the faculty or staff. As a result, Saro-Wiwa was considered one of the Igbo, as all Easterners were called. Naturally, the school’s student government was dominated by the Yoruba, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the student body. Recalling one election he contested where he felt he was “cheated” on tribal grounds, he lamented, “I once contested a student’s Union election and crashed out, winning a majority of votes only in the ladies’ hall. That year, the entire elected Executive was solidly Yoruba. I believed that the Yoruba students were so ashamed of this that the following year they did not contest any post at all, enabling a minority student to win.”3
Another peculiarity that shaped Saro-Wiwa’s early life was that he was unusually short. Standing only five foot one, he constantly sought to prove himself, being fond of the expression “What’s height got to do with it?” This fact gave rise in the popular imagination to the idea that he suffered from a “Napoleon complex,” that he had to overcompensate for his height by demanding attention in other ways. Saro-Wiwa won many university accolades at the University of Ibadan, just as he did at Government College Umuahia. However, it was his love of drama that would dominate his life at university and his later career as a film producer and activist. In 1964, he played Henry IV in a UI production of Shakespeare’s play. The university also had a traveling troupe called Theatre-on-Wheels, with which Saro-Wiwa re-prised his role in performances in Lagos, Ilorin, Kaduna, Kano, Benin, and Enugu, among other cities across Nigeria. Theatre-on-Wheels received much acclaim, both at home and abroad, collaborating with the prestigious Nottingham Playhouse when they sent a troupe to Nigeria in 1963 featuring the young Dame Judi Dench.
Despite his successes in the theater, he had harbored political ambitions from a young age. The loss of the student union leadership office showed him that Nigeria was entrenched in ethnic rivalry that was unlikely to just disappear on its own. Even before his time at the University of Ibadan, he had taught at Government College Umuahia, and at Stella Maris College in Port Harcourt and believed that education was the key to resolving cultural conflict. Therefore, he dedicated himself to teaching at UI, and later at the University of Nigeria–Nsukka, in order to help combat these rivalries. Despite this intention, the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 cut short his ambitions of academic life. When the war broke out, he was teaching at the University of Nigeria–Nsukka, which was quickly renamed the University of Biafra. This put him in personal peril due to his support for Nigeria in the conflict; obviously he was unable to continue working at a university in the center of the Biafran nationalist movement.
3
The Nigerian Civil War Years
Ken Saro-Wiwa seemed destined for a quiet academic life. However, the chain of events that began with the January 1966 coup forever altered the studious young man’s life. When the Nigerian military government, then headed by Major General Yakubu Gowon, transformed the country into a federal republic consisting of twelve states, Saro-Wiwa saw an opportunity to correct the disproportionate power the major ethnic group held in the country and better integrate the Ogoni. He claimed an influential role in this process.
In his memoirs, Saro-Wiwa portrayed himself as a loyal Nigerian citizen trapped inside the secessionist Biafran state. According to Gowon’s federal plan, Ogoniland was to be situated within one of the new states carved out of the secessionist Eastern Region, namely Rivers State. Saro-Wiwa managed to position himself as a leader of the Ogoni community within the new Rivers State. After fleeing Biafra, he returned with the conquering Nigerian military and established himself as civilian administrator of the oil depot city of Bonny. His actions established him as an Ogoni leader firmly devoted to Nigeria who would agitate for his people’s inclusion in the life of the nation. His new position as a leader was made challenging because of some significant events occurring just before the end of colonial rule, however.
On January 10, 1966, the first meeting of the British Commonwealth prime ministers held outside the United Kingdom convened in Lagos. Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Nigeria’s prime minister, convened the special meeting to discuss steps to end white minority rule in Rhodesia. The gathering showcased Nigeria’s growing influence in international affairs and the country’s emergence as an important regional power in Africa. However, as the last delegations left the country on the night of January 15, a group of mostly Igbo military officers, known collectively as the Five Majors, attempted to overthrow the Nigerian First Republic and take control of the government in a coup d’état.1
General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, the Nigerian chief of staff and also Igbo, quickly quashed the coup the following day. However, Tafawa Balewa died in the attack, along with Ahmadu Bello, the premier of the Northern Region, and his Western Region counterpart Samuel Akintola. Festus Okotie-Eboh, the finance minister, and most of the military’s top commanders also died in the bloody attempt. Nnamdi Azikiwe, known popularly as Zik, Nigeria’s first president, was in Britain receiving medical treatment and therefore escaped injury.
With the bulk of the First Republic’s leadership now dead, the republic itself soon died as well, to be replaced by a series of military dictatorships. Saro-Wiwa was then in his last year at the University of Ibadan. Like many in the country, the events of that night took him by surprise. He later recalled the moment he arrived at the university campus in the early afternoon of January 16 and first learned about the coup: “A coup? Impossible! I did not believe it.” By late afternoon, Radio Nigeria confirmed the news, urging calm. However, rather than panic, the campus at the University of Ibadan erupted in celebration: “There was such wild joy, general dance and great jubilation as I had not seen there in all four sessions I had spent in Ibadan. . . . Students forgot themselves in their joy; they embraced and hugged one another, male and female alike.”2
The scenes Saro-Wiwa described were hardly unique. By 1966, the First Republic had become so unpopular that the coup was initially welcomed across the country, and the jubilant scenes repeated even in Ibadan despite the fact that the Western Region’s premier, Akintola, was a victim of the coup attempt. Akintola was not well liked, owing in no small part to the manner in which he ascended to power in the Western Region; he had displaced the visionary Yoruba leader Obafemi Awolowo in 1962 after Akintola orchestrated a riot inside the Western Region’s House of Deputies that gave Abubakar’s federal government justification to declare a state of emergency in the Western Region and order Awolowo imprisoned. The Yoruba leadership found this so repulsive they refused to cooperate with Akintola, who was now regarded as a stooge for the Northern-led Northern People’s Congress (NPC) federal government. Saro-Wiwa recalled the crisis as showing that “bare-faced opportunism had become the prevailing characteristic of Nigerian politics.”3
In his memoir, On a Darkling Plain, Saro-Wiwa posited a theory of the unfolding of the January coup and why it was remembered as an ethnic Igbo coup. For Saro-Wiwa, the coup was not perpetrated as an Igbo ethnic putsch: “Since 1966, there have been enough coups to convince everyone that a coup is a conspiracy, a dangerous conspiracy, and only friends and trusted associates engage in it.” Most of the conspirators were either schoolmates at the various government colleges or otherwise trusted friends belonging to the same military cohort. The fact that many of them were Igbo was the product of British colonial policies that favored Igbo access to school and military institutions and not an explicit attempt to form an exclusively Igbo conspiracy.
This argument did not persuade other Nigerians, especially in the north, who saw the coup as a southern plot to take over the country. Saro-Wiwa detested the political definition of a north-south divide in Nigeria, calling it a dangerous fiction that fed the “cankerworm of tribalism” around the country and oversimplified existing ethnic and linguistic complexities. For Saro-Wiwa, the northerners victimized by the coup consisted of over two hundred unique ethnic, language, and religious groups, and could not be thought of as a single entity. The south was equally heterogeneous, but the Igbo and Yoruba together dominated the political sphere in the south of the country at the expense of the Ogoni, Mbembe, Ijo, and others. Saro-Wiwa concluded
