Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Africa

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.