Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Ken Saro-Wiwa (2)

“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.

Ken Saro-Wiwa was one who perceived the absurdity and injustice of fighting another man’s secessionist war. He escaped through the front lines to the federal side and was appointed civilian administrator of the crucial oil-port of Bonny on the Niger River Delta (he has written of his own experiences in the civil war in his fine autobiography, On a Darkling Plain), where he served until the final collapse of the secessionist forces, marked by the flight of Colonel Ojukwu to the Ivory Coast in January 1970. I lived in Nigeria during the Biafran war and can testify to the novel’s authentic feel. The war did seem that crazy, that surreal and haphazard. But any reader will experience the same undeniable reek of life as it comes off the page. Sozaboy is vivid with the special authority of personal experience.

It is also vivid with a language of uncommon idiosyncrasy and character. Saro-Wiwa subtitles the novel as “A Novel in Rotten English.” Rotten English, as he explains, is a blend of pidgin English (the lingua franca of the West African ex-colonies), corrupted English and “occasional flashes of good, even idiomatic English.” In other words, the language of the novel is a unique literary construct. No one in Nigeria actually speaks or writes like this but the style functions in the novel extraordinarily well. Sozaboy’s narration is at times raunchily funny as well as lyrical and moving, and as the terror of his predicament steadily manifests itself, the small but colourful vocabulary of his idiolect paradoxically manages to capture all the numbing ghastliness of war far more effectively than a more expansive eloquence. It helps to hear the rhythms of a Nigerian accent in your ear as you read, but even if that cannot be reproduced, the cadences of the prose take over after a few lines or so and this remarkable tone of voice holds the reader’s attention absolutely. Some obscure words or phrases are explained in a glossary, but one is never in any doubt about what is going on, and the sheer freshness and immediacy of the subjective point of view are exhilarating. Here Sozaboy visits a local dive:

So, one night, after I have finished bathing, I put powder and scent and went to African Upwine Bar. This African Upwine Bar is in interior part of Diobu. Inside inside. We used to call this Diobu New York. I think you know New York. In America. As people plenty for am, na so dem plenty for Diobu too. Like cockroach. And true true cockroach plenty for Diobu too. Everywhere, like the men. And if you go inside the African Upwine Bar you will see plenty cockroach man and proper cockroach too. Myself, I like the African Upwine Bar. Because you fit drink better palmy there. Fine palmy of three or four days old.

This mode of literary demotic is a highly impressive achievement. Saro-Wiwa has both invented and captured a voice here, one not only bracingly authentic but also capable of many fluent and telling registers. I cannot think of another example where the English language has been so engagingly and skilfully hijacked — or perhaps “colonized” would be a better word. Indeed, throughout the novel, Saro-Wiwa exploits Rotten English with delicate and consummate skill. We see everything through Sozaboy’s naive eyes, and his hampered vision — even in the face of the most shocking sights — is reproduced through inevitable understatement. Sozaboy’s vocabulary simply cannot encompass the strange concepts he encounters or the fearful enormity of what he is undergoing. Yet these silences, these occlusions and fumblings for expression exert a marvellous power. Here a fifth-columnist has been undermining the new recruits’ shaky morale:

So that night Manmuswak did not spend long time with us. After some time he told us that we must be careful because nobody can know when the war will come reach our front. So we told him goodnight, and he began to go away, small small like tall snake passing through the bush, making small noise.

The threat of impending disaster has never been more economically or chillingly conveyed.

Sozaboy’s nightmare picaresque begins when, full of zeal to impress his new wife Agnes, he decides to join up and become a “Soza.” It is the uniform he is really after, hungry for the esteem it will confer on him in his village, where he is only an apprentice lorry driver. The downward spiral of his fortunes in the army — boredom, mutiny, punishment, battle and capture — depresses and mortifies him, but he somehow never loses his fundamental ebullience, his innocent joie de vivre. He reminds me of another classic of African literature, Mr Johnson in Joyce Cary’s novel of the same name. Like Mr Johnson, Sozaboy knows shame and humiliation, and like Mr Johnson it is his resilient spirit and the thought of his young wife that spur him on to greater endeavours no matter what desperate straits he finds himself in. But Sozaboy is also an African Candide and this is where Ken Saro-Wiwa’s novel takes on dimensions that are absent in Joyce Cary’s. Mr Johnson is a great character, as is Sozaboy, but — like Voltaire’s Candide — Sozaboy is also an archetype and a victim in a way that Mr Johnson is not. Malign forces pluck up Sozaboy, whirl him around and deposit him in a heap, his spirit almost crushed, his village ruined, his family slaughtered, his prospects negligible. One needs only to glance at the recent history of Africa to see how paradigmatic Sozaboy’s story is: young men in uniforms, clutching their AK47s, spread fear and desolation, march and die all over the continent.

At the novel’s end, Sozaboy contemplates the destruction that has been wreaked on his life and reflects:

I was thinking how I was prouding before to go to soza and call myself Sozaboy. But now if anybody say anything about war or even fight, I will just run and run and run and run and run. Believe me yours sincerely.

Heartfelt and timeless thoughts, any simple bathos undercut by the astute final sentence, where the half-remembered formal valediction (the words are vapid and empty at the end of a letter) takes on an unfamiliar fervency and gravitas in its new and bitter context.

Sozaboy is a novel born out of harsh personal experience, but shaped with a masterful and sophisticated artistry despite its apparent rough-hewn guilelessness. With equal skill and deftness, it also carries a profound moral message that extends beyond its particular time and setting. Sozaboys are legion, and their lives are being destroyed everywhere on the planet. Sozaboy is not simply a great African novel, it is also a great anti-war novel, among the very best the twentieth century has produced.

1994