This volume showcases a man who transcends African history and who remains, especially since his execution, an icon of human rights and environmental activism. Saro-Wiwa was not only a champion of human rights and a fighter against environmental degradation in his Ogoni homeland; he was also a prolific writer who helped redefine African literature. His voice was not limited to the printed word, however. He wrote extensively for stage and screen, used his artistic fame on Nigerian television to publish children’s books, and created one of the most important publishing houses in Nigeria. His fame was his springboard to political action.
Unlike other works on Ken Saro-Wiwa, this book provides the student, scholar, or casual reader a clear and concise introduction to Saro-Wiwa’s life, his works, and the importance of his legacy in Nigeria and around the world. The book serves as a guide to the reader interested in Saro-Wiwa’s literary career, his environmental and human rights work, and his brushes with the military regime in Nigeria and eventual execution. This book provides an overview of his life as a whole and melds the various aspects of his life into a coherent whole while remaining mindful of the intent of the Short Histories of Africa series.
Though the book follows a chronological approach to Saro-Wiwa’s life, several aspects of his biography and achievements overlap, such as his activities in the private sector and his writings. These discussions provide context to his work, life, and career and yet remain accessible to the casual reader.
Saro-Wiwa was a polarizing figure from the beginning of his public life during the Nigerian Civil War, attracting the attention of friends and foes alike. He is also unique in that he left a broad body of literature behind regarding every subject he engaged. As a result, much scholarship regarding his life begins with his words. In addition to his many literary works, novels such as Sozaboy, children’s books such as the Basi and Company series and many others, his various essay collections and memoirs form the backbone of the scholarship on his life, works, and legacy. Though there is no shortage of work on Saro-Wiwa, the closest to a biography of the man comes from his son in the latter’s memoir In the Shadow of a Saint. This book will serve as a high-profile addition to both the scholarship on Saro-Wiwa and a valuable addition to the Short Histories of Africa series. It provides a unique study of a man whose multifaceted legacy transcends the internal politics of Nigeria and even African Studies. Saro-Wiwa left in his wake a legacy that makes him a truly global figure.
Introduction
On November 10, 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s life ended on a hangman’s noose in a prison in Port Harcourt, the victim of one of the Nigerian “Kangaroo Courts” he so enjoyed satirizing. His death, along with eight other activists in the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), catapulted the Ogoni plight to global awareness. The Ogoni Nine, as they became known, were victims of an alleged conspiracy between Shell Oil and the Nigerian military dictatorship headed by General Sani Abacha to silence MOSOP and Saro-Wiwa, one of the most vocal critics of oil exploitation in Nigeria and the environmental costs to the Ogoni people.
Though Saro-Wiwa is best remembered for the activism that cost him his life, he was famous both in Nigeria and abroad for his many achievements. As a respected author, playwright, poet, and television producer, Saro-Wiwa helped redefine the Nigerian novel, creating a body of work that was consciously Nigerian in its conception rather than based on ethnic identity. His memoirs and journalistic work shed light on the ideas he formed as a young man and his political activities during the Nigerian Civil War, when he became military governor of Rivers State and served on the council that helped create the postwar administration. When he felt he could no longer work within an increasingly corrupt and patronage-based system favoring the larger ethnic groups in the country, he left government work and turned to the private sector. Through a series of businesses culminating in the Saros Publishing and Holding companies, he used his private sector wealth to further his goal of creating a Nigerian consciousness that would not be fragmented into Ogoni, Eastern, Christian, or Southern Nigerian cultural manifestations.
Above all, Saro-Wiwa was a nationalist. Throughout his work and personal experience, he learned to love the English language because it made his work accessible to a broad and receptive audience. He regarded English as the unifying language of Nigeria, one of the most ethnic and linguistically diverse countries in the world. He was not an Ogoni nationalist or separatist, but a Nigerian nationalist, albeit a reluctant one. He fought not only to incorporate his people into Nigeria, but to create a Nigeria that would accept all ethnic groups in Nigeria as equal partners in the country.
Although it is possible to examine Saro-Wiwa’s life in segments, to do so distorts his legacy. He lived and died dedicated to Nigerian unity and attempted to create a nation out of the fragmented state. All his work in government, entertainment, literature, and activism focused on that goal. In life and death Saro-Wiwa confronted what he saw as the injustice of a Nigerian system that rewarded corruption, nepotism, and regionalism at the expense of merit and minority rights.
Ken Saro-Wiwa was a prolific author who left his mark on the literary world as early as 1973 when his first play, The Transistor Radio, was published and produced. His stature as a writer, producer, and journalist gave him a platform to voice his views on Nigerian unity and the place of minorities within the country. His crowning achievement, the hit television series Basi and Company, was a landmark work for Nigeria. For the first time, there was a program that was entirely Nigerian, with characters that all Nigerians could recognize and relate to. Though Basi (aka Mr B) occupied a country not of his own creation, Basi made the postcolonial state his own. Similarly, Nigerians needed to coexist in a federation that provided security for all groups, no matter their size and influence. This idea permeated much of Saro-Wiwa’s work and gives us a lens by which we can study the life of this unique and sometimes controversial man.
Two closely related events in Nigerian history catapulted Saro-Wiwa to prominence. In 1967, Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, military governor of the Eastern Region, broke away from Nigeria to form the short-lived Republic of Biafra. Thirty months of intense civil war culminated in the return of Biafra to Nigeria and the creation of a federal republic, albeit one still under military rule. Unlike many in the nascent republic, Saro-Wiwa became a vocal supporter of Nigerian unity, actively joining the war effort and becoming the civilian administrator of Bonny (in southeastern Nigeria) before going on to join the newly formed Rivers State assembly. Saro-Wiwa’s bold step in supporting Nigerian nationalism came from the realization that the interests of the ethnic minorities in general, and the Ogoni in particular, would be better served as part of a federal Nigeria, where no single ethnic group could dominate.
When Shell discovered oil in the Niger Delta in January 1956, the Delta’s economic importance forever changed. For the Ogoni, oil was a curse, as the ensuing years brought economic destruction and environmental devastation. For Saro-Wiwa, the destruction of the environment that people depended on, coupled with the siphoning of oil revenues to the larger ethnic groups who controlled the economic patronage system in Nigeria, amounted to genocide. Saro-Wiwa did not believe the fight could be waged within Nigeria alone. After the failure of Biafran secession in 1970, oil became the economic glue that held Nigeria together, and Saro-Wiwa began organizing his people in a nonviolent struggle to regain their economic and political rights and keep their cultural identity, which he felt were imperiled by environmental destruction and the lack of economic opportunity.
It may seem a contradiction that Saro-Wiwa preached for a unified Nigerian society while working to preserve his ethnic group’s identity within the structure of the country, but for him, the ideal Nigeria was one where each ethnic group could be culturally independent and still share equally in the political and economic project that