Sozaboy by Ken Saro Wiwa

Sozaboy' paradoxically decodes the despair and alienation of war into a brighter future for humanity in general. It'd a subliminal lesson that, by making the impact that it does, entrenches itself in the reader's unconsciousness, and helps the reader understand the moral and political implications of war on humanity, in general, and the effect of the Nigerian civil war on the minority areas within the Biafran population in particular.

Sozaboy is a powerful book that is intended to serve as anti-war harangue. That this is so can, I think, be best detected through the language ' rotten English' which serves as vehicle for decoding the disorder and brutality of war. The language itself is a corruption of the regular harmonious way of speaking English. It is fractured, uncouth, incomplete and rough. At rare times, the author lapses into 'regular' English and, as seen, these times seem to occur when order seems to be existent. For instance, at the advent of the war, the author describes his fascination for soldiers in very lucid English (p.72).

The plot itself reflects the disorderliness and hollowness of war. The book starts with Mene's dreams of raising a family and becoming a professional driver. He has recently married and is heartily in love. There seems to be a new government on the horizon that is promising propitious results to the village:

…the new government of Soza and police has come. Everybody was saying that everything will be good in Dukana because of new government. They were saying that Kotuma ashbottom from Bori cannot take bribe from people in Dukana again. They were saying too that all those policemen who used to chop big bribe from people who get case will not chop again (P. 1).

God knows but that the village needs invigoration!

Mene's first experiences of war seem disorienting and perplexing:

After the plane has disappeared, then I got up from where I was hiding. Oh Jesus Christ son of God, the thing wey I see my mouth no fit talk am. Oh God our father way dey for up, why you make man wicked like this to his own brother?... I can never forget what I saw that morning. (p.11)

In powerful terms, Mene goes on to describe his experiences:

True true these men were not looking like the people that I have known before. If you see how all their eyes have gone inside their head, and all their hair have become palm oil colour and they have dirty rag shirt and all their bones are shaking inside their body, I am telling you, if you see all these things, and you think about them very well, you will know at once that war is a very bad and stupid game (P. 151)

War is an exercise of those who are supposed to be leaders exploiting a vulnerable population. In Sozaboy, Chief Birabee and Pastor Barika belong to this group; and war is devastating and anti-human with primitive instinctual forces dislodging all normality.

This is alluded too in Saro-Wiwa's plot where over again, Mene, unwilling soldier as he is, tries to return to Dukana and, over again, he finds his village not as it was and his entire history eradicated. His wife, his mother, his family all gone and his house toppled. Most significant of all is the fact that the tribes leaders attempt to imprison him -- they see him as the enemy and he is advised, at the end of the book, to act as though he were really dead:

And as I was going, I was just thinking how the war have spoiled my town Dukana, uselessed many people, killed many others, killed my mama and my wife, Agnes, my beautiful young wife with J.J.C. And now it have made me like person wey get leprosy because I have no town again (P. 181).

Here, it is he who is perceived as the leper rather than war -- that perpetuated the illiteracy of the people - to be blamed for the ruins of Dukana, its disease, its suffering, and its scuttling of hopes and aspirations. Mene's only hope for life -- real life -- is to flee to environs where war doesn't exist.

The village, in particular too close to the scene, and Nigeria, in general, used to its continuality of war may be too immune and habituated to the irrational destructiveness of the phenomenon. As anti-war activist, Saro-Wiwa wants us, the readers, to soak in the terrors and plight of the situation and he does this by deliberating reversing language itself so that the situation penetrates.