In the Shadow of a Saint: A Son's Journey to Understand His Father's Legacy Book

Ken Saro-Wiwa was one of Nigeria's leading writers, a superb newspaper satirist who wrote 25 books. He was executed in November 1995, allegedly for murder, but more accurately for being the founder and leader of MOSOP, Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, in the face of exploitation of their oil-rich land by Shell International. It was reputed that he was born five times, and it took five attempts to hang him. He was also a father, and the eldest of his children he named after himself. It was his first gift to his son, and would prove the one to define and burden him for the rest of his life.The death of Saro-Wiwa forced Ken Wiwa into a limelight he had studiously avoided. It also meant him confronting the memory of his father, which involved questions of personal, familial and national identity: Wiwa was sent to a English boarding school, and spoke English with his father, unlike his mother, with whom he spoke in Khana. In his writing, Saro-Wiwa understood the power of myth, and within hours of his death his memory was invested with mythic qualities, as a martyr for most, but as a liar to others. He was neither, but rather a driven, committed soul who found it easier to sympathise with a people than his family. Wiwa's painful discovery of his father, through letters, books, and his own smarting meditation, found that Saro-Wiwa too had, perhaps inevitably, experienced terrible division from his own father. Wiwa also spoke to Zindzi Mandela, Nathi Biko and Aung San Suu Kyi, all children of prominent political heroes, and all complicated by it. Importantly, though, Wiwa discovers an empathy that liberates him to wear the mantle of his father's name more easily, and his concluding letter to the spirit of his dead father is immeasurably moving: an infrequent correspondent when his father was alive, he makes his peace by invoking his own deeply formative experience of fatherhood. And so it goes on. One senses his father would have approved. --David VincentRead More