THIS is the month of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the civil rights crusader, who was obscenely murdered by the rascally blood-thirsty military government of maximum dictator, General Sani Abacha on November 10,1995. As has become an annual ritual, relatives, friends, comrades as well as foes of the late writer, environmental rightist, and former president of the Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA, will remember him and perhaps stage ceremonies to recall his spirit to a life he so much enjoyed, cherished and struggled to make right and judicious.
However, one of the admirers of the spirit of struggle which Ken represents, Dr Onukaba Adinoyi, who confessed recently at a Book Party that he never really had much interraction with the man, has set in motion a grander celebration of the businessman, who, however, made even greater fame as a playwright, poet and novelist.
Dr Adinoyi’s play, The Killing Swamp, which he wrote to honour the injudicious State murder of the activist, will be staged throughout this month at the two major centres of political and cultural discourses of Nigeria.
Today, the Theatre @ Terra, the weekly thatre project, featuring the Renegade Theatre and Laspapi Production, will open the staging of the play at its repertory base at Terra Kulture on Tiamiyu Savage Street, Victoria Island, Lagos. The presentation will thereafter run every Sunday through the month of November.
The production is at the instance and facilitation of the Committee for Relevant Art, CORA, which had chosen the play as its thematic theatrical presentation to mark the 12th edition of its Lagos Book and Art Festival, LABAF, holding November 12- 14 at the National Theatre in Lagos.
Operatives of the CORA hinted that the Sunday, November 14 staging of the play has been dedicated as the Command Performance to mark the 15th anniverssary of the barbaric execution of the late Saro-Wiwa, “who was a great supporter of the mission of CORA to grow the human capital of Nigeria, and the LABAF dream to push the frontiers of literacy”. The staging is also to round up the three-day festival.
The organisers of LABAF said they chose the Renegade?Theatre to produce the play because of the company’s consistent push at “ensuring that live theatre becomes part of our cultural staple in Lagos. We admire the courage and tenacity of the cast and crew of Renegade Theatre and the managers of Laspapi Production at keeping on stage a theatre performance every Sunday for about five years now”, stated CORA. They also praised the initiative of Dr Onukaba Adinoyi, a University of Ibadan-trained Theatre Artiste, and former Managing Director of the defunct Daily Times Of Nigeria, and ex-Presidential aide, in scripting the play, saying, “it shows a sensivity to contemporary issue in our national and political life. Ken Saro-Wiwa is symbolic of the struggles for emancipation of all the peoples of Nigeria and Africa”.
The Killing Swamp was in the last three finalists of the yearly Nigeria Literature prize, which this year focussed on Drama.
The staging holds at 2 and 6pm daily at the Terra Kulture under the direction of Wole Oguntokun, the house head at the Theatre @ Terra.
And in Abuja, The Killing Swamp, will be premiered “to celebrate the 15 years of the execution of the late Kenule Saro Wiwa”, stated Jerry Adesewo, the head of the production house, Arojah Royal Theatre (ART), a professional company in the Federal capital.
Adesewo wrote: “The Killing Swamp is an imaginative dramatisation of the final hours of Kenule Saro Wiwa. The play provides fresh insight into the Niger Delta crisis through the fictional re-enactment of the controversial life of one of its iconic figures — Ken Saro Wiwa, the Nigerian writer, theatre practitioner and environmental rights activist, was hanged along side eight other pro-government chiefs by the General Sani Abacha led military government on November 10, 1995. The killing drew condemnation from across the world as a criminal act of state murder aimed at silencing protests against the environmentally hostile policies of the oil companies operating in the Niger-Delta as well as the exploitative and oppressive policies of successive Nigerian governments”.
“The Killing Swamp did not just dramatize the last moment of the life of Ken Saro Wiwa, whom we all agree deserves to be so remembered and honoured, but it offers a fresh insight into the Niger Delta crisis which till today remain relevant” Jerry Adesewo whose Arojah Royal Theatre produces the play said, adding that The Killing Swamp is a play we can all connect with, a story that is familiar but only being offered theatrically.
The premier/command performance is scheduled to hold at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre on Saturday November, 13 for a select audiencebefore it opens to the public on Sunday 14th.
Why We Are Honouring Ken Saro-Wiwa with The Killing Swamp
WOLE OGUNTOKUN director of The Killing Swamp and producer of Theatre @Terra spoke to The Guardian's ARMSFREE AJANAKU on the choice of the play for this month.
ON a day in this month 15 years ago, one of the most gruesome and cold-blooded extra judicial killings by the Nigerian State took place. The victim was none other than writer, and environmentalist, Ken Saro Wiwa, who alongside others now known as Ogoni 9 had life snuffed out of them by the hangman’s noose. That tragic event has inspired a play by Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo, The Killing Swamp, which would run as the play of the month at Terra Culture this November. So at 3 and 6pm every Sunday, beginning from today, theatre goers would have the chance to see a fictitious rendition of those harrowing moments, just before the hangman’s noose eclipsed Saro Wiwa’s life.
Coming at a time when the Post-Amnesty programme of the government is giving the peace process in the Niger-Delta a new lease of life, the play seeks to place that tragic event of 1995 in the proper historical perspective. Director of the play, Wole Oguntokun revealed this much when he harped on the need to ensure that the moment was not forgotten. In an interview with The Guardian, he said: “Even if they are resolving the matter, and that is debatable, we shouldn’t forget the lives that they took, and the crimes that were committed in the process of glossing over the matter at one time. There was an attempt to gloss over, and paper over the cracks in the wall, and Ken Saro Wiwa and other Ogoni people had to pay with their lives.
“So this is a reminder of a great man, a great writer who died in pursuit of a cause he believed, and in defence of his people and their rights. We shouldn’t forget; it doesn’t matter that efforts are being made to resolve the crisis there now. I wrote Who is afraid of Wole Soyinka, a play that chronicled the (Sanni) Abacha days it doesn’t matter that the civilian army is here now. There was a time that happened, and we should never forget.” Oguntokun in assessing the script and what it could translate to in a production said it had a great potential. “I think it is a good script, and as all directors do, you would touch it here and there, and sometimes, you add your own perspective to it. It is a good script, and it is my intention, to as much as possible, remain true to what was written, and to the story the writer told. You know, a lot of us say it in passing and in the comfort of our homes that Ken Saro Wiwa was killed by Abacha in collaboration with some giant oil companies, but the details are always overlooked.
This play doesn’t do that; it is a fictitious rendition of the end of his life, and it is striking that someone thought it to write something, whether fiction or anything else, about how Saro Wiwa’s life ended, the manner in which his life was taken away from him.” Particularly, Oguntokun praised the play for balancing all sides of the Saro Wiwa story. “There are sides that say Saro Wiwa himself was culpable in the death of the four Ogoni chiefs.
This script states all sides. We must remember that these things happen and we should look at why they happened and should also see if the things that caused these problems have been rectified. We should see whether in the light of the damage that has been done, there has been compensation.” Oguntokun said the cast being deployed for the production reflected the need to do a professional interpretation of the script. “We are using Kenneth Uphopho, as Saro Wiwa; there is Shola Roberts Iwaotan, Precious Anyanwu, and Jennifer Osamon. All these people are veteran stage actors; there have all being in the Monologues before, and they are people who can tell the story as well, through good acting. We are not going to put anything shoddy there; it is going to be great.
The Director said a massive turn out is being expected for the production because as he puts it, “the issue of Ken Saro Wiwa remains a salient one, and the Niger-Delta issue remains salient. We hope word will get round, and the play would bring people, people who are concerned and savvy about issues like that. The Killing Swamp is about his life, his style, his death and the circumstances surrounding it. It is an attractive play and an attractive title, and we expect people to turn out.” On the portrayal of the Nigerian State in the play, he said the production would not tone down anything unflattering, insisting that things would be said as they are.
“I was watching Al Jazeera, which I consider objective, the other day and there was this documentary about how we kill cows, and get meat in and it was unflattering, and someone who sat next to me told me not to be upset, and he said: ‘that’s your country.’ There they were slamming cows to the ground and taking the meat through muddy and dirty paths; that is the country. Let’s show it, the truth doesn’t need any protection. Let’s say it like it is, maybe we would be ashamed enough to correct ourselves. If CNN or the BBC comes here and points a camera in front of area boys, you can’t hide them, they are there.” Unlike some critics who are worried that mainly intellectuals and literary enthusiasts are constituting theatre audiences, Oguntokun is unfazed, insisting that everyone has his own niche. “If you do TV soaps, there are people that love Papa Ajasco, there are people that watch Tinsel, and in films, there is Yoruba home videos, English films and Hausa movies.
And there are the guys doing The Figurines now for a different kind of audience, so you must look for your own people. I am not going to pander to the masses; of course I hope that everybody is going to see my play, but I am not going to lessen the value of my work so that it can be like pure water. There should be some kind of intellectual satisfaction in what you do,” he said.
The Killing Swamp’s presentation for this month is at the initiative of the 12th Lagos Books and Art Festival, LABAF, organised by the Committee for Relevant Art, CORA, to which Oguntokun is a member.
The Resurrection of Ken Saro-Wiwa..
A review of Adinoyi Ojo Onukaba’s The Killing Swamp
By Denja Abdullahi
The Ken Saro Wiwa saga is an archetypal story that has been re-enacted in various forms ever since it ended. Poets have written volumes about it, including my very self in a poem I titled Africa Kills Her Son ,after a prophetic short story of the same title by Ken Saro Wiwa himself. A young friend of mine, Ford Manuel, also did a very lengthy poetic piece, long enough to make a poetic volume, which he titled Songs of Saro Wiwa.
Playwrights have equally done their bits on it. Helon Habila has a short dramatic piece published in Camouflage: The Best of Contemporary Nigerian Writings edited by Nduka Otiono and Diego Okenyodo. Dr Uwemedimo Atakpo of the University of Uyo also has a play called The Trials of Ken Saro Wiwa and there may be many more by other writers which we may not be aware of presently.
The story of Ken Saro Wiwa and his environmental rights activism has encouraged a lot of writings about the Niger Delta in prose, poetry and drama. We can even conclude that the NLNG literature Prize for the year 2010 for which the play we are reviewing, The Killing Swamp, was shortlisted came by default as one of the legacies of the Ken Saro Wiwa saga.
Sadly, the Saro Wiwa’s struggle which was intellectual in orientation was brutally suppressed by the Nigerian State and the consequence was the militarization of the struggle and the enthronement of miscreants at the forefront of it. The Nigerian nation, which refused to dialogue with Saro Wiwa, was later to treat these band of ill-educated militants like royalty, granting them amnesty and other perks. That reminds us all of the famous quote that those who make peace change impossible make violent change inevitable.
Another lesson from the Ken Saro Wiwa story is the ethnicisation of popular heroism. After Isaac Adaka Boro,Ken Saro Wiwa should by now have taken his rightful place in the pantheon of the heroes of the Niger Delta but I suspect this is not the case. I wonder is it because Ken was not an Ijaw when even his struggle leading towards the declaration of Ogoni Bill of Rights may have inspired the famous Ijaws’ Kiama Declaration. We should remember that Ken started his struggle as an ethnic minority rights activists before veering into environmental rights activism.
Now to the play. The Killing Swamp fulfills all the requirements of a classical tragic play as it has the unity of time, space and action. It is simply a re-enactment of the exchange between Ken Saro Wiwa and his executioners just as he is about to be hanged. The unilineal trajectory of the play’s action does not detract in any way from its artistic profundity. The play is another creative attempt at unraveling the motive behind Ken’s struggle and what may be playing out in his mind as he pays the ultimate price. Expectedly, the reader is not disappointed at the playwright’s portrayal of the final moments of Kenule as some facts that were salvaged from that gory and unfortunate end pointed out that he paid the price with uncommon dignity.
Notwithstanding the play’s fidelity to the dignified stance of Saro Wiwa before his persecutors, captors and eventual murderers, the playwright injected some humour and clearly fictive enactments to show the bohemian humanity of Saro Wiwa even in the face of death (the encounter with Asabe, a female friend and their feigning lovemaking in the shadow of the gallows and other such actions in the play espouse this). In the final analysis, the play leaves us with all what we had long suspected on the realistic plane, that the Federal government of Nigeria did not kill the Ogoni 9 because they love the Ogoni 4, they only used the internal dissension within the Ogoni to murder their arrowhead in the struggle whose influence has to be curtailed in order to guarantee the continue plunder of their environment in the guise of oil exploration.
The play with its minimal character of four has the right suspense and conflict introduced at the very beginning which sustained the actions till the very end. The dialogue is witty, assured and shorn of the clutter that may slow down the pace of such a play tackling verifiable history. The play is a director’s delight and the near absurdist style used with some few ‘plays’ within the play will be very malleable in the hands of a good director.
The Killing Swamp is highly entertaining piece with plenty of gallows humour which in reality we may not put beyond the real Ken saro Wiwa going by his writings and personality. The man wrote somewhere in one of his books that the tiger said “to cry is to show my teeth and to laugh too is to show my teeth so I prefer to laugh rather than cry”. The strength of The Killing Swamp , a finalist in the 2010 NLNG Nigeria Literature Prize, is its contemporary subject, highly dramatic language and a very humanizing story.
How ironic that those who spearheaded the official judicial murder of Ken Saro Wiwa are themselves today nowhere to be found.Their own stories will never be dignified with any kind of telling like that of Saro Wiwa. If at all it is told it will be in the form of a satirical lampooning of their buffoonery in the tradition of Wole Soyinka’s Play of Giants and King Baabu or in a worst form as that of the Nigerian Nollywood home video movie The Stubborn Grasshopper. All hangmen indeed will die one day!
• Abdullahi, former ANA National General Secretary is Deputy Director, Performing ArtsNational Council for Arts and Culture, Abuja.
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