Ohio Short Histories of Africa: Ken Saro-Wiwa by Roy Doron and Toyin Falola (review)

The struggles and untimely end of Kenule (“Ken”) Saro-Wiwa are well documented in Ohio Short Histories of Africa: Ken Saro-Wiwa, coauthored by Roy Doron, an assistant professor of history at Winston-Salem State University, and Toyin Falola, who holds the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker chair in the humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.

Six of the eight chapters discuss the childhood, educational pursuits, accolades, and activism of Saro-Wiwa, hanged with eight other convicted activists in a Nigerian prison on 10 November 1995 by the military regime of General Sani Abacha. Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues thus became martyrs for their supporters in Ogoniland and human-rights organizations inside and outside Nigeria. In a seven-page introduction, Doron and Falola help their readers more fully appreciate Saro-Wiwa:

Though Saro-Wiwa is best remembered for the activism that cost him his life, he was famous both in Nigeria and abroad for his many achievements. Respected author, playwright, poet, and television producer, Saro-Wiwa helped redefine the Nigerian novel, creating a body of work that was consciously Nigerian in its conception rather than based on ethnic identity. His memoirs and journalistic work shed light on the ideas he formed as a young man and his political activities during the Nigerian Civil War, when he became military governor of Rivers State and served on the council that helped create the postwar administration.

(Pp. 13–14)

Many Nigerians and outsiders have wondered about how Saro-Wiwa, a former civilian governor in a military regime, became the fierce agitator who was recognized for championing environmental justice with the winning of the Goldman Environmental Prize. The coauthors provide an explanation:

When he felt he could no longer work within an increasingly corrupt and patronage system favoring the larger ethnic groups in the country, he left government work and turned to the private sector[,] a series of business[es] culminating in the Saros Publishing and Holding companies, [and] he used his private sector wealth to further his goal of creating a Nigerian consciousness that would not be fragmented into Ogoni, Eastern, Christian, or Southern Nigerian cultural manifestations.

(P. 14)

The chapters that detail the circumstances of his trials and execution, as well as his legacies, are chapters seven and eight, respectively. In “The Trials and Death of Saro-Wiwa” (chapter seven), Doron argues that “Ken Saro-Wiwa could not have chosen a more dangerous time to begin his mass movement” (p. 125). This assertion stems from the fact that Nigeria, at the time, was headed by a notorious military leader, who ruled the nation with an iron fist. Abacha, as the coauthors disclose, is said to have “pilfered up to GBP [Great Britain pounds] 6 million from Nigerian government coffers, leading Transparency International to name him the fourth most corrupt head of government in the twentieth century[,] after Suharto of Indonesia, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire” (p. 125).

To bring national and international attention to his activist causes, Saro-Wiwa formed his Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), with himself and eight colleagues as the leading figures, “the Ogoni Nine, as they became known” (p. 13). They were opposed, as narrated in chapter seven, by so-called “elder political elites led by [Edward] Kobani and [Garrick] Leton, and supported by the Rivers State government and the oil companies, led by Shell” (p. 126). Saro-Wiwa’s side of the movement and the Kobani-Leton faction disagreed on tactics; for example, “Saro-Wiwa supported continued action to bring the Ogoni cause to the forefront of Nigerian and global awareness. This disagreement began a power struggle between the two factions, culminating on May 21, 1994, with the murder of Kobani and three other Ogoni leaders” (p. 126).

Abacha’s regime was nervous about Saro-Wiwa’s group and its activism. As a pretext, the three “murders gave the federal...