Ken Saro Wiwa: Twenty years after

Ken Saro Wiwa came to limelight first as a writer with his book Soza Boy, a chronicle of the Nigerian Civil War. His television show Basi and Co, was a popular sitcom on Nigerian television in the late 1980s, with an estimated 30 million viewers. In 1990 Ken Saro Wiwa took up activism to challenge […]

Ken Saro Wiwa came to limelight first as a writer with his book Soza Boy, a chronicle of the Nigerian Civil War. His television show Basi and Co, was a popular sitcom on Nigerian television in the late 1980s, with an estimated 30 million viewers.
In 1990 Ken Saro Wiwa took up activism to challenge the environmental devastation oil exploration was having on his native Ogoniland. This activism pitched him against the behemoth that is Shell and the Nigerian military government.
In 1994, Saro-Wiwa was arrested alongside eight others and later charged for the murder of pro-government Ogoni chiefs. The fact that the trial was under a military tribunal and the dodgy nature of the proceedings led to strenuous international and local outcries. But the cries were not enough to deter the government from hanging the Ogoni 9 on November 10, 1995.
It was an act that shook not only the creatives of Nigeria, who had appealed to the government to show leniency, but it shocked the entire world and made Saro-Wiwa a martyr of the Niger Delta cause.
Why was the recap of this famous story necessary? Well, for one, many Nigerians are in a hurry to move on from the country’s murky past into an even hazier future.
This attitude was summed up by a Tunde Leye. Tweeting at @tundeleye, he said, “I asked my 21 year-old nephew if he knows Saro Wiwa. He doesn’t. But he knows Martin Luther King Jr. This is the story of our history.”
But there are people who have been trying for the world not to forget. Nigerian Artist Sokari Douglas-Camp made a memorial sculpture to the Ogoni 9 and sent it to Nigeria to commemorate the 20th anniversary of their death.
But since September 8th, the sculpture, a metal bus, had been impounded by the Nigerian Custom on the grounds of the work’s “political value”. Incidentally, current custom boss, Col. Hameed Ali was a member of that tribunal that sentenced the Ogoni 9. Efforts to have the boss released in time for the commemoration have been rebuffed by the authorities.
But somewhere in downtown Port Harcourt, on the busy road where Saro-Wiwa used to have his office, a foundation had sprung up to keep his legacy alive. On a 2014 tour of the foundation, I was along with other writers were shown around the facility by Ken Wiwa, son of the late activist.
Ken Wiwa has been active in blowing the trumpet of his father’s legacy. His very revealing book, In the Shadow of a Saint, paints a picture of Ken Saro Wiwa, warts and all, in a light that the world had never seen him. In that book, the son showed the father not only as the hero the world sees of him, but as the flawed father, and husband and man he was. But a man nonetheless.
Now, there are attempts to have Saro-Wiwa pardoned, an effort championed by his son, who maintains his father’s innocence.
“Despite several aborted attempts to reconcile the victims and perpetrators, my father and the other men remain convicted criminals in Nigeria’s legal books. More worrying is that, although the military junta that killed my father is long gone, Nigeria’s civilian government has yet to come to terms with a man and a community whose story stands as enduring testimony to the consequences of reckless and unaccountable oil production,” Wiwa wrote in an article in The Guardian.
One can only imagine the anguish that the Ogoni crisis caused on both sides and over 20 years after, some of that anguish is still seeping through to the surface, causing the heart to waver with grief. In a moving tribute, Saro-Wiwa’s daughter, Noo, wrote on her Facebook account:
“In 1992, when I was 16, my father Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote me a letter. Among other things, he told me that the Nigerian military dictatorship might kill him as a result of his campaign for human rights in the oil-polluted Niger Delta. I thought he was exaggerating, and I was angry with him for scaremongering.
“They say that courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to overcome it. My father pursued his objectives, knowing the huge risks. On the morning of November 10th, 1995, when he and eight of his colleagues were hanged, he was reportedly the only person who didn’t cry as they placed the rope around his neck.
“The murder of a relative can, paradoxically, make you risk-averse. My father taught me a lot about courage, and each year I’m gaining a bit of what he had. One day I will write about Ogoniland.
“The Ogoni Nine risked their lives in order for our people to enjoy the basics of life: clean water, rivers filled with fish to eat, schools for the children. Nobody should have to die for such meagre requests. But their deaths were not in vain.
“The Ogoni Nine: Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawo, Daniel Gbooko, Paul Levera, Felix Nuate, Baribor Bera, Barinem Kiobel, John Kpuine, Ken Saro-Wiwa.
“We remember you and thank you.”
But have their deaths been in vain? The jury is still out, but Ken Wiwa seems to echo his sister’s conviction, despite the lamentable situation of the Niger Delta, and the generality of Nigeria.
There are important lessons to learn from the saga that plucked one of Nigeria’s brilliant writers and left a huge vacuum in the lives of his family and the literary community.
“Sometimes it seems as if 10 November 19995 was another era. In some ways it was, and in others it feels like it was just yesterday. Between the disabling nature of his death and the enabling tests of time, one thought still sustains me: it is the old idea that the arc of the moral universe may be long, but it still bends towards justice,” Ken Wiwa wrote.