PROLOGUE Dr. Owens Wiwa walked behind his brother’s coffin worrying like an old woman. On this sweltering Monday morning in April 2000, it seemed as if all of Ogoniland had come to witness the funeral of Ken Saro-­Wiwa — tens of thousands of people, an excitable, militant throng, jockeying for a glimpse of the casket. Ken had wanted a small, private funeral; this was definitely not what he’d had in mind. The procession slowly parted the crowds in Bane as Ken’s daughter Zina, holding a large crucifix of hibiscus flowers, led the cortege. Behind the pallbearers, her twin sister, Noo, held aloft a large colour photograph of their father in a golden frame. Ken Junior followed, in his role of chief mourner, leading his uncle Owens and the rest of the immediate family toward the church. The little cinder-­block chapel in Bane had been packed for more than an hour with members of the media and groggy villagers who had stayed up all night dancing, singing, and drumming. Tribesmen crowded around the open windows and doors and spilled into the adjacent fields, fanning themselves with copies of the hastily printed church bulletin that stated the ceremony would commence with the “Reception of the Corpse at the entrance of the West Door.” But everyone knew there was no corpse. The coffin that was carried through the village and into the chapel was empty except for two books ( On a Darkling Plain and Pita Dumbrok’s Prison ) and the curved