Nigerian Casefile: The Ken Saro Wiwa-Ogoni Handbook

Compiled by the Coalition Against Dictatorship (CAD)

Section Two

Contents:

Ken Saro Wiwa, The World Bank and Us
Chuks Iloegbunam, The Death of a Writer (an obituary by a Nigerian journalist)
F. W. J. Mnthali, Farewell, Ken Saro-Wiwa! (a poetic memorial by the renowned Malawian poet)
The Writings of Ken Saro Wiwa: A Bibliography
Appendix 1: Action against the Nigerian junta and its backers: Harvard students take the lead
Appendix 2: Wole Soyinka, Why the General Killed

(PLEASE SEE SECTION 1 IN A SEPARATE MAIL FILE)

SECTION 1. CONTENTS:

The Ken Saro Wiwa Campaign
Some History
The Issue
Saro Wiwa's Trial and Execution
Saro Wiwa's Closing Statement at the Trial
The Difference You Can Make
Nigerian Oil and the West: The Moral Challenge
The Challenge of Nigeria: A Call to World Conscience
Ken Saro Wiwa, preface to *Genocide in Nigeria: the Ogoni Tragedy*

KEN SARO WIWA, THE WORLD BANK AND US

A column from the *Sunday Times* of Lagos; reprinted in *Similia: Essays on Anomic Nigeria* (Port Harcourt: Saros: 1991), a collection of columns published in 1989 and 1990. (Note: In this essay Ken uses World Bank and IMF interchange- ably.)

Almost twenty years ago, touring the United States of America, I came to know several variations of my surname. In New York, I was called Sora-Wawo, in Los Angeles Sira-Wawa. But the limit was in Atlanta, in the presence of Mrs. Coretta King, where I was introduced as Saro-Wee-Wee. Uncomfortably close to the toilet, you might say.

I was minded, that day, to change my name to something more heavenly like Wiwa or Saros. I refrained from doing so. In the interest of history. Today, I'm used to these and other varia- tions of my name.

Thus I was only half-surprised when an invitation arrived at my Surulere office the other day, addressed to, you guessed it, Ken Sarohiwa. And it came from the Indian High Commission.

It was an invitation to a party celebrating Indian National Day. I am not a party-going man. Invariably, I find myself, in the day, glued to my telephone or sitting in the front offices of the high and mighty in Nigeria pursuing you know what. At night, I'm in my study consulting dictionaries or the thesaurus and struggling endlessly with words in English or my native Khana. No one invites me to parties. Which is a blessing. So the half of my surprise was that the Indian High Commission had called me up. How on earth did they find out my address? I am supposed to be anonymous, in the name of all you love!

Since I have never been to a diplomat's party, and I do not mind a new experience, I took my courage in my hands and wended my way to Eleke Crescent on Victoria Island.

I suspected I would be lost at the part. I knew that my perpetual *adire* shirt would mark me out as a non-diplomat and that I did not have the polish to match a diplomat's shoes. I *was* lost. I held my soft drink (no alcohol was served) and the only diplomat I met almost sent me to my grave.

No, he did not deal me a blow. He was a high official of the World Bank. These sapped times are hungry times, and a hungry man is an angry man. I never have met any representative of the International Monetary Fund anywhere and this was an opportunity for me to send a message to the Fund through one of its represen- tatives in Nigeria.

As it turned out, I had nothing new to tell the representa- tive. He had been to all but two of the states of Nigeria, and most of it by road. He was aware of the distress caused by the Structural Adjustment Programme. The latest World Bank Report on the Africa Sub-region accepts as much. Forty years of the World Bank experiment in turning the economies of debtor-nations round has not resulted in success in a single country. Yet the Bank persists in its folly. Which makes you believe that their mission in debtor nations is not to heal but to rub salt into wounds. To collect debts and to send the nations into even greater debt so that the World Bank can remain in the nations forever.

The gentleman in question kept reminding me that the IMF would not have been in Nigeria if Nigeria had not gone on a borrowing spree. I know and have always known it. But the ques- tion which confronts us all is what to do in the circumstances. Must we see all our children die of kwashiorkor? Must we see all those who survive the ravages of disease and famine grow up as zombies because they have no books to read, cannot afford good education, decent housing, transportation and water? Perhaps the only thing they can look forward to is a befitting burial which we perversely still give the dead? All of which sends me right back to the present administration which continues to sing of the gains of SAP. It is all right for a government, any government, to put a policy in place and pursue its implementation with single-mindedness. Just to see if it works. However, any respect- able government must also have a fall-back position.

I believe that all Nigerians, indeed, all black people, must work hard, think hard, practise thrift and show dedication to progress. But the question which Government and all of us must now tackle is the failure of World Bank remedies world-wide. A survey in Ghana recently showed that in spite of adherence to World Bank conditionalities, in spite of the fact that the Bank has enough statistics to show that the Ghanaian economy is improving, the fact stands that the average Ghanaian's earnings cannot feed him and his family, much less send his children to school or doctor them.

The representative of the World Bank in Ghana is reported to have said recently that the mismanagement of the past in Ghana was so immense that recovery under the IMF's guidelines will be almost impossible.

For Ghana, you may read Nigeria, Zambia, or wherever. Which, of course, means that the gains of SAP are likely to remain a chimera for all time.

The World Bank itself has now accepted that some of its programmes are faulty. It also accepts that it pays its employees incredible salaries and allowances. but it then places the blame on the various governments: the governments are autocratic, corrupt and have not allowed the full development of the creative energies of their peoples. Maybe. This may mean that the World Bank and its Euro-American mentors will stop forcing incompetent rulers and brutes upon third and enth world societies in the belief that such men will brutalize their peoples and compel them to accept the bitter pill which the World Bank means to force down the nations' throats.

But methinks the World Bank has to accept that its real instrument of torture is its insistence on growth, its economic theorizing at the expense of human welfare. In Nigeria, as elsewhere, its potent instrument is the exchange rate. The fixing of that rate is, as far as I can see it, a con; it is dubious and no one can convince me otherwise. And the sooner debtor-nations realized the political nature of the World Bank, the sooner they will be able to face the bogus economic theories of the Bank with an equivalent weapon--people's power. At no matter what cost.

CHUKS ILOEGBUNAM, THE DEATH OF A WRITER (an obituary by a Nigerian journalist)

It is a supreme irony that the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian environmental activist, businessman and writer at the age of 54, should have come in such a grotesque manner: tried and condemned by a tribunal instead of an ordinary court of law, denied the right of appeal, and hanged. Nothing about his origins, nor indeed, the course of most of his life, indicated even remotely that things would come to this terrible pass.

Saro-Wiwa was born in Bori, near Port Harcourt, capital of Rivers State in Nigeria. He was a brilliant student and government scholarships saw him through Government College, Umuahia, and the University of Ibadan - two famous institutions which some other notable Nigerian writers, including Chinua Achebe, had also attended.

He taught briefly at the Universities of Ibadan and Nigeria (at Nsukka) before the outbreak of the Nigerian civil war in 1967. Stridently anti-Biafran (until his death he wrote the name with a lower case b), Saro-Wiwa pitched his camp with the Federal authorities. He was appointed the administrator of the oil port of Bonny, and in 1968 became one of the first cabinet members of the newly created Rivers State, where he alternately held the powerful portfolios of education and information. However, when he left the cabinet of Commander Alfred Dietee-Spiff, the military governor of Rivers State, in 1973, it was in acrimonious circumstances.

Out of government, Saro-Wiwa turned to business, which he ran alongside his real love of writing. He made good on both scores. He could afford to send his son to Eton; and had to his credit more than 20 titles in all genres of literature. There are four novels, a poetry volume, two books of short stories, three titles on general topics, two drama volumes, one on folklore and nine children's books. And this output does not include the extensive pamphleteering on behalf of the Ogoni cause. His Tambari and Tambari In Dukana, both written for children, were published by Longman. All the others are published by his Saros International Publishers. Last year, Longman re-issued his Sazaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, which received an honourable mention at the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. Only last month the same publishers re-issued A Forest Of Flowers, his first collection of short stories which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1987.

Saro-Wiwa was also at different times an engaging newspaper columnist for Punch, Vanguard and the Daily Times, all Lagos-based dailies. Whether in journalism or in creative writing, he exposed a nation cracking up under the pressures of maladministration, corporate greed, sloth, ignorance and mercenary self-interest, while its people struggle against government neglect and abuse, racketeering, poverty, disease, superstition and ethnic mistrust to quote the apposite comment on the blurb accompanying A Forest Of Flowers.

Sometime in 1991, Saro-Wiwa decided to abandon everything and devote himself to the Ogoni struggle, which until then he had combined with his other activities. He put his creative writing in abeyance, dutifully returning to their owners all the manuscripts his Saros International was to have published, and relinquished his position as president of the Association of Nigerian Authors which he held for three years.

Towards the end of 1992 he was struck by tragedy when his son at Eton dropped dead during a game of rugby. Something inside Saro-Wiwa seemed to have died as a result. From then on he lived only for the Ogoni struggle.

Before long he complained that the military authorities had turned a deaf ear to the demands of his people. In the circumstances, he said that the only option left was to attract the attention of the international community. In July 1992 he addressed the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Population in Geneva and followed this up with a visit to the UN in New York. He bought cine equipment and cameras, and systematically began recording scenes of oil pollution and gas flaring in Ogoniland. Using the platform of Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), which he helped found, he sensitised his people to both the politics and economics of oil.

Greenpeace and other environmental groups soon took up the Ogoni case and the picketing of Shell's office in London became commonplace. (In fact, Shell was chased out of Ogoniland in 1993.) Saro-Wiwa had become an acute embarrassment to oil companies operating in Nigeria and to his country's military rulers.

During his last visit to London in May last year he complained that Shell had put a world-wide surveillance on his movements. He said it was obvious that the military regime in Nigeria was feeling the heat of the Ogoni struggle. I am using even the Koran which says it is right to fight one's oppressors against them, he told me. And they don't like it one bit, A mutual friend, a novelist, asked Saro-Wiwa if it was not possible for him to go slow on the struggle. The man merely smiled and changed the topic.

The last time I saw him was when the UK chapter of the Ogoni movement was launched at the Royal Park Hotel in London. Saro-Wiwa told me he would return to Nigeria the following week, but would be back in good time for the launch of Sozaboy by Longman. He never came back.

Shortly after his return to Nigeria he was arrested and charged with multiple murder although it was established that he was not at the scene of the killings. But Justice Ibrahim Auta, the tribunal chairman, warned: If an accused was not directly involved in a crime, he could still be convicted if he encouraged the act. And the tribunal is empowered to pronounce only capital punishment.

So, the Nigerian state has killed Ken Saro-Wiwa. The man I knew, the one who was my friend for over a decade, believed in combat - the combat of the written and spoken word. If he opposed anything, he went to great lengths to leave nobody in doubt as to where he stood. Perhaps his eternal mistake was that he chose to rail at those who saw themselves in superhuman terms, people who would brook no opposition and who, in the peculiar setting of the Nigerian entity, had invariably coveted the power to decide who got dispatched and who did not.

But he always insisted that the Ogoni would demand their rights peacefully. He showed impatience each time it was alleged that he was planning for the Ogoni to secede. I am not a fool, he would declare. The Ogoni are only 500,000. Nigeria is about 100 million. Secession is not a viable option and we are not into that. Somebody wanted to know the meaning of Saro-Wiwa's death. Simple. It means that nothing has changed.

He is survived by his wife, Hauwa, his children, one of whom, Ken, has been the foremost campaigner for his father's freedom, and his father and mother, who are aged 91 and 75 years respectively.

F W J MNTHALI, FAREWELL, KEN SARO-WIWA!

A poetic memorial by the renowned Malawian poet

Some papers here tell us
you and your colleagues
went to your death singing!

Would that Africa as a whole
boasted more men and women with
your courage and your vision.

But we are all caught up in a web of fear
the fear that rules all killers
that web of silence which is the bane of all our feelings
the fear of our own shadows
the fear of lizards lurking behind freedom's rays
the fear of being thought weak
the fear of parting with loot and plunder
the fear of losing those peripheral powers
whose only guarantee is the barrel of a gun
cynically backed by the greed of those who have more guns!

When fifteen years ago I spent a year in your country
I saw with my own eyes
how the fishes and other forms of life
were all slowly dying
in the sluggish brownish and filthy liquid
that had once been water;black gold it seems
demanded its pound of flesh
from everything and everyone around it!

It has now demanded that you too
like the rest of our continent's creme de la creme
pay with your life for this gold this madness;
that the Ogoni like the rest of us since the days of slavery and brutish colonisation
have been paying with our lives
for treasures that others consume
while our own people go hungry and naked:
it was for reminding it of this simple story
that the sphinx has devoured you
for no sphinx on earth
wants its victims told
how naked and how foolish it looks!

In my own country the sphinx
devoured Dick Matenje and Aaron Gadama
Twaibu Sangala and David Chiwanga
Attati Mpakati and Mkwapatira Mhango
Orton Chirwa and many many others
whose bodies were dumped
into the waters of the Shire
or into the bellies of crocodiles;
many fled into exile which also became an area of darkness
when the tentacles of the sphinx would know no bounds
for the kingdoms of darkness
decay and death are all alike:
they thrive best in the midst of silence and despair
our silence and our despair!

If today's death be that of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others
who have been so brazenly and so blatantly
in the classical fashion of Nazism so openly executed
can the deaths of Moshood Abiola and General Obasanjo
and Ransome Kuti
be far off?

Silence, why must heinous acts
be always followed by a deathly silence
oh, OAU,
oh, Africa?

Felix Mnthali

THE WRITINGS OF KEN SARO-WIWA: A BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE TRANSISTOR RADIO (radio play) BBC-Radio, 1972
BRIDE BY RETURN (radio play) BBC-Radio, 1973
TAMBARI (1973)
TAMBARI IN DUKANA (1973)
SONGS IN A TIME OF WAR (POEMS) (1985)
SOZABOY:A NOVEL IN ROTTEN ENGLISH (1985)
A FOREST OF FLOWERS (SHORT STORIES) (1986)
BASI AND COMPANY:A MODERN AFRICAN FOLKTALE (1987)
PRISONERS OF JEBS (1988)
ADAKU AND OTHER STORIES (1989)
FOUR FARCIAL PLAYS (1989)
ON A DARKLING PLAIN:AN ACCOUNT OF THE NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR (1989)
NIGERIA:THE BRINK OF DISASTER (1991)
PITA'S BUMBROK'S PRISON (1991)
SIMILIA:ESSAYS ON ANOMIC NIGERIA (1991)
THE SINGING ANTHILL:OGONI FOLK TALES (1991)
GENOCIDE IN NIGERIA:THE OGONI TRAGEDY (1992)

In addition, he was producer and writer of the television series, BASI AND COMPANY, 1985-1990, Editor, MELLANBITE, 1963-64, HORIZON, 1964-65,and UMUAHIA TIMES, Member of editorial board, UMUAHIAN

His television series included:

MR. B (1987)
BASI AND COMPANY (1989)
THE TRANSISTOR RADIO (1989)
MR.B GOES TO LAGOS (1989)
MR. B IS DEAD (1991)
SEGI FINDS THE RADIO (1991)
A SHIPLOAD OF RICE (1991)
MR. B'S MATTRESS (1992)
MR. B. GOES TO THE MOON (1992)
A BRIDE FOR MR. B. (1992)

Born October 10, 1941 in Bori, Rivers State, Nigeria Died November 10, 1995 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria Education: University of Ibadan B.A. (Honors), 1965 Avocational interests: Sports, travel, classical music

APPENDIX 1

ACTION AGAINST THE NIGERIAN JUNTA AND ITS BACKERS: HARVARD STUDENTS TAKE THE LEAD

Resolution passed on November 19, 1995

RESOLUTION 14F-28: Response to Human Rights Violations in Nigeria (Simons, Kasper, Freeman)

Whereas, on Friday, 10 November 1995, the military government of Nigeria executed nine anti-government activists, including playwright, environmental and human rights activist Ken Saro- Wiwa, in trials which Amnesty International believes to have been pol itically motivated and unfair;

Whereas, the international community has reacted with outrage and condemnation to the executions, the United States and other nations have withdrawn their ambassadors to Nigeria, the 52-member Commonwealth of Britain has suspended Nigeria as a member, and the brutal government of Nigeria has been described by Nelson Mandela as counter to the most basic human rights;

Whereas, the Nigerian government is supported in large part by foreign investment, especially from oil corporatcorporations, most of the oil from which is exported to the United States;

Whereas, Harvard University is a shareholder in corporations which invest in Nigeria;

Be it resolved that the Undergraduate Council requests that President Neil Rudenstine sign letters to the Nigerian government and to Shell Oil, a leading investor in Nigeria in which Harvard owns shares, expressing outrage and dismay at the executions;

Be it resolved that the Undergraduate Council requests the University Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility to recommend a policy of supporting all shareholders' resolutions calling for corporate withdrawal from Nigeria by drafting a letter to the student representative, Adrienne Bradley, which she shall read on behalf of the Undergraduate Council.

Be it resolved that the Undergraduate Council requests the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers of Harvard College to adopt a policy of selective purchasing which would prohibit any part of the University or its subsidiaries from buying products from or entering into contracts with oil companies which invest in Nigeria.

Be it further resolved that the Undergraduate Council requests that

Harvard University divest fully from oil companies which invest in Nigeria.