Free Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa by Howard W. French Page A

have polluted the entire water table underground; they have left oil scum everywhere. There are flares burning, polluting the air everywhere you look, and they talk to you about classrooms. How much money do they spend on advertising by comparison? Let them keep their classrooms. They are rubbish.”
    In November 1994, a special Civil Disturbances Tribunal was created to try Ken Saro-Wiwa and fifteen others, and in January 1995, the dissidents were finally charged. The special tribunal’s powers included the right to use the death penalty, and its judgment was beyond appeal. Okuntimo’s permission was required for Saro-Wiwa to even meet with his lawyers.
    Tensions rose inexorably throughout the year as international human rights groups beat their drums over the Saro-Wiwa case. The trial and prospect of executions even made leaders of neighboring countries, many of them dedicated authoritarians, jittery with apprehension, and delegation after delegation was sent from throughout the region to urge restraint and clemency.
    Mindful of his unpopularity, particularly in the south, Abacha had long ago given up visiting Lagos, and remained cloistered instead at his heavily guarded presidential compound in Abuja. Many assumed that he was playing a strange new kind of poker, using the fate of the nation as the cards. Surely, many Nigerians thought, when the right time came, he would release the extraordinary pressure that had been building up, issue pardons and for once savor some favorable press. The alternative was just too terrible to contemplate.
    As October 1, Independence Day in Nigeria, approached, the entire country anticipated a peaceful denouement. In a recent speech, Abacha had promised “important news” for the nation, and with Nigerian newspapers speculating feverishly over whether this would mean a series of pardons or the announcement of new elections, I managed to get a visa and flew to Lagos. Abacha was anything but easy to read, but the city had managed to convince itself that he was going to use the occasion to turn things around.
    On the day of my arrival in Lagos, I headed to Chief Abiola’s house on a whim, together with Robert Grossman, the photographer who accompanied me on many of my travels, and Purnell Murdock, the Voice of America correspondent, to see Abiola’s senior wife, Kudirat, to ask if we could be with her to watch the Abacha speech at her house the next day, hoping to witness the celebrations that would take place if her husband’s release were announced.
    Although he was Yoruba, Abiola was a Muslim, and therefore allowed to marry more than one wife. Certainly, as a reputed billionaire, there were no financial obstacles. Kudirat, a handsome, dark-skinned woman who appeared to be in her forties, had a powerful voice and exuded the authority that comes with her matrimonial rank. Indeed, during the long months of fear and frustration over her husband’s solitary confinement she had emerged as a force in opposition politics in her own right. “Abacha is moving the country at a very great speed,” she told me, pausing for dramatic effect before bellowing, “backwards! There is grief in every home in Nigeria, and the most graceful thing for Abacha to do at this point is to have the military step aside.”
    Kudirat Abiola immediately accepted our request to visit her house for Abacha’s early-morning speech, and even offered to prepare breakfast. “By all means, you must come,” she said, exuberantly. “You are welcome.”
    One after another, Nigeria’s dictators had deceived themselves into believing that they could muzzle Africa’s most determinedly free-spoken population. Abacha was the fiercest, but as Kudirat’s courage showed, not even he had come close. Like some child’s toy rigged with springs, a crackdown in one spot led only to opponents popping up somewhere else. In Lagos, when feisty magazines were shut down by the police one week, they merely opened in another neighborhood