Africa Kills its Sun

26/12/2025

Miscellaneous    Download PDF  

   There have been many activist-writers, novelists who are aware that their work cannot easily be extricated from their political concerns, including James Baldwin, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood and Arundhati Roy. But nobody more than Nigeria’s Ken Saro-Wiwa has been identified with the lengths a writer will go in furthering the cause of a people. This rests in his well-publicised execution in 1995, along with eight others involved in the rights of the Ogoni people. “It is true that Saro-Wiwa’s most lasting legacy came about because of how and why he died, a victim of his success in bringing the Ogoni crisis to the world stage,” say Roy Doron and Toyin Falola. “However, he would never have been able to do that without his previous experiences, which both helped him forge the connections that he utilizedlater in life and gave him a unique literary voice that enabled him to bring his ideas to a mass global (and local) audience.” (The Washington Post)

     Nine people were executed, but the one person who is internationally remembered is Ken Saro-Wiwa, and this is because he was the writer among them. The fact might contain an appalling realisation still greater than that a nation can kill one of its authors — that the West gets especially horrified when the death of a literary man takes precedence over the deaths of not just the other eight but the many, many killed in the preceding years. In Nigeria, “In 1984, 355 death sentences were carried out and in 1985 a further 301 executions took place. After another military government came to power in August 1985, the number of executions declined, although a further 200 executions were carried out from 1986 to 1988.” (Amnesty International) However, what can also get lost in the understandable furore over Saro-Wiwa’s death, which can usefully symbolise the death of many others, is that he was a writer. Anybody reading Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale will be reading a novelist who is creating a world that the reader becomes absorbed by on its own terms; while reading 'Africa Kills Her Sun', we should also read it as the work of fiction it is, no matter if it anticipated Saro-Wiwa’s own demise. 

       The epistolary novel was especially popular in the 18th century (The Sorrows of Werther, Dangerous Liaisons, Pamela), and not uncommon in the 20th (Strait is the Gate, Herzog, In the Country of Last Things). A few short stories have adopted the method: work by Virginia Moriconi and George Saunders. But, usually, the epistolary work has taken the form of an exchange of letters; 'Africa Kills Her Sun' consists of only one, a further reason perhaps to read it autobiographically, or at least less fictionally. But this would deny the literary nature of the prose, the importance of the well-structured sentence and the acuteness of its insights. Speaking of the prison guard, the narrator Bana says to his correspondent (a childhood girlfriend he hasn’t seen in ten years): “I pity his ignorance and cannot envy his complacency.” He is speaking of the prison guard whom he has bribed to get the letter to her, someone he thinks should be with him and others awaiting the firing squad.“But he’s condemned like most others to live, to play out his dull, uncomprehending life, doing his menial job for a pittance and a bribe for the next so many years.” 

    The story hinges on a paradox: the condemned man feels more sorry for his captors than they do for him. This might not seem like a contradiction in terms: why would the incarcerators be empathic? But by that reckoning, why should Bana? Yet he says, “the men who shall have eased us out of life will then untie our bodies and dump them into a lorry and thence to some open general grave. That must be a most distasteful task. I’d not do it for a million dollars.” They will do it for a lot less: “…some miserable fellow will do it for a miserable salary at the end of the month. A salary which will not feed them and their families till the next payday. A salary which they will have to augment with a bribe…I do feel sorry for them.” Yet the letter also contains sarcasm, the lowest form of wit perhaps, in some circumstances, but the highest form of dignity in others. “The newspapers will faithfully record the fact of our shooting. If they have space they’ll probably carry a photograph of us to garnish your breakfasts.” There is irony too when Bana says he remembers reading in a paper once of a man whose one request was to be buried with his walking stick: “He was pictured slumping in death, devotedly clutching his beloved walking stick. True friendship, that.” With the animated willing to do others’ bidding, including the priest who will offer last rites and who Bana will yell at, calling him a hypocrite, why wouldn’t a man’s best friend be a stick he can rely upon?

    However, this suggests cynicism, and yet nothing can be more idealistic than dying for a people. As Sara-Wiwo says, “environmental degradation has been a lethal weapon in the war against the indigenous Ogoni people. Incidental to and indeed compounding this ecological devastation is the political marginalization and complete oppression of the Ogoni and especially the denial of their rights, including land rights.” (A Month and a Day) Yet this is where paradox can be at its most pronounced and only resolved temporally. The future offers a hope that the present fails to possess, and perhaps one reason why the future possesses it rests on the sacrifices made in the present by people like Bana. Bana recalls someone saying that Africa kills her sons. Bemused by the remark, he feels he wants to borrow the quote but transform it. Africa Kills her Sun, he thinks, “that’s why she’s been described as the Dark Continent?” How to get Africa to see the light, and Angela L. Rodrigues uses “…the idea of “not-yet”. This is where “…human life is both limited and encouraged by social forces and by a desire for a better world— [it] is fundamental in [Ernst] Bloch’s philosophy, a tour de force that makes his views on utopia unique and dismantles any easy, uncomplicated definition of the term.” (Africa Studies Review)

    On several occasions in the story, the paragraph ends with one word and a question mark. Three times with See?; once with Understand?, and once with Yes? It can seem as accusatory a question mark as it is inquisitive. “I say if my avocation is antisocial, I’m in good company. And that company consists of Presidents of countries, transnational organizations, public servants high and low, men and women. The only difference is that while I’m prepared to pay the price for it all, the others are not. See?” Perhaps one way of viewing the story is as utopian if we understand the word not as a ‘no place’ that its original Greek meaning suggests, nor as potentially an almost perfect world, as Thomas More examines in his book of that name, nor as a totalitarian state, but as a possibility that needs to be sensed as a value. Rodrigues proposes, “in a world of sheer inequalities and violent relations of production, where money and power dictate each and every decision regardless of social and environmental issues, a focus on hope and utopia seems relevant and perhaps even necessary. But of course, in order to make sense of the subject, one must get rid of the fallacious idea of utopia as an unreachable “no place” or worse, as a totalitarian project.” Thus Rodrigues quotes Ruth Levitas, “building on Bloch and Paul Ricoeur, Levitas…affirms that utopia amounts to a ‘transformation of existential experience and of the objective structures of the social world that generates that experience…a proper analytical definition of utopia allows it to be fragmentary, fleeting, elusive.’” (African Studies Review)

    Bana’s questions are part of this attempt at what Bloch would call the “not yet” and Rodrigues paraphrases Austin George: “some of Saro-Wiwa’s characters are constructed as elements in a frontier between a dismaying present and a promising future that is envisioned not so much through a plan but through an act of absolute surrender to the historical forces of the moment.” (African Studies Review) In Africa Kills Her Sun, an absolute surrender is also an absolute resistance. Bana and his fellow executees aren’t just going to be sent to their deaths; they have actively insisted upon it. “Sentence us to death immediately and send us before the firing squad without further delay.” 

       In Africa Kills Her Sun, Bana isn’t explicitly political (unlike Saro-Wiwa), but he is implicitly so, and this is partly what makes it fictionally interesting. It isn't just the clear difference between Saro-Wiwa and Bana, it is also that the story asks us to read the political between the lines, and not only on the surface, as if the story has been as influenced by Camus’s The Outsider as Saro-Wiwa’s activities. It is the story of a thief, not an activist, about a person who will die, but who still might be of dubious character. As Bana tells us in the middle of the story, Bana and his two fellow inmates (Sazan and Jamba) were behind an operation that went wrong. All robberies, Bana says, are in cooperation with the police; they couldn’t succeed otherwise. But on this occasion, the police escort that should have been kept away from the cash van they were robbing wasn’t, and a policeman shot at the boys doing the robbery and the boys shot and killed the policeman. The boys got the money, but they also killed a cop, and that was contrary to the code Bana and his colleagues always insisted upon: “we swore never to kill”. The boys had acted on orders, Bana and the others had made them, and even if the police superintendent was responsible for things going wrong (he was expected to keep the police escort away from the vehicle carrying the cash), they took the wrap.

    What the story proposes is that becoming a robber makes sense within a corrupt culture, that if everybody is robbing the country blind, then it becomes almost a political act to do so from a position of acknowledged criminality. Looking at banditry, Nicholas A. Curott and Alexander Fink note that Eric “Hobsbawm provides an explanation for the positive reception of bandits based upon Marxian class analysis. Hobsbawm formulated the thesis of the social bandit as an explanation of the phenomenon of the bandit hero, whereby social banditry is an early manifestation of proletarian protest against the exploitation of the ruling classes. While social bandits are considered criminals in the eyes of the elites, they are admired by the members of the exploited peasant classes from which they come.” (The American Journal of Economics and Sociology) Bana is a social bandit and a fully conscious. In prison, he reflects on the decisions he has made and the choices that have been available to him, looking back on his time in the Merchant Navy. “It was there I came face to face with the one looting of the national treasury…everyone was busy at it and there was no one to complain to.” When he tried, he was told: if you can’t beat them, join them, and Bana says he wasn’t about to join anyone and chose criminality over corruption — he became an armed robber. 

   There may be a hint of hypocrisy in Bana’s claim: hasn’t he been reliant on the corrupt cops to rob at all? But he also makes clear that the robberies were for spreading wealth rather than holding on to it: “somehow, whatever we took from the people — the rich ones —always was shared by the gang, who were almost always on the bread line. Sazan, Jimba and I are not wealthy.” The accusatory meets the questioning in the reality of a social order that creates characters like Bana, and why Hobsbaum can see in the social bandit a heroic value. Even if various historians have criticised Hobsbaum’s argument, claiming the historical evidence doesn’t match his thesis, one could argue that, from a Blochian position, it doesn’t need to: what matters is that a hint of history meets a chunk of myth and this might be especially useful when, as Currot and Fink note, “…a predatory government is composed of individuals interested in furthering their own interests instead of any notion of social welfare.“ (The American Journal of Economics and Sociology) 

      The government Bana is under is exactly that, and banditry, and the myth of it, is from a certain perspective the “not yet” of a more suitable society. Saro-Wiwa was not a robber but an activist. Yet as we all know, many refuse to make such distinctions or prefer to transform the one into the other. The Nigerian government who executed Saro-Wiwa did so by turning his activism into criminality: claiming he and others were behind murders they clearly didn’t commit — “Compelling new evidence suggests the Nigerian military killed four Ogoni elders whose murders led to the execution of the playwright and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995” So The Independent noted in 2010, suggesting the government was even worse than the one Saro-Wiwa imagines here, where fact is yet crueller than fiction. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Africa Kills its Sun

   There have been many activist-writers, novelists who are aware that their work cannot easily be extricated from their political concerns, including James Baldwin, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood and Arundhati Roy. But nobody more than Nigeria’s Ken Saro-Wiwa has been identified with the lengths a writer will go in furthering the cause of a people. This rests in his well-publicised execution in 1995, along with eight others involved in the rights of the Ogoni people. “It is true that Saro-Wiwa’s most lasting legacy came about because of how and why he died, a victim of his success in bringing the Ogoni crisis to the world stage,” say Roy Doron and Toyin Falola. “However, he would never have been able to do that without his previous experiences, which both helped him forge the connections that he utilizedlater in life and gave him a unique literary voice that enabled him to bring his ideas to a mass global (and local) audience.” (The Washington Post)

     Nine people were executed, but the one person who is internationally remembered is Ken Saro-Wiwa, and this is because he was the writer among them. The fact might contain an appalling realisation still greater than that a nation can kill one of its authors — that the West gets especially horrified when the death of a literary man takes precedence over the deaths of not just the other eight but the many, many killed in the preceding years. In Nigeria, “In 1984, 355 death sentences were carried out and in 1985 a further 301 executions took place. After another military government came to power in August 1985, the number of executions declined, although a further 200 executions were carried out from 1986 to 1988.” (Amnesty International) However, what can also get lost in the understandable furore over Saro-Wiwa’s death, which can usefully symbolise the death of many others, is that he was a writer. Anybody reading Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale will be reading a novelist who is creating a world that the reader becomes absorbed by on its own terms; while reading 'Africa Kills Her Sun', we should also read it as the work of fiction it is, no matter if it anticipated Saro-Wiwa’s own demise. 

       The epistolary novel was especially popular in the 18th century (The Sorrows of Werther, Dangerous Liaisons, Pamela), and not uncommon in the 20th (Strait is the Gate, Herzog, In the Country of Last Things). A few short stories have adopted the method: work by Virginia Moriconi and George Saunders. But, usually, the epistolary work has taken the form of an exchange of letters; 'Africa Kills Her Sun' consists of only one, a further reason perhaps to read it autobiographically, or at least less fictionally. But this would deny the literary nature of the prose, the importance of the well-structured sentence and the acuteness of its insights. Speaking of the prison guard, the narrator Bana says to his correspondent (a childhood girlfriend he hasn’t seen in ten years): “I pity his ignorance and cannot envy his complacency.” He is speaking of the prison guard whom he has bribed to get the letter to her, someone he thinks should be with him and others awaiting the firing squad.“But he’s condemned like most others to live, to play out his dull, uncomprehending life, doing his menial job for a pittance and a bribe for the next so many years.” 

    The story hinges on a paradox: the condemned man feels more sorry for his captors than they do for him. This might not seem like a contradiction in terms: why would the incarcerators be empathic? But by that reckoning, why should Bana? Yet he says, “the men who shall have eased us out of life will then untie our bodies and dump them into a lorry and thence to some open general grave. That must be a most distasteful task. I’d not do it for a million dollars.” They will do it for a lot less: “…some miserable fellow will do it for a miserable salary at the end of the month. A salary which will not feed them and their families till the next payday. A salary which they will have to augment with a bribe…I do feel sorry for them.” Yet the letter also contains sarcasm, the lowest form of wit perhaps, in some circumstances, but the highest form of dignity in others. “The newspapers will faithfully record the fact of our shooting. If they have space they’ll probably carry a photograph of us to garnish your breakfasts.” There is irony too when Bana says he remembers reading in a paper once of a man whose one request was to be buried with his walking stick: “He was pictured slumping in death, devotedly clutching his beloved walking stick. True friendship, that.” With the animated willing to do others’ bidding, including the priest who will offer last rites and who Bana will yell at, calling him a hypocrite, why wouldn’t a man’s best friend be a stick he can rely upon?

    However, this suggests cynicism, and yet nothing can be more idealistic than dying for a people. As Sara-Wiwo says, “environmental degradation has been a lethal weapon in the war against the indigenous Ogoni people. Incidental to and indeed compounding this ecological devastation is the political marginalization and complete oppression of the Ogoni and especially the denial of their rights, including land rights.” (A Month and a Day) Yet this is where paradox can be at its most pronounced and only resolved temporally. The future offers a hope that the present fails to possess, and perhaps one reason why the future possesses it rests on the sacrifices made in the present by people like Bana. Bana recalls someone saying that Africa kills her sons. Bemused by the remark, he feels he wants to borrow the quote but transform it. Africa Kills her Sun, he thinks, “that’s why she’s been described as the Dark Continent?” How to get Africa to see the light, and Angela L. Rodrigues uses “…the idea of “not-yet”. This is where “…human life is both limited and encouraged by social forces and by a desire for a better world— [it] is fundamental in [Ernst] Bloch’s philosophy, a tour de force that makes his views on utopia unique and dismantles any easy, uncomplicated definition of the term.” (Africa Studies Review)

    On several occasions in the story, the paragraph ends with one word and a question mark. Three times with See?; once with Understand?, and once with Yes? It can seem as accusatory a question mark as it is inquisitive. “I say if my avocation is antisocial, I’m in good company. And that company consists of Presidents of countries, transnational organizations, public servants high and low, men and women. The only difference is that while I’m prepared to pay the price for it all, the others are not. See?” Perhaps one way of viewing the story is as utopian if we understand the word not as a ‘no place’ that its original Greek meaning suggests, nor as potentially an almost perfect world, as Thomas More examines in his book of that name, nor as a totalitarian state, but as a possibility that needs to be sensed as a value. Rodrigues proposes, “in a world of sheer inequalities and violent relations of production, where money and power dictate each and every decision regardless of social and environmental issues, a focus on hope and utopia seems relevant and perhaps even necessary. But of course, in order to make sense of the subject, one must get rid of the fallacious idea of utopia as an unreachable “no place” or worse, as a totalitarian project.” Thus Rodrigues quotes Ruth Levitas, “building on Bloch and Paul Ricoeur, Levitas…affirms that utopia amounts to a ‘transformation of existential experience and of the objective structures of the social world that generates that experience…a proper analytical definition of utopia allows it to be fragmentary, fleeting, elusive.’” (African Studies Review)

    Bana’s questions are part of this attempt at what Bloch would call the “not yet” and Rodrigues paraphrases Austin George: “some of Saro-Wiwa’s characters are constructed as elements in a frontier between a dismaying present and a promising future that is envisioned not so much through a plan but through an act of absolute surrender to the historical forces of the moment.” (African Studies Review) In Africa Kills Her Sun, an absolute surrender is also an absolute resistance. Bana and his fellow executees aren’t just going to be sent to their deaths; they have actively insisted upon it. “Sentence us to death immediately and send us before the firing squad without further delay.” 

       In Africa Kills Her Sun, Bana isn’t explicitly political (unlike Saro-Wiwa), but he is implicitly so, and this is partly what makes it fictionally interesting. It isn't just the clear difference between Saro-Wiwa and Bana, it is also that the story asks us to read the political between the lines, and not only on the surface, as if the story has been as influenced by Camus’s The Outsider as Saro-Wiwa’s activities. It is the story of a thief, not an activist, about a person who will die, but who still might be of dubious character. As Bana tells us in the middle of the story, Bana and his two fellow inmates (Sazan and Jamba) were behind an operation that went wrong. All robberies, Bana says, are in cooperation with the police; they couldn’t succeed otherwise. But on this occasion, the police escort that should have been kept away from the cash van they were robbing wasn’t, and a policeman shot at the boys doing the robbery and the boys shot and killed the policeman. The boys got the money, but they also killed a cop, and that was contrary to the code Bana and his colleagues always insisted upon: “we swore never to kill”. The boys had acted on orders, Bana and the others had made them, and even if the police superintendent was responsible for things going wrong (he was expected to keep the police escort away from the vehicle carrying the cash), they took the wrap.

    What the story proposes is that becoming a robber makes sense within a corrupt culture, that if everybody is robbing the country blind, then it becomes almost a political act to do so from a position of acknowledged criminality. Looking at banditry, Nicholas A. Curott and Alexander Fink note that Eric “Hobsbawm provides an explanation for the positive reception of bandits based upon Marxian class analysis. Hobsbawm formulated the thesis of the social bandit as an explanation of the phenomenon of the bandit hero, whereby social banditry is an early manifestation of proletarian protest against the exploitation of the ruling classes. While social bandits are considered criminals in the eyes of the elites, they are admired by the members of the exploited peasant classes from which they come.” (The American Journal of Economics and Sociology) Bana is a social bandit and a fully conscious. In prison, he reflects on the decisions he has made and the choices that have been available to him, looking back on his time in the Merchant Navy. “It was there I came face to face with the one looting of the national treasury…everyone was busy at it and there was no one to complain to.” When he tried, he was told: if you can’t beat them, join them, and Bana says he wasn’t about to join anyone and chose criminality over corruption — he became an armed robber. 

   There may be a hint of hypocrisy in Bana’s claim: hasn’t he been reliant on the corrupt cops to rob at all? But he also makes clear that the robberies were for spreading wealth rather than holding on to it: “somehow, whatever we took from the people — the rich ones —always was shared by the gang, who were almost always on the bread line. Sazan, Jimba and I are not wealthy.” The accusatory meets the questioning in the reality of a social order that creates characters like Bana, and why Hobsbaum can see in the social bandit a heroic value. Even if various historians have criticised Hobsbaum’s argument, claiming the historical evidence doesn’t match his thesis, one could argue that, from a Blochian position, it doesn’t need to: what matters is that a hint of history meets a chunk of myth and this might be especially useful when, as Currot and Fink note, “…a predatory government is composed of individuals interested in furthering their own interests instead of any notion of social welfare.“ (The American Journal of Economics and Sociology) 

      The government Bana is under is exactly that, and banditry, and the myth of it, is from a certain perspective the “not yet” of a more suitable society. Saro-Wiwa was not a robber but an activist. Yet as we all know, many refuse to make such distinctions or prefer to transform the one into the other. The Nigerian government who executed Saro-Wiwa did so by turning his activism into criminality: claiming he and others were behind murders they clearly didn’t commit — “Compelling new evidence suggests the Nigerian military killed four Ogoni elders whose murders led to the execution of the playwright and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995” So The Independent noted in 2010, suggesting the government was even worse than the one Saro-Wiwa imagines here, where fact is yet crueller than fiction. 


© Tony McKibbin