William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

But we — the key conspirators and 21 Publishing — decided to present the book absolutely straight, deadpan. People had to be seduced — deluded — at first in order for the plan to work. The Sunday Telegraph joined the inner circle — an extract would be published, again in deadpan, orthodox manner, on the arts pages. Launch parties were planned, a week apart, in New York and London. We synchronized our responses and waited to see what would happen.

My own expectations were that we would experience a form of slowly mounting scepticism ending, on our part, in candid confession. But in fact the projected slow burn became a loud detonation when a journalist on the Independent , who had overheard two conspirators’ loose tongues wagging, decided to blow the whole thing wide open.

I wasn’t there. When the “hoax” was exposed I was in Paris promoting the French edition of my new novel, Armadillo , hearing everything at second hand. The unspooling of the Nat Tate story was always intended to be something far more subtle and intriguing, but I must confess to a strange frisson when I read, in Paris, an account of the affair in the Herald Tribune . There was the name “Nat Tate” printed in bold alongside other celebrities — Eva Perón, Jimmy Stewart, the Rolling Stones. Perhaps, I thought, poor Nat would, in a curious way, endure — and Nat Tate would have a sort of life, after all.

1998

I was born in Africa (in Ghana) and for the first twenty years of my life regarded it unreflectingly as my home. I felt far more at ease in Ibadan, for example, the regional capital of western Nigeria, than I did in Edinburgh, the city nearest my family’s home in Scotland, where we went on two months’ leave each year — as the rainy season drenched equatorial Africa — to enjoy a showery Scottish summer. So, as I started to write fiction, it seemed entirely natural for me to set that fiction in the continent that, in a way, had both nurtured and fired my imagination.

As a result of this I have found myself perceived as an expert or potential commentator on all things African and have been asked to review books on subjects as varied as the Fashoda Incident, the exploration of the Sahara, the apartheid regime in South Africa and the civil war in Sierra Leone. By and large I have readily complied, and in the process have learned a lot.

But Ghana and Nigeria are the only countries I can claim to know well at first hand and Nigeria, where I spent my teens, provided me with most of the raw African material that I transmuted into my novels and short stories. It also provided me with a friend in the shape of the Nigerian writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and through him, inadvertently, to a saddening connection with ruthless Nigerian politics that I had never expected or sought.

I wrote a great deal about Ken Saro-Wiwa over the years and the articles selected here reproduce the bitter trajectory of his life from contented and successful writer to inspiring political activist, to stubborn prisoner, to condemned man, to the executed victim of a repressive regime.

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. The latest population estimate is 100 million and rising. Yet every Wednesday evening at 8.30, about a third of that vast population sits down in front of its television sets to watch a particular soap opera.

They are enthralled, they are obsessed with it, and they laugh. This is a comedy, pointed and unsparing, scabrous and overtly moral. What makes the whole phenomenon singular and bizarre is that the audience is laughing at itself. This is not some sanitized, deodorized version of family or community life, or some farcical ad-man’s sitcom; this is a soap opera about corruption and graft, about idleness and self-delusion, about futile dreams and impossible aspirations. It is a soap opera about what not to do with your life.

The man who created this is a forty-nine-year-old Nigerian writer called Ken Saro-Wiwa. When I mention the viewing figures he smiles wryly. “You wouldn’t think it an unreasonable conclusion to draw … that as the writer and producer of a television programme that has run to 156 episodes with an average audience of 30 million, I would have made a fortune,” he says.

“Well, yes.”

“Well, you’d be wrong.”

“But you do break even?” I venture, somewhat amazed.

“Not yet.” He shrugs, and smiles again. “Maybe one day.”

Perhaps this is the most extraordinary feature of a most extraordinary enterprise: Mr Saro-Wiwa is not in this for the money. Mr Saro-Wiwa, and I say this with genuine admiration, is not bothered by being in the red. The forces that impel him to make and pay for his soap opera have nothing to do with the profit motive.

The programme in question is called Basi & Co., and although there has never been an official assessment, viewing figures of that size must make it a contender for the world’s most watched television serial.

The idea itself stemmed from a radio play Mr Saro-Wiwa wrote in the early seventies called The Transistor Radio, about an inept conman in Lagos who tries to rip people off by posing as a collector of fees for transistor radio licences.

He was invited by the director of programmes of Nigerian Television to produce a television series of thirteen episodes. He took the characters from his radio play and assembled a troupe of actors to perform his scripts and went into production.

The first episodes were screened in October 1985. Since then, Mr Saro-Wiwa has written the series, produced it, paid the salaries of the cast and crew and has sold the finished programmes to Nigerian Television and the thirty-five local television stations.

Five years later, Basi & Co. has established a place in the national Nigerian consciousness as firmly and redoubtably as Coronation Street or Dallas in other countries. As with any soap opera or sitcom, the central cast of characters inhabit a precise location, in this case Adetola Street in Lagos. The series features half a dozen key personalities, but the eponymous hero is Basi, or Mr B, as he refers to himself. Mr B is an idle, likeable rogue who is powerfully convinced that the world most definitely owes him a living. His personal motto which he has printed on the red T-shirt he invariably wears is, “To be a millionaire, think like a millionaire.” Basi’s dreams are always almost about to be realized.

Almost, but not quite. True, Basi’s vulgar aspirations are timeless and perennial, shared by all lovable rogues, from Barry Lyndon to Basil Seal, but Mr Saro-Wiwa’s objective is not solely to entertain. For it seems clear that the series has succeeded so emphatically precisely because it holds a mirror up to Nigerian society. It is a soap opera fuelled and driven by vehement satire and moral indignation rather than the usual lures of vapid wish fulfilment, folksy low-life homilies or squeaky-clean fantasies of impossible communities. In five years, Basi & Co. has become a Nigerian phenomenon, as, indeed, has its only begetter.

Mr Saro-Wiwa was born in 1941 in the River State in the south-east of Nigeria, near the Niger delta. He won scholarships to a respected secondary school and to the University of Ibadan, where he read English literature. He was a post-graduate when the Nigerian civil war broke out. As the Biafran rebel enclave steadily shrank, Mr Saro-Wiwa escaped to the federal side and was appointed civilian administrator of the crucial oil port of Bonny, a post he held for the rest of the war. (His most recent book, On a Darkling Plain, deals with this portion of his life.)