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Saro-Wiwa’s Childhood and Education

Ken Saro-Wiwa was born Kenule Beeson Tsaro-Wiwa on October 10, 1941, to Jim Beeson Tsaro-Wiwa and his third wife, Widu, in their home in Bane, the center of the Khana kingdom. Tsaro, or Saro, is the Ogoni honorific for a firstborn son of the family. Kenule went by Tsaro-Wiwa until after the Nigerian Civil War in 1970, during which his government correspondence still used Tsaro-Wiwa. He changed his last name to Saro-Wiwa sometime in the early 1970s, apparently for esthetic purposes.

Saro-Wiwa’s father, a forest ranger and businessman, had tried for many years to have children, but his first wife could not bear children, and his second wife suffered a string of miscarriages. Saro-Wiwa’s mother had also miscarried several times before Kenule was born. Unsurprisingly, his birth was not a simple one, and he was left for dead five times perhaps due to a congenital heart disorder, but he managed to rally each time. Despite the circumstances of his birth, he was a well-adjusted child. He walked at seven months and remained an only child until the age of seven. He was the pride of his family, which later included a sister, Barine, and a brother, Owens.

Saro-Wiwa’s early life followed much the same trajectory as that of many children living during the transition in Nigeria from traditional education to the British colonial system. The Ogoni, like many other societies in the Niger Delta, relied heavily on agriculture and aquaculture. Because of this, the traditional education system in Ogoni focused on educating the youth for a life of subsistence farming. One of the primary ways Ogoni youth claimed their place in adult society was through the Yaa tradition. Yaa was a ritualistic passage to adulthood in Ogoni society, focusing on the militaristic aspects of defending Ogoni territory along with cultivating respect for the economic and cultural mainstays defining Ogoni culture. This coming-of-age ritual was of paramount importance in traditional Ogoni society but was being supplanted by colonial education. Saro-Wiwa therefore had a hybrid early education: he was enrolled at the Native Authority School in Bori while participating in the traditional educational activities of the Yaa tradition. Despite his weak heart, he excelled at many of these exercises, especially palm wine tapping and various athletic practices. However, by the time Saro-Wiwa was an older child, the Yaa tradition was in decline, being supplanted by formal schooling, and it is not clear whether he completed the formal rituals before he was sent to Government College Umuahia (GCU) in 1954 at the age of fourteen. One of his childhood contemporaries, the Ogoni historian Sonpie Kpone-Tonwe, completed the rite in the early 1950s, stating that the tradition went into steep decline shortly after, with the next performance not held until the mid-1960s, and the last known enactment in 1983. In 1991, he spoke to Saro-Wiwa about documenting the practice with an eye to reviving it and incorporating it into Ogoni education. However, the latter’s judicial murder in 1995 ended these plans.¹

Like many Nigerian institutions, the education system was a blend of local tradition and foreign impositions. Western education in Nigeria had its origins in the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and in the mid-nineteenth-century Catholic schools. Officials of both CMS and the Catholic Church struggled to maintain support for the schools despite the colonial government’s promotion of industrial and practical education. The missionary groups were not interested in “practical” education and preferred to focus on religious training. The great Nigerian historian Ade Ajayi pointed out, “They [the CMS and the Catholic Church] sent missionaries to preach the gospel and they promoted education largely because they wished to train teachers and clergymen.”² Thus, Western education did not necessarily address the social needs of early Nigerian society and was seen mostly as a status symbol for the Nigerian elites in the colonial system.

It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after Nigeria had been incorporated into the British Empire, that colonial administrators began to address the need for more practical education that would both provide clerks for the colonial bureaucracy and support a class of skilled artisans. The church schools were extremely deficient in this type of training, leading the British government to invest in its own schools. The first was King’s College in Lagos, which became one of the most prestigious schools in Nigeria.

The educational shift accelerated in the 1920s; in 1926, the colonial government passed the Education Ordinance, which, among other projects, funded the creation of Government College Umuahia, where Saro-Wiwa began his secondary school education. Before that, Saro-Wiwa was educated in his native Ogoni schools, in his native Khana language. Only a lucky few among Nigerian youths could hope to attend the new secondary schools. Most could only aspire to a basic education, a privation Saro-Wiwa came to see as one of the great impediments to Nigeria’s success. In fact, he mocked many aspects of Nigerian education in his many works of fiction, as discussed in chapter 4.

Saro-Wiwa left home to attend GCU in 1954. Though he was the only Ogoni in a school dominated by the Igbo, he always claimed that he felt at home there, because school policy mandated that English was the only language spoken there. Though he was the son of an Ogoni chief, he was admitted to the school on his own merits, excelling in the entrance exam and receiving the prestigious school scholarship for 1954. By the time he graduated in 1961, he had amassed a collection of academic and athletic honors, including prizes for history and English; he was captain of the table tennis team and a starting member of the cricket team.

It was the English language that made him feel Nigerian, and not just Ogoni. In later years, he claimed it was this experience at Umuahia that gave him the hope that Nigeria could rise above its ethnic primacy and create a culture that was truly Nigerian. He embraced English as a way to communicate to the widest possible audience, both in Nigeria and abroad. Although he needed little incentive to excel in his studies, sports, and other activities, a common language fostered an environment where he could find equal footing with the other students, and the school’s Latin motto, In Unum Luceant (May We Shine as One), became more than just a slogan for the young scholar. English became an important tool that Saro-Wiwa later wielded in his attempts to show all Nigerians that there existed a quintessentially Nigerian culture that could be more inclusive than blood kinship or ethnicity.

As discussed in chapter 1, Nigeria’s ethnic and linguistic diversity made the country difficult to govern and reinforced the centrality of ethnicity in the mechanisms of the state. However, at GCU, Saro-Wiwa realized that the English language could unite the disparate ethnic groups and create a sense of community beyond the ethnic rivalries. This belief would follow him throughout most of his life, especially in his most popular work, Basi and Company, discussed in chapter 4.

In 1962, Saro-Wiwa left GCU and enrolled at the University of Ibadan (UI); this was the same year the UI severed its association with the University of London and became an independent institution. At UI, Saro-Wiwa continued his academic excellence and cultural contributions. He won the English Department Prize in 1963 and 1965 and a university scholarship in 1963. He was a member of the UI cricket team, as well as president of the school’s dramatic society in the 1964–65 academic year. He was also editor of two school newspapers, first The Mellanbite, Mellanby Hall’s newsletter in 1963–64, and then the university newspaper The Horizon the following year. During 1964–65 he also served as chairman of Mellanby Hall. Saro-Wiwa had a much harder time breaking into student government at UI than he did with academics. In contrast to GCU, UI presented a microcosm experience of the deep ethnic divide in Nigeria. There was only one other Ogoni student in the school and none on the faculty or staff. As a result, Saro-Wiwa was considered one of the Igbo, as all Easterners were called. Naturally, the school’s student government was dominated by the Yoruba, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the student body. Recalling one election he contested where he felt he was “cheated” on tribal grounds, he lamented, “I once contested a student’s Union election and crashed out, winning a majority of votes only in the ladies’ hall. That year, the entire elected Executive was solidly Yoruba. I believed that the Yoruba students were so ashamed of this that the following year they did not contest any post at all, enabling a minority student to win.”³

Another peculiarity that shaped Saro-Wiwa’s early life was that he was unusually short. Standing only five foot one, he constantly sought to prove himself, being fond of the expression “What’s height got to do with it?” This fact gave rise in the popular imagination to the idea that he suffered from a “Napoleon complex,” that he had to overcompensate for his height by demanding attention in other ways. Saro-Wiwa won many university accolades at the University of Ibadan, just as he did at Government College Umuahia. However, it was his love of drama that would dominate his life at university and his later career as a film producer and activist. In 1964, he played Henry IV in a UI production of Shakespeare’s play. The university also had a traveling troupe called Theatre-on-Wheels, with which Saro-Wiwa re-prised his role in performances in Lagos, Ilorin, Kaduna, Kano, Benin, and Enugu, among other cities across Nigeria. Theatre-on-Wheels received much acclaim, both at home and abroad, collaborating with the prestigious Nottingham Playhouse when they sent a troupe to Nigeria in 1963 featuring the young Dame Judi Dench.

Despite his successes in the theater, he had harbored political ambitions from a young age. The loss of the student union leadership office showed him that Nigeria was entrenched in ethnic rivalry that was unlikely to just disappear on its own. Even before his time at the University of Ibadan, he had taught at Government College Umuahia, and at Stella Maris College in Port Harcourt and believed that education was the key to resolving cultural conflict. Therefore, he dedicated himself to teaching at UI, and later at the University of Nigeria–Nsukka, in order to help combat these rivalries. Despite this intention, the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 cut short his ambitions of academic life. When the war broke out, he was teaching at the University of Nigeria–Nsukka, which was quickly renamed the University of Biafra. This put him in personal peril due to his support for Nigeria in the conflict; obviously he was unable to continue working at a university in the center of the Biafran nationalist movement.