/ 13 November 1998

Ken Saro-Wiwa, Mandela and me

Cameron Duodu : Letter from the North

I don’t know whether it’s a blessing or a curse for a journalist to become personally involved in a story. What I do know is that sometimes one has no choice in the matter.

Thus it was with me and the Ken Saro-Wiwa story. I first met Saro-Wiwa in 1986, when I was working for a magazine called South, based in London.

He’d just published a novel called Soza Boy, which he described, with a quirky but unashamed aplomb, as “a novel in rotten English”.

Rotten English, as Saro-Wiwa rendered it in Soza Boy, was totally eccentric. It was based on what we in West Africa call “pidgin English”, but it was better. You could see that every sentence had been deliberately crafted to make you laugh.

It is the fun in the book that made me take notice of it, for it had landed on my desk by way of a public relations outfit based in London, and I had snootily decided that any novelist who used a PR firm could not be taken seriously.

It occurred to me, however, that if an unknown guy published his own novel, it would be difficult to get it reviewed if he just naively sent it to snobbish London literary editors, in the hope that their love for literature would induce them to pass it to one of their reviewers.

So I asked to meet Saro-Wiwa. He came to see me at the offices of Index On Censorship in Islington, where I was to be found when I was not at South.

My first impression of him was not at all favourable. He smoked a pipe, and as I am allergic to tobacco, I put the worst possible construction upon this.

He also drove around London in a green Mercedes Benz 280S! To someone who was so overworked that he involuntarily dozed off during train and bus journeys this was enemy territory. A Merc?

But talking to Saro-Wiwa immediately put me at my ease. He was an unashamed capitalist – he casually let drop the fact that he dealt in commodities.

My heart jumped. The only association I had with commodities was when I reported from Accra for The Financial Times on cocoa. Someone actually gambled his money on the stuff? Respect, man, respect.

The guy was full of wit. When I asked him why he had “betrayed” the Biafran cause during the Nigerian civil war and joined the federal side, he told me that his ethnic group, the Ogoni, is so tiny that “everyone oppresses us”.

Rather than endure oppression from the Ibo, while fighting for them against Big Brother Federal Nigeria, he had thought it more prudent to seek protection for the Ogonis from Big Brother, who was destined to win the war.

In fact, Saro-Wiwa’s prescience was impressive: the feds did win the war, and they did appoint him administrator of his home province, which enabled him to resettle the Ogoni quite well after the war.

We kept in touch after my review of Soza Boy appeared. Then I noticed from pieces of his that he was becoming militantly anti-Federal Nigeria. Next thing I knew, he’d shown up in my house with several items relating to Ogoni “independence”, including a national anthem.

“Hey man,” I warned him, “you’re playing with fire. These guys are going to charge you with treason if you’re not careful.”

He said, “Let them do their worst. We are tired. They just take the oil money from our land and neglect the people. How long can we take it?”

Well, he was inevitably arrested. And fortunately, in those days, The Observer had people who were closely interested in Africa. So, the foreign desk proposed that I should do a big profile of Saro-Wiwa. >From then on, The Observer couldn’t have enough of him and we did everything humanly possible to ensure that his various arrests and tribulations received full coverage.

We were outraged when he was sentenced to death, and we campaigned for his release. One night, I had a most vivid dream, in which I heard Saro-Wiwa’s voice asking plaintively, “Cameron, why are you allowing them to kill us?”

I was damned scared and took the matter most seriously. I became a campaigner – something which my school of journalism normally frowns upon.

The publicity we generated was of such strength that we thought Sani Abacha would never dare to execute Saro-Wiwa and the eight other Ogonis.

Ironically, I was in a BBC TV studio talking about the Commonwealth Conference taking place in New Zealand when the news was fed through our presenter’s ear-piece that Saro-Wiwa had been executed.

The rest is history. In the aftermath, some in the London press tried to make President Nelson Mandela a scapegoat for Abacha’s butchery. I felt this was quite wrong, for I was privy to attempts the president had made to influence Abacha, not only on Saro-Wiwa’s behalf, but also on behalf of Chief Moshood Abiola, the winner of the Nigerian presidential election, whom Abacha had unjustly imprisoned.

So I came down to Jo’burg to talk to Mandela for the record. He exploded on hearing Abacha’s name: Abacha’s action was “barbaric” etcetera.

This was the first time, to my knowledge, that an African head of state had publicly gone against trade union rules and insulted a fellow card holder. It was a great interview and I splashed it on the BBC, The Observer, The Sunday Independent in Johannesburg and De Volkskrant in Amsterdam.

Mandela, Saro-Wiwa thanks you. Abiola thanks you. I hope when you leave others will be inspired to emulate a bit of your humanity, and use it on behalf of Africa.

* In last week’s Letter From The North, the printer’s devil refused to believe me when I said that before I left Ghana, the currency, the cedi, was worth 2,75 to the dollar. This was changed to 275. We would be so lucky! It is now 2 693 cedis to the dollar. Work out the devaluation rate, if you can!