The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis.

• Author: Sachs, Aaron

In December of 1995, just one month after the Nigerian government executed Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists (see my article, "Dying for Oil," in the May/June 1996 issue), I attended a lecture on foreign policy in Washington, D.C., hoping to hear some new ideas about how to handle such "rogue" regimes. The speaker, an academic serving as a consultant to the United States government, touched on a number of the world's "hot spots" and explained a new "early-warning" system for monitoring these potentially unstable situations overseas - a system designed to make U.S. foreign intervention more timely and cost-effective. It sounded reasonable: the international community could have saved millions of lives and billions of dollars, for instance, if it had recognized the explosiveness of the resource shortages and ethnic tensions in Somalia and Rwanda a little earlier.

It puzzled me, though, that the speaker failed to mention the current situation in Nigeria. When I eventually asked her what she thought of the atrocities committed under General Sani Abacha's illegal regime, she answered that although the recent murders were indeed lamentable, human rights violations were not necessarily indicators of general unrest, and in her opinion Nigeria was actually one of the most stable countries in all of Africa.

Wole Soyinka, given his penchant for irony, would probably agree. After all, as the renowned Nigerian playwright documents extensively in his new work of non-fiction, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, the political history of Nigeria has become predictable to the point of monotony: since the 1960s, Nigerians have endured one vicious, parasitical dictator after another. So, the average citizen in Africa's most populous country has almost never had to deal with the destabilizing forces of education, health care, elections, or public transportation. And whenever Nigerians have tried to disturb the peace by demonstrating for democracy or publishing subversive articles criticizing the military, soldiers have always moved in quickly to restore order.

Such consistent repression, however, has not lulled Nigerians into a mindless acceptance of their fate: "the combative spirit of [the] nation is not yet extinguished," Soyinka insists - or perhaps warns. The playwright's jeremiad is intended to help the rest of the world realize how volatile the Nigerian crisis really is. With aid from the international community, Soyinka urges, his country's 250 ethnic groups may be able to maintain a united front against Abacha and preserve some modicum of nationhood. If we continue to ignore the warning signs, however, and fail to weaken Abacha's grip on power from the outside, we could be looking at another Rwanda - in a country 15 times as...