By Dan Amor
This week (Wednesday November 10, 2021, to be specific) indubitably marks the 26th anniversary of the tragic death of Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa and eight of his Ogoni kinsmen, in the evil hands of professional hangmen who sneaked into Port Harcourt from Sokoto in the cover of darkness. We were at the national convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) in the auditorium of the University of Lagos when the news came to us with a rude shock that our immediate past President then had been killed by the State under the watchful eyes of Gen. Sani Abacha who was head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
By his death, the Abacha-led military junta had demonstrated, in shocking finality, to the larger world, that it was guided by the most base, most callous of instincts. As a student of Nigerian history, and of the literature of the Nigerian Civil War, I am adequately aware that Ken Saro-Wiwa, against the backdrop of our multicultural complexities allegedly worked against his own region during the War, the consequences of which he would have regretted even in his grave.
But I write of him today not as a politician but as a literary
man and environmental rights activist. We remember him because, for this
writer, as for most disinterested Nigerians, Ken Saro-Wiwa lives alternatively
as an inspirational spirit, and a haunting one at that. Now, as always,
Nigerians who care still hear Ken’s steps on the polluted land of his
ancestors. They still see the monstrous flares from poisonous gas stacks, and
still remember his symbolic pipe. Now, as always, passionate Nigerians will
remember and hear the gleeful blast of the Ogoni song, the song Ken sang at his
peril. Yet, only the initiated can see the Ogoni national flag flutter
cautiously in the saddened clouds of a proud land. But all can hear his name in
the fluttering of the Eagle’s wing.
Ken Saro-Wiwa was a modern Nigerian hero who did not sacrifice
sense and spirit merely to pedantic refinements. As an aggrieved writer,
appalled by the denigrating poverty of his people who live on a richly endowed
land, distressed by their political marginalisation and economic strangulation,
angered by the devastation of their God-given land, their ultimate heritage,
anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined
to usher to his country as a whole, a fair and just democratic system which
protects every one and every ethnic group and gives all a valid claim to human
civilisation, he was an embodiment of the writer as crusader.
There is, indeed, a prophetic, all-embracing commitment to a
depiction of the reality of his Ogoni kinsmen in his works about which he seems
helpless. For that matter, there is in his writing career, something of an
overloading, of avocation and responsibilities variously devolving on the
ethnographer, the creative writer, the polemicist, the politician and the
activist. No doubt, Nigerians will wake up one day to discover that in the
little man from Ogoni, the nation produced, without realising it, one of the
major literary voices of the contemporary world.
If Ken Saro-Wiwa weren’t head and shoulders above the ranks of
the organised stealing called military regimes, and if he didn’t amply deserve
his position as a recognised and popular Commander-in-Chief of the Literary
Brigade of his generation, I wouldn’t be wasting my precious time here
discussing his contributions to modern artistic creativity and minority rights
awareness in Nigeria and the world. The great division in all contemporary
writing is between that little that has been written by men and women who had
clarified their intentions; who were writing with the sole aim of registering
and communicating truth or their desire, and the overwhelming bulk composed by
the consciously dishonest and of those whose writing has been affected at
second or tenth remove by economic pressure, economic temptation, economic
flattery, and so on.
For Ken, “writing must do something to transform the lives of a
community, of a nation. What is of interest to me is that my art should be able
to alter the lives of a large number of people, of a whole community, of the
entire country, so that my literature has to be entirely different.” It could
therefore be seen that as one who hailed from one of the marginalized minority
areas of this country, Saro-Wiwa used his literature to propagate the delicate
and monolithic national question.
Ken saw literature as a veritable instrument for a committed
global crusade for his people, and he actually pursued this goal with his exuding
physical and intellectual energy, his material wealth and his precious life. If
Professor Wole Soyinka’s voice is the loudest in the Nigerian literary cosmos,
Ken’s is the most disturbing, for he brings to his readers the unrelieved
darkness of tragedy. His persistent anger against those who steal our national
patrimony into their private pockets thereby reducing the nation to rubble is
palpable in his writings. A number of properties can be associated with his
writing: the fictionality of all memories and anticipations, radical linguistic
skepticism and the obligation not to remain silent.
Of course, not much in terms of detailed stylistic exegesis has
been carried out on his works by our army of critics, but the canonical
ambience of his art shows a more than clever anatomy of its technical grace and
distinction. His mercurial temperament notwithstanding, Saro-Wiwa’s style bears
witness to the integration of a writer’s prodigious lyrical gift and
pyrotechnic wit with a mournful sense of helplessness and waste. His grace of
style is always in tandem with the rhetorical dazzle, a streak of malicious
artistic cruelty that may, for all anyone knows, have been the earliest
beginnings of his paranoia. Ken’s consistent refrain is the streak of humour
which overlaces a well-textured irony with the profundity of the prophet.
Consequently, on the artistic canvas, we are yet missing an
accomplished writer of such an immense vitality whose diction is stiff with
gorgeous embroidery. Ken Saro-Wiwa was not only the immediate past President of
the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) who was hanged on the day ANA was
having its annual convention at the University of Lagos, he had won the Foulon
Nichols Award for Creative Writing and Human Rights Crusade. He also won the
prestigious Rights Livelihood Prize, which is widely regarded as the
Alternative Nobel, and the British Environment and Media ( Special Awareness )
Award.
Nothing we can say today that will add much to the fame
Saro-Wiwa had garnered globally before his brutal murder on the hangman’s noose
by agents of intimidation in solidarity with advanced state terrorism. He will
also be remembered as a thinker and polemicist whose collection of newspaper
articles written under a column of the tittle “SIMILIA”, is arguably one of the
most poised, most distinguished, and most wide-ranging bodies of such views we
are likely to have in Nigeria for a long time.
Saro-Wiwa was desirous that his people should think for
themselves as well as tax themselves, and should be emancipated from the
dominion of prejudice as well as from the painful tyranny of a jackboot. His
killers thought that by his death they would have silenced all forms of
agitation in the Niger Delta. Despite collecting $1billion from the
international community for the Ogoni clean-up, the Muhammadu Buhari government
only used the Ogoni Pollution as gimmick for cheap political goals. Small
wonder that the Ogoni people rejected the alleged plan by the Buhari regime to
grant Ken and his kinsmen a national pardon. A government which planned to
establish a national cemetery in Ogoniland insisted of a productive and
progressive federal presence, should eat its pardon. We don’t need it!
The whole gamut of crises, resistances and even militancies in
the region, shows that unless the Nigerian State summons the political will to
address the intractable plight of the people of the Niger Delta, whose land
produces the nation’s enormous wealth, unless Shell Petroleum Development
Company and other multinational oil companies respect the laws of the land and
manifest their corporate social responsibility in their host communities, the
Isaac Adaka Boros, the Ken Saro-Wiwas, will continue to constitute a nightmare
to them. And their restless and unrelenting spirits shall continue to haunt
their murderers and their collaborators. As we remember him this week, as
always, may Ken’s spirit continue to reign supreme in the literary firmament of
Heaven.
*Dan Amor, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja
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