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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 didnt 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. Nigerias 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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