William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

After the war he stayed in government for a number of years before he abandoned politics and went into business in 1973.

“I was writing before that,” he says, “and I had published two books of poetry, but in 1973 I decided to stop writing and turn to commerce.” He became a general merchant and ran a grocery store, selling imported foodstuffs and kitchen equipment. He worked hard and his business grew. The profits he made were invested in property. After ten years he was a wealthy man with a comfortable income. “You have no idea how hard I worked in those years,” he says, a flicker of retrospective exhaustion crossing his face. The money was in the bank; it was time to return to his writing career.

The efforts of the seventeen years since then have been no less prodigious. In addition to Basi & Co., Mr Saro-Wiwa has written three novels, two volumes of short stories, a volume of autobiography and six children’s books.

They are all published, moreover, by himself, with Saros International Publishers, head office in Ewell, Surrey. Mr Saro-Wiwa prints and publishes the books in England and exports them to Nigeria. The entrepreneurial drive has not been entirely abandoned. “How many copies do you sell?” I ask. He laughs. “That’s a trade secret.”

Mr Saro-Wiwa is a spry man who does not look his age. His demeanour is genial and amused, quietly self-assured. He does not appear driven or manically energetic, yet his workload is astonishing. On top of his business, television and publishing interests, he also has a reputation as one of Nigeria’s fiercest political journalists, writing a weekly column in the local Daily Times. I ask him how he sees himself now, how he would describe himself. “A publisher, I suppose,” he says.

Mr Saro-Wiwa’s most extraordinary novel, which he published in 1985, is called Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. It is a story told by a young conscript caught up in the horrors of the Biafran war and is written in a blend of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and occasional limpid passages of correct idiomatic English. It has no rules and no syntax and, as Mr Saro-Wiwa observes, it thrives on lawlessness.

The effect at first seems too complex and discordant, but gradually the rhythms and expressive potential of this “rotten English” begin to take hold with remarkable force and impact. In this book, the demotic soul is given a unique literary voice.

Somehow, Mr Saro-Wiwa keeps all these various literary balls up in the air. His energy is fuelled by two extra ingredients not normally associated with writers, let alone soap opera producers.

The first is a strong pedagogic inclination: Mr Saro-Wiwa wants to show his audience and readers how to improve themselves. The implication is clear: African writers today rarely write for their own populations. “They’re published in London or New York.”

Mr Saro-Wiwa loves Nigeria and enjoys his life there. He makes it sound an extraordinary place. This is a country where anything is possible, he claims, however he is not sanguine about the return to civilian rule in 1992. “There will be a short civilian period, then the military will take over again,” he says. “We need an enlightened despot.” What about Nigeria’s bad image abroad? “It’s just lousy PR by the government.” He enthuses further about the astonishing freedoms in the country; anything can be done, he says, anything is possible and at the same time claims that it is the Nigerian people who actively encourage the military to take over when things get out of hand. Hearing him talking so enthusiastically about Lagos, say, he makes the place sound like Barcelona or pre-Castro Havana.

“Oh, Lagos is not so bad,” he says with a smile. “Things go wrong, sure. But there’s a lot of fun to be had there, too. A lot of fun.”

1990

“Although, everybody in Dukana was happy at first” is the wonderful and audacious opening line of a wonderful and audacious novel. By the novel’s conclusion, however, this sentence’s disarming grammar and its minatory simplicity (what does that “at first” portend?) have taken on more sinister and melancholy hues. One has learned that this is the beginning of a story about innocence brutally lost and of a consolatory wisdom only fleetingly and partially grasped. The incomprehension — and the profound sadness — are gathered there in those few words; the inspired, odd displacement of “Although” carries a new poignancy.

Sozaboy is a war novel, the narrative of one young man’s helpless and hapless journey through a terrifying African war. Although — it is curious how the word has changed, somehow, charged with its Sozaboy freight — Ken Saro-Wiwa does not specify it is in fact set during a particular and precise conflict, namely the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70, also known as the Biafran war. Unusually for an African conflict, it was one that figured prominently on British television screens. Nigeria was a former colony (independence had been granted seven years previously) and Britain had powerful vested interests there. The British government’s support — material and diplomatic — was firmly behind the Federal Government, led by General Gowon, and against the secessionist eastern states, known as Biafra, led by Colonel Ojukwu. There were no clear-cut heroes or villains in this conflict, and culpability can be equally distributed; but with hindsight one can see that the decision of the eastern states to secede made war — and also eventual defeat — inevitable. That the war lasted as long as it did, and that it caused as much misery and suffering (over a million died, mostly civilians, mostly from disease and starvation in the shrinking, blockaded heartland that was Biafra), is a result of many familiar factors: heroic tenacity, woeful stupidity, tactical blunders, difficult terrain, muddle and confusion, extended supply lines and so on. Anyone who requires an overview of this almost forgotten war should read The Struggle for Secession by N. U. Akpan, the best account that I know. Histories of the war are very thin on the ground or otherwise ponderously, not to say ludicrously, partisan; Nigerian novelists have been swifter off the mark and truer to this bleak chapter in their country’s history, and there are fine and moving works of fiction by Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri (among others) which treat of the conflict. But in my opinion Sozaboy remains the war’s enduring literary monument.

Ken Saro-Wiwa is from eastern Nigeria, a member of the Ogoni tribe. The outbreak of war in 1967 trapped him within the new boundaries of the Biafran state. It is important to establish that not all easterners wanted to secede from the Nigerian federation. Colonel Ojukwu was an Ibo, the dominant tribe in eastern Nigeria. When he declared Biafra independent, “Ibo” and “Biafra” were not at all synonymous: like it or not, some thirty or so other ethnic groups were included in the new country. Like it or not, these other tribes found themselves at war against Nigeria.

This fact explains much that is intentionally fuzzy about the novel. No one seems to understand why war is impending or why it breaks out. No one seems really sure why they are fighting or against whom: they are designated simply as “the enemy.” To many eastern Nigerians caught up in the Biafran net, the motives for war and the nature of their adversaries must have seemed equally vague. Sozaboy — as the hero, Mene, is dubbed (“Soza” means “soldier”) — is one such uncertain conscript and he meanders through the novel in an almost permanent state of ignorance; clarity beckoning from time to time only to be occluded promptly. This is a state of mind familiar to all front-line soldiers, but to the many non-Ibos dragooned into the Biafran army there must have been an extra degree of obfuscation.