Saro-Wiwa, Biko spoke truth to power

On November 10, the African literary community, environmentalists and human rights advocates will observe a grim anniversary.

This will be the 19th year since Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged.

The date is clearly etched in my mind as I happened to be in West Africa when the events that led to Saro-Wiwa’s execution moved towards their climax.

I wasn’t in Nigeria, but in Accra, Ghana, where I was attending a conference of what was eventually to become the International Society for Oral Literature in Africa (Isola).

But on the way to Accra, we had made a brief stop at the Murtala Muhamed Airport in Lagos, and I couldn’t help recalling the few heady months I had spent there in the late 1970s, at the height of the good times ushered in by the oil boom, which was later to turn into a miserable tragedy for millions of Nigerians, including Saro-Wiwa and his Ogoni people.

Ken Saro-Wiwa made his audiences laugh. A humorist with an irrepressible knack for highlighting the funny, the absurd and the ridiculous in human situations, he authored numerous works of scintillating hilarity, lampooning the African condition.

Among these, I most clearly recall Prisoners of Jebs, cartooning a community of high profile African malefactors detained in an island prison camp, Soza Boy: A Novel in Rotten English, and the drama series Basi and Company.

Like our own beloved departed Francis Imbuga, Saro-Wiwa believed that the most effective way of looking at the African reality without succumbing to total heartbreak was to laugh about it.

IRRESPONSIBLE CORPORATES

We read his works and we laughed with him, a laughter provoked by our appreciation of how accurately he had captured the irrationality of our societies and their leaders.

Maybe what we outside Nigeria did not fully realize was that Ken Saro-Wiwa was writing out of a very deep and immediate concern about what was happening to his community.

Most of the oil that made Nigeria a major player in the energy field was, and still is, extracted from wells in and around the south-eastern coast of the country, especially in the Rivers State, which straddles the Niger Delta and whose main city is Port Harcourt.

But while the oil magnates were counting their nairas and dollars in Lagos, Abuja and the capitals of the West, Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoni people were only counting the tragic losses that the oil boom had visited on them.

Like most littoral people around the world, the Ogoni earned their living from a mixture of fishing and subsistence farming.

But decades of irresponsible behaviour by the oil companies had led to such levels of environmental pollution that their livelihood was seriously threatened with extinction.

Saro-Wiwa and other like-minded and articulate residents decided to act and bring the plight of Ogoniland to the attention of the world.

Through their advocacy organisation, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (Mosop), they exposed the genocidal viciousness of the oil companies and the complicity of the Nigerian leadership in the crime.

 Sani Abacha, who boasted frequently about being a “trained manager of violence”, was Nigeria’s military dictator at the time, and he was not amused about the “meddlings” of Saro-Wiwa and company.

Why were those busybodies trying to interfere with the good times he was having with the oil barons, constantly replenishing his Swiss bank accounts to the brim and even to overflowing?

Abacha’s chance wasn’t long coming.  An outburst of local violence resulted in the death of some pro-government officials, and the authorities immediately blamed Mosop, and especially Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow leaders, for the incident. After a brief and hastily-staged trial by a military tribunal (read kangaroo court), they were hanged.

The world was outraged. Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth and several other sanctions were imposed.

But did Sani Abacha and his clique care? On the contrary, they were celebrating the final silencing of the “big mouths” that had tried to embarrass the Federal Republic.

ACTS OF STATE

Three things come to mind as one ponders Ken Saro-Wiwa’s fate. The first is the oft-asked question why a writer should “abandon” his pen and paper and actively engage in political action.

In our own African context, we think of writers like the late Christopher Okigbo, who perished in combat in the Biafran war, Wole Soyinka, who narrowly survived the consequences of his intervention in the same conflict, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the late Katama Mkangi, who both suffered detention and lost their jobs through “acts of state” not too far away from here.

The point is that in most of these cases, the writers are not abandoning anything. Their political activism is simply an extension of what drove them to write in the first place: an overwhelming concern about the betterment of their societies.

I am known (maybe even a little notorious) among my colleagues as a stickler for technique, structure and linguistic aesthetics in writing. But even I, in my sober moments, readily admit that the ultimate value of literature lies in its contribution to the transformation of society and humankind.

 So, most serious writers do not regard themselves as “mere writers”, cut off from the concerns and struggles of their people. Indeed, it is often these concerns, aspirations and struggles that inspire and motivate these individuals to write.

The second reflection that Saro-Wiwa’s silencing raises is the age-old institution of censorship. From the earliest beginnings of human society, there have been attempts by some people to control what their fellow human beings can or cannot say.

Ministers of the word, like writers, preachers, teachers and orators, have been particularly targeted by censors. The censorship itself takes a variety of forms, ranging from simple taboos to bannings and burnings, of both writers and their works.

Prosecution, inquisition, detention, exile, brutal murder and even forced “suicide”, as in the case of the proto-philosopher Socrates, are all weapons in the arsenal of powerful dictators, who appear to live in mortal fear of the word and the truth that it bears.

A HOLE IN THE SKY

These and other extreme attempts to silence writers are not unknown to our own times and climes. Speak of detention and exile and names like Abdilatif Abdalla, Alamin Mazrui and Ngugi wa Thiong’o leap to mind.

Joining Saro-Wiwa in murdered company would be people like the black consciousness activist Steve Bantu Biko, author of I Write What I Like, and my own relative and mentor, Byron Kawadwa.

Kawadwa, the Director of the Uganda National Theatre in Kampala in 1977, was murdered by Idi Amin because he had written and directed Song of the Cockerel, described as an anti-dictatorship play.

Our final reflection: vast oil deposits have been discovered in East Africa, many of them in the vicinity of, if not right under, delicate water bodies, like Lakes Turkana and Albert.

Will the oil companies and the politicians behave responsibly this time, and avoid the temptation to sacrifice more Ken Saro-Wiwas, who will inevitably speak out if their people are threatened?

The reader may want to see what happens to Lake Riziki, in my recent play, 'A Hole in the Sky'.