Friday, April 7, 2017

Resistance moon: The meat of dictators

The first time I heard of Ken Saro-Wiwa was in the last week of his life, when Peter Jennings announced that the Nigerian environmental activist, writer and television producer had been hanged by his government for his protests against the multinational petroleum corporations that were destroying the resources of his homeland.

Saro-Wiwa was an articulate and unflagging advocate for the basic human right to a safe environment, clean water, the sharing of natural resources—which made him dangerous to the conglomerates and the military dictatorship in Lagos they’d paid for. His voice and his pen struck more terror than any firearm he might have wielded—had he ever chosen to, which he did not.

Dictatorships and multinationals—the bigger they grow, the more enraged they are by anyone not falling into line.

Saro-Wiwa’s non-violent campaign led to his arrest on trumped-up charges of murder; he was tortured and executed in 1995 at age 54, along with eight other leaders of his Ogoni tribe.


Families of the nine filed suit against Royal Dutch Shell the following year for human rights violations in the matter of their deaths. In 2009, just as the case was about to go to trial in Manhattan, Shell settled out of court, paying out $15.5M. The company continues to deny any wrongdoing, issuing one of those statements you hear every fucking time some guilty-as-hell politician, businessman or corporation settles out of court solely “to put the matter behind all parties.”

In this case, one of Shell’s mouthpieces intoned, “While we were prepared to go to court to clear our name, we believe the right way forward is to focus on the future for Ogoni people.”

Man, these oleaginous scumbags only seem to have one songbook to sing from, and it’s the same, sour tune every time.

Saro-Wiwa wrote “The True Prison” in 1993, when he’d already been imprisoned twice without trial. He was arrested again in 1994 on charges of incitement to murder in the deaths of Ogoni chiefs. He was in prison for more than a year before his execution in 1995. There was outrage around the world at his hanging, but it didn’t seem to stop anyone from doing business there.

You remember about the oil, right?

There are so many lines in this poem that make me want to weep—for Saro-Wiwa and his people, and for me and my people, both then and now. Do these not resonate with you—cowardice masking as obedience, security agents running amok for such low wages, lies pounded into a generation’s ears? He has cut to the heart of the tragedy with not a single word too many.

“The True Prison”

It is not the leaking roof
Nor the singing mosquitoes
In the damp, wretched cell
It is not the clank of the key
As the warden locks you in
It is not the measly rations
Unfit for beast or man
Nor yet the emptiness of day
Dipping into the blankness of night
It is not
It is not
It is not

It is the lies that have been drummed
Into your ears for a generation
It is the security agent running amok
Executing callous calamitous orders
In exchange for a wretched meal a day
The magistrate writing into her book
A punishment she knows is undeserved
The moral decrepitude
The mental ineptitude
The meat of dictators
Cowardice masking as obedience
Lurking in our denigrated souls
It is fear damping trousers
That we dare not wash
It is this
It is this
It is this
Dear friend, turns our free world
Into a dreary prison



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