|
|
|
Friday, 2 December 2005
|
| Entertainment |
| Writers remember Ken Saro Wiwa |
|
by
Kondwani Kamiyala, 02 December 2005
-
03:07:11
|
Not even the rain drizzle could keep their spirits down. Malawian
writers Tuesday braved the Blantyre evening down pour to pay homage to
Nigerian writer Ken Saro Wiwa, executed on November 10, 1995.
Patrons at the Bishop Mackenzie Hall were treated to poetry recitals,
with an interlude of a minute’s silence in honour of Wiwa and Malawi’s
founding president Dr Kamuzu Banda, who died on November 27, 1997.
“Ken is among people who are forced to die as they fight for a just
cause. After birth, we all know we will die someday, but to be taken to
the death violently is beyond our imagination,” said Kingston Lapken,
Secretary General for the Malawi PEN.
Lapken mesmerised the audience with his poem ‘Life Amongst the Dead’,
where he declares: “Saro Wiwa died a melancholically death engineered
by people with a flowery intellect”.
He held the audience further on the edges of their seats with his
‘Voices from Kamuzu’s Catacombs’. The poem highlights the problems of
Malawi after the demise of Kamuzu, a country where “interjections in
Parliament have become injuctions (and) Chief Whips are used to whip
political opponents”.
Quoting from the International PEN Charter, Malawi Writers’ Union
(MAWU) President Stanley Onjezani Kenani said: “Writing is the world’s
common currency. A writer is, first and foremost, a citizen of the
world. Therefore, Saro Wiwa was a citizen of Malawi, as much as he was
Nigerian. We ought to remember him.”
Coincidentally, Malawi PEN founding member Edson Mpina was among the
few who bade farewell to Saro Wiwa in the judgement hall when Saro Wiwa
and nine others were convicted of murder by a tribunal handpicked by
the Nigerian military dictator Sani Abacha.
Renowned Malawian poet Jack Mapanje is on record to have comforted Saro
Wiwa in prison with a poem that recounted Mapanje’s own incarceration
at Mikuyu Prison from 1987 to 1991. Mapanje is one of the editors of
Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Saro Wiwa, an anthology
which features world-renowned poets like Mutabaruka, Kwesi Linton
Johnson, Amiri Baraka, Kamau Braithwaite and others.
The evening also saw presentations on the Ghandi inspired non-violent
but fighting life of Saro Wiwa by Maureen Sulumba and another one on
Blantyre’s environmental degradation by Andrew Palika.
There were also poetry recitals from writers Andrew Munthali who did In
Memory of Saro Wiwa and The Uninvited Visitor and Kondwani Kamiyala who
took the floor with The Duel, a narrative poem that looks into the
early stages of John Chilembwe’s Malawi liberation struggle that ended
in his execution in 1915.
Malawi PEN President Alfred Msadala, who read Leaders Versus Writers, a
paper he published in 1997, had a warning. “Writers must not use
freedoms for personal gains. Leaders, or anyone, can’t bar writers, or
any other human being, from thinking. Thinking is the essence of
being,” he said.
Ken Saro Wiwa was born in October 1941. He was an author, journalist,
entrepreneur, academician and environmentalist. He lived his life
fighting for the minority rights of his Ogoni people.
In spite of an international outcry, he was hanged in a summary trial
hot on the heels of his heavy criticism of the Nigerian government
policy, which played blind eye to the environmental degradation in his
homeland brought by foreign oil companies. As the oil and gas industry
took riches from the land, it left the land polluted and
disenfranchised.
He is renowned for several works of literature, including his most famous work Soza Boy: a Novel in Rotten English.
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
