Pa Jim Wiwa

Pa Jim Beeson Wiwa, Ken’s father, died the way he lived, fighting. Even when by last Easter it was clear to members of his family that the end was near, he still clung to life, summoning Dr Owens Wiwa, his younger son, to his side now and again. His words were barely coherent, but their import was clear: ‘The Ogoni have won the struggle against their tormentors. Ken has won. Victory is ours.’

Owens would recount these intermittent encounters to me while we were together in Port Harcourt last month. To the uninformed and the unintelligent, Pa Wiwa’s words would not have made sense. What victory when the Ogoni are still weighed down by poverty, denied their civic and social rights, and their hero Ken still pining away in an unmarked grave? What victory when Shell, the chief architect of their misery, is still strutting her stuff all over the Niger delta, spreading destruction and mayhem wherever she puts down her oil rigs?

But then it is in the nature of the old and wise to see far into the future; to journey where mortal eyes cannot see, and to divine the profound truths wrapped up in the seeds of time. Pa Jim Beeson Wiwa embarked on that journey shortly before he left his mortal remain, and what he saw and relayed back to his younger son, Owens, gave those of us who have resolved to continue Ken’s work great comfort. Justice and truth will triumph in the fullness of time.

To recount Papa Jim Wiwa’s life history is also to recount the history of our nation. Born in 1904, he grew up in an Ogoni given over to the needs and designs of imperial Britain and her Proconsul in Nigeria, Frederick Lugard. The sacking of Ogoni and her incorporation into what later became known as colonial Nigeria was a particularly brutal affair.

The Ogoni, it must be remembered, are a republican people, fiercely jealous of their freedom, and refusing to bow down before rulers not of their own making. The highest unit of political aggregation and power in precolonial Ogoni was the village. The village head, though a descendant of one of the original founders of the village, was elected by popular acclaim. All Ogoni were citizens, men and women. And all participated in facilitating the ascension of the village head to power.

Land was the all-important means of production and also the central store of wealth. Yet all land was held in common, and you accessed it in virtue of your belonging to the community, and subscribing to its overarching norms and values. There were taboos and decrees, the violation of which was visited with appropriate sanctions. The citizens of pre-colonial Ogoni may not have invented Maxim guns and conquered the oceans, but they were able to work out a social and political engineering wherein neighbours lived at peace with each other, and no body ever went to bed hungry because they were poor.

The imposition of colonial rule on the Ogoni at the turn of the 20th century disrupted this political and social order. It was not just that the British deposed patriotic and honest village heads and murdered the particularly powerful ones, they put in their place stooges and ‘warrant chiefs’ who did their dirty work and treated their fellow Ogoni as subjects fit only to do Her Majesty’s bidding. Worse, the economic order, deriving from age-old Ogoni norms of self-reliance, reciprocity, and sustainability, was displaced by an imperial monetary economy that introduced scarcity, unemployment, and hunger where previously they had not existed.

It was in this milieu, underpinned by the general psyche appropriate to a conquered people, that Jim Beeson Wiwa grew up in the first and second decades of the 20th century. He began his working life as a forest ranger in the service of the colonial government. But it had not been his first choice. He had actually set up as a palm oil trader, but the Great Depression of the early 1930s, and the depredations of the British trading firms who even then had begun to displace indigenous merchants, forced him to close shop and seek alternative employment.

All through the turbulent 1930s and into the de-colonisation period of the 1940s and 1950s, Beeson Wiwa dug in and in the face of enormous difficulties, brought up his children and also attended to the needs of his large extended family. When civil war broke out in July 1967, he was in Umuahia, working as a market master. His eldest son, Ken, was on the Federal side, soon to be appointed Administrator for Bonny. His wives and other children were in Bane, Ogoni, trapped between retreating Biafran troops and advancing Federal infantry. These were difficult times.

The civil war ended in 1970 and he brought his family together again and resumed life as a loyal, hardworking citizen of Nigeria. He had never asked for much, only for the opportunity to earn a decent living and bring up his children as honest and diligent members of society. Pa Beeson was fiercely proud of his first born son, Ken. Right from his first days in Native Authority School, Bori, Ogoni in the late 1940s, Ken had demonstrated that he was gifted with an uncommon intelligence.

It is a tribute to Pa Beeson’s farsightedness and generosity of spirit that all the ingredients that were to come together to make the brilliant and intrepid writer and political thinker who was to humble the largest oil company in the world in the early 1990s with only a mere pen found a clement room to thrive and prosper under his roof. For there would never have been a Ken Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP without a determined, focused, and hard-working Beeson Jim Wiwa. He taught his eldest son the value of hard work, thrift, and honesty. But above all he taught him never to suffer fools and buffoons gladly and to always dig deep and find the courage to say truth to unaccountable and self-serving power.

In May 2004, aware that Pa Wiwa was getting on in years, and worried that his substantive words on the struggle of his people, the struggle that took the life of his beloved son, had not been recorded for posterity, I journeyed to his home in Bane, Ogoni. I went in the company of Patrick Naagbaaton, the talented and courageous Ogoni journalist and political activist.

He was clearly ailing now, but the Beeson Wiwa who received us on that fine May morning was still full of fire and defiance. He told me of the morning, now so long ago, when Ken came to him and sought his permission to lead the Ogoni to freedom from the tyranny of Shell and the Nigerian state.

‘It was a difficult decision for me to make,’ Pa Wiwa told me. ‘I asked my son, who will bury me after they have killed you? I asked him this question three times. But he was still determined to do something to save our people. In the end, I gave him my blessing.’

Truly, there is no greater love than this: that a father will give his first beloved son that the community might live.

Ike Okonta

Some Ogoni and ND resources

All Africa Environmental Rights Action Human Rights Watch Reports Various, Ogoni Factsheet  Corporate Watch Project Underground MOSOP