We fundraised for the project, and, with the help of the curator David A. Bailey, we began to conceptualise the process we wanted for our memorial, and then, working with Platform colleagues Lorne Stockman and Jane Trowell, publicity materials for the campaign were designed – and the ‘Remember Saro-Wiwa’ campaign was up and running. We were determined the project would not be a conventional public art commission, but rather a ‘living memorial’ which would refocus attention on the ongoing environmental devastation caused by oil extraction in the Niger Delta.
A year later, in March 2005, we had the official launch, at a packed City Hall, hosted by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, Ken Wiwa and Anita Roddick, where we called for submissions for ‘a Living Memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight’. Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kadija Sesay and Helon Habila read and performed their work, and William Boyd described his shock on hearing of the executions, and read one of the last letters he’d ever received from Ken in prison:
I am bitter and I am dreadfully sad. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the bravest man I have known, is no more. From time to time, Ken managed to smuggle a letter out of prison. One of the last letters I received ended in this way: ‘I’m in good spirits … There’s no doubt that my idea will succeed in time,6 but I’ll have to bear the pain of the moment … the most important thing for me is that I’ve used my talents as a writer to enable the Ogoni people to confront their tormentors. And it makes me feel good! I’m mentally prepared for the worst, but hopeful for the best. I think I have the moral victory.’
You have, Ken. Rest in peace.
*
24 November 2006
In the taxi we remember the first articles we ever read about what had been happening in Ogoni, by Andy Rowell and John Vidal, seeing those first pictures thirteen years before, hearing the name ‘Ken Saro-Wiwa’ for the first time. And all that has come afterwards … the vow we made that morning in Glasgow. A long way travelled since. Clerkenwell Green. We’ve arrived. The taxi pulls up at the hotel, we take a deep breath. We ask the taxi to wait and head inside. I hear myself say to the receptionist: ‘We’re here to collect Angela Davis,’ and a minute or so later, the lift doors open, and walking towards us is a smiling woman in her sixties, that instantly recognisable face and hair, iconic of those years of revolutionary change – the Black Power movement of the early 1970s. She introduces us to her colleague and fellow academic Gina Dent, and the four of us then head back towards Tower Bridge in the taxi. She apologises for still being a little jet-lagged, wants to know more about the shape of the event tonight, quizzes us on ‘Mayor Livingstone’ and the current state of the left in Britain. Soon we’re back at Tower Bridge and the Platform offices, and we’re introducing Angela and Gina to our colleagues and Maria Saro-Wiwa, Ken’s widow, and her son, Ken Wiwa.
I get another text from the mayor’s assistant asking us when we will be arriving – at City Hall – the mayor and officials are all waiting outside. Well, it won’t hurt for them to wait a little longer. We’re walking under Tower Bridge now towards City Hall, I can see the winner of our Living Memorial to the Ogoni Nine, shimmering ahead of us – Sokari Douglas Camp’s glorious ‘battle bus’ glinting silver in the night.
And there they are outside City Hall, Ken Livingstone and his deputy Lee Jasper and other officials waiting in a line, like nervous schoolchildren. I savour this moment, as we approach – politicians, for once in their lives, deferring to activists and artists. I introduce Angela Davis and Ken Wiwa to the mayoral group, flashes of cameras, official pictures taken.
There’s an admiring inspection of the memorial, and then we’re ushered inside City Hall, and whisked up to the seventh floor – the mayor’s inner sanctum. Assistants look up as we go past, we’re guided into a room with a fine view of Tower Bridge below. There’s a long table with nibbles laid out and glasses, we’ve got about half an hour before the event starts, and Ken Livingstone’s in his hostly element now: ‘Right, what will you all have to drink? Wine? Beer? Whisky? Rum?’ Conscious of the event to come, we mostly ask for juices and water; this does not go down well with our mayor: ‘God, I dunno what’s happened to the left these days! Nobody drinks any more. Talk about the New Puritanism!’ Soon he’s deep in conversation with Angela about Chavez and Venezuela, J. and I are on the other side of the table talking to Lee Jasper, but I’m still finalising in my head what I want to say this evening.
In a few moments we’re being taken down to the chamber. We emerge to a buzz of expectancy. City Hall is packed tonight. Three or four hundred people here. I’m sitting between Angela Davis and Ken Livingstone, there are our huge projections in green, black and white behind us, ‘REMEMBER SARO-WIWA’. This campaign has come a long way from that moment on the Piccadilly Line three years ago. A time when the Ogoni struggle had almost been forgotten in our culture. Shell were beginning to breathe more easily, hoping that things had ‘moved on’ – to use that favourite phrase of corporations and politicians who rely on our short-term memory to get away with murder.
And now I can see Maria Saro-Wiwa smiling at me from the second row. How much I’ve learnt from her in the last years: the sorrow that she carries with her like a cloak, the permanence of grief, her absolute determination that justice for her people will come one day, that all the deaths will not have been for nothing, the tenderness of her love for her children and grandchildren. I can never forget what she’d told me the year before: that, just after Ken was killed, she gathered the whole family together to talk and to pray. She told them that she’d had a dream, and in this dream Ken had come to her and promised that ‘a lion of justice will come to help you all in the future’. And then she thanked us for all that we had done, and all that we were planning to do. At the moments in the campaign when we’ve had major setbacks I’ve simply thought of Maria and what she and the family have been through. She has give us an incredible strength and inspiration. And I can guess what this memorial means to her, to the children, Ken, Zina and Noo, and to the wider Ogoni community, both here in London and in the Niger Delta.
Ken Livingstone is now introducing tonight’s event and speaking about the formative influence of Angela Davis, and how he remembers as a boy, and a member of the Young Socialists, collecting money in south London for the imprisoned Black Panthers. I’m interested to hear him speak from the heart tonight about Ken Saro-Wiwa, and what his campaign for justice has given to the world. Then Angela Davis is given a rousing reception, and she’s soon describing the electrifying impact of Saro-Wiwa’s message, and the way it links to so many other struggles for self-determination. Much of what she says concerns the illusion of permanence which those in power try to create, but how shallow this illusion is. She quotes Brecht’s comment that ‘because things are the way they are, they will not stay the way they are’, and then links this to her own experience of growing up in the most segregated city in America – Birmingham, Alabama – and not being able to go to the libraries and the museums as a girl. How her mother told her that change would happen, and it has – though, going back to Birmingham today, she still feels ‘like a stranger to the city, because black people weren’t allowed in the majority of areas’ when she was a child. And, despite all the social advances, there are still huge legacies from centuries of such institutionalised racism and violence, the prison system in America being just one example – over 2.2 million people imprisoned, with a disproportionately high percentage of young African American men incarcerated.