A good man in Africa: the Nigerian dictatorship is fighting back against the weapon it fears more than anger

National Review, July 10, 1995 by Anthony Daniels

THE last time I visited the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, in his office on the Aggrey Road in Port Harcourt, there was a naked body, bloated with decomposition, lying in the gutter about a hundred yards down the road. An announcer on the local radio station appealed for its owner, whoever he might be, to come and take it away.

Whatever Nigeria's shortcomings in other respects, it provides writers with a great deal of material. Saro-Wiwa, the author of a beautiful and moving novel of the Nigerian civil war, Sozaboy, and of an immensely popular television series satirizing the get-rich-quick mentality of the Nigerians, Basi and Co., is now at the center of his own drama. He is accused of incitement to murder, and is currently on trial for his life before a special tribunal in Port Harcourt, along with 14 other defendants. If the verdict is guilty, the death sentence is mandatory and can be altered only by the Armed Forces Ruling Council. Saro-Wiwa gave up his writing a few years ago to campaign politically. There are times of crisis, he told me, when pleasant literary pursuits have to be forgone for the sake of more important matters. Saro-Wiwa belongs to a small ethnic group called the Ogoni, who inhabit an area of the Niger Delta from which a high proportion of Nigeria's oil is extracted. Ogoniland covers some 400 square miles, and has half a million inhabitants. According to Saro-Wiwa, none of the oil revenue has been returned to Ogoniland; it has been used instead to enrich a rapacious Nigerian elite and to build an extravagant new capital city, Abuja. In the meantime, Ogoniland has been utterly ruined for its inhabitants by pollution. In response, Saro-Wiwa and others founded the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). In 1991, MOSOP organized a peaceful demonstration of up to 300,000 people in Ogoniland to protest the federal government's policies, and also the Shell Oil Company's methods of extraction. Nothing like it had ever been seen in Nigeria, and the government -- a military dictatorship tempered by corruption and incompetence -- was frightened. The last thing it wanted was an inquiry into where the country's vast oil revenues were going. But MOSOP split into opposing factions, one of them led by Saro-Wiwa. On May 21, 1994, a meeting was held in Giokoo, attended by some of Saro-Wiwa's opponents. It was attacked by a mob, which killed four people in brutal fashion. Saro-Wiwa, who was not present, was arrested (not for the first time) along with many others, and held for several months without charge. It was eventually alleged that he had told his supporters to ``deal with'' his opponents, and was therefore guilty of incitement. That he should be tried by something called a Civil Disturbance Special Tribunal, from whose decision there is no right of appeal and over which the military exercises considerable influence, rather than by an ordinary court of law, must raise strong suspicions that the military government is trying to remove Saro-Wiwa from the scene. Two of the chief prosecution witnesses have already signed affidavits to the effect that they were bribed to testify against Saro-Wiwa, and against the other defendants. Perilous Laughter IT IS not only the partiality of friendship, I think, which makes me write that Ken Saro-Wiwa is an unlikely promoter of savage violence. Whenever I met him, either in Nigeria or in London, he struck me as a man of the greatest good humor, who found the corrupt antics of various Nigerian governments amusing as well as disgraceful. He called his opponents in the government, even after they had arrested him once before, rascals -- not a word a fanatic would use. Unlike many African (and other) intellectuals, Saro-Wiwa is not a snob. He is unashamed of the fact that for many years he earned his living as a grocer, and even says that he enjoyed it: for a shopkeeper soon learns a great deal about human nature, rather as a doctor or a priest does. And Saro-Wiwa was unembittered even after personal tragedy struck. Being an admirer of traditional British education, and having made sufficient money to do so, he sent his sons to Eton, where one of them died suddenly on the playing fields, of a rare heart complaint. In fact, it is not Saro-Wiwa's fanaticism that the Nigerian government fears, but his lack of it. His capacity to laugh at wrongdoing, to turn it into comedy, is far more subversive and therefore dangerous than pious denunciation, especially in a country such as Nigeria, where the ridiculous is a way of life. The present head of government, General Sani Abachi, is trying to be a real, full-scale dictator, which is why he must eradicate both those who laugh and laughter itself.