Ken Saro-Wiwa’s prison comrades have been freed. But they are still struggling to come to terms with the horror of ordeal, reports Alex Duval Smith
Aa ke, Aa ke
Pya Ogoni aa ke
Iilee yira na ko
Yoo-ue a zia-i
Arise, arise,
Ogoni people arise
We shall no longer
allow people to cheat us
– Ogoni anthem, written by Ken Saro- Wiwa
The morning of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s execution, Nyieda Nasikpo awoke in his ground-level cell to the sound of hymns. He pushed his way through the crowded squalor to a peephole giving on to the bleak yard enclosed within Port Harcourt prison’s black concrete walls. “The warders, singing all the time, were cutting down the sugar cane we had planted, to clear the area around the gallows. I had some paper and a pen, so I recorded everything.”
From that moment – on November 10 1995 – until their release last month, Nasikpo and the other 18 Ogonis jailed and tortured with him, without trial, awoke every day fearing that the next hymns would be for them.
The author Saro-Wiwa and eight others were executed by the Nigerian military regime for speaking out against the Anglo-Dutch Shell company’s exploitation of the oil-rich area. Tried by a specially created court, the Ogoni 20 – a ragbag of fishermen, traders and teachers ranging from 13 to 53 in age – could also have been sentenced to death at the whim of the ruthless late dictator, General Sani Abacha.
“My cell, D1, was just about four metres from the gallows,” says Nasikpo, now 35. “At 10.45am, a warder started calling the names: Paul Levura, Saturday Doobee, Felix Nuate, Daniel Gboko, Nordu Eanwo. They were told to kneel down in the yard, then they were leg-chained and handcuffed.
“At about 11.50am we heard a siren. Ken was brought in with John Kpuinen, Barinem Kiobel and Baribor Bera. They had not been held at Port Harcourt prison. Ken had leg-chains and handcuffs. He was wearing a white brocade gown. The two hangmen were in red overalls, and Ken was holding a white purse in his hands, containing his pipe. The warders were singing Glory, Glory Be to God, Amen, Alleluia. It is the hangman’s anthem.
“Then we heard the siren of the state governor’s car and I saw many other officials arrive, and a Catholic priest. Ken was called to the gallows first. He said, `What sort of country is this that delights in the killing of its illustrious citizens? What have I done that I deserve death, other than that I spoke the truth, demanding justice for my poor people of Ogoniland?’
“Then there was this mysterious electrical fault. The trapdoor did not work. Maybe the gods of the land did not want him to die. They tried twice. Then they took him away and brought Kpuinen. The button was pressed, and it worked.
“They took Ken back and it still did not work. So they took Dr Kiobel and he died. When they led Ken back, he said in Gokhana [an Ogoni language], `The God of Heaven and the gods and soil of Ogoniland, I served you well. I never betrayed my people. If it be that I can die to free my people, please my God and the gods of the soil of Ogoniland, allow me to die.’
“When the gallows worked and Ken died, there was smoke everywhere. This is Nigeria and you never know what is going to happen. It was mysterious. Then it was so quiet. So quiet. We never thought they would do it.”
Saro-Wiwa and the other eight Ogonis now lie in an unmarked grave, somewhere in Port Harcourt municipal cemetery, a neglected and overgrown walled field of long green grass, at the end of a cul-de-sac clogged with rotting household waste. Until recently, the cemetery was under 24- hour military guard – a no-go area for civilians. The staff who were there in 1995 have been sacked and replaced. None of the new employees know, or want to reveal, the whereabouts of the Ogonis’ grave.
Nigeria’s military leadership has pledged a move towards democracy, hoping to earn a return to the Commonwealth, debt relief and an end to its worldwide pariah status. But the city of Port Harcourt, which is not in Ogoniland, lives in fear of repercussions from the dark episode of November 1995.
Worse still, the Ogoni problem has replicated itself all along Nigeria’s oil-producing Atlantic Ocean coast: places where rural farmers and fisherfolk who have neither roads nor electricity are learning that, underfoot, dwell reserves of the world’s highest-grade crude oil. Not a day goes by without new reports of tribes clashing, foreign oil workers being taken hostage and oil installations being vandalised. Recently, as a result of the current trouble, Nigeria’s oil output has been halved.
But for Nasikpo and the 18 others who cheated the hymns of death, the pressing concern since their release on September 7 has been to come to terms with what happened to them, and what they escaped. Nasikpo, a lecturer in environmental health whose job in Port Harcourt was filled while he was inside, is now back with his wife, Barinem, in his village of Bomu.
It is humble, quiet, and all Ogoni – the soil so fertile the clearings for houses seem to battle for survival against a dense onslaught of coconut palms, banana trees, cassava and yam plants. After a hero’s return a month ago, Nasikpo is getting to know his seven- and five-year-old sons, Tombari and Kenule, the latter named after Saro-Wiwa.
But the nightmares are recurrent and, in the absence of trauma counselling, they are likely to stay with him. “The soldiers came to my house in Bomu over the weekend,” he says. “It was 3.30am. They took five of us to Bori camp, where a task force major with a horsewhip subjected us to a regular morning drill. It involved being made to hold our ears while jumping along. In May 1995, we were sent to Port Harcourt prison, a human zoo where the conditions were horrible. There is a new borehole at the prison but it is reserved for the masters and the privileged inmates. We were directed to use another well. We had to send men down it first, to clean it up. It contained the bones of soldiers who died in the Nigerian civil war 30 years ago.
“We were fed beans for breakfast, given no lunch, and served garri [cassava meal] and some gutter water they called soup. There were 120 inmates in a cell which was 14m by 12m. There was one bucket for all of us and the urine and excrement was only removed at the warders’ discretion. Most of us slept on the bare ground. The privileged ones slept on mats infested with lice and ticks.
“In February 1997, one of us was bitten in the heel by a snake in the cell. He was taken to the infirmary but brought back because the medicines which had been prescribed were not available at the prison. This is how all illness was treated. You never got the medicine.”
Apart from Tusmina, who died, several of the Ogoni 20 fell ill during their three years and five months in detention. They suffered from tuberculosis and hypertension, one lost his sight and several developed eczema. One man, Kale Beete, reportedly had a finger cut off during torture at the time of his arrest. Nasikpo developed asthma while in prison.
Kagbara Bassee (37) and Blessing Israel (33) were among the worst treated after they were arrested on June 22 1994, by police at Benson Beach in neighbouring Akwa Ibom State. Shell has bought sophisticated weaponry, which it has given to the Nigerian police who guard its installations. Bassee, from Bomu, says: “We were just setting off in our boat to Cameroon. We used to go there to sell electronic equipment and we would fish on the way back. About 15 police came towards me. They said they were interested in people from Bomu. We said we were from there.
“They accused us of being the people responsible for stopping Shell’s work in Ogoniland and they took us to a detention cell in Oron. There they beat us with batons,” says Bassee, pointing to a scar on the side of his nose.
Israel, who has a 5cm scar on his head from a baton wound, adds: “We were half dead by the time we were taken to the State Intelligence and Investigations Bureau in Port Harcourt. There, we were strung up and beaten with electrical cord.” He indicates a 7cm scar on his lower back, from one of 150 whip strokes he received.
“For two weeks we were beaten and, when we lay on the ground, they sprayed tear gas in our faces.” Both men have returned to Bomu “full of misery”. Israel’s father died earlier this year but, because prison visits were limited to once every six months, he was only told the news when he was released. Both men’s wives have left them, probably as a result of the terror campaign the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (Mosop) says was waged on the detainees’ families.
“We have nothing,” says Bassee. “Even our boat has rotted.” Ogoniland still has many open wounds. Even though Shell suspended oil extraction there in 1993, it still runs oil through its Ogoniland flow stations and manifolds, down to the port of Bonny. The company has tried to repair its image, building 71 classroom blocks in the Niger Delta area last year, with learning facilities for 12 500 children. In response to claims from Mosop that it is responsible for extensive environmental damage, the company says 67% of oil spill are caused by vandalism – done for financial gain because clean-up teams employ local people.
Mosop says Shell has done less than other oil companies to employ local people, provide infrastructure such as electricity and running water, or even invite its expatriot staff to live among the villagers. It claims the Nigerian regime owes the Ogonis $3- billion for environmental degradation and wealth deprivation.
The Ogoni 20 are free but in Ogoniland suspicion still prevails. Suspicion of a regime that, as Ken Saro-Wiwa said at the gallows, “delights in the killing of its illustrious citizens”; suspicion of oil companies whose track record since the 1950s is of collaboration with tyrants; and suspicion within villages where illiterate folk are divided by bitternesses which run as deep as the intangible wealth spouting from the bowels of their earth.
Even now, after the hymns of death have died down and the 20 men have been released from their handcuffs and leg-chains, Shell pipelines run like arteries through verdant Ogoniland.
Saro-Wiwa lies in an unmarked grave, in a sordid cemetery. But his people believe, as strongly as he did in his last words, that the gods of the soil will ultimately be more powerful than the veins of oil.