William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Ken was not only a publisher but a businessman (in the grocery trade); a celebrated political journalist, with a particularly trenchant and swingeing style; and, I discovered, a prolific writer of novels, plays, poems and children’s books (mostly published by him). He was, in addition, the highly successful writer and producer of Nigeria’s most popular TV soap opera, Basi & Co., which ran for 150-odd episodes in the mid eighties and was reputedly Africa’s most watched soap opera, with an audience of up to 30 million. Basi and his cronies were a bunch of feckless Lagos wide-boys who, indigent and lazy, did nothing but hatch inept schemes for becoming rich. Although funny and wincingly accurate, the show was also unashamedly pedagogic. What was wrong with Basi and his chums was wrong with Nigeria: none of them wanted to work, and they all acted as though the world owed them a living; if that couldn’t be acquired by fair means foul ones would do just as well. This was soap opera as a form of civic education.

Whenever Ken passed through London, we’d meet for lunch, usually in the Chelsea Arts Club. His wife and four children lived in England — the children attended school there — so he was a regular visitor. And, though I wrote a profile of him for the London Times (Ken was trying to get his books distributed in Britain), our encounters were mainly those of two writers with a lot in common, hanging out for a highly agreeable, bibulous hour or three.

Ken’s writing was remarkably various, covering almost all genres. Sozaboy, in my opinion his greatest work, is subtitled A Novel in Rotten English and is written in a unique combination of pidgin English, the lingua franca of the former West African British colonies, and an English that is, in its phrases and sentences, altogether more classical and lyrical. The language is a form of literary demotic, a benign hijacking of English, and a perfect vehicle for the story it tells, of a simple village boy recruited into the Biafran army during the Nigerian civil war. The boy has dreamed of being a soldier (a soza ), but the harsh realities of this brutal conflict send him into a dizzying spiral of cruel disillusion. Sozaboy is not simply a great African novel but also a great antiwar novel — among the very best of the twentieth century.

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.