The accidental activist

Ken Wiwa, son of the executed Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, struggled for years in the shadow of his father. Now he is rethinking some of his father's strategy and seeking to 'manage the monster' of globalisation. He talks to David Shanks

Ken Wiwa sees himself as having been put in a position of responsibility by the courage of others. "I always had a feeling in the back of my mind of a privilege not earned, that one doesn't feel authentic" - because of not being imprisoned for his views.

Wiwa used to feel guilty about not suffering in the way his famous father did at the hands of the Abacha dictatorship in Nigeria. But these doubts have given way to a vision of social justice that rejects fundamentalism, including that of George W. Bush, bin Laden and the anti-globalisation protesters. He disapproves too of local community attitudes that say "what I have I keep" or "speak my language if you want to build a factory here".

Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed by a military tribunal in 1995 for allegedly murdering four tribal elders, had campaigned against the symbiosis between the Abacha military regime of Nigeria and the Shell Corporation. In an impressively honest and self-revealing book, In the Shadow of a Saint published two years ago, the younger Wiwa worked out his feelings about his writer/activist father.

Wiwa describes the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), founded by his father, as "a model for non-violent advocacy". It brought 300,000 people in southern Nigeria - from the total Ogoni population of half a million - out to protest and prompted the retreat of Shell from the area. He believes that the lesson to be learnt from the Ogoni's campaign and the reaction of the international community to the authorities' intransigent and violent response is that governments and multinationals should listen to the people.

But he is clearly rethinking some of his father's strategy and sees danger in the still potent "attraction of nostalgia for paradise lost".

"We must watch ourselves," he says, during a recent visit to Limerick. "If we are not careful we will end up retreating." The movement must be kept organic and open to outside influences and dialogue, he stresses. "We can shame them into action" but not by "closing ourselves off".

Saro-Wiwa is depicted in his son's book as seeing issues of social justice in black and white. He believed that his son should return to the struggle in Nigeria armed with an expensive education in England and Canada. However the then-apolitical Wiwa had other ideas about almost everything. Now 33, he works as a writer and lives in Canada with his wife and two young children.

Today, working on a second book, The Last Man - about people's stories, ownership of history, rights, power, and language as a weapon - he sees many "grey areas".

In this fiction/non-fiction account he is "reconstructing another creation myth" suggesting strongly that he who controls the past controls the future. The past has apparently become a territory that is up for grabs - it is a question of whose story is more compelling. Here he instances the Israeli dream of the Promised Land from the Old Testament: "The stories we tell ourselves have an impact on the way we organise society".

His fiction is intended to question some of the assumptions of history - and of law. "If soldiers are sent in to wipe out a community because it is resisting a law that has been written down, whose law is that?" He wants to highlight the contradictions between oral "customary law" of indigenous people and law in treaties written thousands of miles away that the people had no say in.

He loves grey areas, senses of time and paradox. Speaking of those who criticise the way he has moved on - some question his right to be an Ogoni spokesman because "you aren't here all the time" - he uses the image of a grey barrier. To those up-close it is a wall but to someone 100 yards away on a hill it is obviously an elephant.

Wiwa feels he has the perspective and the right to advance his ideas as he grows into his destiny. "My father did all the work, he defined my past, he wrote my history and I must confess to an Oedipal desire to escape that history and embrace my future." In Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi's parting whisper to him was: "Best of luck in everything you do, Ken, because you know we are all one family in this".

In the future, he wants to see local communities having an influence on the "form and content" of the "amorphous monster" of globalisation. The human-rights movement has been campaigning for years on globalisation and inter-connectedness, and Wiwa supports negotiating inevitable change, pointing out that there is a "a point of contact between the two allegedly opposing forces" of globalisation and human rights.

The debate needs to focus on that overlap, he stresses For instance, on issues of law to produce a better kind of globalisation, one which embraces the idea of sustainable development. He is looking for ways to "manage the monster" and make it accountable. "I want to be a global citizen," he says.

"Ogoni: past imperfect, future tense" was the title of his keynote address to a development-education conference at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, last weekend. (He was on his way home to Toronto after several weeks in Nigeria, where he runs his father's publishing and property management business, which he is taking in the direction of information technology.)

He told his audience that the sense of Ogoni identity of community arose out of conflict with the oil company and that there was a need in the 1990s "to define what was being threatened, to describe an Ogoni utopia before our innocence, our solitude was exposed". But he warns of the current danger of a retreat into solitude. "A people, a nation, must move with the times." It is Gabriel García Márquez's message when he says "communities that spend 100 years in solitude rarely get a second chance on earth", he explains.

Wiwa prefers to do his "talking in writing" - but when he gets going about his family mantle as an "accidental activist" for social justice he is compulsive - exuding sincerity and a vulnerability.

Would he go into politics? All he allows me to write about this is that he doesn't have political ambition: "My usual explanation is that I grew up in a political house. Politics has exacted a heavy toll on my family and I'd rather not put my family through that again."

He does, however, support the present democracy in Nigeria under President Olusegun Obasanjo: "It's not perfect, but a lot of people have died for it". His worst fear is of extreme violence around next year's election because of high arms importations in the past five years and the insecurity felt in the Muslim north.

WHATEVER about Nigerian politics, though, he still wants to change the world. "The concept of the nation state is being abolished. In Europe, the concept of being English or Irish is being subsumed. But in the Southern world, it is the opposite." Globalisation offers a world of no boundaries but people are saying: "No, no, no, we want to assert our right to self-determination".

This conflict, believes Wiwa, has the "potential to unravel the map of the world . . . The struggle for social justice will redefine our world, it will reconfigure a world that was assembled between the 14th and 20th centuries." In the meantime, he has won - only last month - the legal argument that a case against Shell could be heard in the US. This test case, which Shell "will fight tooth and nail", could take 20 years. The pre-trial has already taken five.

The most important thing for Wiwa in this case is to clear his father's name. His lawyers want Shell to admit complicity in the extrajudicial killing of Saro-Wiwa and eight others. And maybe clean up Ogoni's degraded environment, where acid rain from gas-flaring eats attin roofs, strange plants grow in creeks (forcing fishermen further out to sea) and respiratory diseases have exponentially increased. Wiwa wants "to highlight the loopholes which allow multinational companies to operate with impunity around the world".

In the Western world, there are measures which protect the people against companies, "but in places like Nigeria there are loopholes and multinational companies can do as they please.

"When you have a company that is not observing environmental regulations and is contributing significantly to global warming, it is impoverishing us all."

He finished his Limerick address with: "In short an imperfect past makes the future tense".