S2 EP2: The Political Rise of Ken Saro-Wiwa (Part I)

We are going to demand our rights peacefully, non-violently, and we shall win!

On a humid afternoon in Bori, a town in Rivers State right in the centre of Ogoniland, and about two hours by road from Port-Harcourt City, Ken Saro-Wiwa spoke the words you just heard to a teeming crowd of Ogonis.

It was 4 January 1993, eight years into the military regime of Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida aka IBB. On one hand, IBB’s government was selling dreams of a democratic transition, with a presidential election between the National Republican Convention and the Social Democratic Party, two parties he had created, set for later that year. On the other hand, you only needed to look at Ogoniland to see the mirage. 

And just days before the rally, the government had declared a national ban on public gatherings. At this point 51 years old, Saro-Wiwa had been many things: a federal government administrator during the Nigerian Civil War, a fierce opposer of the Biafran cause, a successful novelist, poet, businessman and television producer, and a family man.

On this day, however, Saro-Wiwa was addressing the world as the leader of the nonviolent Movement For the Survival of the Ogoni People also known as MOSOP. 

Actually he was one of the founding members. We had other Ogoni elites that worked together with him.

MOSOP was founded in 1990 through a coalition of existing Ogoni groups. But until Saro-Wiwa joined the Ogoni movement, the movement had been largely local and grassroots-led. Saro-Wiwa, however, was a well-travelled member of the elite. You might think his background made him incompatible with MOSOP but, in reality, it provided a unique opportunity for Saro-Wiwa to make a difference.

Saro-Wiwa played a very, very prominent role. I remember during the Civil War he became popular. He had been popular and well known in terms of administration, so lay that context… He became prominent as a television producer, very famous, running a series which people became addicted to. And then he became an environmental activist with the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, MOSOP, which he aligned with the GREEN MOVEMENT to internationalize it. It was a very, very brilliant move.

By 1993, Saro-Wiwa had successfully connected MOSOP to the broader global environmental movement. The date, January 4, which the Ogonis declared Ogoni Day also was no coincidence. As early as 1990, the United Nations had declared 1993 as the International year of the World’s Indigenous People. January 4 was the first Monday of 1993. Saro-Wiwa was strategic about using such global events to platform the Ogoni cause. His philosophy was simple: if the Nigerian government wasn’t going to listen to Ogonis, the same government could surely not ignore the entire world, which was becoming environmentally conscious. 

In photos of the January 4 1993 Ogoni rally, Saro-Wiwa stands out. You can sense his passion, his energy but more curiously his pull. These are very dangerous times to be protesting. Only days before, the IBB regime had placed a ban on public gatherings. So what was it about the movement that made it (and I’m going to borrow from the American writer Toni Cade Bambara here) irresistible to Saro-Wiwa? He was pretty well off and could have lived a much more convenient, non-political life. At the same time, Nigeria is a highly unequal society where the wealthy are often out of touch. This was true even back then; so what was it about Saro-Wiwa that made him connect not just materially with Ogoni people but philosophically, almost spiritually enough to make them risk even death in joining him on this march? 

MOSOP is more of an intellectual struggle. We knew Ken Saro-Wiwa. Most of us knew him without seeing him. At the time we knew him, we had not met him. But we read his books. His books gave us the kind of orientation that he had.

Fegalo Nsuke, the MOSOP leader you’ve just heard, just said something very important. Most of us knew him without seeing him.  As you’ll come to find out, Saro-Wiwa’s influence was not just about Saro-Wiwa’s reach, which his media enterprise helped with, but his depth. His ability to articulate the Ogoni crisis. It was like what the American writer, James Baldwin, said about the victim who in articulating the situation of the victim ceases to be a victim.

That afternoon of January 4, 1993, as Saro-Wiwa addressed his largest crowd yet, he and the over 200,000 Ogonis present were demanding to be recognized no longer as victims. They wanted to make it clear to the world that Ogonis were taking charge over their destiny as a people. But with the oil wealth at stake, what the Nigerian government saw was a growing problem.

We want freedom! We want freedom!! We want freedom! FREEDOMMM!!

It’s incredible to imagine that Bori was the site of the January 1993 Ogoni demonstrations. I spent some time walking through Bori during my research for this podcast and found it quiet, much slower than the city, incredibly beautiful, and very green. Bori has additional significance: in 1941, it was there, in the community of Bane, Saro-Wiwa was born. 

You do get individuals in this world who have multiple talents, multiple interests, and they have a natural born confidence to carry it through. And I think my father was part of that generation of Nigerians. He was in, you know, the same generation as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. They were the first to go to university. They had access to an excellent education. You know, when they went to Ibadan University, it was just another college of London University. The standard of education was comparable. And I think they took from that, you know, a real confidence. They were the vanguard.

You just heard  journalist Noo Saro-Wiwa. On October 10, 1941, her father Kenule Beeson was born to Jim and Jessica Wiwa. Kenule is an Ogoni name given to a child considered to have a bright future. More specifically, it supposedly means ‘where this child is going in life, or looking for, there is something there.’

In accordance with Ogoni customs, and as a mark of honour, Jim Wiwa bestowed on Kenule the name ‘saro’ which means ‘eldest son’. Saro-Wiwa was born in the proverbial Nigerian sense ‘without a silver spoon’. Jim, his father, had worked as an apprentice under a man called Harry Jaja, a relative of King Jaja of Opobo. After Jim came of age, he started his own business of exporting palm oil and palm kernels, and importing salt, tobacco, and clothing materials which were in high demand in Ogoni.

As the first and eldest son of the family in the 1940s, Saro-Wiwa was favoured by his parents, treated like a child genius, and sent to the only school they could afford, the Native Authority School, in the nearby town of Bori. When he wasn’t in school, Saro-Wiwa helped his father on the farm to tap palm trees for oil and palm kernels.

It’s important to hear what Saro-Wiwa thought of his background, so I asked TONY MALIK, who wrote this episode with me, to read an extract from Saro-Wiwa’s 1989 book, On A Darkling Plain:

 

In 1947, by which time I had begun to form lasting impressions of the world around me, Bori was still rather a primitive place, without Government presence in the form of a Divisional Office, and without a hospital or dispensary. Only the Native Authority School and a market were there… At that time there were hardly more than ten Ogoni boys and girls in secondary school. As far as I know, there was no Ogoni University graduate, no doctor, no lawyer, no accountant, no such professional. 

With the profits they made from trading in palm oil and other commodities, Saro-Wiwa’s parents became the first to build a one-storey house of cement and zinc in Bane. In 1954, at the age of thirteen, Saro-Wiwa won a scholarship to attend the prestigious Government College Umuahia or GCU, in present day Abia State. At school, Saro-Wiwa liked to play cricket, drink tea like the English, and spend hours reading English Literature, especially books by Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare. Like many parents of that era, Jim Wiwa must have been proud that his son was getting what was considered ‘a proper British education’, the kind that would set Saro-Wiwa up for life as one of a privileged few. 

Jim himself had been sent by Harry Jaja to St. Paul’s, an Anglican Missionary School in Opobo. It was there Jim became fluent in English and a devout Christian. While you can take the man out of Ogoni, you cannot take Ogoni out of the man it seems. Because Saro-Wiwa’s father being a Christian convert did not eliminate his core traditional Ogoni beliefs. One way he demonstrated this was in marrying several wives. Jessica, Saro-Wiwa’s mother, was his third wife and had five children with him. By the time the fifth child was born, Saro-Wiwa was already studying at GCU.

In those days, GCU had the reputation of being one of the best schools in the entire country and admitted students from different regions of Nigeria. Notable alumni of the school included the novelist Chinua Achebe, the novelist Chukwuemeka Ike, the visual artist Ben Enwonwu, and the  poet Christopher Okigbo. Here’s more from Saro-Wiwa from his book, On A Darkling Plain: 

I was one of about sixty boys admitted to Umuahia Government College in September, 1954. Although I was the only Ogoni boy in this premier school of then Eastern Nigeria, that fact did not matter to me. The only language we were allowed to speak was English. And in our class, there were boys drawn from all parts of the country. Including the Cameroons. 

In these formative years of his life, Saro-Wiwa and his classmates were given a taste of the Nigerian society they were to graduate into. A national soup of ethnic diversity, different cultures, and political affiliations. It was at GCU that Saro-Wiwa first got a taste of what it was like to belong to a minority ethnic group in the soon-to-be nation of Nigeria.

 In 1957, while the likes of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Anthony Ehanoro and Ahmadu Bello tussled for political control of a Nigeria that was on the cusp of independence, students of GCU and around the country, watched the unfolding of events, learning as much about politics as they did about themselves. Saro-Wiwa described his experience in his book: 

In 1957 there was an election to the Eastern House of Assembly. We were playing a football match that afternoon and everyone was on the field cheering the teams. We repaired to the dining hall as dinner time drew near -you had to be there on time or else..- As I drew nearer the hall, all the cooks and stewards who in normal circumstances were quite friendly with me, began to molest me:

one of them said, and someone advised that I should go and warn the Ogoni people. I? Warn the Ogoni people? At 16? And that thing on stupidity stung me. I was not a taciturn student by any measure, but that day I was tongue-tied. And then I cried.. not before them, but in the dark of night, after lights-out when everybody had slept. I later learnt that in the elections to the Regional Assembly, the Ogoni people had voted out the NCNC incumbents, replacing them with Action Group candidates. That was supposed to be my crime. I felt isolated for the first time in that excellent school. 

And so the seeds of isolation and marginalization were planted in the young mind of Saro-Wiwa, but they would not take root for a while. Saro-Wiwa graduated from secondary school as the quintessential Nigerian. His friendships cut across ethnic and religious divides. This ability to make friends from the East, West and North would serve as a key strength for Saro-Wiwa in future years as he matured into a widely read author and an activist who fought against ethnic domination and oppression.

You may know the story of the east as other parts of the country, why minorities were struggling for self determination. So Saro Wiwa, himself was a believer, himself, in self-determination. And so as a student, as a university student, and even as a secondary school student, Saro-Wiwa was against the kind of ethnic situation that was happening in eastern Nigeria. 

That was Professor Ben Naanen, an economic historian at the University of Port Harcourt who was the executive secretary of MOSOP in the 90s and worked closely with Saro-Wiwa. What Professor Naanen is hinting at is that Saro-Wiwa must have felt a keen sense of awareness as a student, that he was an ethnic minority. At the time, Nigeria was divided into the Northern, Western and Eastern Region. The Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba and Igbo were the dominant ethnic groups or the ethnic majorities in these respective regions. Ogoni was part of the eastern region. Very quickly as a student, Saro-Wiwa stood out as one of the very few Ogonis receiving the kind of education he was getting.His classmates tended to be from majority ethnic groups, Igbo especially. This skewed educational system was his first way of observing just how foundational ethnic inequalities were in the Eastern Region and in Nigeria at large. 

You know, the fact that the Ogoni people were a very small, still are a very small minority, when you compare to all the other ethnic groups in Nigeria, and my father really put us on the map.

He didn’t go along with the narrative that the other ethnic groups in the area were the big boys and that we Ogonis take a back seat which is what we’d always done. He was very forthright about putting Ogoni rights and Ogoni identity on the table.

 And so in 1962, armed with this knowledge, Saro-Wiwa swapped the climates of Eastern Nigeria for that of Western Nigeria when he won a scholarship to study English at the University of Ibadan. He followed in the steps of schoolmates such as Chinua Achebe, and Chukwuemeka Ike. Being the foremost tertiary institution in Nigeria at the time, the University of Ibadan attracted virtually all of Nigeria’s earliest young intellectuals and writers. And having excelled at English in GCU, Saro-Wiwa now had the opportunity to rub minds with intellectuals from other parts of Nigeria, and hone his talent as a writer. In On A Darkling Plain, he wrote that:

 In 1962, I went to the University of Ibadan. I enjoyed my stay there, leaving myself open to all possible influences. There were only a few students from the North, and everyone referred to them as ‘Hausas’. There was quite a sizeable number from the East, we were all referred to as ‘Ibos’. The Yorubas were in the majority and everyone felt their presence. They were accused of always speaking Yoruba in preference to English. Ibadan was in a sense a mirror of Nigerian elite society. I once contested a Students Union election and crashed out, winning only a majority of votes in the Ladies’ Hall. That year the entire elected Elective was Yoruba. I believe that the Yoruba students were so ashamed of this that the following year they did not contest any post at all, enabling a minority student to win.

The Saro-Wiwa who graduated from the University of Ibadan in 1965 at the age of 24 had already begun to ‘see shege’ as Nigerians say. The Nigeria he met as a graduate was marred by ethnic tensions. By 1965, several incidents had tested the fragile state of the young Republic. First, in 1962, the first national census was held after independence. The results from the census were going to determine key issues such as parliamentary representation, revenue allocation, and employment at the Federal level from each state. From a series of local interviews ITN broadcasted in 1964, the atmosphere in Nigeria seemed anxious.

It is not likely to lead to violence. Because with the Prime Minister and the Federal President stepping into the show at this early stage, and with their political maturity, and with the amount of confidence they command among the various political parties and the masses in the country, I think they’ll be there to avert the situation, and nip the crisis in the bud.

When the government of Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa, announced the census results, opinions were split between southern and northern politicians. Southern politicians publicized the census results which indicated that the population of the south outnumbered the population of the north. Curiously, Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, a northerner, ordered a recount in 1963. The result of the 1963 census was that the northern population had now increased by 8,500,0008.5 million people and surpassed the population of the Ssouth. Politicians from the major ethnic groups in the South, the Yorubas and the Igbos, challenged the results and took the matter to the Supreme Court. The decision of the apex court was that the court, and I quote, ‘lacked jurisdiction over the administrative functions of the federal government.’

In the 1964 ITN interview, Oba Adeniji Aderele made a point about how, in typical Nigerian fashion, uproar around the census results would not last very long.  

We fight and within a short time the fight dies down. And within a short time the present uproar about the census will go down and then there’ll be no more trouble. 

The Nigerian musician, Idris Abdulkareem may have released his classic ‘Nigeria jaga-jaga, everything scatter scatter’ in 2002 but things had begun to scatter since as far back as 1964. The jaga-jaga that followed the Nigerian general elections of 1964 rocked the country which was still reeling from the aftermath of the census crisis. When the Parliamentary elections were concluded, Balewa’s party, the Northern People’s Congress, was victorious as it won 162 out of 312 seats in the House of Representatives, and Balewa was re-elected as Prime Minister. According to various sources, the elections were characterized by manipulation and violence. It was even reported that the elections were boycotted in some constituencies in the Eastern Region, Lagos, and the Mid-West.

As a young intellectual from a minority ethnic group, one could imagine Saro-Wiwa’s thoughts as he watched these events unfold. He must have had flashbacks to that day in GCU when he was called ‘stupid’ because of the political choices of his people. He must have realized that as far as Nigeria was concerned, the power struggle was confined to the major ethnic groups and their interests, and only within the interests of the major ethnic groups could the minorities be allowed a voice. He must have known then, that for the Ogoni people to be recognized fairly and have a say as an ethnic group in Nigeria, they would have to overcome the dominance of the three major ethnic groups. 

You know, he had to overcome a lot when he was a child. You know, he was a very short man. He was only five foot two. And so he would have had to overcome a lot of jibes from people. He lived through the war, the, you know, the Second World War, and then Biafra as well. I think anyone who goes through those sorts of challenges comes out at the end a lot stronger.

The 1964 ITN interview series I mentioned earlier was called ‘Africa’s Giant – Nigeria’ and featured intellectuals and prominent figures like the novelist Cyprian Ekwensi. When they were asked if they thought the prevailing crises of the times could break Nigeria apart, this is what some of them had to say.  

I don’t think so. The country is so firmly knit together, it’s so firmly but loosely, knit together, this is the main thing about it. 

Well if things were left to get out of hand, the crisis is capable of ruining the Federal set up which might result in having four countries instead of one Nigeria. 

It could if we didn’t have some sense of balance in the end. I think the leaders will get together. I do not think it would deteriorate to that extent. Of course we should all be concerned, but I do not think it would deteriorate to that extent.

I look forward to seeing some of the work of rehabilitation and relief. For I know that Port-Harcourt is one of the centers of the relief effort to which the ITIC, that is the agency which the Federal Government has chosen to handle relief efforts in Nigeria the British people have contributed. I look forward, your excellency, to seeing to the work that has been and is being done to restore Port-Harcourt itself, to its vital position as a center of industry and of commerce. 

That was the Prime Minister of Britain, Harold Wilson, in a speech he gave in March 1969, on a visit to Port-Harcourt City, the capital of the newly created Rivers State. His reference to the importance of Port-Harcourt as an industrial and commercial center was not lost on Saro-Wiwa, who was fresh out of university and had campaigned for the creation of Rivers State in the 1960s.

Saro-Wiwa was one of the members of the Rivers State Study Group based in Lagos that were agitating for the creation of Rivers State. 

The ‘Swinging Sixties’ were pivotal years for Saro-Wiwa, as well as for the Nigerian society Saro-Wiwa had graduated into. Just a few years after the census debacle, on January 15, 1966, a group of men called ‘The Five Majors’ consisting of Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna, Major Adewale Ademoyega, Major Chris Anuforo, and Major Timothy Onwuatuegwu, staged a coup against the Balewa-led administration. According to Saro-Wiwa, in his book On A Darkling Plain, he personally knew two of the Five Majors, Major Anuforo and Major Onwuatuegwu, because they had attended school together at GCU.

Can you please give me an account of the night of the coup in Kaduna?

Well it’s rather something like the longest day? We started this off on the night of the 13th in January, when a night exercise was planned by the military college, which I command, we took out troops to the ground and taught them night attacks. We didn’t tell them what we were planning for, but I don’t know the exercise. We took them out and showed them various places where they were to stand and just remain in the theater. The next day, we went out again at the same time for exercise, and at the end, we issued them with ammunition. This time, live ammunition, and told them that they were going back to the same place as they went yesterday, but this time they were to get certain people.

So they were with you, were they?

Oh, of course they did. They supported us.

—

Well, no, we didn’t see him until the time we actually shot him. He ran away from his house when we fired the first few shots of anti-tank guns into the building, the whole roof was blown up and the place was set alight. Then we went to the rear of the house and started searching from room to room, until we found him among the women and children, hiding himself. So we took away the women and children, and shot him.

Now, what are your relations with General Ironsi in Lagos?

Very good, he’s my boss. I have always been under him. And still, I’m under him. Misunderstandings arose, but this was due to the publication in the press and by announcements over the radio. At one time, they tried calling us in Kaduna rebels, whereas, in fact, the revolution was all a planned affair all over the country…

The January 1966 coup was bloody and handed power to Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi. Citing issues such as endemic corruption, nepotism, and tribalism, the coup plotters overthrew the civilian government. The coup plotters killed Balewa, alongside members of his cabinet such as Felix Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister, and Samuel Ladoke Akintola, premier of the Western Region. The coup was led by Major Nzeogwu. He was an Igbo man born up north in Kaduna and it was reported that he spoke Hausa more fluently than he spoke Igbo. Nonetheless, the coup was perceived by northerners in the army as an Igbo-led coup targeted specifically against northerners. Never mind that Akintola and Okotie-Eboh were from the West and Mid-West regions respectively. 

Six months later, there was a counter-coup and Major General Aguiyi-Ironsi, who was Igbo, was assassinated. The counter-coup was masterminded by northern military officers including Murtala Mohammed, Theophilus Danjuma, Abba Kyari, Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha. General Murtala Mohammed became head of state.

Following the counter-coup, violence broke out in northern cities. Reports of pogroms and targeted attacks against Igbo settlements in the North and some parts of the West became widespread. In large numbers, Igbo people fled their homes around the country and traveled East. But curiously, members of other minority ethnic groups also fled the North and West. Saro-Wiwa was one of them. He writes in his book, On A Darkling Plain, that as far as the Yorubas and Hausas were concerned, everyone from the Eastern Region was an Igbo person. As a result non-Igbos were also attacked and killed in the pogroms that followed the General Mohammed-led counter-coup. Here’s more from Saro-Wiwa in On A Darkling Plain:

No responsible leader would have encouraged any Eastern Nigerian to remain in Northern Nigeria. Most of them either fled, or were sent away.. I stopped at the Armels Transport Office on the morning of August 7th and observed the great rush by, particularly women and children who were being encouraged to return home by their husbands and fathers. It was a sorry sight to see women, their life-long belongings packed up in shabby bundles, children tied to their backs, fighting their way into the offices of the transport companies in a bid to get a booking on huge lorries traveling to the Eastern Region. I traveled on one of those sorry vehicles the following day back to Port-Harcourt. All the way, at the various stops, the general questioning was of the brutalities. 

Faced with such brutality, the Igbos made the unanimous demand to secede from Nigeria. On May 30 1967, the Governor of the Eastern Region, Lieutenant Odumegwu Ojukwu declared the Republic of Biafra independent from Nigeria. In response, the Nigerian Head of State, Yakubu Gowon, launched an invasion of Biafra. 

Seven years after independence, Nigeria descended into a civil war, and Saro-Wiwa found himself in the middle of it. 

You know, Biafra included the areas you now call Cross River, Niger Delta. The Igbo historically have been hinterlanders, although they claim that they built Port Harcourt, a controversial issue up until today. So the boundaries of what you call the current Benue state, up until the sea, was declared as the Republic of Biafra. Bear in mind that the Ijaw, the fourth largest group, became part of that Republic. They weren’t interested in becoming part of the Republic. Nobody asked them. The Ibibio, the Ogoni, the area you now call part of Edo state, parts of Niger Delta. They were lumped into that, what you historically call Eastern Nigeria. And that was the beginning of a crisis.

Indeed a crisis was brewing. The minority ethnic groups within the Eastern Region objected to the control which the Igbo-led Regional Government had over their natural resources, especially crude oil. For these minority ethnic groups, the Civil War became the proverbial case of ‘when two elephants are fighting, the grass suffers.’

Most of the oil, which was to bankroll the nation’s future economy lay in the Niger Delta region. Being within the Eastern Region, present-day Niger Delta states like Bayelsa and Rivers, with their numerous minority ethnic groups, had become part of Biafra. While the Nigerian government needed the crude oil economy, the Biafran authorities also desperately wanted to keep control of the crude oil to help build their fledgling nation. In short, much of the civil war hinged on who would get to control Nigeria’s crude oil resources. Saro-Wiwa, like his Ogoni people and the other minority ethnic groups annexed into Biafra, had to pick a side. What side did Saro-Wiwa choose?

When Biafra was declared, he was totally against it, because he felt that the oppression, oppression in quote, of the minorities would intensify under the Biafra regime. 

According to Saro-Wiwa’s brother, Dr. Owens Wiwa, from the journalist, J. Timothy Hunt’s book The Politics of Bones, in September 1966, Saro-Wiwa had returned to Ogoni. While there, he published a memorandum calling for the creation of Rivers State. As you can imagine, the Eastern Region’s clamour for secession was what dominated the news. But Saro-Wiwa’s memorandum apparently caught the attention of the Federal Government, who must have felt they had an ally in Saro-Wiwa. The memorandum also caught the attention of officials within the Eastern Region’s government, and they did not take kindly to it. This was the first time that the name ‘Ken Saro-Wiwa’ entered the Nigerian public consciousness. Saro-Wiwa now found himself in a tricky situation. He was trapped within Biafra and wanted for capture by the Biafran Government, while the Nigerian side wanted to work with him but were miles away from Ogoni. 

After the Civil War broke out in 1967, federal troops captured Bonny Island, a province about thirty kilometres away from Bori, Saro-Wiwa’s hometown. It was July, and according to Dr. Owens Wiwa in The Politics of Bones, Saro-Wiwa hoped that Nigerian Troops would soon arrive in Bori and liberate the Ogoni people. Already, the Biafrans had set up a command post on the Imo River bordering Ogoniland, and from there they invaded Ogoniland, terrorizing the villagers, seizing, slaughtering, and eating the livestock of the villagers. 

According to Dr. Owens Wiwa, most young Ogoni men did not support the war, but were coerced by Biafran soldiers to join the Biafran army and civil defence. Those who resisted conscription by the Biafrans were deported from Ogoni and sent into the Biafran heartland from where only a few returned after the war. In fact, Saro-Wiwa and his brother also witnessed their father, Jim, being forcibly transferred to Umuahia by Biafran soldiers. 

What Saro-Wiwa did next was pivotal. In September 1967, he decided to leave Bori, and join the federal troops camping at Bonny Island. Late at night, when it was dark enough for them to go unnoticed, Saro-Wiwa and his wife, Maria, boarded a canoe. They manoeuvred through the Niger Delta’s creeks, crossed the Biafran front lines and found safety on the side of the Nigerian army. 

So eventually, war broke out in Nigeria, and he took a great risk. He took the creeks, took the seas, to join the federal troops in Bonny, to support one Nigeria. At Bonny, he was made the administrator of Bonny at the time. So he was the person taking charge of affairs in Bonny. So it was that opposition to ethnic domination that propelled him to join the Nigerian side. Even in Nigeria he wasn’t also comfortable with the ethnic configuration of the country. He wasn’t at all, and he strongly believed in self determination for the ethnic communities. 

That strong belief in self-determination for the minority ethnic groups soon paid dividends. Three months after his escape from Biafran-occupied Ogoniland in September 1967, the Nigerian National Broadcasting Service announced that the Federal Government had appointed Saro-Wiwa the new administrator of Bonny Province. He was only 26 years old. 

By then, Saro-Wiwa had surfaced in Lagos. He lived on Tejuosho Street in Surulere, and taught English at the University of Lagos.                                              

In The Politics of Bones, Dr. Owens Wiwa notes that when the Biafran soldiers heard about Saro-Wiwa’s appointment, they went to Saro-Wiwa’s father’s house, ransacked the building and abducted his mother and siblings to Kono, a village behind the Biafran front lines.

Some useful context here is that Phillip Effiong was Biafra’s first Vice President. He was from the Ibibio minority ethnic group in present-day Akwa Ibom. Through his appointment as Vice President, Ojukwu aimed to win the hearts and the minds of the minority groups in the Eastern Region and convince them that they would be represented in the Biafra project. However, the acts of aggression against the Ogoni people by Biafran troops on the ground alienated Saro-Wiwa further, and aligned him with the Nigerian side.

People like Saro Wiwa were not committed to that project, and by the time Gowon and his administration broke the regions into many states, part of that political restructuring was to take away from Biafra areas that were not Igbo.

By the late 60s, Saro-Wiwa had become a darling of the Nigerian elite. First of all, he had published his September 1966 memorandum calling for the creation of Rivers State out of the Eastern Region. Only a few months later, on May 27 1967, the Gowon administration announced the creation of Rivers State, splitting it from the Eastern Region. The Civil War would not start until July 6, but this was clearly a strategic move influenced by Saro-Wiwa’s memorandum, to further isolate Biafra and win over groups such as the Ogoni to the Federal side.

Saro-Wiwa played a very, very prominent role. 

I remember during the Civil War he became popular and well known in terms of administration, so lay that context.  

At the height of the Civil War, it had become well-known that Saro-Wiwa had acquired the friendship of military officials of the Federal Government such as Abacha and IBB. In his capacity as administrator of Bonny Island, Saro-Wiwa had a duty to ensure that relief efforts were received by the Bonny people as well as Bonny refugees who arrived daily from the hinterlands. In doing this, Saro-Wiwa had to work with military commanders and so made friends with high ranking members of the military. In the last episode, we talked about how there was a party Saro-Wiwa hosted in his house during the war, with a guest list that included military officials Olusegun Obasanjo, T.Y. Danjuma, and Abacha who was also Saro-Wiwa’s neighbour.

 In the memoir of Saro-Wiwa’s son, Ken Wiwa Junior, titled in the Shadow of a Saint, Ken Junior recalls living in Port Harcourt and being neighbours in the 70s with the Abacha family. They lived on Nzimiro Street,a government residential area. During my research for this podcast, I visited the street. The Saro-Wiwa’s lived at number 11 and the building I met there was stately in the usual Nigerian style with pillars holding up the roof. Next to that building is the house I suspect Abacha lived in. The hint was the house is still occupied by military officers today. The house itself is nestled among the tall trees and tall military outposts manned by soldiers. I also noticed cameras placed around the building’s fence and a large military insignia on the building’s main gate. 

According to Ken Junior: 

The fact that many years later Abacha would sentence his old friend and next-door neighbour to death by hanging is one of those twists of fate unique to the Nigerian historical fabric. A similar thing had happened in 1986 when Mamman Vatsa was executed by his dear friend, and military head of state, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. 

By the late 1960s, Saro-Wiwa’s political profile was rising rapidly. Towards the end of 1968, Saro-Wiwa was appointed as the Commissioner of Education for Rivers State. This meant that he was in charge of all state-sponsored scholarships. He was also appointed as a founding member of the Interim Advisory Council of Rivers State, and as the Rivers State Commissioner for Works, Land, and Transport. Dr. Owens Wiwa mentions in The Politics of Bones, that in Saro-Wiwa’s capacity as a Rivers State Cabinet member, one of the notable things he did was to take advantage of the new-found oil wealth of Rivers State, to work towards the rehabilitation of local minority ethnic groups like the Ikwerre, Kalabari and Ogoni who had been victims of the Civil War. 

The local communities where the oil came from, were still not in the picture. So for example, Rivers State was one of the richest in the 70s with the first wave of oil boom. But still, you discover that at that level, not much was going into the oil producing communities. 

While crude oil was churning money for the Nigerian federal government, the oil producing communities were dying. Saro-Wiwa must have felt like he had to do more, because the next thing he did which further increased his popularity as a political administrator in Rivers State, was published an article in 1969 titled Ogoni Nation Today and Tomorrow. In the article, Saro-Wiwa pointed out that the oil company, Shell, owed the Ogoni a share of the revenue derived from the oil it extracted in Ogoniland. From The Politics of Bones, here’s some of what Saro-Wiwa wrote:

We find it most intolerable that we who sit on oil should be one of the poorest, if not the poorest people, in the country. The common man in the Western State benefits from Cocoa; so does the man in Kano benefit from groundnut. We, on the contrary, are chased out of our land by oil-prospecting companies and left to languish in poverty. We find it untenable that the oil industry should bring prosperity to everyone but us. We refuse to accept that the only responsibility which Shell-BP owes our nation is the exploitation of our lands to satisfy the company’s needs for the silly sum of five shillings per acre in an area where 1,200 people live on each square mile of land, and the only source of income as well as subsistence is agriculture. Shell-BP can earn the goodwill of our people. She can do for us what she knows is right.

After the Civil War ended, Saro-Wiwa in his capacity as the Commissioner of Education, announced that every Ogoni child who desired a government scholarship would be granted one. People soon began to speak of ‘a Black man wearing a French suit’ arriving in Ogoniland, granting scholarships and criticizing Shell. 

So the good thing about Ken was that he wasn’t a typical elite. He was someone that was actually into the people. He communicated with everybody… And then as commissioner for education, he gave scholarships in Rivers state. Ken was the commissioner for information too. You know, he was 24, and he set up The Tide of Port Harcourt newspaper, the first government-owned newspaper in Rivers state. So beyond this level, beyond his class, he could be driving along the road and see a young chap, and stop to talk to the person. I’ve had testimonies of people that visited him in his office for the very first time. And he will ask you what you are doing. And then the next thing, he sends you to a school. He was very proactive about situations. He could see your right now and take action. And then he was involved with the people, he knew what they were doing. In short, most of what we know about Ogoni today are from books written by Ken. Before him, there was barely anything to talk about Ogoni and the Niger-Delta. But he started documenting. So he became like a source of inspiration for both the young and the old. 

On April 25, 1970, it was reported that a group of Ogoni Chiefs stormed the Government House where the then Military Governor of Rivers State, Alfred Diete-Spiff, resided, and handed him a document titled ‘Humble Petition of Complaint on Shell-BP Operations in Ogoni Division.’ The petition accused Shell of seriously endangering the lives of the Ogoni people. 

By the early 70s, the environmental issue had become a serious, very deep concern to the Ogoni people, because during the war, escaping Biafran troops had vandalized a lot of facilities in Ebubu and other areas. And there was massive spill, massive, massive spill. They were retreating. They were vandalizing those things so that the Nigerian state will not have access to the oil. So coupled with the operational challenges that Shell had, so the environmental situation became very dire in the Ogoni area. 

The situation was indeed very dire. In the petition the Ogoni Chiefs presented to the Rivers State Governor, they described how Shell bulldozed their farms and trees, and how the oil spills destroyed their mangrove swamps as well as the riverine ecosystem of fishes, crabs, and shrimps, which the Ogoni people depended on for their livelihood. 

According to Dr. Owens Wiwa, from The Politics of Bones, the story went that the petition presented by the Ogoni Chiefs was in fact ghostwritten by Saro-Wiwa. Being a member of the Government which the petition was brought against, it was said that he used the Chiefs as a front to petition Shell and the Government. 

In July 1970, three months after the government received the petition from the Ogoni people, the first major oil-related ecological disaster occurred in Ogoniland. An oil well at the Bomu/Shell oilfield exploded, causing widespread pollution and damage to the environment. People lost their lives, survivors lost their homes, farms, and livelihood. 

What we’re walking on now is crude oil. This land is lost… for the next thousand years, nothing is going to grow here. 

There’s a saying Nigerians have that I really like. It goes, ‘water don pass garri.’ It basically means that a situation has deteriorated beyond a manageable point. There is way more water in the bowl than garri, so it is time to do something about it. Do you try to save the situation by adding more garri, or do you throw the entire bowl away? 

When the oil well exploded in Ogoniland in July 1970, it was a ‘water don pass garri’ dilemma for Saro-Wiwa. Here’s Saro-Wiwa on the 1970 oil blowout:

Oil blow-outs, spillages, oil leaks, and general pollution, accompany the search for oil. This is usual. But in most cases the oil companies have an obligation to ensure that these things do not happen, or that when they happen they do not disrupt life a big deal. Unfortunately, in Nigeria, She’ll which has prospected for oil in Ogoniland for the past thirty-three years has not done any of these things. It uses outdated equipment in Ogoni, as a result of that we’ve had a major blowout in 1970. The land that was destroyed at that time remains in that state. It’s totally unusable up till this moment. We live in a devastated environment in the Delta, among the ethnic minorities.

In The Politics of Bones, Dr. Owens Wiwa noted that Saro-Wiwa went to see the effects of the explosion for himself. The oilfield was located in Gokana, near a village called Dere. Thick pillars of black smoke rose into the air, darkening the sky and blotting out the sun. At the village, the people complained to Saro-Wiwa that their rivers and streams were all covered in crude oil. Everything was polluted, even the air. Officials from Shell had also gone round the villages warning the people that it was dangerous to light any fires for cooking food due to the gas explosions. Being a government official, Saro-Wiwa knew that the people expected him to do something to save the situation. He had petitioned Shell and the government in secret, but could he openly turn against the very government he worked for? 

Find out next week in part two. We’ll talk about how Saro-Wiwa changed his focus from engaging with political elites to becoming more grassroots oriented. We’ll discuss his literary career and how his writing served as a unique political outlet. We’ll also discuss what it eventually meant for him to take his activism off the page and into the streets. 

Thanks to Aderemi Ojo, Ibrahim Odugbemi and Peace Onafuye for the archival audio you heard on this episode and our overall research. 

You’ll find a full list of the books, articles, and documentaries that we relied on in researching this episode at our website, republic.com.ng/podcasts.

The Republic Podcast is produced by The Republic, a digital media startup based in Lagos, Nigeria; with technical sound engineering by the Voix Collective.  The artwork for the show is by Sarah Kanu with graphic design by Dami Mojid and Wale Lawal. Our script writers are Funbi Akinsanya, Tony Malik and myself Wale Lawal⎈