She ends her speech by returning to the significance of Ken Saro-Wiwa in a global context. His exemplary activism and defence of his people are an inspiration, and today is still ‘a beacon of light’ for all struggling against racism and genocide. His insistence that art should play a crucial role in transforming the lives of people is very important as well because ‘artists can encourage us to dream in a radically different way’, and this is also the power of the Living Memorial that Sokari Douglas Camp has created.
After Angela’s speech, we’ve organised for a section of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s final interview to be projected on a large screen at the back of the chamber. I’ve seen this film so many times, but it has a visceral power tonight, as if he’s speaking to us directly:
To deny a people their right to self-determination for well on 100 years is to subject them to slavery.
To take away the resources of a people and refuse to give them anything in return is to subject them to slavery.
To take away the land of a people who depend solely for land for their survival, and refuse to pay them compensation is to subject them to genocide.
I accuse the ethnic majority who run Nigeria of practising genocide against the Ogoni people. I accuse the oil companies who prospect for oil in Ogoni of encouraging genocide against the Ogoni people. I accuse Shell and Chevron of practising racism against the Ogoni people, because they do in Ogoni what they do not do in other parts of the world where they prospect for oil.
The film extract finishes. You can sense a collective drawing of breath right across the chamber. Then I can hear Lee Jasper, our chair this evening, introducing me, and I have one of those strange, disembodied experiences where you actually look down on yourself from outside your body. I see myself walking to the lecturn, hear myself begin to speak. I start by taking issue with the title of the film extract we’ve just seen – ‘Nigeria’s Shame’; for surely the killing of Ken and his eight colleagues was just as much Britain’s shame, the Netherlands’ shame? For without Shell’s devastation of the Niger Delta there would never have needed to be an environmental campaign in the first place. Then I gesture to the cityscape of buildings visible on the other side of the Thames from City Hall, and describe the even greater historic responsibility for providing the financing and organisation of the slave trade – Barclays’ European headquarters, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyd’s of London. All of these pillars of the British banking and insurance industries, all of these founded upon wealth coming directly from the trade in human beings. And how much of our supposed ‘civilisation’ has come from centuries of what might be called ‘successful violence’ perpetrated by Britain? I talk about Ken’s inspirational activism, celebrate Sokari’s exceptional Living Memorial, and reflect on the role of art, quoting John Berger’s magnificent words about how art sometimes has ‘judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten … the powerful fear art … when it does this … because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that … is inseparable from a justice at last.7 Art when it functions like this, becomes a meeting place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.’
There is an electricity in the air now. Ken Wiwa speaks, updating us on the situation in the Niger Delta today, and explaining how the memorial and our campaign is already having an impact – people in Nigeria, and in Ogoni, know that there is international solidarity and their struggle is not forgotten. J. makes his contribution, describing what he calls the ‘carbon web’ of the oil companies and their tentacular reach into our society, Baroness Lola Young then links the themes of the campaign to broader issues of anti-racism and equality, and at the end, Ben Okri’s poem ‘For Ken Saro-Wiwa’ is read:
That he should be jailed / For loving the land / And tortured / For protecting his people / And crying out / As the ancient town-criers did / At the earth’s defilement / Is monstrously unfitting. / And we live in unnatural times. / And we must make it Natural again / With our singing / And our intelligent rage.
There are then animated contributions and questions from people in the chamber, which end in a discussion about political strategy now, political strategies in the past. The South African boycott is mentioned, Lee Jasper asks the speakers for our thoughts on this, and any final ideas. I say that we need the spirit of the anti-apartheid movement, but we need to develop new strategies, new ways of resisting. But what we can take from those years, when some of us in this chamber used to gather on Fridays for the pickets outside the South African Embassy, is that a state that appeared to be immoveable suddenly crumbled. As Angela said this evening, what is perceived as permanent never is. As for a new strategy, what would happen if we got rid of that cliché ‘corporate social responsibility’ and started to talk instead about the individual responsibility of those working in corporations? If we started to hold the individuals within Shell to account? Those men and women who were in power at the time of the executions of Ken and his eight colleagues? What about starting to bring these individuals to justice?
I end by asking people to reflect on what oppressors always try to do – the attempt to silence the voices of truth, and the absurdity of this. They might just as well try to catch the air in their fingers. I tell the story of Osip Mandelstam, the great Russian poet who Stalin sent to the Gulag in Siberia, where he died in 1938 at the age of forty-seven. One of Mandelstam’s last poems, was not written down, but rather memorised by his fellow prisoners. These four lines are a precise reason why truth can never be silenced. And why Ken Saro-Wiwa, Baribor Bera, Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawo, Daniel Gbokoo, Barinem Kiobel, John Kpuinen, Paul Levula and Felix Nuate will never be forgotten:
You took away all the oceans and all the room,
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.
Yes, the struggle is certainly continuing tonight – we can sense Ken looking down on us with that wild smile, chuckling away, and also Shell, just along the river, getting nervous that our campaign is beginning to gather strength and allies now … The event eventually ends with thunderous appreciation for Ken Saro-Wiwa, for the family, for the Ogoni.
Such evenings do not happen very often. When they do, we should use them like a battery for the times ahead, granaries for the winter to come.
9
From a Desk in Waterloo to a Cell in Port Harcourt
For a long time now an imaginary film has been playing in my head. And with the passing of time, this imaginary film becomes ever more vivid. The two main characters were born barely a year apart, in 1940 and 1941, both into relatively privileged families, the first in Sussex, England, the second in Bori, Nigeria. The first, after many years working in an oil company, rose to become a managing director in 1991; the second began his career as a teacher, later became a businessman, a writer and finally an activist. The film takes us inside their parallel experience of the same day – 10 November 1995: