The Artist Who Terrified the Nigerian State
In 2015, when a steel bus Sokari Douglas Camp built to honour Ken Saro-Wiwa arrived in Nigeria, she didn’t expect the Nigerian state to arrest it. Ten years on with the bus still detained, the fearless sculptor reveals how one artwork shook the government and why memory, once forged in metal, can never be silenced.
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‘Public memory shouldn’t be controlled by the government,’ the Nigerian British sculptor, Sokari Douglas Camp, told me. It was April 2024, and we were in the verdant rooftop patio of her London home and studio. It was a rare, sunny afternoon for that time of the year, and she was having some renovation done, which meant the soft-spoken artist and I would sometimes pause for a wave of clanking to pass to keep from straining to hear one another. I was on the European leg of my research for season two of The Republic’s podcast on Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Nine. One argument I planned to explore on the podcast was that the Ogoni movement was not remote but had profound international ramifications. What I couldn’t figure out, though, was what exactly the Ogonis’ international reach looked like, and the implications such a reach had on their relationship with the Nigerian government. While I knew that the Ogonis had been persecuted by the Nigerian state after the execution of the Ogoni Nine in 1995 (with many becoming refugees in nearby countries), it wasn’t clear just how prolonged and multi-faceted the state’s repression of the Ogonis was.
Enter the Battle Bus.
In 2006, the human and environment rights organization, Platform, commissioned Camp to create a work of art to honour the memory of Saro-Wiwa. Camp, who grew up in Port Harcourt and is herself from the Niger Delta, created a life-sized replica of a Nigerian steel bus, called ‘Battle Bus: Living Memorial for Ken Saro-Wiwa’; a work as striking in form as it was in political force in challenging silence and honouring the lives erased by environmental injustice. ‘It was an artistic symbol,’ I explained on the podcast, ‘of movement and change.’
In the years that followed, Camp established herself as an artist whose powerful sculptures—often forged in steel—channelled beauty, strength, memory and resistance. No surprise then that in 2015, 20 years after the Nigerian state had executed the Ogoni Nine, Platform wanted Camp’s Battle Bus to feature at a commemorative event in Bori, Saro-Wiwa’s hometown. But when the bus arrived at the Lagos seaport that year, it was impounded by the port authorities. ‘The head of Lagos Port said that he wasn’t going to let the sculpture enter and he basically arrested a work of art,’ Camp recalled. The bus never made it to Bori and has been missing ever since.
Back in London, our conversation spanned both the personal and the political: Camp’s Kalabari roots; the formative years she spent shuttling between Nigeria and the UK; her artistic philosophy; and the emotional weight of creating a memorial for Saro-Wiwa. ‘Anything romantic about Nigeria died,’ she told me remembering the day Saro-Wiwa was killed, ‘I was that upset.’ In many ways, the Battle Bus was her means of processing and articulating what Saro-Wiwa’s death had meant to everyday Nigerians; a way, too, of confronting the protracted injustices Saro-Wiwa and many from the oil-rich Niger Delta had endured and resisted. Years after the execution, nobody expected that a piece of art that sought to memorialize Saro-Wiwa would be detained at the ports. ‘It happened because the man who runs Lagos port was one of the judges that sentence the Ogoni 9,’ Camp revealed, ‘and it must have been like the people who were sentenced came back to life.’
Nigeria, like repressive states tend to be, is terrified of its own public memory, especially when such memory speaks to its legacy of violence. ‘No victor, no vanquished,’ the philosophy that became the state’s modus operandi following the Nigerian Civil War soon betrays its true purpose, which is not to seek diplomatic resolution as ostensibly purported, but to institutionalize silence. A symptom of our leaders’ prolonged inability to imagine a just Nigeria. So, when Camp’s Battle Bus was impounded on the grounds that it might incite violence in Ogoniland (never mind that the Ogoni movement was peaceful but brutally repressed by the government), it was an instance of the state’s totalizing fear of confronting its own violent history. ‘I just wish that the people that govern us were a little braver,’ Camp said.
Our full conversation continues below, edited for brevity and clarity...
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