LITMIR.BIZ

       1

       Nigeria and Saro-Wiwa’s World to 1960

      Kenule Saro-Wiwa’s story is intertwined with the story of the country Lord Lugard created in 1914 when he unified Nigeria into one political entity. Saro-Wiwa’s relationship with Nigeria defined much of his life, and his attempts to reform it led to his death. In fact, his life, work, and literary career were largely shaped by the same forces that created the colonial state of Nigeria and shaped the legacy that independent Nigeria inherited on October 1, 1960.

      The Ogoni, one of the smallest ethnic groups within Nigeria, struggled throughout the colonial period to achieve official recognition and the government protection and funding that came with it. The Ogoni, like many minorities in Nigeria, faced a long history of oppression and domination by the three largest ethnic groups: the Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Yoruba in the southwest, and the Igbo, who dominated the southeast, where the Ogoni lived.¹ Saro-Wiwa viewed his own life as entwined in this struggle and sought to use his position and influence to help achieve an inclusive Nigerian national identity. In many of his works, most notably his Nigerian Civil War memoir On a Darkling Plain and his various activist writings in the early 1990s, he is acutely aware of his predecessors and his place within these struggles.

      The Ogoni are one of the smallest ethnic and linguistic groups in Nigeria, residing directly east of Port Harcourt along the eastern edge of the Niger Delta, with a population of roughly half a million. They are made up of several subgroups, each with its own identity, history, and distinct dialect. In fact, like most ethnicities in Nigeria, Ogoni identity has historically been fluid, with groups aligning with and dissociating themselves from the Ogoni, according to constantly shifting political considerations within Nigeria. Traditionally a riverine agrarian people, their economic mainstays are aquatic agricultural production, animal husbandry, and fisheries in the Niger Delta. In fact, the Ogoni live in such close relationship to their land that there is no distinction in the Ogoni language between the name for the people and the name for the land,² as Saro-Wiwa was fond of pointing out.

      Ogoni origins are contested, both with regard to the oral traditions and with regard to linguistic and archaeological evidence. Moreover, the different groups composing the Ogoni have historically acknowledged little mutual identity, despite common linguistic and cultural practices. Some scholars, such as the late linguist Kay Williamson, rely on oral traditions and linguistic analysis to suggest that the Ogoni migrated to their present location from the Kingdom of Ghana over one thousand years ago. Others cite a combination of migration and absorption patterns with local communities as the origin of the Ogoni people. However, their incorporation into the broader Nigerian colonial state forced the Ogoni to organize into a political unity, despite the fact that some Ogoni groups had long rejected the idea of a pan-Ogoni identity.³

      For Saro-Wiwa, British rule in southern Nigeria, which formally began in 1900 and ended in 1960, ushered in a new phase in interethnic relations. British rule concentrated power over the country and its resources along ethnic lines; it created a system that encouraged resource exploitation, and ethnicity became the de facto mode for political organization. This system, which the British called “indirect rule,” gave rise to a struggle for access to the mechanisms determining political culture after independence. Saro-Wiwa decried this system, not only because it shaped the ethnically fractured structure of postcolonial Nigeria, but more importantly, because it gave rise to a system of exploitation that he called “indigenous imperialism.”

      Although the British did not invent ethnic and political conflict in Nigeria, they created a system in which the only legitimate access to resources and the mechanisms of distribution was organized along ethnic lines. In his civil war memoir Saro-Wiwa lambasted the Igbo for denouncing this system for marginalizing them at the national level but failing to acknowledge that the same system allowed them to dominate political institutions in the southeast of the country at the expense of the smaller groups whom they shut out of government appointments and contracts.

      From the establishment of colonial rule in Nigeria at the end of the nineteenth century until 1914, the British created several protectorates, which eventually coalesced into the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria and the Colony and the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. As with most colonial possessions, the British administered the protectorates through a system of local rulers, known collectively as “indirect rule,” as mentioned earlier. In the Northern Nigeria Protectorate, the British relied heavily on established local rulers, usually emirs remaining from precolonial times, to administer the protectorate and collect taxes. In the much more politically diverse Southern Protectorate, many differing local administrations emerged, owing to British recognition of the multiplicity of precolonial political systems. The British colonial administration co-opted those systems as important mechanisms in colonial

Скачать книгу