I am a man of peace, a man of ideas . Appaled by the denigrating poverty of my people who live on a richly endowed land, distressed by their political marginalization and economic strangulation, angered by the devastation of their land, their ultimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined to usher to this country as a whole a fair and just democratic system which protects everyone and every ethnic group and gives us all a valid claim to human civilization I have devoted all my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated. I have no doubt at all about the ultimate success of my cause, no matter the trials and tribulations which I and those who believe with me may encounter on our journey. Neither imprisonment nor death can stop our ultimate victory.
------Ken Saro-Wiwa, October 31, 1995.
Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth.
-----Wole Soyinka, The Man Died (9).
Ken Saro-Wiwa was contoversial in life, and continues to be so in death. Hanged for his political views and his position in the very touchy debate of the majority / minority discourse in Nigerian politics, his name and his idea have now stood firm in the stream of debates issuing from Nigerian politics.
------Onookome Okome, 2000.
Ken Saro-Wiwa was a man who was conscious of his role in his community and in the larger political configuration called Nigeria. He loved history immensely and was constantly reading it and the same passion he showed for the study of history he brought to the creation of history. He often consciously created it and now his life has assumed the historical for us, the living. This fact of his life the most staunch adversary cannot hope to becloud in any way.
------Onookome Okome, 2000.
The construction of a representation relation of coincidence between Sozaboy;s story and the structure of the story of the oppressed minorities can infact be extended to the life of Ken Saro-Wiwa himself. Ken Saro-Wiwa always cut the picture of a small embattled man confronting a material and discursive power far in excess of his ability to overcome. But Ken was born into an awareness of difference.
------Harry Garuba, 2000.
----Literature in a critical situation such as Nigeria's cannot be divorced from politics. Indeed, literature must serve society by steeping itself in politics, by intervention, and writers must not merely write to amuse or to take a bemused, critical look at society. They must play an interventionist role..., the writer must be L'homme engage: the intellectual man of action. He must take part in mass organizations.
------Ken Saro-Wiwa.
.... A struggle will necessarily ensue, but thta should conduce to making the writer even better. For we write best of the things we directly experience, better of what we hear, and well of what we imagine.
------Ken Saro-Wiwa.
.... To deny me means of utilizing my mind is torture. To feed my body but deny my mind is deliberate dehumanization. To accept this meekly is a form of supineness. To accept this continuously is to accept risks of an end which even I cannot fortell. I need to exchange thoughts not merely with myself but within a community of other minds. I cannot circle indefinitely in the regurgitations of my mind alone. It is evil.... I must break out of the mental prison in which they have encased me.
-----Wole Soyinka, The Man Died 226; emphasis added.
You can tell the state of a nation by the way it keeps its prisons, prisoners beding mostly out of sight. Going by this criterion, Nigeria was in a parlous state indeed.
------Ken Saro-Wiwa.
On the surface, it may appear that I have been making an argument for the Ogoni people. But in essence, I have been questioning the entire Nigerian system - the political structurfing, ethnic relations, resource allocation, morality and social justice in Nigeria. I was able to mobilize the Ogoni people to identify with this questioning and to lay themselves open to Babangida's obvious fascism in co-operation with the brutality of international capitalism in the Third World.
------Ken Saro-Wiwa
.....Literature works its way through society and time slowly. Its eventual victual victory is not in doubt. But since our society demands much more urgency, the writer cannot be a mere story-teller, he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely x-ray society's weakness, its ills, its perils, he or she must be actively involved in shaping its present and its future.
------Ken Saro-Wiwa.
In the Nigerian context, the writer must see the truth and see it whole. He must make the critical connectiion between the theft of the oil resources belonging to a weak group and the theft of an election, of a popular mandate. He must condemn a faulty constitution or a faulty constitutional process and the monsters they breed. Or even see that the one is father to the other. And he must not only condemn, he has to work assiduously to destroy a system which breeds aberrations.
------Ken Saro-Wiwa.
.... you see the truth cannot be hidden and good ideas have legs. They walk, and some-times run. That is what the prisoner lecturer said. However, what had surprised him was the regularity with which Africa bred monsters.... The emergence of these men on the African political scene was an liquid stupid'...The fact that African rulers held on to power even when they knew the problems were beyond their ability, was an "aliquid stupid."
------Ken Saro-Wiwa
Of all the countries who had black gold, Nigeria was the only one that has succeeded in doing absolutely nothing with it. The Arabs used their oil very well indeed; not only had they given their people education and alot else that conduced to good living, they also had invested their money in Europe and America. They had spent their money in buying foreign food which they consumed or even threw away; in paying for ships waiting on the high seas to deliver food.
------Ken Saro-Wiwa.
... as I see it, the generation to which I belong is about to leave the scene. There is a need for the next generation to prepare itself to continue where we shall have left off.
------Ken Saro-Wiwa.
....fighting to right the wrong would be the greatest gift of life! Yes the gift of life... May it be worse. The designers of the iniquitous system must be ashamed. My spirit would not be broken.
-----Ken Saro-Wiwa.
A playwright has two obligations: first to make some statement about the condition of "man" (as it is put) and second to make some statement about the nature of the form ....
------Edward Albee.
.... the time has now come when the African writer must have the courage to determine what alone can be salvaged from the recurrent cycle of human stupidity.
-----Wole Soyinka.
An artist differs from the rest of us mainly because he reacts sharply and in an uncommon manner to phenbomena which leave the rest of us unmoved, or, at most, merely annoy us vaguely.
------H. L. Menchken.
The worst sin on earth is thed failure to think. It is thoughtlessness that has reduced Africa to beggardom, to famine, poverty and disease. The failure to use the creative imagination has reduced Africans to the status of mimic men and consumers of the product of other imagination.
------Ken Saro-Wiwa.
A Nigerian politician is venomous. A Nigerian politician of the Second Republic is a curse. The Nigerian politicans of the Second Republic in one body add up to an epidemic.
------Ken Saro-Wiwa
.... the weapon of the intelligent obliged to associate with the foolish and the barbarous. It enables him to maintain his own private standards while appearing to conform to those of society. It enables him to criticize without his being apparent to those he does not wish to offend.
------James Reeves
The present division of the country into a federation in which some ethnic groups are split into several states whereas other ethnic groups are forced to remain together in a difficult unitary system inimical to the country, is a recipe for dissension and future wars.
------Saro-Wiwa, 1994.
He may not indeed destroy the framework of the received legends... but he ought to show invention of his own, and skillfully handle the traditional material.
-----Aristotle, Poetics XIV
It is no doubt that Ken Saro-Wiwa's fiction, plays, and even peoms represent onde of Nigeria's most powerful literary critiques of the contemporary Nigerian society. In a effective manner, he employs humor, sarcasm, and irony to lay bare the malfeasances of a corrupt system embeded in injustice, exploitation of the weak by the strong, lack of fair play. These literary devices, as employedby Ken, are not gratuitously used. In a society where everyone is insane, where men of great intelligence and artistic sensibility are condemned by circumstances to live in a mkore or less foolish and philistine social environment such as Nigeria, great writers are often misunderstood. These writers generally hide behind such literary devices to hide or becloud their intentions.
-----Francis Unimna Angrey, 2000.