An Inventory of Belonging

By Ken Wiwa (page 2 of 5)

I can see a blue jay skipping in and out of the branches of the big pine trees that landscape the view from in here. Every now and again the pines ruffle furtively as a squirrel darts in and out of the branches while I always keep half an eye out for the racoon that often startles me each time I catch sight of the morose expression on its face. But as much as I would love to glean some poetic insight from the scene outside, I already know that the story is in here, hidden in the belongings scattered around my study.

I knew the minute I set eyes on this room that I wanted to live in this house. It is a small room, maybe 10 foot by six, in an annex of my bedroom. I say "I knew" but it was as much an unconscious as a conscious decision. So many of the choices we make in life are informed by our past and I strongly suspect that my decision to live in this particular house was probably decided years ago when I used to spend my summer holidays loitering in my father's study in an annexe of his bedroom in Nigeria. I would scan the shelves of his library, plucking out any book that caught my epileptic fancy, dipping in and out of its pages, reading indiscriminately; Swift, Shakespeare, Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Flitting from Soyinka to Senghor between Achebe and Pepper Clarke, I would search for something to help while away the holiday until it was time to return to school in England.

I don't even have to look to confirm that some of the books on the shelves in here are familiar; I too have accumulated a library of books by Chinua Achebe, by Wole Soyinka and by John Pepper Clarke. I also have two books by the grand old man of African letters, the former Senegalese poet, soldier, priest and President Leopold Sedar Senghor. Monsieur Senghor was my father's ideal of a Renaissance man, l'homme engage as Ken Saro-Wiwa liked to envisage himself. I've never actually read Senghor but I bought his books anyway. I am conscious that this room is something of a shrine to my father, an unconscious need to belong, to establish a connection with him and with home.

Was it fate or accident that compelled me to reconstruct my father's house in here? Who knows? Of course there are as many, probably more differences than similarities in the books on our shelves. I don't, for instance, share my father's passion for classic English literature. Shakespeare and Dickens have never captured my imagination as they did my father's. He was an Anglophile, a passion he developed as a schoolboy at his secondary school in Southern Nigeria. This love of things English has been bred into my family's genes; my great grandfather started it - he was the one who brought English missionaries to our village. I suspect it was the reason why his son, my grandfather, Jim Wiwa, has an English name. Papa later worked for the English trading conglomerate UAC (United African Company) as a translator but my father was the first one in my family to receive a formal English education. Through a government scholarship he went "abroad" to Umuahia, a town 125 kilometres from home where he was one of a handful of Ogoni students. It was at Umuahia that Ken Saro-Wiwa fell in love with all things English. Modelled on an English boarding school, Umuahia was run by expatriate teachers in the colonial service. By the time Ken Saro-Wiwa's first son was ready for secondary school, Nigeria had long since been independent from the British and the school system we inherited from our former masters had been abused by the ruinous politics of Nigeria. Which was why my father sent me to school in England.

When I arrived in England on a bitterly, bitterly cold day in January 1978, I spent the next 20 years trying to acclimatise. Although I schooled in England, my life was divided between Africa and Europe and I floated between two worlds charting the course that had been mapped out by my father's love of all things English and his fierce commitment to our home. If it was probably inevitable that I would reject Africa if only as a declaration of my independence from my father's politics, England, to a certain extent, also forced my hand.

England is an island, proud of its imperial history but the English are always fearful that foreigners will swamp its culture. So every immigrant is encouraged, overtly and covertly, to assimilate - to become one of us. It is a tradition and philosophy that the Anglo-Saxon has perfected during 1000 years of conquest and assimilation. The strategy has served them so well that English is now the world's international language. A language whose original dictionary has been swamped by an influx of words and phrases annexed from other languages. Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed that "the English language is the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven". So like many other immigrants of an impressionable age, I was swept up into the English channel.

Twenty years in England moulded my identity. My accent, my values, my worldview - so much about me became anglicised. It wasn't until I was 26-years-old that I began to question my emerging identity.

Up until then there had always been this vague, unexplored, uncomfortable and unspeakable feeling of shame, of betrayal that I identified more with European values than Africa ones. And so when my father's involvement in politics in Nigeria demanded that I repay the faith he had invested in me, I obliged him as any dutiful son would but I was aware that my involvement in my father's politics would have long term consequences for my identity. The deeper I was drawn into his world the more resentful I became that so many of my choices in life had been motivated by a desire to escape his influence rather than what I actually wanted for myself. After he was murdered in November 1995, those feelings intensified. I was torn between my now politicised identity as Ken Saro-Wiwa's son and the apolitical, anglicised identity I had hidden behind in England. I was hovering between a country I had tried to leave behind and now wanted to forget and a country that was trying to shoehorn me into an identity that no longer fitted me. By the time I was 29 I had no idea who I was or what I wanted to be. I had no clear concept of where home was or to whom or to what I owed my allegiance. I was rootless, deracinated and adrift in the world.