Dr. Owens Wiwa walked behind his brother's coffin, worrying like an old woman. On this sweltering Easter Monday morning, it seemed as though all of Ogoniland had come to pay its respects - tens of thousands of people crowded into the little African village of Bane, in the Niger Delta; an excitable, turbulent throng, jockeying for a glimpse of the casket. Owens knew that this would not be the small, private funeral service his brother Ken Saro-Wiwa had requested.
The funeral procession slowly parted the crowds as Owens's niece Zina, holding a large crucifix of hibiscus flowers, led the cortège. Behind the pallbearers, her twin sister, Noo, held aloft a large colour photograph of their father in a golden frame. Ken's eldest son, Ken Wiwa, Jr., followed next in his role as chief mourner, as custom dictated, leading his uncle Owens and the rest of the immediate family toward the church.
The little cinder-block Anglican chapel had been packed for more than an hour with journalists and groggy villagers who had been up all night dancing, singing, and drumming at the funeral vigil. Thousands of their fellow tribesmen crowded around the open windows and doors and spilled into the adjacent fields, fanning themselves with hastily printed church bulletins that stated the ceremony would commence with the "Reception of the Corpse at the entrance of the West Door."
But everyone knew there was no corpse. This was a symbolic funeral, a gesture of reconciliation, not the real thing.
For the past five years, the bones of Ken
Saro-Wiwa - the celebrated author, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and human-rights activist - have
lain in a secret, unmarked grave, mingled with the remains of the eight other men who were
hanged with him. Before his execution by the Nigerian dictator General Sani Abacha in 1995,
Ken Saro-Wiwa had spent seventeen years leading protests against the destructive consequences
of multinational oil operations in Ogoniland, and, more recently, against the brutal oppression of
his people by Nigeria's military regime. Saro-Wiwa's execution sparked international outrage and
led to Nigeria's suspension from the Commonwealth. It also forced Saro-Wiwa's younger brother
Owens, reluctantly, into the spotlight.
Owens Wiwa, who came to Canada as a refugee in 1996, is now a research coordinator at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. He's a short, stocky man with wide-set eyes and a shy smile. He bears an uncanny resemblance to his famous older brother and is considered by many Ogoni to be Ken's successor, more so even than Ken Wiwa, Jr., a journalist, who also now lives and works in Toronto.
"I remember my father saying, 'Get involved in the struggle because heroes will be born of it,' " Ken Jr. recalls. "My uncle Owens is a hero of the struggle. He's a very passionate believer, determined to see it through with all his energies. Sometimes it makes me feel inadequate in some way, because I don't have the same passion for it."
Owens, too, is haunted by feelings of inadequacy. Soft-spoken and studious by nature, he was very different from his messianic older sibling and his urbane, more aloof nephew. Undoubtedly, it was hard to be the younger brother of Ken Saro-Wiwa. And yet, to keep Ken's memory and message alive, Owens has fashioned himself into a tireless crusader for environmental protection and human rights. As vice-chairman of the Eastern Canada chapter of the Sierra Club and an active member of Amnesty International, he is frequently called upon around the world as a public speaker.
"You put Owens up on a podium and the man rocks," says Stephen Mills, director of the Sierra Club's International Program. "Here was someone trained as a doctor and thrust into the role of an activist. I don't think he ever expected to be the one on the podium rallying crowds. Still, he does a phenomenal job of translating the horrendous issues happening in Nigeria for North Americans. He knows how to move an audience."
Owens's wife, Diana Barikor-Wiwa, understands better than anyone how tragedy has changed Owens's character. "He was a quiet country doctor with his little practice and then one day he found himself in the middle of this huge movement," she says. "Now in Ogoni he's mentioned in about five different folk songs."
For the last year, Owens Wiwa has been lobbying Nigeria's new democratically elected regime to have Ken's remains returned to the family for a proper burial. But so far, the quest has been futile, a disappointment made more poignant by the fact that Owens had also tried, before he fled Nigeria, to save his brother's life.
"There are still some individuals who have very strong feelings against my brother," Owens said after the funeral. "These are very powerful individuals. Some are in government, some are businessmen who deal with oil companies, and some are the traditional elites and rulers who don't want to change. It's been very taxing emotionally, the way people have behaved. And for what? For bones."
From his father's balcony, he looked out over his native village and said quietly, "The politics of bones is a very strange thing."
*
The six kingdoms of the
Ogoni - Gokana, Ken-Khana, Nyo-Khana, Eleme, Babbe, and Tai - are situated in the southeast
corner of Nigeria's Rivers State in the heart of the densely populated Niger River Delta. A tribe
of fishermen and farmers, the Ogoni are a relatively small ethnic group, numbering no more
than half a million.
Chief Jim Beeson ("Pa") Wiwa was among the most prosperous landowners in the little Ken-Khana village of Bane (pronounced bah-nay). Pa Wiwa, ninety-six, is a happily avowed polygamist with seven wives, five of whom are still living. In 1941, wife number two, Jessica Widu, bore his first son, Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa. In Ogoni, the prefix "Saro" means eldest son. Sixteen years to the day after having Ken, Jessica gave birth to Monday Owens Wiwa, her third son, who became known simply as "Mon."
In 1958, when Mon was one year old, Royal Dutch Shell began extracting oil in Ogoniland through a joint venture with the government. Over the next thirty-five years, this venture - in which the government was a majority partner and Shell the largest private partner - produced 634 million barrels of oil worth $30 billion (U.S.). (Chevron, Mobil, Texaco, British Petroleum, Agip of Italy, and Elf of France also have operations in the Delta and offshore, but their combined presence is dwarfed by Shell's.)
The first rumbling of discontent occurred in April, 1970, when a group of Ogoni chiefs handed a petition to the military governor of Rivers State complaining that Shell, at the time operating in a joint venture with BP, was "seriously threatening the well-being and even the very lives" of the Ogoni. Shell responded, saying that, "We have . . . been extremely careful to ensure that our operations cause minimal disturbance to the people. . . . There can be no doubt, however, that the incidental benefits accruing to [the Ogoni] from Shell-BP's presence there greatly outweigh any disadvantages."
The "incidental benefits" were
incidental indeed. Despite the vast wealth being extracted from their land, the Ogoni continued
to live in poverty. Successive military governments have kept the area severely
underdeveloped. There were few roads and almost no electricity
and running water available to the Ogoni. The oil revenue enriched only a select few; today,
with a per-capita gross national product of only $390, Nigeria is one of the poorest countries in
the world.
As for "minimal disturbance," the Ogoni claimed that the oil extraction had turned their once abundant kingdoms into an ecological wasteland, with air reeking of sulphur, water holes and creeks poisoned with oil, and a night sky turned to perpetual twilight by gas flares.
Shell insisted that allegations of environmental devastation in Ogoniland were untrue. "Any industrial enterprise, including oil operations, has an impact on the environment, and this is true in Ogoni," Shell said in an official statement, blaming problems in the area on "the rapidly expanding population which has caused deforestation, erosion, and over-farming leading to degraded soil."
Although Shell now says it has begun an "intensive program of burying pipelines," the reality until a few years ago was different. Television and film crews documented how the company had laid high-pressure crude-oil pipelines over Nigerian farmlands and through the hearts of villages, in some cases literally across the doorsteps of Ogoni homes. During a fifteen-year period, official figures recorded an average of four oil spills per week in the Delta. Shell claims that many of the spills were the result of sabotage; the Ogoni say most of them were caused by equipment failure and corrosion. Shell has, however, admitted to burning off two billion standard cubic feet of gas a day in the Niger Delta, and according to an investigative report in the Independent in December, 1995, the area emits 35 million tons of carbon dioxide and 12 million tons of methane a year, making it the world's largest single contributor to global warming.
*
When Owens was still a
child, his brother Ken, a university student at the time, wrote a number of anonymous letters to
government-controlled newspapers and to Shell about the situation in Ogoniland. In the early
eighties, Ken began receiving international attention as a political journalist and author of
novels, plays, poems, and children's books. But it was television that made him a celebrity.
From 1985 to 1990, he wrote, produced, directed, and acted in Nigeria's most popular tv
sit-com, Basi & Co., which attracted an audience of up to 30 million viewers each
week.
By 1990, Ken had given up his career to devote himself full-time to lobbying for the Ogoni cause. He helped found a non-violent action group called the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). The group called for greater autonomy within Nigeria and a greater share of the oil revenues. Content to leave the leadership of the movement to the Ogoni "elites," Ken became a MOSOP spokesperson at home and abroad.
While Ken was throwing himself into the struggle, Owens was studying medicine in Calabar, a city in eastern Nigeria, and then in England, specializing in respiratory ailments. After a brief stint in the Rivers State ministry of health, he set up a clinic at Bori, in the heart of Ogoniland. There, he witnessed an alarming increase in cases of asthma, bronchitis, and skin disease. "This happened at the same time MOSOP was gaining awareness," says Owens. "I had known about the movement for about a year, but I didn't join it until later, when I saw that what they were demanding could prevent the illnesses I was struggling to treat."
Owens joined MOSOP in 1992,
becoming the chair of the movement's Social Welfare and Health Committee. At a rally several
months later, he met Diana Barikor, a university student and MOSOP organizer. After a brief
courtship, Owens and Diana married and settled in Bori, in Ogoniland, where he continued to
run his little clinic, a two-storey building with about twenty beds.
Soon, however, the treatment of chronic disease would take a back seat to dealing with the more immediate consequences of political violence. In December, 1992, MOSOP, frustrated by the lack of response to its demands, issued an ultimatum to Shell, Chevron, and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. It called for $6 billion in back rent and royalties and $4 billion compensation for environmental devastation. MOSOP said that if it got no response within thirty days, it would take that to mean the oil companies intended to pull out.
There was no reply, and a month later, a
Shell worker was badly beaten. Shell announced it was pulling out of Ogoniland to avoid placing
its workers at risk, though contractors continued working there on the company's behalf until
mid-1993, when the company ceased production in the area. But during that half-year period,
pumping stations were left on automatic, gas flares continued to burn, no repairs were made, and
oil spills were left untouched. In late April, while an American contracting firm was laying new
pipelines for Shell, about 10,000 Ogoni held four days of peaceful demonstrations to protest the
construction. The government brought in soldiers to disperse the crowds. One of the protesters
was shot dead.
In his medical practice, Owens was
seeing more and more evidence of the violence. "Within the period between February, 1993, and
May, 1994, I probably treated more than fifteen hundred patients who were victims of everything
from gunshot wounds to those forcibly raped and beaten up," he says.
Tensions in the Delta increased when
Ken Saro-Wiwa was arrested and charged with sedition in June, 1993. After a month of
international pressure by Amnesty and
other groups, he was released on bail. The Nigerian government dispatched soldiers to
Ogoniland, and on July 30 the Ogoni police were mysteriously withdrawn from the area. Five
days later, the Ogoni
town of Kaa was attacked and destroyed. More than thirty people were killed and 8,000 were
left homeless. The military described the incident as an "ethnic clash" between the Ogoni and
their neighbours, the Andoni. (Eyewitnesses claim the Andoni were armed by
the Nigerian military.) That fall, ten more Ogoni villages were brutally set upon by
unidentified attackers; 750 people were killed and 30,000 were left homeless. (Shell denies
knowledge of, involvement in, or financial contributions to, any military operations in Ogoni.)
Frantic with worry, Diana went out into
the night to find someone to drive her to Port Harcourt. At 4 a.m. she and a friend were
stopped at a police roadblock and ordered out of the car. When the police learned she was the
wife of Dr. Monday Wiwa, one officer sneered and said, "Oh, she's married to that
troublemaker." The policeman raised his rifle and ordered Diana to throw herself into a nearby
pond that was polluted with oil. Diana
refused and put up a struggle. When the officer pressed the barrel of his rifle into her
pregnant abdomen, she felt the first contractions of premature labour.
A week later Owens, still in detention,
was interviewed by Major Paul Okuntimo of Rivers State Internal Security. Okuntimo
suggested that Owens have MOSOP "remove" a Shell executive who wasn't making his bribe
payments and, moreover, was impeding the clean-up and compensation for the Ogoni. Owens
replied that MOSOP didn't do things like that. (Shell says that all charges of bribery are
investigated, and any staff found engaged in corrupt practices are dismissed.)
Owens was released almost
immediately after this discussion. When his mother-in-law came to pick him up, he asked
about Diana.
"They're fine," said Diana's mother.
"What do you mean 'they'?" Owens
said. "I only have one wife."
"You have a child," she said. "A son."
Befii Saro-Wiwa had been born
at gunpoint.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, meanwhile, was
becoming increasingly frustrated with MOSOP's lack of progress. He suspected that the group's
leaders, who were less strident than he, were willing to negotiate a compromise with Shell and
the military. Unable to gain direct control of MOSOP, he began building an alternative power
base among community groups.
In April, patients started coming into Owens's clinic in Bori with gunshot and machete
wounds, saying they had been attacked by Nigerian soldiers. "There were so many I ran out of
sutures and intravenous drip," says Owens.
Instructing an ambulance to follow
him, Owens set off for Port
Harcourt for new supplies. He didn't get very far: the roads were filled with terrified people
who told him that soldiers were shooting and burning their villages. Owens contacted a local
journalist and drove him to a village called Oloko. "All the houses were still burning and we
counted at least five bodies on the roadside," Owens says. "I was so angry I drove to an army
checkpoint to ask them what was going on."
At the checkpoint, Owens, the
journalist, and the ambulance attendants were ordered out of their vehicles, searched, and then
instructed to turn around and face the forest. As the soldiers aimed their guns, Owens heard a
man shout, "You can't shoot them when I'm here!"
The voice belonged to a policeman
whose daughter Owens had been treating for sickle-cell anemia. The officer quarrelled with
the
soldiers and eventually persuaded them to arrest the doctor and his companions instead of
killing them. They were driven to an army camp and held in a cramped and filthy holding area
along with hundreds
of other Ogoni men and young
boys. Although Owens's companions were soon let go, Ken had to campaign vigorously for
his brother's
release, enlisting the aid of Amnesty International and the Catholic Daughters of Charity.
Two weeks later, Owens was back in his clinic. About this time, an unsigned pamphlet of dubious origin with
the headline "News Flash," began making the rounds in Ogoniland accusing Shell of having
promised the moderate MOSOP leaders $4.5 million if they destroyed their organization and
Ken Saro-Wiwa. The moderates, decried as "vultures" in the pamphlet, denied accepting
money from Shell and said the pamphlet put their lives in danger.
On May 21, 1994, four of the moderate
Ogoni leaders, who were meeting at the palace of the chief of the Gokana district of
Ogoniland, were set upon by a mob chanting "vulture, vulture," and were beaten to death with
clubs. Though Ken Saro-Wiwa had been prevented by
a police roadblock from entering Ogoniland earlier that day, the military accused him of
having incited the attack. He was arrested along with MOSOP vice-president Ledum Mitee and
several others. They were held without charge, clamped in leg irons, and tortured.
When Owens learned of Ken's arrest,
he made the ten-hour drive to Lagos to confer with a lawyer. While he was there, he learned
from the papers that he was number one on the list of suspects the police were seeking to
apprehend for the same crime. He immediately went underground.
Although Owens's picture had not been
in the papers, his appearance
was a problem. He looked too much like the famous brother everyone knew from television.
A new beard helped only a little. He also stopped using his first name, Monday.
Though in hiding, he remained in
contact with Ken through letters that Diana smuggled back and forth from the jail in Befii's
diapers. In these letters, the brothers bolstered each other's spirits and planned a desperate
publicity campaign. "I was very
active," says Owens. "I was meeting with human-rights groups, environmental groups, church
leaders, and all the western embassies in Nigeria, telling them the truth so that they could
pressure for Ken's release." The response to the campaign was overwhelming. Groups such as
pen International, Amnesty, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and Human Rights Watch
condemned the Nigerian military and turned the arrest of Ken Saro-Wiwa into a cause
célèbre. Royal Dutch Shell, though no longer extracting oil from Ogoniland, was
subjected to boycott campaigns around the world.
For a time, Owens and other Ogoni
activists found refuge at the Canadian High Commission in Lagos. Canada's then high
commissioner to Nigeria, Gerald Ohlsen, even gave them shelter in his home. "Mr. Ohlsen was
one of the very few diplomats who provided us with safety and passed information about Ken
to other embassies and to the world," says Owens. "Most other embassies were intent on
keeping their businesses open with the dictator and did not take a stand."
But Owens never remained very long in
one place. "My younger brother was in the army, so part of the time I was staying in a military
barrack." Owens laughs at the recollection. "Even though I was wanted for murder, I was
meeting all these cabinet-level foreign ministers. And all the people I was meeting would tell me
to go and talk to Shell."
A circuitous game of diplomacy
followed. Gerald Ohlsen introduced Owens to the Irish ambassador, who introduced him to the
American ambassador, who in turn introduced him to the British ambassador, who arranged for
an invitation to the Queen's birthday celebration in Lagos to be hand-delivered to Owens at one
of his hideouts. One of the expected guests was Brian Anderson, the chairman and managing
director of Shell Nigeria.
"I was really scared," says Owens,
"because the people they invited were top Nigerian functionaries, military officials, and of
course all the diplomats. And I'm wanted for murder." But he and Diana went anyway.
Owens and Diana were met at the door
by the British deputy high commissioner, who escorted them directly to Brian Anderson. "He
was standing there with a top Mobil Nigeria official by the table where they had all the food.
What really took me by surprise was the man from Mobil, who started picking up shrimps on
skewers and putting them in my mouth," says Owens.
Ignoring the American oil executive's
strange behaviour, Owens turned to Anderson and told him that Ken suffered from a heart
condition and was not receiving adequate medical attention in jail. Anderson seemed
sympathetic and said that he would see what he could do to help. He gave Owens his card and
the two planned a follow-up meeting.
Before his second meeting with
Anderson, Owens received word that Ken had indeed been transferred to a military hospital.
Emboldened by Shell's apparent willingness to help, Owens next asked Anderson if he would
use his influence to get Ken released from prison. "Anderson said it was difficult but not
impossible," said Owens. "He said our international campaign was hurting Shell and the
Nigerian government. If we stopped the campaign, he might be able to do something. He also
said I should get out a press release mentioning the fact that there was no environmental
devastation in Ogoniland. I said, 'I don't have the power to do that, but I will pass on the
information to Ken.' "
Owens wrote to his brother, who drafted
a letter for Owens to hand-deliver to Anderson. This letter presented Shell with two scenarios:
(1) Ken gets executed and becomes a martyr and a public-relations nightmare for the company,
or (2) it uses its influence to see that Ken and the others are freed, and conducts an
environmental-impact assessment and a cleanup operation. Should Shell choose the latter
option, the international campaigns against Shell would stop of their own accord.
"I gave Brian Anderson Ken's letter,"
says Owens. "He read it and I could see him grow red. He handed the letter back to me and said
that if my brother wanted to be a martyr, well, that's his business." (Shell spokesman James
Herbert told Saturday Night that Dr. Owens Wiwa's account of this matter is "misleading
and contrary," and that Shell "rejects the claim that we offered to help ensure Ken Saro-Wiwa's
release if he stopped the campaign.")
Throughout the trial Owens remained in
hiding in Lagos. Then Diana, a visible and active member of MOSOP, was put on the wanted list
along with her husband, and she and the baby fled to Lagos. On October 31, 1995, Ken and
another eight Ogoni were sentenced to death. Surprisingly, Ledum Mitee, MOSOP's
vice-president and legal adviser, and five others, were acquitted. Ten days later, Owens placed a
call to the prison in Port Harcourt and was told that Ken and the others had most likely been
hanged. "I called a BBC correspondent, Janet Anderson, and I asked her whether she knew if
Ken had been executed. She said, 'You know, Owens, I think it's true.' And with that, she just
started crying."
After the executions, Owens and Diana
started moving daily from one small hotel in Lagos to another. "Maybe it was our own paranoia,
but whenever we heard anyone say anything bad about Ken, we moved," says Owens. "And there
was nobody, nobody, who would keep us in their house."
International reaction to the executions
was swift. Nigeria was promptly suspended from the Commonwealth and more than a dozen
countries, including the United States, recalled their ambassadors. When the Wiwas came back
to the Canadian High Commission in Lagos, Gerald Ohlsen took their passports and certificates
and forwarded the documents on to the Canadian High Commission in Accra, Ghana. The next
day, the Wiwas obtained false travelling papers on the black market. Diana disguised herself as a
poor market trader, tying Befii to her back, peasant-fashion, and, with seventy American dollars
in cash, the three made their way to the Benin border, then by bus and foot across Benin, through
the little country of Togo, and on to Ghana.
Once in the capital city, Accra, the
Wiwas went straight to the Canadian High Commission to pick up their passports and apply for
refugee status. Given the help they had received from the Canadian High Commission in Lagos
they felt that this would be a mere formality. "They gave us our documents," said Owens, "but
when I told an immigration officer that we were not safe in Ghana and would like to go to
Canada, she said to forget it. If we thought that we were going to Canada, we must be joking."
Not knowing what to do next, Owens
placed a call to Ken Wiwa, Jr., who was living in London. Ken Jr., in turn, contacted a
representative from the cosmetics retailer The Body Shop, who arranged two things. First,
Owens was to give an interview to a reporter from the Sunday Times; second, The Body
Shop persuaded KLM Royal Dutch Airlines to donate a pair of business-class seats to London.
Business class or not, the flight was a
nightmare. Once aboard the aircraft, the Wiwas learned that the plane would be making an
unscheduled stop in Nigeria. To make matters worse, it would be in the northern city of Kano -
home to the very man they were fleeing, General Sani Abacha. When the plane landed, military
personnel swarmed aboard with guns at the ready. For an hour, the soldiers kept the plane on the
ground as they completed what turned out to be a routine security check. They left without
discovering that two of their country's most wanted fugitives were sitting at the front of the plane
in business class.
"It was the longest hour of my life," says
Owens. "When the plane finally moved out of Nigerian skies, I really hugged my wife."
They also started receiving threatening
phone calls, which they took very seriously after learning the home of another Ogoni family
seeking refuge in England had been firebombed. Yet good fortune, like bad, seemed to come in
waves. Through friends at Amnesty International, the writer Doris Lessing learned of the
threatening calls and invited the Wiwas to live in her house. At the same time, Owens was
offered a paid speaking tour of North America. Toronto was one of the stops.
While he was in Toronto in February,
1996, Jeanne Moffat, the executive director of Greenpeace Canada, invited Owens out to lunch.
She asked him about his situation in England and he told her everything.
"Do you want to come to Canada?" she
asked.
"I've always wanted to come to Canada,
ever since we left Nigeria," answered Owens. Then he explained what the immigration officer in
Ghana had told him.
Moffat contacted the Bloor Street United
Church, and once back in London, Owens and Diana received a letter saying that the church had
agreed to act as their sponsor.
Nearly five years after Ken's execution,
Pa Wiwa's most grievous complaint about the government was that he had not been able to hold
a funeral for his son. His age lent the situation a sense of urgency.
After Owens's relocation to Canada,
the unexpected death of the Nigerian dictator, General Abacha, made greater openness
possible in Nigeria. Early in 1999, Owens returned to his home country to meet with the newly
elected president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who gave the Wiwas permission to exhume the remains
of the Ogoni Nine for a proper funeral.
The politics of bones, however, proved
rife with hidden hobgoblins. The bodies of the Ogoni Nine are believed to have been dumped
in an unmarked, common grave in Port Harcourt, although this has never been officially
acknowledged, nor has the location of the grave ever been revealed. After his meeting with
President Obasanjo, Owens asked the Physicians for Human Rights for a team of international
pathologists to unearth the tangled remains and use DNA testing to return the nine victims to
their families.
The trouble began shortly after
Obasanjo's order was announced. Having at first welcomed the exhumation and reburial, the
families of the other eight Ogoni activists suddenly dissociated themselves from the entire
plan. Their reason, they said, was that they were not consulted on any of the arrangements.
However, it was strongly believed in some quarters that this odd turn of events was the
handiwork of Ledum Mitee, the former MOSOP leader and right-hand man of Ken Saro-Wiwa
who had been one of those miraculously acquitted while the other nine were hustled off to the
gallows.
Once free, Mitee was elected president
of MOSOP, and some have accused him of rushing to cozy up to Shell. It has been seven years
since Shell pumped its last drop of Ogoni oil and the land affected by spills is slowly recovering.
Shell would like to start operations again, but not if the Ogoni remain antagonistic. Ken
Saro-Wiwa's followers have said they would welcome an oil company back to Ogoniland as long
as it acted responsibly - and as long as it was not Royal Dutch Shell. As a result, MOSOP has
broken into bitterly opposed factions.
On February 15 this year, at the Global
Issues Conference held at Upper Canada College in Toronto, Nnarmeka Achebe, an executive
from Shell International, stunned an audience of 500 high-school students from fifty countries
when he announced that Shell has been having fruitful discussions with Ledum Mitee's faction
of MOSOP in London and Nigeria. These discussions, he said, are such that the Ogoni struggle
is considered over. A few days after this speech, the Rivers State governor quashed the offer to
the families of the Ogoni Nine, and the exhumation was cancelled. The long-awaited and highly
publicized funeral for Nigeria's most famous martyr, however, would go ahead on Easter
Monday whether the body of Ken Saro-Wiwa was in his coffin or not.
But Owens wasn't listening to the
sermon. Nor was he listening to the faint voices of Ogoni women in the distant fields singing
about his brother's heroic deeds. He was brooding about the intensely private part of the
ceremony yet to occur, wondering whether it could possibly be private, under the circumstances.
Ken's final resting place, symbolic
though it may be, sits in a sandy one-acre field behind the village where he was born, a deep
concrete tomb lined with blue tiles. Around the field is a lush mangrove swamp and beyond that,
the broad river. After the church service, the crowds followed the coffin as it made its way down
the narrow dirt path to the gravesite.
"Everybody wanted to see the coffin, to
see the last symbol of Ken as it was lowered into the ground," says Owens. "It was as if
everybody wanted to go into the grave with him."
As the archdeacon uttered the words
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," Ken Jr. shovelled three spadefuls of dirt onto his father's coffin.
After the graveside ceremony, after the family had departed through the pressing crowd, Owens
remained behind. "I wanted this very, very last minute with Ken," he said later from his home in
Toronto. "We had a very special relationship. We were born on the same birthday and in most
cases he knew what I was thinking without me saying anything."
There is still hope that Nigeria will one
day return the remains of Ken Saro-Wiwa to his family, that Owens will have a chance to give
his brother the quiet, dignified service Ken had wanted. Until that day, Dr. Monday Owens
Wiwa plans to live a quiet life in Canada, a life more like the one he had when he was a simple
country doctor, back before he and his brother were characters in Ogoni folk songs.
*
Two days after Christmas,
1993, at around 2 a.m., armed soldiers burst in upon Owens and Diana, who was eight months
pregnant, and arrested Owens without specifying any charge. He was driven to an army base an
hour away in Port Harcourt and later transferred to a detention centre in that city.
*
In early 1994, under a new
military dictator, General Sani Abacha, the Nigerian regime, in an effort to break their
resistance, planned a full assault on Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni. The military's agenda was
set forth in a memo reportedly drafted by Major Okuntimo: "Shell operations still impossible
unless ruthless military operations are undertaken for smooth economic activities to
commence." (Copies of the memo exist, but its authenticity has never been verified.)
*
In February, 1995,
General Abacha set up a special military tribunal to try Ken Saro-Wiwa and the others for the
murder of the moderate Ogoni chiefs. A number of prosecution witnesses admitted later they had
been bribed to give false testimony, and Paul Okuntimo, who had recently been promoted to the
rank of lieutenant colonel, attempted to have the defence lawyers barred from the trial. When
this failed, he had Saro-Wiwa's seventy-four-year-old mother horsewhipped and thrown out of
court. Diana Wiwa and Ken's wife, Maria, were also flogged.
*
In London, Owens, Diana,
and Befii were invited to stay at the townhouse of the Body Shop founder, Anita Roddick. But
after two whirlwind weeks of press interviews and media attention, life in London quickly
soured. Over the next few months, Owens and his family found themselves broke and
perpetually on the move, shuttled back and forth among the spare bedrooms of a series of
sympathetic London families. Eventually, they were relocated to a tiny basement apartment in
Islington, where they ran out of money and food.
*
Owens and his family had
escaped from all but the memory of his brother, whose death continued to haunt them. On Easter
Sunday this year, the day before the funeral, Pa Wiwa sat in his two-storey house in the village
of Bane, staring forlornly at Ken's photograph on the wall. "I'm desolate," he said. "I am
ninety-six years old. This is the time my son should have taken care of me. All this was for him,
and now ..." He waved his cane in disgust at the view from his sitting-room window. "The
government of Nigeria is bad," he said with a gimlet glare. "Shell is bad."
*
Owens took his seat near
the front of the church, and watched as independent film crews making documentaries for the
CBC and PBS clambered around the altar with their boom mikes and video cameras, as reporters
from the Nigerian press ran up and down the aisles taking photographs and asking for interviews
during prayers, and as vigilant members of MOSOP patrolled the chapel to sternly awaken
sleeping parishioners with a sharp poke of a finger. Archdeacon the Ven. Dr. S. O. Amadi's long
and loopy eulogy, at times comparing the martyrdom of Ken Saro-Wiwa to that of Jesus Christ,
was frequently drowned out by the commotion outside.
Related Links:
Dr.
Owens Wiwa’s testimony
MOSOP
Canada
US State Department's Report on
Nigeria
Shell Nigeria’s
homepage