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117 Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni struggle and the logic of spectacle Austin Tam-George INTRODUCTION In many of his writings, Ken Saro-Wiwa, the slain Nigerian dissident writer and minority rights activist, shows a consistent preoccupation with the burdens of minority citizenship in a multi-ethnic state. In Nigeria’s vast political and cultural landscape, Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoni are a small peasant community in the South Eastern tip of the Niger Delta region – a region where for half a century, the oil drilling activities of transnational companies have caused environmental and cultural dislocation. In his texts such as Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1985), On a Darkling Plain: An account of the Nigerian Civil War (1989), Prisoners of Jebs (1989), Pita Dumbrok’s Prison (1991), etc., Saro-Wiwa uses a range of literary devises such as irony and sarcasm, repudiation and contradiction, as well as revision, ruse and satire to expose and challenge what he saw as the tyranny of Nigeria’s nationalist modernity. But as he observes in his detention diary A Month and a Day (1995), literature ’s impact on the psychology of tyranny particularly in Africa could be painfully slow as rulers choose to ignore writers, aware that the majority of the people were unable to read and write. To press their message home, Saro-Wiwa believes that writers must also be involved in mass movements. As Saro-Wiwa puts it, the writer: [M]ust establish direct contact with the people and resort to the strength of African literature – oratory in the tongue. For the word is power and more powerful is it when expressed in common currency. That is why a writer who takes part in mass organizations will deliver his message more effectively than one who only writes waiting for time to work its literary wonders (Saro-Wiwa 1995: 81). From 1990, after his literary and other imaginative arguments for a new grammar of citizenship had failed to alter mainstream political attitudes in Nigeria, Ken Saro-Wiwa tried to redirect his campaigns to the grassroots as a way of galvanising communal support and participation. A milestone of this phase CHAPTER 6 118 CHAPTER 6 of his activism was the formation in 1990 of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), a community-based mass mobilisation organisation aimed at galvanising the Ogoni to resist the continued denigration of their environment by the oil conglomerate Shell, and to demand justice and fair representation in the Nigerian state through non-violent means. As a mass movement, MOSOP itself was an umbrella body to several other social and cultural organisations throughout the Ogoni Kingdom. Under the platform of MOSOP, Ken Saro-Wiwa and the leadership hierarchy composed a document called the Ogoni Bill of Rights, where they catalogued the many deprivations of Ogoni as an oil-bearing community, and demanded reparations from the Nigerian state and Shell (Saro-Wiwa, 1995: 67–70). Key demands in the Ogoni Bill of Rights include (a) the political control of Ogoni affairs by Ogoni people, (b) the right to control and use of a fair proportion of Ogoni economic resources for Ogoni development, (c) adequate and direct representation, as a right in all Nigerian institutions, and (d) the right to protect the Ogoni environment and ecology from further degradation. This document was forwarded to the Nigerian government, and ignored. Subsequently , MOSOP under Saro-Wiwa organised protests, vigils, demonstrations, election boycotts, and organisation of seminars, mass enlightenment campaigns , local and international media campaigns, composition of petitions to the United Nations Organisation, and campaigns for the review of the Nigerian Constitution. In this chapter, the author examines how the Ogoni used demonstrations, boycotts, petitions, and so forth, as counter-narrative forms possessing ‘a formative energy in the dynamic of history’ (Sfez: 1999, cited in Colin Caret). Since demonstrations and protest marches help to mobilise people and serve to channel diverse oppositional sentiments, I will interpret these forms as elemental sites of popular sovereignty. Furthermore, how dissenting groups negotiate their relationship with Nigeria’s nationalist laws in their struggles for a more egalitarian society will be examined. Moreover, the Ogoni struggle launched in the early 1990s appears to have inspired the moral comradeship of many groups and communities around the world in a way that some other dissident movements have not. It is therefore important to examine the significance of this struggle to our understanding of a dissident culturalist discourse in Africa and beyond. Throughout this article, the author uses...

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