Sam Amadi was my ally and indeed a good one, during those days when Babangida's swagger-stick savagely amputated our collective limps and turned us into exiles of the pro-June 12 struggle. Thereafter, we were again co-travellers in those days when abysmal night blanketed Ogoni. "Sam" as I affectionately call him, is unarguably an intelligent young man, a brilliant lawyer, scholar, orator, columnist, radical and writer of the Igbo ethnic-nationality. "Ken Saro-Wiwa; "Defining The Legacy" was an article which appeared in The Guardian newspaper of Sunday, November 16, 2003, page 15. Same piece featured in ThisDay newspaper of same week. My good friend, Sam authored it.

To say the obvious, the writer was in his element in that post-mortem of Ken Saro-Wiwa's life. It looks like a piece written by Sam Amadi's niece, Ms. Dornu Kogbara, at the height of that tornado that wrapped the roofs, the fists and converted it into a rendezvous of hangmen in Ogoniland in the mid 90s and beyond. Sam's article was neither here nor there like his typically capricious clenched fists at a student union's congress at Malabo Campus at the University of Calabar. The piece only dazzles readers with word play and comparison of issues that have no origin with one another, while the writer twisting his face and waists uncontrollably in obedience to the drumbeat of the furious Igbo Agaba (Masquerade) dance on the grave of his dead "client", Saro-Wiwa.

At that precarious time in 1994, when the black-hearted Kangaroos under the stupendous influence of petro-dollars converged in Port Harcourt, under the name, Justice Ibrahim Auta Civil Disturbances Tribunal, to pronounce the prepared verdict against Ken and his Ogoni, Sam was working as an attorney in the far-famed Chief Gani Fawehinmi's Law firm in Lagos. The lion-hearted Lagos lawyer and activist, Fawehinmi (SAN) led a team of lawyers as principal counsel, and including Olisa Agbakoba (SAN), Femi Falana, E.C. Ukala (SAN), Oromo Natei Douglas, Hon. Uche Onyeagocha, Hon. David Brigidi Cobbina and Sam Amadi, all notable human rights and environmental attorneys to plead with the murderous hangmen to spare the lives of Ken and others.

Yesterday sounds like today, I am beginning to dread the wig if this is the way lawyers do their clients whether dead or alive, of such posthumous Freudian psycho-analysis. Still on the Auta's Tribunal of High Injustice, Sam Amadi was one of the lawyers in the team I pitied. He was under undue pressures. Though, sustained, subtle and serious from Mrs. Ann Kogbara, Sam's sister, she did not want him to defend Ken Saro-Wiwa at the Tribunal. What was her ill-humour? 'How can an Igbo man like you (Sam) defend this stupid short man called Ken, who stood against the struggles of the Igbos to achieve Biafra. Please don't, my son, allow these noise-making Yoruba people (Gani, Femi others) to do what they know best. I tell you noise-making can't save Ken". That was her pre-judicial verdict. To her, she was not bothered whether four respected Ogoni chiefs were killed or not. The motif of her razor-sharp tongue was Biafra and Biafra only.

Dornu Kogbara is the beautiful and intelligent daughter of Mrs. Ann Kogbara. Sam Amadi used Dornu's piece as the swivel in explicating Ken's life in his treatise. However, Mrs. Ann Kogbara is an Igbo by birth and by marriage an Ogoni. She is married to Chief Ignatus Owens Vibe Kogbara, former Biafran Ambassador to Britain and well-known Ogoni elite. Sadly, Chief Kogbara hopped the twing months ago, and was interred at his country home in Bodo City in the Gokana Local Government Area, Ogoni, Rivers State.

"It came out clear that the vision of the Ogoni revolution was Ken's ... Was Ken really a hero? How much were his sacrifice and suffering for the cause of the Ogonis, and how much were they in the service of egoism?... I thought of writing a critique of The Darkling Plan that focussed on this irony, but changed my mind, that is not the way to treat a client... the Ogoni revolution was very violent. It was violence of hatred and egoism that fell the Ogoni-6, the Ogoni-9 and turned a utopian revolution into a midsummer night dream..."

Above were part of Amadi's anatomisations and characterisations of Ken Saro-Wiwa's life, his heroism, his rise to fame and his struggles. The psychoanalytic job was chauvinistic, parochial and egoistic. I knew Ken. He was a man who took his non-violent campaign to a comical level. A man who preached non-violence and brotherhood till the iniquitous hangmen struck. He was, indeed, humane to his toiling people and others in and outside the Niger Delta.

In the science of psychoanalysis, while decoding or unmasking the "neurotic" personality behind a given situation, it is necessary to analyse and interpret the society that produces such a person. Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote On a Darkling Plain - An Account of the Nigerian Civil War based on the trembling realities of that epoch. He was a writer who knows the platonic relationship between his craft and society. Commenting on the book, highly respected Professor E.J. Alagoa stated, "The book permits the reader to see the welter of events of the years immediately preceding, during and following the civil war through a crystal ball clarified in the vision of a young and honest mind. Indeed, its hallmarks are a compelling story line and honesty and rigour in the analysis of character and ideas".

I am sure that Sam Amadi, while at the John F. Kennedy School of Government of the famous Harvard University (USA) as a Mason fellow, must have met this great woman I admire so much and been following her activities quietly. She is Taslima Nasrin, a Bangladesh writer and human rights campaigner, who sprang into the international arena with her novel, Shame. The book attacks Muslim persecution of Bangladesh's Hindu minority.

The book was banned, a fatwa issued, (setting a price on her head). The Bangladesh Government had also filed a criminal case on the charges of hurting the religious feeling of people against her. The medical doctor turned radical writer had to flee Bangladesh and currently lives in Europe. I love her courage and craft. I lover writers who know what they owe society. Ken was one of them. They are the same all over the world.

Poor Ken, the man who was too friendly with his pipe especially when the holey instrument became smoke-darkened and flared like the death and disease distributing flare pit of Shell at the backwoods of Ogoni. He couldn't bury his head in the sand over the iron-handedness of Zeus, and like the epic hero, Prometheus, unbounded his people. Today, Ken is a celebrated writer, intellectual, environmentalist, columnist, activist and satirist, not because he was arrogant, egoistic, violent or frugal, as Sam would want us to believe.

Again, I urge Sam Amadi to read and re-read other Ken Saro-Wiwa's works such as Prisoners of Jeb, which satirises corruption in high places, societal decay and elevation of eco-feminism to a height in literary discourse in Nigeria and beyond. Or, is his Pita Dumbrok, of the martydom of environmental activism? Or where the versatile beautiful Amazon of a journalist, Asa is re-examining unpopular policies with the quintessential journalist Pita Dumbrok? What about AFforest of Flowers? The book depicts dangerous environmental metaphors, oxymoron and the reaction of the conscious Dukana youths against environmental devastation.

My friend, Sam, let's be fair to Ken. He is dead now. He was, indeed, a hero. The underdogs and poverty-stricken children, women and men of our different nationalities need our knife-edged pen to protect them; let's stop this dog eats dog stuff. Agaba (masquerade) dance does no one any good including its owner.