The Nigerian dictatorship killed Ken Saro-Wiwa ensuring his lasting fame, as several new books show
Chris Dunton
Together with eight other activists campaigning for the economic and environmental rights of the Ogoni people, Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian government on November 10 1995.
Before his death he was already a prominent figure: a representative against injustice whose cause had alerted support groups worldwide, a successful publisher and entrepreneur, and a writer whose work includes novels and short stories, children’s literature, stage plays and Nigeria’s most popular television sitcom of its day, Basi and Company. No doubting the brilliance or the commercial success of the latter, each episode combining satire (something of a national industry in Nigeria) with knockabout comedy. Ever the canny businessman, Saro-Wiwa backed up television screenings with a series of spin-offs, Basi magazines and children’s stories. Arguably, though, Saro-Wiwa’s most remarkable work as a writer was Sozaboy.
Subtitled A Novel in Rotten English, this is a first-person account of the adventures and suffering of a young soldier in the Nigerian Civil War. The sharpness with which Saro-Wiwa evokes the dismay of the young recruit, discovering the brutalities of combat, claws at your face and yet the novel remains achingly funny right up to its last horrified admission: “I was thinking how I was prouding before to go to soza and call myself Sozaboy.
“But now if anybody say anything about war or even fight, I will just run and run and run and run and run. Believe me yours sincerely.” One of the striking successes of this book is the way it gives voice to its hero, using a kind of modified Nigerian Pidgin (the “rotten English” of the subtitle). For the benefit of non-English speakers, though, how on Earth to translate such a text? Not an unprecedented venture, this. The French surrealist Raymond Queneau managed in the 1960s a translation of the work of Amos Tutuola, whose stories are told in a kind of English that has been pummeled through the sieve of Yoruba. Now, though, there has appeared Sozaboy: Ptit Militaire (published in a very stylish edition by Actes Sud), a translation of Saro-Wiwa’s novel into the French-based Pidgin of Abidjan, made by Samuel Millogo and Amadou Bissiri, two academics from Burkina Faso. Someone should go on circuit doing public readings from this text, for it is a stunning achievement. Or tour-de-force. Or as Sozaboy would put it, “di tin fain wel wel”.
This translation brings Saro-Wiwa’s masterpiece to large new audiences, in France and in West and Central Africa (if the latter can get hold of copies), audiences who would hardly have been able to access the novel before. At the same time Saro-Wiwa’s work is being explored and analysed enthusiastically now: a marker of the recognition that his political activism provides the international community with inescapable reference points and that his writings are landmark works that help redefine the space between popular and “high” culture.
A bitter irony is here: that in killing Saro-Wiwa and his comrades Sani Abacha’s cretinous thugs opened as wide a window as never before on the injustices of the Nigerian state. As Saro-Wiwa’s son has written: “When a large ship stops, the motion carries on in the sea.” Among recent collections of work on Saro-Wiwa is Ogoni’s Agonies, edited by Abdul Rasheed Na’Allah. This reprints some earlier material, including an assessment by William Boyd. There are also new essays on Saro-Wiwa’s writing and politics. Interspersed with the essays and this gives the collection a special vibrancy is a folio of 50 specially commissioned poems, a fine and moving tribute from Saro-Wiwa’s fellow writers. Ogoni’s Agonies is published by Africa World Press, one of the most active of current Africanist publishers. The same press has just issued another Saro-Wiwa collection, Before I Am Hanged, edited by Onookome Okome. This contains 15 essays, all by Nigerians working within that country, some of them relatively young, some focusing on developments since Saro-Wiwa’s execution.
Here there is a fresh, unfettered critique of the society in which the activist worked and died. As Okome notes in a penetrating and sometimes provocative introduction to the collection, despite accusations to the contrary Saro-Wiwa was not a man who wanted Nigeria split into ethnic mini-states. Rather, his voice was one calling for justice in a land beset with all kinds of bigotries. As Okome puts it, “the picture [his writings offer] is that of a country on trial”. A third recent collection of essays is Ken Saro-nnnWiwa:Writer and Political Activist, edited by Craig McLuckie and Aubrey McPhail and published by Lynne Rienner. In terms of documentation this is the strongest of the three collections, including chronologies and a comprehensive bibliography. All but one of its 15 pieces are new and the survey is wide-ranging, including a piece on Saro-Wiwa as entrepreneur and publisher a piece that vividly shows how outspoken and forceful the man could be, how energetic and ambitious.
Lastly, from Doubleday, the most necessary book (already excerpted in this paper), Ken Wiwa’s biography of his father, In the Shadow of a Saint. Marvellously written, this memoir offers both exploration and expiation. “My father,” Wiwa begins by asking, “where does he end and where do I begin? I used to fantasise about his death, imagining it as the moment when I would finally be free to be my own man.” Given his father’s name, Wiwa was both made and entrapped by his birthright; tracing a fiercely difficult relationship (he is frank, for example, in detailing the pain caused by his father’s adultery).
Wiwa admits “I was angry with him, resentful at having been handed such a complicated personal and political legacy.” For non-Nigerian readers early chapters provide a pretty good introduction to the Nigerian scene, the writing detailed, vivid and sensitive to the labyrinthine contradictions of that country. The primary focus, though, is on Saro-Wiwa’s political activism.
The Ogoni leader is portrayed “listening to the elders, collating their thoughts, computing them using the wisdom of the past to conceive of a vision of the future”. Past into future, an axis provocatively addressed in an ironic quotation from Lewis Carroll: “It’s a poor kind of memory that only works backwards.” On Shell’s despoliation of the Ogoni sub-region, on the brutality of the Abacha regime and on the vicious sham of Saro-Wiwa’s trial, Wiwa is excellent. As it can only be, this account is devastating. Following the record of his father’s execution and this is one of the most striking sections of the book Wiwa details his meetings with other children of leaders in the world’s eye: Zindzi Mandela, Nkosinathi Biko, Aung San Suu Kyi.
The last word, then to Saro-Wiwa, writing on his detention and trial: “The men who ordain and supervise this tragic charade are frightened by the word, the power of ideas, the power of the pen; by the demands of social justice and the rights of man. Nor do they have a sense of history. They are so scared of the power of the word, that they do not read. And that is their funeral.”