Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy: The Politics of "Rotten English"
Translation seems by definition an international issue, and the translatability of a text seems to be relevant only when that text travels outside the national boundaries within which it was created. But these assumptions depend on a national model for which there are virtually no pure examples in the contemporary world, because even the most homogeneous societies have significant minority languages. In many countries where there is no true majority language at all, the very existence of a national literary medium depends on the possibility of translation, so that translatability is not an incidental characteristic of a writer’s work but an implicit feature of it from the beginning. Implicitly or explicitly, literary works in countries such as India or Nigeria must always confront internal limits to their intelligibility; in so doing, they also raise larger questions about national self-representation.
No writer exemplifies this situation more poignantly than Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed in 1995 by a government apparently determined to end his political career at any cost. For several years, Saro-Wiwa had been the most prominent spokesman of the Ogoni, a small Nigerian minority group whose territory in the Niger River delta happens to cover oil reserves developed by Royal/Dutch Shell Group. The Ogoni, according to Saro-Wiwa, have suffered all the devastation brought by the drilling and transportation of oil, without gaining any of the economic benefits, primarily because they have never been powerful enough to figure in the ethnic spoils system by which Nigeria has been governed since its civil war in the 1960s. Saro-Wiwa was leading a campaign against Shell and the Nigerian regime when four Ogoni elders were killed in the course of a demonstration. Though Saro-Wiwa was not present at the demonstration, and though there was never any convincing proof of his complicity in the murders, which were widely attributed to the government itself, he was arrested, held without bail, tried by a special military tribunal, and finally hanged, despite worldwide protests.1
Saro-Wiwa had been a very popular writer, creator of a successful television series, and an unremitting satirical scourge of successive Nigerian governments, but he was not executed because of his writings. The struggle leading to his death and the outrage following it centered on ecology and oil politics rather than on literature, and in the years since his execution, relatively little attention has been paid to a body of writing that includes the television plays collected as Basi and Company, the satirical works Prisoners of Jebs and Pita Dumbrok’s Prison, a novel, several volumes of poems and folk tales, and a series of journalistic reports on “anomic Nigeria.”2 This inattention represents a missed opportunity for postcolonial literary studies in the United States, which would seem to have a particular stake in the work of an Anglophone writer who was also an international spokesman for minority rights, but it also tends to impoverish political analysis of Saro-Wiwa’s campaign and his fate. Together, Saro-Wiwa’s writing and his activism raised questions about Nigerian national self-representation that have yet to be answered, despite recent changes in the Nigerian government. As he was led away from the third of the four botched attempts to hang him, Saro- Wiwa cried out, “What sort of a nation is this?” Wole Soyinka insists that this is a question that Saro-Wiwa’s case poses in quite a literal sense, for the act of judicial murder that took his life was coincident with the loss of national selfdetermination, even national identity, suffered as the electoral system in Nigeria was frustrated by governmental fiat.3 More generally, though, Saro-Wiwa’s campaign on behalf of minority rights demanded a reexamination of the ways in which Nigeria had imagined itself as a nation. Showing how the Ogoni had been left out of the oil boom, had in fact been impoverished by it, Saro-Wiwa punctured the pretense of national unity that oil had made possible and exposed the reality of private aggrandizement within it. Saro-Wiwa’s writings, even those such as Basi and Company that were created primarily as entertainment, always address the issue of national identity, but the most significant of these works, the novel Sozaboy, actually proposes, in the very language that it uses, an alternative model of national self-representation.
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Notes
- For a particularly vivid and gruesome account of the execution of Saro-Wiwa and his eight “coconspirators,” see Joshua Hammer, “The Making of a Legend,” Newsweek 126 (18 December 1995), 47. Saro-Wiwa’s final statement to the military tribunal that condemned him is reprinted as Saro- Wiwa, “Final Statement to the Tribunal” in Social Justice 23, no. 4 (1996): 7; his account of a previous detention is given in Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary (New York: Penguin, 1995). He spells out his case against Shell in greatest detail in Saro-Wiwa, Genocide in Nigeria: The Ogoni Tragedy (London: Saros International, 1992).
- Ken Saro-Wiwa, Basi and Company: Four Television Plays (Port Harcourt, Nigeria: Saros International, 1988); Saro-Wiwa, Prisoners of Jebs (Port Harcourt, Nigeria: Saros International, 1988); Saro-Wiwa, Pita Dumbrok’s Prison (London: Saros International, 1991). The phrase “anomic Nigeria” is taken from the subtitle of Saro-Wiwa’s Similia: Essays on Anomic Nigeria (London: Saros International, 1991). Two memorial collections have appeared since Saro-Wiwa’s death. Abdul Rasheed Na’Allah, ed., Ogoni’s Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1998) includes Harry Garuba’s discussion of Sozaboy, “Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy and the Logic of Minority Discourse,” and Adetayo Alabi’s “Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Politics of Language in African Literature,” among a much larger number of essays and memorials that concentrate on Saro-Wiwa’s political activities. Craig W. McLuckie and Aubrey McPhail, eds., Ken Saro- Wiwa: Writer and Political Activist (Boulder, Colo.: Lynn Rienner, 2000) includes a larger and more varied discussion of Saro-Wiwa’s writings. In particular, see the essay by Maureen N. Eke entitled “Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English.” Outside of such memorial volumes, attention to Saro-Wiwa’s writings has been virtually nonexistent.
- Wole Soyinka, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 149.