Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Ken Saro-Wiwa (1)

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.)

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