Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy: The politics of "Rotten English"

Public Culture

Volumn 13, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 97-112

  North, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 25444462511     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-13-1-97     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. For a particularly vivid and gruesome account of the execution of Saro-Wiwa and his eight "co-conspirators," see Joshua Hammer, "The Making of a Legend," Newsweek 126 (18 December 1995), 47.
2. Saro-Wiwa's final statement to the military tribunal that condemned him is reprinted as Saro-Wiwa, "Final Statement to the Tribunal" in Social Justice 23, no. 4 (1996): 7;
3. his account of a previous detention is given in Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary (New York: Penguin, 1995).
4. He spells out his case against Shell in greatest detail in Saro-Wiwa, Genocide in Nigeria: The Ogoni Tragedy (London: Saros International, 1992).
5. Ken Saro-Wiwa, Basi and Company: Four Television Plays (Port Harcourt, Nigeria: Saros International, 1988);
6. Saro-Wiwa, Prisoners of Jebs (Port Harcourt, Nigeria: Saros International, 1988);
7. Saro-Wiwa, Pita Dumbrok's Prison (London: Saros International, 1991).
8. The phrase "anomic Nigeria" is taken from the subtitle of Saro-Wiwa's Similia: Essays on Anomic Nigeria (London: Saros International, 1991).
9. Two memorial collections have appeared since Saro-Wiwa's death. Abdul Rasheed Na'Allah, ed., Ogoni's Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1998) includes Harry Garuba's discussion of Sozaboy, "Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy and the Logic of Minority Discourse," and Adetayo Alabi's "Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Politics of Language in African Literature," among a much larger number of essays and memorials that concentrate on Saro-Wiwa's political activities.
10. Craig W. McLuckie and Aubrey McPhail, eds., Ken Saro-Wiwa: Writer and Political Activist (Boulder, Colo.: Lynn Rienner, 2000) includes a larger and more varied discussion of Saro-Wiwa's writings.
11. In particular, see the essay by Maureen N. Eke entitled "Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English." Outside of such memorial volumes, attention to Saro-Wiwa's writings has been virtually nonexistent.
12. Wole Soyinka, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 149.
13. Obiajunwa Wali, "The Dead End of African Literature?" Transition 4 (September 1963): 14. This article was followed in Transition by a number of letters and short essays, many of them, especially those by British writers and scholars, hostile to Wali's point of view.
14. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: J. Currey, 1986).
15. Ngũgĩ begins the first essay in this collection by harking back to the earlier controversy in Transition. See pp. 5-9.
16. Research in African Literatures 23, no. 2 (1992).
17. Ken Saro-Wiwa, "The Language of African Literature: A Writer's Testimony," Research in African Literatures 23, no. 2 (1992): 156-57.
18. This argument is expressed by David Crystal in English as a Global Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Though Crystal ends by admitting that a global English will almost inevitably lead to new, mutually incompatible versions of English, this does not alter, for him, the necessity of a universal, standard English for international communication. See 130-38.
19. For an informative history of the idea that English is the inevitable global language, see Richard W. Bailey, Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 93-121.
20. Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (New York: Longman, 1994), vii. Sozaboy was originally published in 1985 by Saros International in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Saros, under a system that Saro-Wiwa has referred to as self-publishing, originally issued all of Saro-Wiwa's works. I refer to the later edition throughout this essay because it is the one that readers of this essay are far more likely to have.
21. See Chantal Zabus, "Mending the Schizo-Text: Pidgin in the Nigerian Novel," Kunapipi 14 (1992): 125-26;
22. Doris Akekue, "Mind-Style in Sozaboy: A Functional Approach to Language," in Critical Essays on Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, ed. Charles Nnolim (London: Saros International, 1992), 22-23.
23. See Zabus, "Mending the Schizo-Text," 124;
24. Willfried F. Feuser, "The Voice from Dukana: Ken Saro-Wiwa," Matatu 1 (1987): 54.
25. Akekue, "Mind-Style," 28.
26. Asomwan S. Adagboyin, "The Language of Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy" in Nnolim, Critical Essays, 37-38.
27. William Boyd, "Introduction," Sozaboy, iii.
28. Amos Tutuola's first novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, appeared in 1952.
29. It is currently available, bound with Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (New York: Grove Press, 1994).
30. At one point, Mene enumerates his reasons for becoming a soldier. Roughly speaking, these boil down to hurt pride, desire to impress and perhaps protect his wife, and the attractions of the uniform (59).
31. Seiyifa Koroye, "Sozaboy. First Person Narration and Mene's 'Very Bad Dream,'" in Nnolim, Critical Essays, 91.
32. "Khana" seems to be the accepted transliteration, and it is the one that Saro-Wiwa uses in most works other than Sozaboy.
33. Charles Nnolim, "Saro-Wiwa's World and His Craft in Sozaboy" in Nnolim, Critical Essays, 76.
34. Akinwumi Isola, "The African Writer's Tongue," Research in African Literatures 23, no. 2 (1992): 25.
35. For a well-articulated contrary point of view, see Simon Gikandi, "Ngũgĩ's Conversion: Writing and the Politics of Language," Research in African Literatures 23, no. 2 (1992): 131-44.
36. Andrew Apter, "Death and the King's Henchmen: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Political Ecology of Citizenship in Nigeria," in Na'Allah, Ogoni's Agonies, 133, 135.
37. Soyinka, Open Sore, 15. In his use of the term nation language, a synonym for newly assertive nonstandard languages, especially in the Caribbean, Soyinka equates discrimination against nonstandard dialects or minority languages with indifference to the rights and opinions of minority peoples.