The perils of activism
Ken Saro-Wiwa
By Anthony Daniels
The New Criterion | Date not given
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/18/jan00/sarowiwa.htm
The last time I visited the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa in Port
Harcourt, two years before he was hanged in the city's prison, the
naked corpse of a man lay on the sidewalk of the Aggrey Road, about a
hundred yards from his office. Broiling in the noonday sun, the body
was so inflated by the gases of decomposition that it looked as if it
might ascend to heaven of its own accord, in a halo of black flies.
Meanwhile, the radio appealed for the "owner" of the corpse, which had
so far remained unclaimed for three days, to take it away as it was
causing a public nuisance. All things considered, however, life seemed
to be proceeding around it normally enough, as if a naked corpse in
the street were nothing very remarkable. Which in Nigeria, perhaps, it
isn't.
I mentioned the corpse to Saro-Wiwa, who was only too aware of its
presence nearby, and of the unavailing radio appeals to the public
spirit of its owner. Though he was only small in stature, Saro-Wiwa's
basso profundo laugh shook the whole room. Whenever he laughed, it was
with every fiber of his body: as if he had somehow understood the
absurdity not just of Nigeria, but of existence itself. For above all,
life was funny.
We discussed how the hallucinatory nature of everyday reality in
Nigeria provided Nigerian writers with inexhaustible subject matter
for their work, but Saro-Wiwa said that there were few writers
nowadays to take advantage of it. The extraordinary flowering of
Nigerian literature just before and after independence was over: not
only had economic conditions rendered the printing or importation of
books difficult and restricted the size of the market, but the
degeneration of the educational system also meant that few people in
the country were now equipped to write or even to read.
Saro-Wiwa was a member of a fortunate generation of Nigerians who
received a classical British education at the famous school of
Umuahia, among whose alumni are Chinua Achebe and several other
eminent writers. Saro-Wiwa's career since then had been varied. He
started out as a university teacher of English, but then became a
high-ranking civil servant, on the federal side, during the Nigerian
civil war. After the war he went into business as a grocer in order to
achieve financial independence. (Unlike many intellectuals, he was
unembittered by the need to support himself other than by the pen, and
spoke with genuine pleasure of his time as a shopkeeper, for in
Nigeria, as he once remarked, a freelance writer is one who writes for
free.)
Having secured his independence, he started to write, self-publishing
his novels, essays, short stories, plays, and poems. He also financed,
wrote, directed, and produced the most popular television series in
Nigeria, "Basi and Company," which ran for five years and was watched
with intense enjoyment by some 30 million of his countrymen.
But now, he told me, the time for writing was over: the situation
demanded action, not words. In the last few years he had become a
political activist at the expense of all literary work except for
polemics and propaganda. He regretted this, for there had recently
come to light a local scandal which would have served as the perfect
vehicle for the literary exposure of Nigeria's get-rich-quick
mentality. A pyramid savings scheme in Port Harcourt, in which
fantastically high monthly rates of interest were paid with new
depositors' money, had just collapsed, as was inevitable, and it
transpired that almost everyone had fallen for the fraud, from market
trading women to the military governor, from peasant farmers to
university professors and church pastors. But his novel about it would
now have to wait until he had secured justice for his people, a more
urgent task than mere imaginative writing could ever be.
I felt uneasy as Saro-Wiwa told me this, but as a visitor to his
country, no doubt ill-informed, I was not in a strong position to
argue with him, though I tried my best. I had a presentiment for a
number of reasons that his political activism would lead to disaster,
though I did not guess that it would lead to his death.
Saro-Wiwa's tribe, the Ogoni, numbers about half-a-million people
living in an area of four-hundred square miles in the delta of the
River Niger. Unfortunately for them, their land of forests and creeks
was discovered in the 1950s to be oil-bearing. According to Saro-Wiwa,
the oil companies principally Shellhave extracted $30 billion worth
of oil from Ogoniland in the last thirty years, in the process
degrading the soil, polluting the water, and causing the Ogonis to
live under the eternal light of gas flares. And the Nigerian federal
government to which Shell paid enormous royalties has spent none of
them on Ogoni- land, which remains without proper roads, schools,
clinics, or facilities of any kind. Instead, the royalties have lined
private pockets and built an extravagantly luxurious new capital at Abuja.
"The rascals, the rascals!," Saro-Wiwa exclaimed, and shook the room
again with his laughter. Rascal is a word that is generally used with
a degree of affection, so what Saro-Wiwa said next was all the more
shocking. "They'll kill me, you know. They'll kill me."
I didn't believe him. Nigeria was a military dictatorship, of course,
as it has been for most of the time since independence, but the
country was simply too large, diverse, and administratively
disorganized, and its population too irrepressible, for it to be a
proper dictatorship, of the kind in which political conversations are
conducted only in whispers in dark corners. "They'll never do that," I
said. "They don't kill writers in Nigeria." I knew, of course, that
the death penalty was applied, and applied frequently, in Nigeria.
Indeed, on my very first day in the country, seven years before,
arriving overland from Northern Cameroon, I discovered the city of
Maiduguri entirely deserted for everyone was away at the public
executions held on the municipal execution grounds outside the city.
In the evening, I watched the three executed men give their last
television interview as they were being tied to the stake. One
proclaimed his innocence, another wished he could have spoken to his
mother before he died. The firing squad took up its positions about
two yards from the condemned men, and according to the television
commentary the firing lasted two minutes: after which, it said, a
doctor, who by then must surely have required few diagnostic skills,
pronounced them dead.
But these were armed robbers, not members of the Nigerian intellectual
elite who had many friends abroad. (Only later did I learn that the
Nigerian police often rented out their weapons nightly to armed
robbers, when they did not actually commit the armed robberies
themselves.) So while I could envisage the imprisonment of Saro-Wiwa,
I could not envisage his execution. I was wrong. Saro-Wiwa had founded
an organization, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People
(MOSOP), which challenged the Nigerian state at its two most tender,
vulnerable, and explosive points: the distribution of the oil
revenuesmore than 90 percent of its foreign earningsand the ethnic
question. MOSOP, which spread like wildfire, was soon able to mount a
demonstration attended by 60 percent of the population of Ogoniland.
Saro-Wiwa demanded that each ethnic group in Nigeria be given a say
qua ethnic group in the government, and that each such group gain
control of the mineral resources of its own land. He was not an ethnic
separatist, but objected to the permanent political and economic
domination of Nigeria by the larger ethnic groups, especially the
Muslim northerners, who consumed a great deal but produced little.
It wasn't difficult to think of objections to Saro-Wiwa's ideas.
Sometimes he said there were 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria, sometimes
300. What, then, counted as a distinct ethnic group with its own
political and financial rights? When so much depended on the answer,
the mere question would in itself generate a lot of conflict.
Moreover, the establishment of a rich but tiny ethnic enclave in the
midst of poverty, such as Ogoniland would have become if Saro-Wiwa's
proposals were put into practice, seemed hardly a recipe for peace in
Nigeria. The country's oil resources, upon which its 100 million
people have come disastrously to depend for their daily sustenance,
were highly concentrated, geographically speaking. The question of who
was to control them had already generated one civil war: might it not
easily generate another?
Saro-Wiwa argued that the situation in Ogoniland was already so
catastrophic that it could get no worse, that it amounted to slow
genocide and therefore that something had to be done about it at once,
before it was too late. But I was suspicious of the idea that things
could get no worse. Human ingenuity in causing disaster is almost
infinite, no matter how low the starting point, and in neighboring
Liberia I had seen with my own eyes what could be achieved by the
thirst for power disguised as the need to ameliorate conditions that
allegedly could get no worse: scores of thousands killed,
three-quarters of the population displaced, and the infrastructure
totally destroyed. Was it not likely that, in Nigerian conditions, a
mass movement such as MOSOP would end in violence and intimidation,
however pacific its leaders' intentions? Saro-Wiwa was confident on
this score, but in the event it was the violence of some of his
followers that gave the military government the pretext to execute him.
On May 21, 1994, several Ogoni elders who were not entirely in
agreement with Saro-Wiwa's methods decided to meet in the town of
Giokoo in Ogoniland. Saro-Wiwa was due to attend, but was turned away
by soldiers before he could reach the meeting. Some of his young
supporters, enraged by this, brutally killed four of the elders and
burnt their bodies. Saro-Wiwa, along with fourteen others, was charged
with their murder. By any reasonable standard, the charges against him
were not proved, but the military government, by now in the hands of
by far the most ruthless of all Nigeria's military presidents, General
Sani Abachawho had been Saro-Wiwa's friend during the civil war and
who had unsuccessfully offered him the job of oil minister in his
government to bribe him to desist from his campaignwas determined to
rid itself of this troublesome writer and activist. Ten days after
being found guilty, he was executed with eight of the other
defendants. It has been alleged that Abacha had the execution recorded
on video for his private satisfaction.
World outrage at the execution was intense but shallowas usual. There
were calls for sanctions against Nigeria, but it was far from certain
whom these would harm if applied. The idea that sanctions should be
applied to a country because it had executed a writer known to and
friendly with intellectuals outside its borders, while for years the
execution of large numbers of unknown men in the most dubious of
circumstances had evoked not the slightest expression of concern,
suggested thattheir protestations to the contrary
notwithstandingintellectuals did not believe that all human lives
were of equal worth, and really cared only about people like themselves.
Precisely as I had expected, the situation in Ogoniland deteriorated
after the establishment of MOSOP. According to the organization's own
reports (perhaps exaggerated for propaganda purposes), several
thousand Ogoni have now been killed in Ogoniland and many thousands
more made homeless by Nigerian security forces. Worse still, similar
movements have been started in other oil-producing parts of Nigeria,
with similar results. What countervailing good has come of this harm?
Saro-Wiwa was the best of company: anecdotes poured from him without
cease. In his presence, it was impossible to feel anything other than
that life was infinitely interesting, varied, and enjoyable. But in
turning to practical politics, it seemed to me that he betrayed his
own insight: for the singlemindedness of his mass movement represented
an impoverishment rather than an enrichment of life. It also
contradicted the message of his own first book, Sozaboy
(Addison-Wesley, 1995), which is one of the great antiwar novels of
the century, by which he would have been remembered even had he not
met so dramatic and gruesome a death. For Sozaboy is not just an
antiwar novel, it is anti-rhetorical and mistrustful of all high-flown
sentiment.
Sozaboy is subtitled A novel in rotten English. It is the first-person
narrative of a young villager who goes to be a "sozaboy" (a soldier
boy) during the Nigerian Civil War, written in the kind of
Englishincorrect, but often highly expressive and even poeticthat
semi-educated West Africans use with great gusto and pride.
Saro-Wiwa's novel was not the first to be written in this kind of
English. Nearly half a century ago, Amos Tutuola published The
Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) to critical acclaim, and no one who read it
was likely to forget the impact of the first two paragraphs:
I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age.
I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. In those
days we did not know other money, except COWRIES, so that everything
was very cheap, and my father was the richest man in our town.
My father got eight children and I was the eldest among them, all
the rest were hard workers, but I myself was an expert palm-wine
drinkard. I was drinking palm-wine from morning till night and from
night till morning. By that time I could not drink ordinary water at
all except palm-wine.
But whereas Tutuola probably could not write in any other style of
English, and his story was a wild surrealist Pilgrim's Progress
(without, as far as I can tell, any moral content or meaning) of a
drunkard through the spirit world of the Nigerian imagination,
Saro-Wiwa used his rotten English self-consciously for literary and
emotional effect, in a work of strict social realism. And he did it
with a consummate mastery that he never quite attained elsewhere in
his oeuvre.
In Sozaboy, Saro-Wiwa successfully reconciled his desire to write in
authentic West African English with his desire to reach a wider
English-speaking audience: for after a few conventions are grasped,
and with the help of a short glossary (itself very entertaining),
Sozaboy can be read by any English speaker with ease. Saro-Wiwa also
managed to create a thoroughly credible protagonist, a village boy
suddenly thrust into a new and alien world, who is naïve, but not
stupid, and goodhearted while retaining the normal desires of flesh
and blood. Having achieved these two considerable literary feats
(writing in authentic but comprehensible West African English, and
creating a credible village hero), Saro-Wiwa tells an affecting story
through the eyes of his narrator: Mene, a young man from Dukana. Our
sympathy for him is engaged at once:
I am free-born of Dukana and that is where I went to school. I am
the only son of my mama and I have no father. It is my mama who sent
me to St. Dominic's school in Dukana where I passed my elementary six
with distinction. In fact, I am very clever boy in school and I like
to work hard always.
Unfortunately, his mother is unable to pay for his further education.
"The thing pained me bad bad because I wanted to be big man like
lawyer or doctor riding car and talking big big English." His mother
suggests that he become a mechanic and driver instead:
So my mama told me that I should learn to be driver. Because
Dukana people have one lorry which they call "Progres." But they have
no driver and they have to go and get driver from another country to
drive the lorry.
Mene describes how the people in Dukana react with joy to the news of
a military coup that overthrows the corrupt civilian government:
Even one woman was talking that the sun will shine proper proper
and people will not die again because there will be medicine in the
hospital and the doctor will not charge money for operation.
Gradually, however, the deteriorating political situation impinges on
Dukana. At first, it is good for business.
And plenty people were returning to their village. From far far
places. We motor people begin to make plenty money. Plenty trouble,
plenty money. And my master [the owner of the truck] was prouding. We
were charging passengers as lawyer charge people who get case. We were
charging them proper.
But soon "fear begin to catch everybody" because stories are heard
"about how they are killing people in the train; cutting their hand or
their leg or breaking their head with matchet."
Pastor Barika of Church of Light of God, the most important church
in Dukana, was saying the world will soon end. I no like that one at
all. How will the world end and I never get my [driving] licence? Is
that good thing?
The simplicity and narrowness of Mene's concerns (and those of his
fellow villagers) are charmingly conveyed. But the rest of the book is
a painful African Bildungsroman. As the civil war approaches Dukana,
Mene's young wife Agnes and the older men in the village goad Mene
into joining the army. It is the way for him to prove his manhood, and
the uniform is very smart and attractive besides. So Mene joins up
without any idea of what war might actually entail, or even why it is
being fought (at no point in the book is the alleged purpose of the
war mentioned).
Mene soon learns that there is more to war than parading in a smart
uniform to the admiration of his wife. He is sent into action, where
his officers behave with casual brutality and his friends are killed
by planes "shitting bombs." He suffers hunger, fear, and hardship;
eventually he is badly injured and captured by the enemy, who restore
him to health and make him join their army. Mene realizes that the two
contending armies are in fact identical, offering their soldiers no
reason to fight and kill other than hatred of the enemy. But why
should they hate the enemy? No reason is given. He meets only
skullduggery and treachery.
He manages to desert and returns clandestinely to Dukana, whose
population is now either dead or in refugee camps. The village is in
ruins. The book ends as Mene walks disconsolately from Dukana:
And as I was going, I was just thinking how the war have spoiled
my town Dukana, uselessed many people, killed others, killed my mama
and my wife, Agnes, my beautiful young wife. and now it have made me
like porson wey [person who] get leprosy because I have no town again.
And 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.
How ironical that a man who wrote these heartfelt words (surely the
distillation of his own experience of the Nigerian Civil War) should
have started a political movement that resulted in violence and mass
displacement. But Saro-Wiwa was in any case thoroughly disillusioned
by the inability of mere writing to change anything by itself. His
television series, "Basi and Company," had been watched by one
Nigerian in three, after all, and yet nothing in Nigeria had changed.
Through the character of Basi, a young ne'er-do-well who rents a room
from a Lagos landlady called Madam the Madam, and who constantly
dreams of dishonest schemes to make a fortune overnight, he had neatly
satirized the national mentality. Every Nigerian had recognized
himself in Basi, and laughed heartily, and yet had remained unchanged.
It was time, Saro-Wiwa said, for more than mere words.
Throughout my last meeting with Saro-Wiwa, I thought of the letter
Turgenev wrote on his deathbed to Tolstoy in 1883 the last words,
indeed, he ever wrote. At the time Tolstoy had forsaken writing novels
for moralistic tracts.
My dear Lev Nikolayevich, I have not written to you for a long
time for I was and still am at death's door. I am writing especially
to you to say how glad I was to have been a contemporary of yours and
to express my final, sincere request. My friend, return to literature!
This gift comes to you from where everything else comes. Ah, how happy
I should be to think that this request would have some effect on you.
My friend, great writer of the Russian land, heed my request! Let me
know if this note reaches you, and allow me to embrace you tightly,
tightly, for one last time, and your wife and all your family. I can
write no more.
With Saro-Wiwa and me, however, it was the supplicant who survived and
the person to whom the appeal was addressed who died. Ken Saro-Wiwa
was hanged in Port Harcourt prisonat the fifth attempton November
10, 1995.
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