SOURCE: Rieff, David. Review of The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, by Wole Soyinka. New Republic 216, no. 24 (16 June 1997): 33-41.

In the following review, Rieff chronicles recent Nigerian history and discusses Soyinka's outlook in The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis toward the repressive Nigerian regime and the relative indifference of the West.

Not even God is wise enough.

—Nigerian proverb

I.

The hangmen who, on November 10, 1995, carried out the execution of the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his colleagues from MOSOP, or the Movement for the Salvation of the Ogoni People, the militant tribal advocacy group that he had helped to found five years earlier, were flown into the southeastern Nigerian city of Port Harcourt, where the doomed men were being held, from the far north of the country. Since hangmen are not...