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Transcription: [00:07:16]
[Jonathan Peters]
Record of history is a catalog of the wars of mankind where from one generation to another we exploit people. That is the way he has looked at society as a social visionary.

[00:07:29]
[Brooks Robinson]
Okay. Now you've done extensive studies and analyses of his uh... many works. Uh... is there one thing in particular that uh you found uh... exceptionally exciting or exceptionally interesting as it compares to other writers that are talked about or anything that you really find remarkable?

[00:07:50]
[Jonathan Peters]
Well I like, first of all, I like so many things about Wole Soyinka cause it's very hard to pinpoint one, but I like the way he has made use of the African concept of time. There's the idea that in Western civilization and culture now that time is linear; you move from today to tomorrow and time moves along that phrase and you can go back and pinpoint the year 1000, and the year and the year 2000, and the year 450 B.C. In the sense that time, time is something which moves in a chronological fashion. In African, in African concepts, the idea is that times, time zones, as it were, exists contemporaneously at the same time. The past, the past is still here,

[Brooks Robinson]
Mhm.

[Jonathan Peters]
the present is here and the future is already somewhere in the making.

[Brooks Robinson]
Mhm.

[Jonathan Peters]
So that you can move from one area to another. And this is one of the most interesting ideas that Soyinka has developed. This idea that all of these phases exist already. And there's a special ritual that you have to perform to cross the barrier from present life, for instance, to go into the past and you cross that barrier to go into the future. So that idea of time, I think, is very very interesting because we find that there are 2/3 of the world's people, for instance, believe in the idea of reincarnation, that people will be born again, and Soyinka explores this idea, the idea of death...

[00:09:24]

Transcription Notes:
Not sure who the speakers are so they're not listed. Each new line is the other person speaking