Sozaboy was born of Ken’s personal experience of the conflict—the Biafran war, as it came to be known—and, indeed, so were many of his other writings. Biafra was the name given to a loose ethnic grouping in eastern Nigeria, dominated by the Ibo tribe. The Ibo leader, Colonel Chukwue-meka Odumegwu Ojukwu, decided to secede from the Nigerian Federation, taking most of the country’s oil reserves with him. In the war that was then waged against the secessionist state, perhaps a million people died, mainly of starvation in the shrinking heartland.
Not all the ethnic groups caught up in Ojukwu’s secessionist dream were willing participants. Ken’s tribe, the Ogoni, for one. When the war broke out, in 1967, Ken was on vacation and found himself trapped within the new borders of Biafra. He saw at once the absurdity of being forced to fight in another man’s war, and he escaped through the front lines to the Federal side. He was appointed civilian administrator of the crucial oil port of Bonny on the Niger River Delta, and he served there until the final collapse of the Biafran forces in 1970. Ken wrote about his experiences of the civil war in his fine memoir, On a Darkling Plain.
Ken’s later fight against the Nigerian military, as it turned out, was oddly prefigured in those years of the Biafran war: the helplessness of an ethnic minority in the face of an overpowering military dictatorship; oil and oil wealth as a destructive and corrupting catalyst in society, the need to be true to one’s conscience.
This moral rigour was especially apparent in Ken’s satirical political journalism (he was, over the years, a columnist on the Lagos daily newspapers Punch, Vanguard and Daily Times), much of which was charged with a Swiftian saeva indignatio at what he saw as the persistent ills of Nigerian life: tribalism, ignorance of the rights of minorities, rampant materialism, inefficiency and general graft. Apart from Basi & Co., his journalism was what brought him his greatest renown among the population at large.
In the late eighties, I remember, Ken’s conversations turned more and more frequently to the topic of his tribal homeland. The Ogoni are a small tribe (there are 250 tribes in Nigeria) of about half a million people living in a small area of the fertile Niger River Delta. The Ogoni’s great misfortune is that their homeland happens to lie above a significant portion of Nigeria’s oil reserves. Since the mid 1950s, Ogoniland has been devastated by the industrial pollution caused by the extraction of oil. What was once a placid rural community of prosperous farmers and fishermen is now an ecological wasteland reeking of sulphur, its creeks and water holes poisoned by indiscriminate oil spillage and ghoulishly lit at night by the orange flames of gas flares.
As Ken’s concern for his homeland grew, he effectively abandoned his vocation and devoted himself to lobbying for the Ogoni cause at home and abroad. He was instrumental in setting up the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) and soon became its figurehead. That struggle for survival was an ecological more than a political one: his people, he said, were being subjected to a “slow genocide.” Ken protested against the despoliation of his homeland and demanded compensation from the Nigerian government and from the international oil companies—Shell in particular. (He resented Shell profoundly and held the company responsible for the ecological calamity in Ogoniland.) But from the outset Ken made sure that the movement’s protest was peaceful and non-violent. Nigeria today is a corrupt and dangerously violent nation: it was enormously to the credit of the Ogoni movement that it stayed true to its principles. Mass demonstrations were organized and passed off without incident. Abroad, Greenpeace and other environmental groups allied themselves with the Ogoni cause, but, ironically, the real measure of the success of Ken’s agitation came when, in 1992, he was arrested by the Nigerian military and held in prison for some months without a trial. The next year, Shell Oil ceased its operations in the Ogoni region.
At that time, the Nigerian military was led by General Ibrahim Babangida. Ken was eventually released (after a campaign in the British media), and Babangida voluntarily yielded power to General Abacha, a crony, who was meant to supervise the transition of power to a civilian government after a general election, which was duly held in 1993. The nation went to the polls and democratically elected Chief Moshood Abiola as President. General Abacha then declared the election null and void and later imprisoned the victor. Nigeria entered a new era of near anarchy and despotism. Things looked bad for Nigeria, but they looked worse for the Ogoni and their leaders.
Over these years, Ken and I continued to meet for our Chelsea Arts Club lunches whenever he was in London. In 1992 he suffered a personal tragedy when his youngest son, aged fourteen, who was at Eton, died suddenly of heart failure during a rugby game. Strangely, Ken’s awful grief gave a new force to his fight for his people’s rights.
We met just before he returned to Nigeria. From my own experience of Nigeria, I knew of the uncompromising ruthlessness of political life there. Ken was not young, nor was he in the best of health (he too had a heart condition). As we said goodbye, I shook his hand and said, “Be careful, Ken, OK?” And he laughed—his dry, delighted laugh—and replied, “Oh, I’ll be very careful, don’t worry.” But I knew he wouldn’t.
A succession of Nigerian military governments have survived as a result of the huge revenues generated by oil, and the military leaders themselves have routinely benefited from the oil revenues, making millions and millions of dollars. Any movement that threatened this flow of money was bound to be silenced—extinguished. With the ascendance of Abacha and his brazenly greedy junta, Ken was now squarely in harm’s way. Even so, he returned to Nigeria to continue his protests. These protests were now conducted in a more sinister country than the one I had known—a country where rapes, murders and the burning of villages were being carried out as a deliberate policy of state terrorism. There have been 2,000 Ogoni deaths thus far.
In May of last year Ken was on his way to address a rally in an Ogoni town but was turned back at a military roadblock and headed, reluctantly, for home. The rally took place, a riot ensued, and in the general mayhem four Ogoni elders—believed to be sympathetic to the military—were killed.
Ken was arrested and, with fifteen others, was accused of incitement to murder. The fact that he was in a car some miles away and going in the opposite direction made no difference. He was imprisoned for more than a year and then was tried before a specially convened tribunal. There was no right of appeal. This “judicial process” has been internationally condemned as a sham. It was a show trial in a kangaroo court designed to procure the verdict required by the government.
On Thursday, 2 November, Ken and eight co-defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. Suddenly the world acknowledged the nature of Nigeria’s degeneracy.
Things did not augur well. But, instinctively wanting to make the best of a bad situation, I hoped that the publicity surrounding Ken’s case, along with the timely coincidence of the Commonwealth Conference in New Zealand (the biennial gathering of the former members of the British Empire), would prevent the very worst from happening. Surely, I reasoned, the heads of state congregating in Auckland would not allow one of their members to flout their own human rights principles so callously and blatantly? General Abacha, however, did not dare leave his benighted country, which was represented by his Foreign Minister instead.
The presence of Nelson Mandela at the conference was especially encouraging, not only for me but also for all the people who had spent the last months fighting to free Ken. (We were a loosely knit organization, including International PEN, the Ogoni Foundation, Amnesty International, Greenpeace and others.) We felt that if anything could persuade the Nigerians to think again it would be Mandela’s moral authority. We were baffled and confused, though, when Mandela did little more than persistently advocate that we should all be patient, that the problem would be resolved through an easy, low-key diplomacy.
Despite Mandela’s advice, there was a clamorous condemnation in the media of the Nigerian military. In response, Abacha’s junta released newsreel pic
tures of Ken’s trial to establish the legality of the “judicial process.” One saw a row of prisoners, still, faces drawn, heads bowed, confronting three stout officers, swagged with gold braid, ostentatiously passing pieces of paper to each other. In the background, a soldier strolled back and forth. Then Ken addressed the court. His voice was strong: he was redoubtably defiant; he seemed without fear, utterly convinced.
These images both defied belief and profoundly disturbed. If Abacha thought that this would make his tribunals look acceptable, then the level of naivety, or blind ignorance, implied was astonishing. But a keening note of worry was also sounded: someone who could do something this damaging, I thought, was beyond the reach of reason. World opinion, international outrage, appeals for clemency seemed to me now to be nugatory. Abacha had painted himself into a corner. For him it had become a question of saving face, of loud bluster, of maintaining some sort of martial pride. I slept very badly that night.
The next day, 10 November, just after lunch, I received a call from the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN. I was told that a source in Port Harcourt had seen the prisoners arrive at the gaol at dawn that day, in leg irons. Then the executioners had presented themselves, only to be turned away, because—it was a moment of grimmest, darkest farce—their papers were not in order. This source, however, was “110 percent certain” that the executions had eventually occurred. Some hours later, this certainty was confirmed by the Nigerian military.
So now Ken was dead, along with eight co-defendants: hanged in a mass execution just as the Commonwealth Conference got under way.
I am bitter and I am dreadfully sad. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the bravest man I have known, is no more. From time to time, Ken managed to smuggle a letter out of prison. One of the last letters I received ended this way: “I’m in good spirits … There’s no doubt that my idea will succeed in time, but I’ll have to bear the pain of the moment … the most important thing for me is that I’ve used my talents as a writer to enable the Ogoni people to confront their tormentors. I was not able to do it as a politician or a businessman. My writing did it. And it sure makes me feel good! I’m mentally prepared for the worst, but hopeful for the best. I think I have the moral victory.” You have, Ken. Rest in peace.
1995
Cecil Rhodes
(Review of The Randlords by Geoffrey Wheatcroft)
The story of the South African gold and diamond fields and of the men who rose to wealth and notoriety as a result of their exploitation has stimulated writers since the 1870s, when diamonds were first discovered there. And yet amongst the millions of words there are curious lacunae, particularly in the area of biography. The key figures are Cecil Rhodes, Barney Barnato, Alfred Beit, J. B. Robinson, Solly Joel and Julius Wern-her. None has a definitive biography, and on someone such as Beit there is an almost complete silence. This is even more true of the minor figures, such as Rhodes’s henchman Rutherfoord Harris, his partner Charles Rudd or even Leander Starr Jameson. Paradoxically, there exists a first-rate scholarly account of Rhodes’s involvement with the annexation of Bechuanaland—yet no similar treatment of his life. Even the most recent biography (by J. Flint, 1976) is inadequate on certain areas of his life. If one wants to learn about Neville Pickering, his first private secretary and the great love of his life (Rhodes, in his second will, left his estate to Pickering), one must turn to Brian Roberts’s Cecil Rhodes and the Princess, where, for the first and only time, Pickering’s early life and background are accurately delineated. Other murky areas—Rhodes’s dealings with Lobengula and the Matabele, the formation of the British South Africa Company, the widespread concession racketeering—still await their chroniclers.
As a result, no study of the period or of its protagonists can do without a process of assiduous weeding and winnowing of all manner of sources, from rambunctious Victorian travel books to dry works of Bantu topography. Wheatcroft is particularly good on the financial machinations that went into the making of the vast fortunes achieved at Kimberley and on the Rand. For the history of the gold and diamond fields—superficially a glamorous, adventurous one of strikes and rushes, booms and slumps—is, at a more profound level, a chilly illustration of the working of monopoly capitalism at its most forthright and ruthless. The early diggers were drawn by the lure of quick wealth for a little hard work; those that survived and stayed on were concerned with consolidation. They were essentially financiers and speculators interested solely in profit. What distinguished the men of Kimberley and Johannesburg from the grey souls who populated the world’s stock exchanges was a robust, frontier insouciance—no veneer of bland decorum had yet had time to form.
People like Beit and Wernher devoted their lives to making phenomenal amounts of money for themselves and after a while this process ceases to be interesting. I had expected that Wheatcroft’s book would fill in the gaps, particularly on Beit, but there is nothing about him in The Randlords that we cannot find elsewhere. This now seems to me not so much a deficiency in Wheatcroft’s research as a shallowness in Beit’s character. He was a timid, portly, extraordinarily hard-working man with superb financial acumen. He associated himself with Rhodes early on in his career and Rhodes came to rely heavily on his judgement. Perhaps there is nothing more to say. Others, such as Barney Barnato and J. B. Robinson, were more flamboyant—almost Gogolian—characters. Barnato was a Cockney Jew who arrived in the early days of the diamond fields with assets consisting of forty rather bad cigars. He became a multi-millionaire with—almost obligatory for the South African magnates—a Park Lane mansion. He never lost his accent and was never truly accepted by the high society of the day. Towards the end of his life he became afflicted by paranoias and depressions, and committed suicide by jumping overboard from an Atlantic liner. One story about Barney, which Wheatcroft doesn’t mention, occurred in his heyday. He bought a Millais called Joseph and the Sheep which he hung with due prominence in his Park Lane house. At a reception Barney was loudly asked by an aristocratic society grande dame (presumably to effect some social discomfiture) why he had bought the picture and what was it that made it appealing to him. Barney, goaded and irritated, replied with equal volume: “I bought it, madam, because one of the poor fuckin’ sheep looks just like me.”
Barney Barnato, sometimes accused of being a shady operator, was nevertheless a popular figure in the minefields. J. B. Robinson, on the other hand, inspired nothing but hate. After his death in 1929, the Cape Times published an obituary which must rank as one of the most vitriolic ever written. His will, the obituary said, was “scandalously repugnant … it stinks, too, against public decency.” What provoked the ire was the fact that Robinson’s will set up no trust funds nor benefited the country in any way. Robinson, the Cape Times went on, should serve as a warning: “those who in future may acquire great wealth in this country will shudder lest their memories should come within possible risk of rivalling the loathsomeness of the thing that is the memory of Sir Joseph Robinson.” It is ironic now to reflect that when Rhodes died he was regarded as a national hero. His funeral train passed through the solemn and mourning country as if he were some great monarch being laid to rest. Robinson’s legacy was one of personal bitterness and repugnance. Rhodes’s bequest to his adopted country was altogether more complex and damaging. Rhodes was not only a corrupt and ruthless capitalist who used his ostensible imperialist aims to win large fortunes for himself (he made at least a million pounds out of the creation of Rhodesia): he also laid the foundations of apartheid with his racial legislation when he was Prime Minister of the Cape; and he was directly responsible for the Boer War and all its repercussions, thanks to the fiasco of the Jameson Raid. It is harder to calculate the long-term effects of his actions on the Matabele tribe, and the results of his colonization north of the Zambezi. It is perhaps sufficient to observe that he and his agents (the good Dr Jameson again) adopted methods no less severe than the United States did in their wars against the Plains Indians in the 1870s: the smallpox weapon, the r
eservation policy, found an echo in Rhodesia.
And yet this man died an imperial hero. If ever there was a case for a revisionist biography, Rhodes positively cries out for one. Wheat-croft makes no attempt to rehabilitate, but holds back from attempting a full analysis. Speculating about the absence of a satisfactory “Life of Rhodes,” he asks: “Is it because, as hinted in Chapter Nine, and to borrow Gertrude Stein’s words in another context, ‘there is no there there’? The looming gap between his deeds and his unfathomable personality remains.” That “hinted in” is revealing, and I think that to preserve ideas of “mystery” and “unfathomableness” does Rhodes too great a favour and lends him an air of glamorous potency. There were, it is true, baffling sides to Rhodes, but in many crucial respects he seems to me entirely transparent.
Wheatcroft illuminates one significant fact early on. “Even in a rough age,” he observes, “standards of financial morality on the diamond fields were low.” This is almost a euphemism. The key to Rhodes’s character lies in the fact that his education—unusually for a boy of his class—was in the polyglot graft and corruption of the diggings. Rhodes left school at sixteen, moreover; unlike the other Englishmen of his class, he was not a public schoolboy. He did not possess that protective veneer which years in a single-sex boarding school provide. When he finally entered the English educational system—Oxford—it was as a mature young man with several years in the diggings behind him. He had, in fact, more in common with the working-class financiers—Barnato, Joel—than with the English “gents” he messed with. We are inclined to see Rhodes as typically middle class (father a vicar, brothers at Eton and Winchester, Oxford education), but it is more instructive to see him as an East End wide-boy in disguise. He was streetwise. The history of his career is of a man who gets what he wants by whatever means is most effective. Sometimes it was charm, sometimes guile, sometimes main force, sometimes bribery and corruption. “Tell me a man’s ambitions,” he said, “and I will tell you his price.”