In the wake of the persistent religious intolerance that forms a part of the problems facing Nigeria, Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka in a keynote address he delivered at PANAFEST launch and Colloquium 2010 organised by Panafest Foundation recently, argues that the solution is for all religions to learn collective humility which is the basis of harmonious co-existence
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It must appear a little sad that, at the end of this first decade of the third millennium, over a century after the incursion of Christianity into the lives of the colonized of this continent - an event that surely carried with it a process of evaluation of the incoming faith and of the world-view it displaced - we should still encounter occasions and attitudes which provoke a now familiar lament that I shall shortly share with you. It should be sad, yes, but perhaps it is a good thing that this lament continues to be aired in societies such as ours. The question for us is simply whether such a lament is provoked by what we identify as the process of unreasoned, instinctive and therefore, primitive form of rejection or embrace of new ideas or, whether the lament is itself the product of unreason. Wherever we encounter either, it is our duty to use the power of reason, of facts, of history, even of attested lessons of existence to wean such minds away from the habit of clinging fanatically to an unreflecting habit of embracing a new phenomenon, or uncritically defending the old. We deploy the weapons of superior argument, counter their illogic with logic, their narrowness of mind with the vastness of the human experience.
Culture under siege (http://thenationonlineng.net/web3/sunday-magazine/cover/23440.html)