not see that globalization is necessarily what would constitute a form of civilization. It is a trend, a particular step in a progression but it is not something I would call civilization.

I do not think we can avoid totally what one might call the purely academic aspect, the exhumation of the past. It is necessary, for instance, to understand absolutely what is happening now and why we are in a state of increasing intolerance in many aspects of human, social and national intercourse. Last century turned out to be one of the bloodiest that the world has known for quite a while. I should have thought that one reason for dialogue is to understand why human progression took such a seemingly retrogressive step. In the process of course there will have to be some soul-searching. We had some indictments of certain civilizations this morning and that is quite accurate. One would hope that the result of dialogue would be that this kind of criticism would even come from within, a kind of self-criticism. What have we done to other civilizations? What have we done to make other civilizations so suspicious, so resentful of us today? Why is there such a catalogue of indictment from one side to the other?

The focus as I see it would be an examination, an exhumation of the past with a view to understanding the present and trying to build a more harmonious and humane future.

Mr. Picco: Perhaps we could ask Professor Faridzadeh to contribute to our conversation of what is the very core of the dialogue we are seeking.

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