Showing posts with label Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa. Show all posts

Monday, November 8, 2021

Ken Saro-Wiwa And The Ogoni Conundrum

 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. 

*Ken Saro-Wiwa 

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. 

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Ken Saro-Wiwa: 21 Years After

By Dan Amor
Today, Thursday November 10, 2016, indubitably marks the twenty-first anniversary of the tragic and shocking 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. By his death, the Sani 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. 
*Ken Saro-Wiwa
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 marginalization 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 civilization, 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 realizing 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 organized stealing called military regime, and if he didn't amply deserve his position as a recognized 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.