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Steve Ogah

Lagos, NIGERIA - "I am mentally prepared for the worst, but hopeful for the best. I think I have the moral victory" -- Ken Saro Wiwa, in a letter to? British friend and writer, William Boyd.

On? November 10, 1995, Ken Saro Wiwa was hanged to death in Port Harcourt prison. Then they poured acid on his dead body. Five years after, an empty casket was laid to rest in his honor, because his body could not be found.

Ken Saro Wiwa was a writer and environmentalist, who laid down his life for his people, the Ogonis of the Niger Delta Area of Nigeria. He didn't die alone, though. He was part of the Ogoni 9 that were tried by a military tribunal and sentenced to death for allegedly being responsible for the death of the Ogoni 4. When the [British] Commonwealth of Nations suspended Nigeria from the organization because of Ken's death, General Sanni Abacha, the head of the military regime, didn't show to us that he was bothered. Ten years on, Ken Saro Wiwa is still alive in our memories.

My first encounter with Ken was through his book, Basi and Company. It was always lying about in the house. The Television series was no less popular as I can still recollect the antics of characters like Mr. Basi and Alali.

I went to the university and read A forest of flowers, a collection of delightful short stories. I returned home and owned a copy, only to lose it to a female attendant of a restaurant in Lagos.

The military regime was so afraid of Ken that even after pouring acid on his corpse they yanked A forest of flowers off the school syllabus so that Ken Saro Wiwa would be forgotten in a hurry.

But I still remember him as a novelist, author of Sozaboy, a civil war narrative written in "rotten English," as Ken insists. The Nigerian Civil war of 1967- 1970 had a terrible effect on Mr. Wiwa, as he was the civilian administrator of Bonny at that time. Songs in a time of war is a collection of poems he wrote to etch his experience on us. Some lines:

For you cannot speak
While the guns roar
And you cannot cry
Where you'll not be heard
For the loud resonance
Of an empty lie

?A prolific writer, he was concerned with prison, in his titles. (He later died in one). So he authored Pita Dumbrok's Prison and Prisoners of Jebs, as works of fiction. N.J. Udoeyop, the critic at the university of Uyo, here in Nigeria has this to say of Mr. Wiwa:

The metaphorical prison predominates in Pita Dumbrok's Prison. It becomes increasingly clear that part of Saro-Wiwa's use of the metaphor is to suggest and Nigeria especially and Africa in general is trapped, imprisoned, in the colonial/neo-colonial phase of her history and in all the "values" which that phase implies. All values and relations in any society are determined by the historical epoch, and in Saro-Wiwa's fiction that epoch for Africa and Nigeria is the colonial/neo-colonial. And so in all of his fiction, Saro Wiwa reveals to us what we ought to know: that in reality, people are imprisoned not so much in concrete walls or Iron bars but in concept and ideas; they are shut up in their own history, which is the making of their own relations.

?Captain Ita, a character in Pita Dumbrok's Prison, bares his mind:

There is a prison in each of us. Each person is locked into a prison, not that prison into which I had been put away for months but a prison all the same. Each man's responsibility is to find his own prison, and then break out of it.

?But Ken was put in Port Harcourt prison, River State, but never broke out of it. And when he realized that the military government was hell-bent on executing him without proper legal procedures, he advised his legal team lead by the luminary, chief Gani Fawehinmi, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) to withdraw. He was going to face the hangman's noose.

So he wrote A Month and A Day: A Detention Diary (London, Penguin, 1995.) William Boyd, British writer and friend to Wiwa introduces the posthumously published book:

The Ogoni's great Misfortune is that their homeland happens to lie above a significant portion of Nigeria's oil reserves.

Since the mid-1950s, Ogoni land has been devastated by the industrial pollution caused by extraction of oil. What was once a placid rural community of prosperous farmers and fishermen is now an ecological wasteland reeking of sulphur, its creek and holes poisoned by indiscriminate oil spillage and ghoulishly lit (at) night by the orange flames of gas flares.

This is what Mr. Wiwa wanted to address when he became an environmentalist. In his own words "the writer must be L'homme engage: The intellectual man of action". But he later lost his life when he became involved in the action. Nonetheless he is remembered as a playwright too. "The Transistor Radio", part of Four Farcical Plays, was in 1972 broadcast on the "African Theater" programme of the BBC. As a playwright, he was a satirist to the core who never spared governments.

Imo Ben Eshiet, PhD, critic and lecturer in Dramatic Literature, University of Calabar, has a view on Ken:

Saro Wiwa's plays show a penchant for anti-philistinism and dissent ... Drawing meaningfully from an extraordinary talent and irrepressible gift for wit, the playwright uses evocative references to routine experiences to powerfully conjure the damage done by an inhuman political system and [the] politics which sustains it, to the psyche of the little man ... While reserving humorous sympathies for victims of this man-made hell, he, however, uses grim humor to punch home the bizarre and terrifying plight of man trapped in a dehumanizing environment.

Ken Saro Wiwa is also remembered as a writer of non-fiction. He? saw the Nigerian civil war and wrote, On a Darkling Plain: An Account of The Nigerian Civil War. He witnessed the many convulsion of Nigeria, especially during the murderous military regimes, then he wrote, Nigeria: The Brink of Disaster, Genocide in Nigeria: Ogoni Tragedy ??and Message from the Mad House.

On the eve of his hanging, he wrote a moving piece about a "musing" with a "roach", here he mentioned Fate of a Cockroach, by the Egyptian playwright, Tewfik Al Hakim. I have read the book and know that the cockroach died in the bathtub, its own prison.

Ken was wealthy. He was a publisher. Some of his kids went to the best schools in the world, including Eton College, UK; so he could have chosen to live a life of opulence. But he never did. He pitched his tent with the oppressed and depressed, and this later consumed him. Then in a classic case of what E.M. Forster may see as plot, one of Ken's parents later died from "grief," not long after he was hanged.

Those who sold his books were often visited by security agencies but Mr. Wiwa will always be celebrated. Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka describes him as a "Feisty and passionate writer". In his book, The Open Sore Of A Continent, he writes thus:

A leader of the movement for the survival of the Ogoni people, MOSOP, he exposed the plight of Ogoni to the United Nations Minorities Council, calling for the recognition of the Ogoni people as one of the world's endangered minorities.

Because we don't want to forget we have a number of books and articles about Ken Saro-Wiwa. His friend William Boyd wrote "Death of a Waiter", The New Yorker, November 27, 1995. Before I am Hanged is edited by Onookome Okome, Africa World Press, New Jersey. ?Iremoje: Ritual Poetry for Ken Saro Wiwa, is authored by Akeem Lasisi. Imo Eshiet, et al, edits Ken Saro Wiwa and the Discourse of Ethnic Minorities in Nigeria.

There are several poems, essay and books to the memory of this fearless writer that he is gradually becoming one of the most written about writers in history, just a decade after his brutal death.

Here in the World's Magazine, I have read one of Mphuthumi Ntabeni's brilliant essays, where he made reference to Mr. Wiwa.This reflects his recognition outside his homeland. Interestingly, the Guardian Newspapers, Nigeria, chose Ken as the Man of the Year in 1995.

But one cannot remember Ken Saro Wiwa without remembering his "political and literary credo," however long:

I am a man of peace, of ideas appalled by the denigrating Poverty of my people, who live on richly, endowed land, distressed by their political marginalisation and economic strangulation; angered by the devastation of their land, their intimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined to usher to this country as a whole a fair and just democratic system which protects everyone and every ethnic group and gives us all a valid claim to human civilization, I have devoted all my intellectual and material resource; my very life to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated.

I have no doubt at all about the ultimate success of my cause no matter the trials and tribulations, which I and those who believe with me may encounter on our journey. Neither imprisonment nor death can stop our ultimate victory. - (ANA REVIEW, 1995)

When death came in Port Harcourt prison in 1995, Ken Saro Wiwa, graduate of the University of Ibadan had some words to those who were putting the black shroud over his face: "You can kill the messenger, you cannot kill the message, you cannot kill the message." The world still remembers the messenger and the message!