NOO SARO-WIWANoo Saro-Wiwa is the daughter of slain Nigerian writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.
She tells host Marco Werman about her difficult journey to bury her father’s bones in his homeland, a trip that inspired her new book, “Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria.”
>via: http://www.theworld.org/2012/08/author-noo-saro-wiwas-personal-journey-writin...__________________________Wiwa vs. Royal Dutch Shell
Author Noo Saro-Wiwa
Noo Saro-Wiwa is the daughter of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed by the Nigerian dictatorship in 1995. In our interview, we spoke mostly about her new book, “Looking for Transwonderland.”
But afterwards, I asked her about the Saro-Wiwa family lawsuits that they brought against Royal Dutch Shell in 1996.
The family was able to sue Royal Dutch Shell in US federal court through the Alien Tort Statute.
It’s a US law from 1789 which allows for non-US citizens to file suit in US courts when the cases involve international human rights violations.
They also sued the company under the Torture Victim Prevention Act. It allows individuals to seek damages in the US for torture or extrajudicial killing, regardless of where the acts took place.
The Saro-Wiwa family was aiming to hold Royal Dutch Shell complicit in human rights abuses against the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta.
I asked Noo Saro-Wiwa what the basis was for the lawsuit.
The case did drag on for 12 years. But finally in 2009, Shell settled out-of-court with the Saro-Wiwa family for $15.5 million. But the company still denied any culpability in his and his nine fellow activists’ deaths.
>via: http://www.theworld.org/2012/08/wiwa-vs-royal-dutch-shell/
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Africa Utopia is a month long festival of events at the Southbank Centre, celebrating Africa today in film, music, dance, literature, spoken word, theatre, fashion, talks and debates. The festival running throughout July is a cultural summit lead by Baaba Maal to show what Africa has to offer the world, and this week, we’ve joined them on the Southbank for a week of themed posts.
Early this month, I was in the audience for an Africa Utopia event called ‘Nigeria Now’, a discussion about the complexities on Nigeria. The standout voice on the stage belonged to Noo Saro-Wiwa, author of Transwonderland. Noo is an incredible writer. She brought up in England, she was dragged back to Nigeria every Summer – a country she viewed as ‘an annoying parallel universe where she had to relinquish all her creature comforts and sense of individuality.’ Her father, Ken Saro Wiwa, a celebrated writer and activist, was executed for speaking out for environmental change. After his death, Noo didn’t return to Nigeria for several years, until recently. The result is a magnificent travel memoir ‘Looking for Transwonderland’. For this week’s Beyond the Headlines, we talked to Noo about the book, her experiences of travel, and her honest feelings about her homeland.
Why did you decide to write your first book about Nigeria?
My long-term plan has been to write travel books, particularly about African countries. Transwonderland wasn’t actually my first book – seven years ago I wrote about my experiences in South Africa. But my literary agent told me that with a surname like mine, readers might find it odd that I wasn’t concentrating on my homeland. Writing about Nigeria was always in the pipeline, so I decided to make it the subject of my first published book.
I had avoided going back to Nigeria after my father’s death. I was busy travelling everywhere else. Having written travel guides for Lonely Planet and Rough Guide, other African countries were more familiar to me than my country of birth, which was a ridiculous situation, really. But as time passed I became more curious about Nigeria. I started to see it as a potential travel destination, not just that awful place where my father died and where I was forced to spend my childhood summers. The thought of travelling around suddenly seemed intriguing.
In your Nigeria Now talk at the Southbank you said the thing you love about travelling was that is ‘confounds your idea of a place’ – what were some of the biggest shocks and surprises going back?
The most surprising thing I encountered was a dog show, held at Ibadan University by veterinary students. I didn’t think Nigerians were dog lovers. It was very entertaining.
Another eye-opener was the Lonely Hearts section in the newspapers. Young men, often students, were looking for middle-aged sugar mummies who could give them financial help with their studies in exchange for sex. The adverts were hilariously frank, and it was a refreshing antidote to the piety and religiosity that dominates Nigerian life.
What did the culture teach you?
People are very tough and enterprising. They get on with life, no matter how hard it is. They find original ways to make ends meet. It’s good to observe that and try to emulate it. Life in the UK can soften you up a bit too much.
You don’t apologise for being honest. Do you feel a pressure to be positive about your homeland?
Yes, there’s pressure. Nigeria has a bad reputation, and Nigerians feel negatively judged by a world that often wants its prejudices about Africa confirmed. When I was out there I saw a billboard that said, “Don’t badmouth Nigeria, things are changing”. However, it would be impossible to write a decent book if I bowed to that pressure and only wrote positive things. You have to be honest in your observations if your writing is to have integrity, otherwise you’re simply producing a propaganda piece.
The key thing is to contextualise and rationalise your observations. Human beings are fundamentally the same all over the world, so if things go wrong in one country, there’s always a rational reason for it. Part of your job as a writer is to try and understand those reasons and explain them. Nigeria has a bad reputation because of bad government, so it’s up to our politicians to improve the country and its standing in the world. The burden shouldn’t rest on the shoulders of writers; we don’t have the power to hide all the bad stuff anyway – it would be like sticking a Lilliputian fig leaf on Gulliver’s testicles.
How would you say Nigeria differs from the stereotypes commonly portrayed in the media?
People are much more honest and co-operative than the media might have you believe. We also have lakes where you can go bird-watching; we have rainforests with chimpanzees and gorillas; mist-shrouded mountains, art galleries, fun weddings, ancient artefacts. Pretty much everything you would find in a functioning country. It’s all overlain by political strife and economic underachievement, unfortunately.
As a traveller, how do you go about really getting a grip of a place?
Look around constantly. Observe as much as you can. The biggest revelations can be found in the smallest, most mundane places. Pester people with questions and spend more time listening rather than talking. Never make assumptions, no matter how true you might think they may be. Even if you’re sure the sky is blue, check that someone else doesn’t think it’s green!
When covering your home country is it difficult to remain objective?
Yes. You love aspects of the country more than foreigners would, and you’re upset by things that foreigners might be more chilled out about. I try to be objective in certain areas of my writing, but I also consider travel writing to be a partly subjective genre. You write in the first-person, and you dwell on your personal feelings and thoughts. So travel writers have licence to be subjective from time to time. But I’m always honest about that. I lay my biases, fears and preferences on the table. And it’s important to remember that I didn’t write a book about Nigeria; I wrote a book about my journey in Nigeria. Sensible readers will recognise the difference.
You mentioned in your talk that travel writing is historically dominated by older white male voices, why do you think that is?
Commercial publishing took off in the West, so it’s understandable that travel writing would be dominated by Westerners, especially men. In the last 500 years the emergence of exploration, cartography, photography, colonialism and the ‘civilising mission’ all fed into a hunger among Westerners for information about the rest of the world. The market was, and to some extent still is, dominated by white readers. For them, these books are a vicarious form of travel, therefore they (consciously or subconsciously) want to see something of themselves in the writer. Men like Paul Theroux re-invigorated the modern form of travel writing, so their dominance can only be expected.
Travel writing is often about outsiders visiting somewhere that’s unfamiliar. The establishment of an African diaspora means that people like me are the new outsiders looking in. We’re now getting more involved in the genre. I’m not at all against old, white men writing about the continent – anyone has the right to write about it. But we need a broad range of voices and perspectives.
Who are your travel writing inspirations?
The first travel book I ever read was Almost Heaven by Martin Fletcher, a British journalist who travelled around the backwoods of the US, exploring the parts of America that aren’t represented in the media. It opened my eyes to the idea of non-fiction. I also adore Miranda France’s Bad Times in Buenos Aires, in which she describes her experiences of living in Argentina in the late 1980s. Her humour and unapologetic criticism of the country annoyed Argentines, but she was prescient in her negativity – the economy collapsed within a decade. Michaela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz was brilliant, informative and a huge inspiration. Viva Mexico by Charles Flandrau was another joy to read, very funny and surprisingly modern for a book written nearly 100 years ago. Ryszard Kapuscinski and Paul Theroux were inspirations too, even though I don’t agree with some of their writing.
Finally, if Boat Magazine were to devote one issue to an African city, where would you suggest?
I like big, crazy cities with wealth disparities and heaving populations and lots of culture. Lagos, Kinshasa, Nairobi and Johannesburg would be the prime candidates.
Noo Saro-Wiwa‘s Looking For Transwonderland is published by Granta and is quite frankly brilliant.
Noo Saro Wiwa Goes Home:
Looking For Transwonderland
– A Review By Magnus Taylor
January 9, 2012
Noo Saro Wiwa’s heritage made writing a book about Nigeria a complicated proposition. As the daughter of murdered environmental activist Ken Saro Wiwa, one can imagine how Noo fought the idea of piggybacking on her long deceased father’s fame when, as a fine and dryly observant writer, she would have believed that success could be achieved without such paternal association.
Noo admits that ‘I feel like I’m carrying my father’s name…it’s not just me by myself’ – her words are, in a sense amplified by association, and it is perhaps partly this influence that motivated her to construct a careful and largely non-judgemental account of her homeland. In conversation she is a little more forthright in her opinions about modern Nigeria, expressing exasperation and confusion at the current state of the country. This, she says, ‘affects you on a deep level…[as] it represents who you are.’ And, I sense this is accentuated by being a long-time diaspora Nigerian, inescapably connected to what is perceived by the rest of the world as a failing state.
Another complication is the position she holds as Nigerian by birth but very much English by upbringing. As a child Noo was however taken for uncomfortable annual summer trips back to Nigeria. She tells us that whilst there she always ‘wanted to go back to the place I called home: leafy Surrey, a bountiful paradise of Twix bars and TV cartoons and leylandii trees.’ This attitude is accentuated by the execution of Ken in 1995 at the hands of the thuggish Abacha regime. From this point on, ‘Nigeria sapped my self-esteem; it was the hostile epicentre of a life in which we languished at the margins in England…I wanted nothing to do with the country.’ The pain of losing her father is clearly evident in Saro Wiwa’s writing, and whilst the passage of 15 years has made it possible for her to speak and write with an air of detachment from that horrific event, it is also clear that this book was never just going to be about travel.
Saro Wiwa admits that writing the book was an unexpectedly cathartic process. From setting out to compose a reasonably detached account of her journey, she is noticeably sucked in to her own personal narrative, jolted by the regular recognition of her family name and emotionally affected by the return to the family home in the Delta city of Port Harcourt. She poignantly describes how several years ago the family re-assembled the bones of Ken’s body, unceremoniously returned to them by the newly-installed civilian government in a large bag.
Compelling personal narrative aside, Saro Wiwa, with her history of guide-book journalism (she has written for bothRough Guide and Lonely Planet), is a competent and convincing travel writer with an eye for the absurd. Not many people backpack around Nigeria, but she demonstrates that it is possible to negotiate what is often an intimidating place largely on local transport and with a day-by-day budget that doesn’t allow constant splurges on luxury hotels. Whilst Saro Wiwa does take in some interesting sites – rickety local museums, Benin bronzes and the wonderful bird-filled Chad Basin National Park (steadily encroached upon by the Southward drift of the Sahara desert) – she seems more interested in teasing out the humour of, for example, the University of Ibadan’s somewhat anarchic dog show (‘I beg, don’t run, o!’ the MC implored down the mike. ‘The dog will pursue you if you run.’) Or in dead-pan style pretending (by phone) to be a prospective middle-aged ‘sugar mummy’ replying to newspaper adverts such as the following:
‘Julius, 28, needs a rich, sexy single sugar mummy, aged between 30-45 for financial support in exchange for the fun of her life.’
That is one of the refreshing things about Saro Wiwa’s book. It lacks the po-faced concern of most academic, journalistic or literary accounts of poor old benighted Africa, and concentrates more on the humour of the place. She tells me that despite the depressing poverty and neglect she found in Nigeria ‘it’s impossible not to laugh there.’
‘When you’re raised in two different cultures, you don’t buy into the myths of either’ says Noo. This desire to avoid ‘myths’ about Nigeria – composed from international stereotypes and childhood experience – is a constant throughout the book. One senses that Saro Wiwa was personally surprised by how much she enjoyed rediscovering the country of her birth. Towards the end of the book she comments that ‘my dislike for the country was softening into a wavering ambiguity’ – a characteristically undemonstrative assertion.
Saro Wiwa doesn’t let us romantically fall for an idealised version of Nigeria. Even if such a thing existed, it was (by her own admission) too expensive to visit all the waterfalls and remote panoramas which always seem to require the traveller to hire a 4×4 (at great expense). In Nigeria money talks and good impressions can be bought. By slumming it a bit, talking to many ordinary Nigerians, and letting us into a little of the Saro Wiwa story, Noo has crafted a highly enjoyable and revealing account of her complicated homeland.
Magnus Taylor is Managing Editor, African Arguments Online.
>via: http://africanarguments.org/2012/01/09/rediscovering-transwonderland-noo-saro...
Nigerian activist
Ken Saro-Wiwa's daughter
remembers her father
Noo Saro-Wiwa was 14 when she found out
her father, Ken, had another family.
It took years – and his death –
for her to begin to understand him
-
- The Guardian, Friday 30 December 2011
To most of us, Ken Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian activist and a martyr, a brave and inspiring campaigner who led his Ogoni people's struggle against the decades-long defilement of their land by Big Oil, and ended up paying for it with his life.
To Noo Saro-Wiwa, he was Dad. Rather a distant dad, though; for most of her childhood, she saw him only three or four times a year, on his regular visits to England (where she lived with her mother, brothers and twin sister), and during the long summer holidays at the family home in Port Harcourt, where her father lived.
Also, he wasn't always the perfect dad. Certainly not that day in 1990, when the 14 year-old Noo received a phone call from her uncle out of the blue. He revealed that when Noo was to visit to Nigeria that summer, she and her siblings would have two new friends to play with: their half-sisters.
"He got his brother to tell us about them," she says. "About this whole 'other family' he had. They were eight and six by the time we learned they even existed. We were shocked, angry. We felt betrayed. Less valued. Now I see it differently. But at the time ..."
Poised and perceptive, Noo, 35, has written a book – as funny and affectionate as it is honest and, frankly, alarming – about her first prolonged visit to her homeland since that summer 20 years ago. At that point, she says, she and her siblings had rebelled: "For years, we'd been dragged back there for two months every summer. We just said, enough is enough." And after Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the country's military dictatorship in November 1995, of course, there was even less of an incentive to return. Nigeria, says Noo, became a repository of all her pain, fears, disappointments and resentments, a place "where nightmares come true". It took time to go back – as it has taken time for her to reappraise her father.
Before he became a world-renowned activist, Ken was "a true polymath", she says. "He had an almost manic energy. He saw potential everywhere. He was a writer, he had interests in retail, property, the media ..." Noo recalls watching episodes of Basi & Co, a satirical TV show her father produced that was for a time the most-watched soap inAfrica.
She had moved with her mother and siblings to Britain in 1977, aged barely one. A successful, self-made and by then relatively well-off man, Ken "wanted us to have the best possible start in life. I don't think there was ever any question of us not going back to Nigeria eventually, but my father wanted his children to do well."
The family settled in Ewell in Surrey, and the children were sent to boarding schools; Noo went to Roedean. "Apart from that, though, I don't recall our life being anything special," she says. "Materially, it felt quite deprived. We really weren't as well off as all that. We didn't have separate bedrooms; I wore my brothers' hand-me-downs."
Ken shuttled across three or four times a year, and the family spent every summer together in Port Harcourt. "As a young child, you of course have little sense of him," says Noo. "He was just this great, energetic, moustachioed presence, with fantastic bedside stories and always lots of presents and chocolates. And permanently with his pipe. When I was very young, I used to think every black man I saw with a moustache was him."
Gradually, though, her parents' marriage began to show signs of strain, noticeable – if not understandable – even to a child. Noo's mother, never particularly pleased at her exile to England, where she spent 17 years working at a Job Centre, became increasingly unhappy, sometimes tearful; rows erupted, during Ken's visits, over clothes bought "for cousins"; her father grew more and more distant.
The summer before Noo, her brothers and sister were belatedly introduced to their father's "other family", he made one last effort to woo them with the wonders of Nigeria, taking them on a road trip through the central highlands and further into the interior in the family Peugeot. Noo mainly remembers being subjected to endless recordings of Richard Clayderman's neo-classical renderings of 70s pop hits on the car stereo.
What she didn't fully grasp at the time was that her father was by then devoting most of his time and energies to campaigning. Ken was one of the first members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (Mosop), a non-violent group militating for greater autonomy, a fair share of oil revenues, and repair of the environmental destruction wrought by the oil majors, notably – and notoriously – Shell.
"He was starting to talk about it," Noo says. "He'd set up the group, published the Ogoni bill of rights. He took us there. He showed us the gas flares burning in the village, the oil spills. He was very passionate about it, I remember that. But we never had any inkling of what it would eventually lead to."
Ken was arrested for the first time by Nigeria's military regime in 1992 and spent several months in prison without trial. The following year, after about 300,000 people – around half the Ogoni population – took part in peaceful marches and demonstrations across the region, the military government of General Sani Abacha sent in the troops and Ogoniland was occupied. Ken was promptly arrested once more, but released after a month.
In May 1994, four conservative Ogoni elders were murdered. Ken was immediately arrested and charged with incitement. After more than a year in jail, he and eight other senior Mosop leaders appeared before a specially convened military tribunal. Most of the Ogoni Nine's defence lawyers resigned at what they protested was the outrageous rigging of the trial; a number of prosecution witnesses later admitted they had been bribed to provide incriminating testimony.
If a guilty verdict came as no surprise, the sentence – death by hanging – most certainly did. Few domestic or foreign observers ever expected it to be carried out. But on 10 November, Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight co-defendants were duly executed. The resulting wave of international shock and outrage, led by Nelson Mandela, who called the killings "a heinous act", saw Nigeria suspended from the Commonwealth for three years.
Back in Surrey, Noo says she and her brothers and sister were "shielded from a lot of what went on in the time leading up to the execution. My mother shielded us. We knew he was being locked up, but you know … Nigeria is the kind of place where people do spend time in prison."
From solitary confinement, Ken wrote to ask how her end-of-term exams had gone, and which universities she was thinking of applying to.
It was 18 months since she had last seen him, when her mother called with the news. It was, says Noo, "a complete surprise. Just so shocking. Nobody had expected that. Nobody thought the regime would actually carry through. And what was almost as shocking, to me as a 19-year-old, was how huge the news was. It was the front page of every newspaper, the top item on the TV news. I had no idea he was such a big figure. That he meant so much."
In the aftermath she buried herself in her work: a geography degree at King's College London, early travel writing experience on The Rough Guide to West Africa, a year at Columbia's journalism school in New York, a stint at ABC News as a researcher, more African travel with Lonely Planet. She returned to Nigeria only twice in the decade after her father's death: for his official burial in 2000, then for his family burial five years later. That is movingly described in her book. In her father's home village of Bane, next to her grandfather's house, Noo and her relatives painstakingly reassembled Ken's exhumed skeleton, the remains identified and eventually released after lengthy discussions with Nigeria's new and democratically elected government. With the help of an uncle who was a medical doctor, Ken Saro-Wiwa's carefully arranged bones were, finally, laid to rest.
"It's actually surprisingly easy to change one's perspective," Noo says now. "I could either have been all western about it and freaked out at the idea of touching his bones, or think: this is still my father. I shouldn't run away from him or be scared. He needs to be properly buried. So that's what I did."
The decision to go back for a lengthy stay, to lay her many and various Nigerian ghosts, and above all to write about it, was down at least in part to Noo's agent. "Initially I was reluctant; I just wanted to do a straight travel book," she says. "My agent said I really had to deal with the family thing. She was right, of course. The truth is always more interesting, and you have to embrace it all. You can't leave stuff out."
Spending time in Nigeria left her deeply, indelibly impressed by her father's achievements, she says. "It's such an incredibly tough country, just to live in. You see how people struggle. The skills you need merely to survive there … It's just so much more difficult than in the UK. So to truly see what my father achieved, from such a disadvantaged background economically and ethnically, and the challenges he took on over and above that – facing down a massive oil multinational, a military dictatorship. I knew he was brave, but only now do I really understand just how monumental it was, what he did."
She finds herself ever more drawn, too, to her father's work. The Ken Saro-Wiwa Foundation, with the involvement of her brother and uncle, carries on Ken's mission. It's a more complex one now that the oil multinationals, in Noo's words, "at least feel they have to make an effort" (in 2009, Shell agreed an $15.5m out-of-court settlement with the families of the Ogoni Nine – although without admitting any liability in their deaths).
"I would like to become more involved, now, yes," says Noo. "My father wanted to improve the lives of the Ogoni people. I don't have to get involved in the oil stuff to do that; there's education, childcare, other issues. And I certainly want to write about Ogoniland. But I don't want to do it just as Ken Saro-Wiwa's daughter. I want to establish myself as a writer first. Then when I write about what he fought for, it may mean more."
What, though, about Ken Saro-Wiwa as a father – that whole "other family"? Have her feelings changed since she learned, 20 years ago, that she had two sisters she never knew existed? "Human beings are flawed," Noo says. "When you're young, you don't fully understand that your parents are the product of their upbringing. Polygamy complicates things …
"Look, my grandfather, my father's father, had six wives. I've no idea how many children he had. So my father was already a massive improvement; a step on the road to normality. I'm grateful to him."
Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria by Noo Saro-Wiwa is published by Granta, £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
>via: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/31/noo-saro-wiwa-kens-daughte...