Phillippe Wamba
- 2002
Fellowship Title:
- Africa's Next Generation
Fellowship Year:
- 2002
A Son Confronts Oil Poverty in the Niger Delta
“As much money as they take out of here, this place should look like New York,” Ken Wiwa says, gesturing at the passing landscape as his car, chauffeured by his father’s driver, Sonny, speeds southeast from Port Harcourt towards Ogoniland along the area’s only major road. The buildings of the city quickly give way to fields of banana and palm trees. Two gas flares, one at a local petrochemical plant, the other burning above the area’s lone oil refinery, are visible through the foliage, like palm trees with undulating orange flames in place of green fronds. Dozens of oil trucks are parked at the roadside, awaiting the opportunity to fill up with shipments of gasoline bound for all over Nigeria when the refinery opens on Monday morning. The scenery is lush and green, but except for the road, the nearby industrial plants and the occasional shack, it’s devoid of construction. Hardly a New York skyline. Ken Saro-Wiwa, was one of Nigeria’s most prolific writers and most outspoken political activists until his hanging by the repressive
In the Name of the Father
In For My Sons and Daughters, the South African poet Dennis Brutus conveyed a prophetic message to his children: “Memory of me will be a process of conscious and unconscious exorcism.” As noted by chroniclers and scholars of the human experience from Euripides to Freud, coming of age necessitates coming to terms with your parents’ legacy. In Africa, where a new generation stands poised to inherit control of a continent from elders who are slowly relinquishing their grip on power seized in the 1960s, the future will largely be shaped by the ways in which young Africans selectively embrace or reject their parents’ example. For Seun Kuti and Ken Wiwa, both sons of late and legendary fathers who loomed large in Nigerian history, this is a particularly onerous task. Seun’s father, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, was Nigeria’s most beloved popular musician and most acerbic social critic until his death of AIDS in 1997. Ken’s father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, was one of Nigeria’s most prolific writers and most outspoken political activists until his hanging by the repressive Sani