The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
The 2009 PEN World Voices event on Ken Saro-Wiwa’s life and legacy opened with a reading from his play, “The Transistor Radio.” Candor, humor, and conscientiousness leaped from the pages—and along with them, a dark glimpse into the despair and desperation in the lives of his Nigerian characters. An unrelenting grind is revealed, one that is probably unfathomable to many of us. Imagine a day, or three, without enough food—or with just a cup of tea.
Almost fifteen years have passed since writer-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian military government over trumped-up murder charges. But not much has improved for those in the oil-rich Delta region of Nigeria, Saro-wiwa’s homeland. In fact, it has gotten bleaker.
As one of the most vocal critics of the actions of government and oil companies in the region, Saro-Wiwa was compelled as writer and activist to “speak for the little people,” said his son, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Jr., a panelist at the PEN event. Poised and articulate, Saro-Wiwa, Jr., spoke fondly of his father as a renaissance man, who “always carried a book and pipe…and within whose life ran a sense of injustice that often produced sadness.”
For Saro-Wiwa, this sense and this emotion collided powerfully within, resulting in a remarkable legacy that involved, as second panelist and writer Richard Patterson said, a passionate, nonviolent struggle against “a terrible reality of economy and indifference.”
During the event, a brief documentary by PEN spelled out what many of us already know about this reality: the environmental devastation wrought upon the Delta by reckless oil spills and flares, and the painfully inadequate infrastructures in the region, despite the large sums of money procured by the Nigerian government and foreign oil companies.
Sadly, this reality continues to grip the region, immorally perpetuated by those caught up in an unending cycle of corruption and greed. Patterson, whose novel Eclipse is loosely based on the life of Ken Saro-Wiwa, also marveled at the scant US response to this travesty, calling it, essentially, a “failure of empathy and imagination.”
But the arc of the moral universe, as we know it, might actually begin to bend toward justice. Next week, a court case opens in New York, finally bringing to the fore a lawsuit that has been lodged against Shell, Inc. for, among other allegations, its complicity in the silencing and untimely death of Ken Saro-Wiwa. We must await the outcome now, hoping of course that MLK, Jr. was indeed right about that moral trajectory.
