Feed the Charm

Adewale Maja-Pearce

In the Shadow of a Saint: A Son’s Journey to Understand His Father’s Legacy by Ken Wiwa
Black Swan, 320 pp, £7.99, January 2002, ISBN 0 552 99891 5
This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis by Karl Maier
Penguin, 327 pp, £9.99, February 2002, ISBN 0 14 029884 3
The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War by Stephen Ellis
Hurst, 350 pp, £40.00, November 1999, ISBN 1 85065 417 4

Last December, Chief Bola Ige, the Nigerian Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, was assassinated. The political violence that has ensued will culminate in elections next year, when the ostensibly democratic Government of Olusegun Obasanjo, a retired general, hopes to return for a second term. Its chances of success are slim. There have been two previous attempts by civilian Governments in Nigeria to organise their own succession: both ended in military takeover, and with it levels of executive lawlessness that saw one general, Ibrahim Babangida, spirit away US$12 billion of crude oil revenue. The other, Sani Abacha, turned the country into a pariah state by hanging Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists on 10 November 1995 after a trial that everyone agreed was flawed. Saro-Wiwa had been charged with complicity in the murder of four Ogoni chiefs the previous year, although he was nowhere near the scene at the time. However, he had already been identified by the authorities as the person responsible for stirring up international opinion against the environmental degradation caused by the activities of Shell, and they were out to get him. Within days of his arrest, he was pronounced guilty by the psychopathic military administrator of Rivers State, Lt Col. Dauda Komo, who called him a ‘dictator who has no room for any dissenting view’, and described his organisation, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), as a ‘reckless and irresponsible terror group’.

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Vol. 24 No. 14 · 25 July 2002 » Adewale Maja-Pearce » Feed the Charm (print version)
Pages 23-26 | 4414 words

Letters

From Ken Wiwa

In his review of my memoir, In the Shadow of a Saint, Adewale Maja-Pearce makes a number of baseless allegations about my father, Ken Saro-Wiwa (LRB, 25 July).

As my portrayal of my father showed, and Maja-Pearce himself knows, Ken Saro-Wiwa worked hard and was miserly with his money. He was a successful businessman who made and invested his money at a time when the naira enjoyed parity with sterling. There were many like him during the oil-boom years in Nigeria. Not all of them were crooks and many of them worked hard and invested their profits at home, abroad and in their children's education. When the bottom fell out of Nigeria's economy, my father was introduced to a currency trader in Geneva by a Nigeria-based Lebanese businessman, Gilbert Chagouri. Maja-Pearce's assertion that it was illegal to move money out of Nigeria proves nothing – any sober Nigerian had savings abroad, and still does. In fact, my father's biggest financial mistake was to repatriate a substantial portion of his profits. As for Chagouri, yes, he was Abacha's banker and yes, he was my father's friend, but what of it? Should that have automatically disqualified Saro-Wiwa from taking a stand against social injustice?

My father was a careful man who had an acute understanding of history and of his place in it; he kept strict records of his life, including his financial dealings. I still have them and I challenge Maja-Pearce to substantiate his allegations.

Why does the source of my father's wealth matter so much to Maja-Pearce? If he focused on this issue as a way of indicating that I did not portray my father as a complex man with links to the military, then he can't have read my book very carefully. I show clearly that Saro-Wiwa was an insider and a power broker, and that he knew all the main players in Nigerian politics. He attended the top schools and universities, and was offered and took some top appointments in Nigerian politics. It is surprising in the circumstances that Maja-Pearce chose not to talk about or mention his own dealings with my father. As for his suggestion that I am an unreliable witness to the complexity of Saro-Wiwa's character and position in Nigerian society and politics, it is simplistic. If he were writing as a literary critic I would have no problem agreeing with him that I might be an unreliable witness, but the context of his criticism turns this literary unreliability into the basis of a serious allegation. My book is a memoir and not a biography of my father. Nor is it a political history of Nigeria or the Ogoni struggle, nor an interrogation of the role of Shell in the Niger Delta. There are plenty of books that offer an exhaustive account of those issues, and I took them to be the context for my story.

Ken Wiwa
Toronto