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Research in African Literatures 32.1 (2001) 131-134



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Book Review

Ken Saro-Wiwa: A Bio-Critical Study

Ken Saro-Wiwa: Writer and Political Activist


Ken Saro-Wiwa: A Bio-Critical Study, by Femi Ojo-Ade. New York: Africana Legacy, 1999. xxiv + 330 pp. ISBN 0-9663837-1-0. Distributed by African Books Collective, Ltd., 27 Park End Street, Oxford, OX1 1HU; http://www.africanbookscollective.com

Ken Saro-Wiwa: Writer and Political Activist, ed. Craig W. McLuckie and Aubrey McPhail. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000. xi + 289 pp. ISBN 0-89410-883-2 cloth.

Two starkly contrasting assessments of Ken Saro-Wiwa have recently appeared in print, Craig McLuckie and Aubrey McPhail's Ken Saro-Wiwa: Writer and Political Activist and Femi Ojo-Ade's Ken Saro-Wiwa: A Bio-Critical Study. If both volumes reveal the paradoxical affiliations that shaped Saro-Wiwa's life and writings, offering portraits of an amazingly energetic and complex human being, they nonetheless draw surprisingly different conclusions about the meaning of Saro-Wiwa's state-ordered murder and the tragic events surrounding it. The McLuckie-McPhail study situates Saro-Wiwa's execution within a global context, drawing out the wider implications of his killing, whereas Ojo-Ade provides fuller detail on the specific Nigerian context, relative to Saro-Wiwa's involvement in the Biafran war in the mid 1960s. The former volume is a collection of essays offering sometimes disparate views on Saro-Wiwa and his work, written largely by foreign [End Page 131] observers (with the exception of helpful contributions by the Nigerian poet Tanure Ojaide); the latter volume is written by a Nigerian exile, now living and teaching in the United States, whose life experiences and knowledge of national politics have deeply impacted his views on Saro-Wiwa. While McLuckie and McPhail's essay collection may lack the detailed specificity of Ojo-Ade's "bio-critical" study, the latter finally sinks under the weight of that specificity, its author unable to transcend his own idiosyncratic biases and personal obsessions. For instance, the McLuckie-McPhail title emphasizes Saro-Wiwa's activism while Ojo-Ade refuses to accept the thesis that he was a true activist at all (19); this is actually to Saro-Wiwa's credit, however, since "activism," for Ojo-Ade, "implies extremism" (11), or involvement in the "filth" of political engagement. In fact, Ojo-Ade has written an insightful but finally embittered book; his critical analyses of Saro-Wiwa's writings are marked by his despair for a country that is apparently beyond redemption, profoundly unworthy of Saro-Wiwa's supreme sacrifice. "Why did he not escape abroad," Ojo-Ade muses, especially when he had the opportunity (288)? "On the matter of nationalism," Ojo-Ade further insists, "there is ample proof that [Saro-Wiwa's] interest was Ogoni; Nigeria would serve only as means to that end" (222). Thus, Saro-Wiwa's refusal to go into exile--like Ojo-Ade himself--was motivated by his "determination to die" (255), or to be "killed for nothing" (xii). What Ojo-Ade will not allow is that Saro-Wiwa's act may underscore a lifelong commitment to what he calls "the big fraud" that is Nigeria (26); or that, despite his frustrations, Saro-Wiwa repeatedly called for Ogoni autonomy within a Nigerian federation.

Ojo-Ade's most provocative thesis is that Saro-Wiwa was killed by his former federalist cohorts from Northern Nigerian (i.e., the "ill-prepared, incompetent Hausa-Fulani," 223) in an act of "nauseating irony" (212). Saro-Wiwa's blind and injudicious "love for the Northerners and the Military" (215), dating back to the Biafran war, spelled his own doom. Similarly, his lack of feeling for the Igbo (and Yoruba) people who were decimated in this war reveals Saro-Wiwa's own "cynicism," "inhumanism," and "bad-faith" (208). For this reason, we are told, many Igbo today believe that Saro-Wiwa "deserved what he got" (27). Paradoxically, Ojo-Ade will insist that Saro-Wiwa's most "fatal misconception" lay in his willingness to grant...

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