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.
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| *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.
