by William Boyd
Mr Saro-Wiwa was born in 1941 in the River State in the south-east of Nigeria, near the Niger delta. He won scholarships to a respected secondary school and to the University of Ibadan, where he read English literature. He was a post-graduate when the Nigerian civil war broke out. As the Biafran rebel enclave steadily shrank, Mr Saro-Wiwa escaped to the federal side and was appointed civilian administrator of the crucial oil port of Bonny, a post he held for the rest of the war. (His most recent book, On a Darkling Plain, deals with this portion of his life.)
After the war he stayed in government for a number of years before he abandoned politics and went into business in 1973.
“I was writing before that,” he says, “and I had published two books of poetry, but in 1973 I decided to stop writing and turn to commerce.” He became a general merchant and ran a grocery store, selling imported foodstuffs and kitchen equipment. He worked hard and his business grew. The profits he made were invested in property. After ten years he was a wealthy man with a comfortable income. “You have no idea how hard I worked in those years,” he says, a flicker of retrospective exhaustion crossing his face. The money was in the bank; it was time to return to his writing career.
The efforts of the seventeen years since then have been no less prodigious. In addition to Basi & Co., Mr Saro-Wiwa has written three novels, two volumes of short stories, a volume of autobiography and six children’s books.
They are all published, moreover, by himself, with Saros International Publishers, head office in Ewell, Surrey. Mr Saro-Wiwa prints and publishes the books in England and exports them to Nigeria. The entrepreneurial drive has not been entirely abandoned. “How many copies do you sell?” I ask. He laughs. “That’s a trade secret.”
Mr Saro-Wiwa is a spry man who does not look his age. His demeanour is genial and amused, quietly self-assured. He does not appear driven or manically energetic, yet his workload is astonishing. On top of his business, television and publishing interests, he also has a reputation as one of Nigeria’s fiercest political journalists, writing a weekly column in the local Daily Times. I ask him how he sees himself now, how he would describe himself. “A publisher, I suppose,” he says.
Mr Saro-Wiwa’s most extraordinary novel, which he published in 1985, is called Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. It is a story told by a young conscript caught up in the horrors of the Biafran war and is written in a blend of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and occasional limpid passages of correct idiomatic English. It has no rules and no syntax and, as Mr Saro-Wiwa observes, it thrives on lawlessness.
The effect at first seems too complex and discordant, but gradually the rhythms and expressive potential of this “rotten English” begin to take hold with remarkable force and impact. In this book, the demotic soul is given a unique literary voice.
Somehow, Mr Saro-Wiwa keeps all these various literary balls up in the air. His energy is fuelled by two extra ingredients not normally associated with writers, let alone soap opera producers.
The first is a strong pedagogic inclination: Mr Saro-Wiwa wants to show his audience and readers how to improve themselves. The implication is clear: African writers today rarely write for their own populations. “They’re published in London or New York.”
Mr Saro-Wiwa loves Nigeria and enjoys his life there. He makes it sound an extraordinary place. This is a country where anything is possible, he claims, however he is not sanguine about the return to civilian rule in 1992. “There will be a short civilian period, then the military will take over again,” he says. “We need an enlightened despot.” What about Nigeria’s bad image abroad? “It’s just lousy PR by the government.” He enthuses further about the astonishing freedoms in the country; anything can be done, he says, anything is possible and at the same time claims that it is the Nigerian people who actively encourage the military to take over when things get out of hand. Hearing him talking so enthusiastically about Lagos, say, he makes the place sound like Barcelona or pre-Castro Havana.
“Oh, Lagos is not so bad,” he says with a smile. “Things go wrong, sure. But there’s a lot of fun to be had there, too. A lot of fun.”
1990
Ken Saro-Wiwa (2)
“Although, everybody in Dukana was happy at first” is the wonderful and audacious opening line of a wonderful and audacious novel. By the novel’s conclusion, however, this sentence’s disarming grammar and its minatory simplicity (what does that “at first” portend?) have taken on more sinister and melancholy hues. One has learned that this is the beginning of a story about innocence brutally lost and of a consolatory wisdom only fleetingly and partially grasped. The incomprehension—and the profound sadness—are gathered there in those few words; the inspired, odd displacement of “Although” carries a new poignancy.
Sozaboy is a war novel, the narrative of one young man’s helpless and hapless journey through a terrifying African war. Although—it is curious how the word has changed, somehow, charged with its Sozaboy freight—Ken Saro-Wiwa does not specify it is in fact set during a particular and precise conflict, namely the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70, also known as the Biafran war. Unusually for an African conflict, it was one that figured prominently on British television screens. Nigeria was a former colony (independence had been granted seven years previously) and Britain had powerful vested interests there. The British government’s support—material and diplomatic—was firmly behind the Federal Government, led by General Gowon, and against the secessionist eastern states, known as Biafra, led by Colonel Ojukwu. There were no clear-cut heroes or villains in this conflict, and culpability can be equally distributed; but with hindsight one can see that the decision of the eastern states to secede made war—and also eventual defeat—inevitable. That the war lasted as long as it did, and that it caused as much misery and suffering (over a million died, mostly civilians, mostly from disease and starvation in the shrinking, blockaded heartland that was Biafra), is a result of many familiar factors: heroic tenacity, woeful stupidity, tactical blunders, difficult terrain, muddle and confusion, extended supply lines and so on. Anyone who requires an overview of this almost forgotten war should read The Struggle for Secession by N. U. Akpan, the best account that I know. Histories of the war are very thin on the ground or otherwise ponderously, not to say ludicrously, partisan; Nigerian novelists have been swifter off the mark and truer to this bleak chapter in their country’s history, and there are fine and moving works of fiction by Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri (among others) which treat of the conflict. But in my opinion Sozaboy remains the war’s enduring literary monument.
Ken Saro-Wiwa is from eastern Nigeria, a member of the Ogoni tribe. The outbreak of war in 1967 trapped him within the new boundaries of the Biafran state. It is important to establish that not all easterners wanted to secede from the Nigerian federation. Colonel Ojukwu was an Ibo, the dominant tribe in eastern Nigeria. When he declared Biafra independent, “Ibo” and “Biafra” were not at all synonymous: like it or not, some thirty or so other ethnic groups were included in the new country. Like it or not, these other tribes found themselves at war against Nigeria.
This fact explains much that is intentionally fuzzy about the novel. No one seems to understand why war is impending or why it breaks out. No one seems really sure why they are fighting or against whom: they are designated simply as “the enemy.” To many eastern Nigerians caught up in the Biafran net, the motives for war and the nature of their adversaries must have seemed equally vague. Sozaboy—as the hero, Mene, is dubbed (“Soza” means “soldier”)—is one such uncertain conscript and he meanders through the novel in an almost permanent state of ignorance; clarity beckoning from time to time only to be occluded promptly. This is a state of mind familiar to all front-line soldiers, but to the many non-Ibos dragooned into the Biafran army there must have been an extra degree of obfuscation.
Ken Saro-Wiwa was one who perceived the absurdity and injustice of fighting another man’s secessionist war. He escaped through the front lines t
o the federal side and was appointed civilian administrator of the crucial oil-port of Bonny on the Niger River Delta (he has written of his own experiences in the civil war in his fine autobiography, On a Darkling Plain), where he served until the final collapse of the secessionist forces, marked by the flight of Colonel Ojukwu to the Ivory Coast in January 1970. I lived in Nigeria during the Biafran war and can testify to the novel’s authentic feel. The war did seem that crazy, that surreal and haphazard. But any reader will experience the same undeniable reek of life as it comes off the page. Sozaboy is vivid with the special authority of personal experience.
It is also vivid with a language of uncommon idiosyncrasy and character. Saro-Wiwa subtitles the novel as “A Novel in Rotten English.” Rotten English, as he explains, is a blend of pidgin English (the lingua franca of the West African ex-colonies), corrupted English and “occasional flashes of good, even idiomatic English.” In other words, the language of the novel is a unique literary construct. No one in Nigeria actually speaks or writes like this but the style functions in the novel extraordinarily well. Sozaboy’s narration is at times raunchily funny as well as lyrical and moving, and as the terror of his predicament steadily manifests itself, the small but colourful vocabulary of his idiolect paradoxically manages to capture all the numbing ghastliness of war far more effectively than a more expansive eloquence. It helps to hear the rhythms of a Nigerian accent in your ear as you read, but even if that cannot be reproduced, the cadences of the prose take over after a few lines or so and this remarkable tone of voice holds the reader’s attention absolutely. Some obscure words or phrases are explained in a glossary, but one is never in any doubt about what is going on, and the sheer freshness and immediacy of the subjective point of view are exhilarating. Here Sozaboy visits a local dive:
So, one night, after I have finished bathing, I put powder and scent and went to African Upwine Bar. This African Upwine Bar is in interior part of Diobu. Inside inside. We used to call this Diobu New York. I think you know New York. In America. As people plenty for am, na so dem plenty for Diobu too. Like cockroach. And true true cockroach plenty for Diobu too. Everywhere, like the men. And if you go inside the African Upwine Bar you will see plenty cockroach man and proper cockroach too. Myself, I like the African Upwine Bar. Because you fit drink better palmy there. Fine palmy of three or four days old.
This mode of literary demotic is a highly impressive achievement. Saro-Wiwa has both invented and captured a voice here, one not only bracingly authentic but also capable of many fluent and telling registers. I cannot think of another example where the English language has been so engagingly and skilfully hijacked—or perhaps “colonized” would be a better word. Indeed, throughout the novel, Saro-Wiwa exploits Rotten English with delicate and consummate skill. We see everything through Sozaboy’s naive eyes, and his hampered vision—even in the face of the most shocking sights—is reproduced through inevitable understatement. Sozaboy’s vocabulary simply cannot encompass the strange concepts he encounters or the fearful enormity of what he is undergoing. Yet these silences, these occlusions and fumblings for expression exert a marvellous power. Here a fifth-columnist has been undermining the new recruits’ shaky morale:
So that night Manmuswak did not spend long time with us. After some time he told us that we must be careful because nobody can know when the war will come reach our front. So we told him goodnight, and he began to go away, small small like tall snake passing through the bush, making small noise.
The threat of impending disaster has never been more economically or chillingly conveyed.
Sozaboy’s nightmare picaresque begins when, full of zeal to impress his new wife Agnes, he decides to join up and become a “Soza.” It is the uniform he is really after, hungry for the esteem it will confer on him in his village, where he is only an apprentice lorry driver. The downward spiral of his fortunes in the army—boredom, mutiny, punishment, battle and capture—depresses and mortifies him, but he somehow never loses his fundamental ebullience, his innocent joie de vivre. He reminds me of another classic of African literature, Mr Johnson in Joyce Cary’s novel of the same name. Like Mr Johnson, Sozaboy knows shame and humiliation, and like Mr Johnson it is his resilient spirit and the thought of his young wife that spur him on to greater endeavours no matter what desperate straits he finds himself in. But Sozaboy is also an African Candide and this is where Ken Saro-Wiwa’s novel takes on dimensions that are absent in Joyce Cary’s. Mr Johnson is a great character, as is Sozaboy, but—like Voltaire’s Candide—Sozaboy is also an archetype and a victim in a way that Mr Johnson is not. Malign forces pluck up Sozaboy, whirl him around and deposit him in a heap, his spirit almost crushed, his village ruined, his family slaughtered, his prospects negligible. One needs only to glance at the recent history of Africa to see how paradigmatic Sozaboy’s story is: young men in uniforms, clutching their AK47s, spread fear and desolation, march and die all over the continent.
At the novel’s end, Sozaboy contemplates the destruction that has been wreaked on his life and reflects:
I was thinking how I was prouding before to go to soza and call myself Sozaboy. But now if anybody say anything about war or even fight, I will just run and run and run and run and run. Believe me yours sincerely.
Heartfelt and timeless thoughts, any simple bathos undercut by the astute final sentence, where the half-remembered formal valediction (the words are vapid and empty at the end of a letter) takes on an unfamiliar fervency and gravitas in its new and bitter context.
Sozaboy is a novel born out of harsh personal experience, but shaped with a masterful and sophisticated artistry despite its apparent rough-hewn guilelessness. With equal skill and deftness, it also carries a profound moral message that extends beyond its particular time and setting. Sozaboys are legion, and their lives are being destroyed everywhere on the planet. Sozaboy is not simply a great African novel, it is also a great anti-war novel, among the very best the twentieth century has produced.
1994
Ken Saro-Wiwa (3)
Ken Saro-Wiwa was a friend of mine. At eleven thirty in the morning on 10 November 1995, he was hanged in a prison in Port Harcourt, in eastern Nigeria, on the orders of General Sani Abacha, the military leader of Nigeria. Ken Saro-Wiwa was fifty-four years old, and an innocent man.
I first met Ken in the summer of 1986 at a British Council seminar at Cambridge University. He had come to England from Nigeria in his capacity as a publisher and had asked the British Council to arrange a meeting with me. He had read my first novel, A Good Man in Africa, and had recognized, despite fictional names and thin disguises, that it was set in Nigeria, the country that had been my home when I was in my teens and early twenties.
Ken had been a student at the University of Ibadan, in western Nigeria, in the mid sixties. My late father, Dr Alexander Boyd, had run the university health services there, and had treated Ken and come to know him. Ken recognized that the Dr Murray in my novel was a portrait of Dr Boyd and was curious to meet his son.
I remember that it was a sunny summer day, one of those days that are really too hot for England. In shirt-sleeves, we strolled about the immaculate quadrangle of a Cambridge college, talking about Nigeria. Ken was a small man, probably no more than five feet two or three. He was stocky and energetic—in fact, brimful of energy—and had a big, wide smile. He smoked a pipe with a curved stem. I learned later that the pipe was virtually a logo: in Nigeria people recognized him by it. In newsreel pictures that the Nigerian military released of the final days of Ken’s show trial, there’s a shot of him walking towards the courthouse, leaning on a stick, thinner and aged as a result of eighteen months’ incarceration, the familiar pipe still clenched between his teeth.
Ken was not only a publisher but a businessman (in the grocery trade); a celebrated political journalist, with a particularly trenchant and swingeing style; and, I discovered, a prolific writer of novels, plays, poems and children’s books (mostly published by him). He was, in additi
on, the highly successful writer and producer of Nigeria’s most popular TV soap opera, Basi & Co., which ran for 150-odd episodes in the mid eighties and was reputedly Africa’s most watched soap opera, with an audience of up to 30 million. Basi and his cronies were a bunch of feckless Lagos wide-boys who, indigent and lazy, did nothing but hatch inept schemes for becoming rich. Although funny and wincingly accurate, the show was also unashamedly pedagogic. What was wrong with Basi and his chums was wrong with Nigeria: none of them wanted to work, and they all acted as though the world owed them a living; if that couldn’t be acquired by fair means foul ones would do just as well. This was soap opera as a form of civic education.
Whenever Ken passed through London, we’d meet for lunch, usually in the Chelsea Arts Club. His wife and four children lived in England—the children attended school there—so he was a regular visitor. And, though I wrote a profile of him for the London Times (Ken was trying to get his books distributed in Britain), our encounters were mainly those of two writers with a lot in common, hanging out for a highly agreeable, bibulous hour or three.
Ken’s writing was remarkably various, covering almost all genres. Sozaboy, in my opinion his greatest work, is subtitled A Novel in Rotten English and is written in a unique combination of pidgin English, the lingua franca of the former West African British colonies, and an English that is, in its phrases and sentences, altogether more classical and lyrical. The language is a form of literary demotic, a benign hijacking of English, and a perfect vehicle for the story it tells, of a simple village boy recruited into the Biafran army during the Nigerian civil war. The boy has dreamed of being a soldier (a soza), but the harsh realities of this brutal conflict send him into a dizzying spiral of cruel disillusion. Sozaboy is not simply a great African novel but also a great antiwar novel—among the very best of the twentieth century.