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REAL LIVES - turning points

Ken


I have never been a good or conscientious letter writer. My father, in contrast, was an inveterate letter-writer, always firing off missives in his beautiful, slanted handwriting. He wrote to me after his arrest and I replied, commiserating with him but explaining that I was busy settling into my first job since leaving journalism school. I told him about the difficulties I was having trying to place the story of his arrest in the British media. It was a small lie, because all I had done was send out a press release. I knew, deep down, that he was innocent, but acknowledging his innocence would mean I would have to abandon my life to help him. And not only would I be pulled into the struggle, but I would have to take a position against my cousins who had already publicly sworn to avenge their father's death.

I told him that my cousins and other Ogoni in London and in Nigeria had been trying to persuade my mother to turn against him. I wanted him to realise that his fate was in my mother's hands, to pay him back for all the times he had hurt her. I wanted him to sit in his cell and contemplate the fact that she would be justified in taking her family's side against him. It was a cruel thing to do, but our emotional attachment had been almost severed by the years of mutual suspicion and misunderstanding.


I didn’t hear from him for two months. In a way, his silence was a relief because it shielded me from having to make a decision I would have been happy to put off for the rest of my life. I buried my head in the sand, hoping the situation would somehow resolve itself.


But the silence was unbearable. His silence and my own.


I flinch now at how cold I was. It seems obvious, especially with the benefit of hindsight, that anything, however banal, would have kept his spirits up. But I was paralysed by an awareness that if I wrote to him, I would have to answer the issue dangling like a large question mark between his hot, filthy prison cell in Port Harcourt and my comfortable misery in London: What was I going to do?
A letter arrived from Nigeria.


"Dear Junior,
I have not heard from you in months.
Your father."


Only three lines, but three lines that spoke volumes. In that anguished letter, I felt his pain, his anger. He must have thought that I had abandoned him. I threw it in the bin. I felt my anger was justified, but the letter sat in the bin, insisting that I stand up for my father.


At last, some time later, I wrote a long letter to my father. I have kept almost all the letters my father ever wrote to me, but I wish I had been as careful and conscientious with my own. I wish I could retrieve that particular letter I wrote, because it changed the dynamics of our relationship. What I do remember clearly is that I finally found the courage to confront my father about his relationship with my mother. I told him he was lucky to have a wife like her, and I explained that she had always been responsible for keeping his children, especially me, loyal to him, that she had never once tried to turn me against him. He had done that all by himself. I told him that she had always advised me to stand by him, no matter how rough their marriage was for her. I reminded him that he hadn't always been as faithful, and that he had often tried to blame her for his difficulties with his children.


I also told him I was going to marry Olivia; I went about it in a cautious, circumspect way. I had read somewhere that Ogoni were forbidden to marry outside their race, and I somehow imagined that since he had become such an Ogoni nationalist, he would disapprove of my choosing to marry outside.

His reply came back to me in less than a week. Nigeria’s notorious postal system had never been so efficient. He described my letter as "a very encouraging and cheering Xmas gift". He wrote positively about my mother, my upcoming wedding, the need to work hard and to save.


That letter remains the most important one my father ever wrote to me. But as was my wont in those days, I zeroed in on his criticisms of me: I was ashamed that he felt I was "lazy". He could have said I was lacking in direction, but my father never minced his words, especially when he was trying to motivate me. It did the trick, however, because I handed in my notice at work the very next day. I decided it was time to show him what I could do.


At the time, I rationalised my decision as giving up my life to try to save his. But when I look back on it, it is probably fairer to say that I had decided to make something of my life by trying to save his.
I was standing in a newsroom of the BBC World Service in London when I heard that he had been sentenced to death. I was leaning against a desk when a disembodied voice suddenly bounced out of a nearby speaker, announcing that Janet Anderson, the BBC correspondent in Nigeria, was standing by to file a report from Port Harcourt. The volume on the speakers seemed to rise a couple of notches as a voice boomed out like an announcer at a train station:


"KEN SARO-WIWA HAS BEEN SENTENCED TO DEATH..."

Ken Wiwa (2000)
"A Difficult Martyr"
London: The Guardian Weekend, October 28th, 2000. pages 11-20.
extracted from Ken Wiwa (2000).
In the Shadow of a Saint
. London: Doubleday (a division of Transworld Publishers).
Extracted with permission.
Copyright Ken Wiwa, 2000.

 

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