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Ken Saro-Wiwa was one of Nigeria's leading writers, a superb newspaper satirist who wrote 25 books. He was executed in November 1995, allegedly for murder, but more accurately for being the founder and leader of MOSOP, Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, in the face of exploitation of their oil-rich land by Shell International. It was reputed that he was born five times, and it took five attempts to hang him. He was also a father, and the eldest of his children he named after himself. It was his first gift to his son, and would prove the one to define and burden him for the rest of his life.
The death of Saro-Wiwa forced Ken Wiwa into a limelight he had studiously avoided. It also meant him confronting the memory of his father, which involved questions of personal, familial and national identity: Wiwa was sent to a English boarding school, and spoke English with his father, unlike his mother, with whom he spoke in Khana. In his writing, Saro-Wiwa understood the power of myth, and within hours of his death his memory was invested with mythic qualities, as a martyr for most, but as a liar to others. He was neither, but rather a driven, committed soul who found it easier to sympathise with a people than his family. Wiwa's painful discovery of his father, through letters, books, and his own smarting meditation, found that Saro-Wiwa too had, perhaps inevitably, experienced terrible division from his own father. Wiwa also spoke to Zindzi Mandela, Nathi Biko and Aung San Suu Kyi, all children of prominent political heroes, and all complicated by it. Importantly, though, Wiwa discovers an empathy that liberates him to wear the mantle of his father's name more easily, and his concluding letter to the spirit of his dead father is immeasurably moving: an infrequent correspondent when his father was alive, he makes his peace by invoking his own deeply formative experience of fatherhood. And so it goes on. One senses his father would have approved. --David Vincent
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From Publishers Weekly
The daunting emotional challenge of living up to an almost mythically famous parent is the subject of Wiwa's brutally candid memoir, which explores his psychological tug-of-war with his father, Nigerian writer and human rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Asking "My father. Where does he end and where do I begin?" Wiwa recalls his troubled childhood growing up in the shadow of a world-renowned man who simultaneously took on a powerful military regime and the mighty Shell Oil conglomerate, only to be executed by the Nigerian dictatorship in November 1995. Writing this book, according to Wiwa, who is now a journalist in Canada, was an attempt to understand the complex bond between his father and himself, a relationship so difficult at times that it compelled him to legally change his name. Resentful at his father's mood swings, absences and infidelities, he was angry at being pressured to continue the older Wiwa's work and legacy until he fully reassessed the man's untiring fight against tyranny. Wiwa's impassioned and detailed memoir provides a superb overview of the Nigerian political landscape, as well as an excellent behind-the-scenes look at his father. In addition to his own story, the concluding segments about other children of prominent human rights heroes Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko and Bogoyoke Aung San are revealing and informative. Agents, Bruce Westwood, Westwood Creative Artists, and Derek Johns, AP Watt. (Sept. 1) Forecast: This book is almost certain to attract media attention, given the international celebrity of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the irresistible family angle. Its eloquence promises a wide readership among those who care about international human rights and those who love family memoirs.
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