Although a personal element weaves in and out of the narrative, Ken Wiwa’s memoir is really a testament to a Nigerian political martyr. Rich in detail of the politics and economy of Nigeria, In the Shadow of a Saint depicts its author’s love-hate relationship with his father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, a minority-rights activist on behalf of the Ogoni people and a celebrated writer. Saro-Wiwa was hanged in 1995 for speaking out against the country’s brutal dictatorship.

He was an anomaly, though. A dandy who smoked a gold pipe, Saro-Wiwa was the voice of a people about whom he was remarkably ambivalent. He was a good provider, yet he was largely absent from the home. He loved his gentle, forgiving wife, yet he cheated on her chronically. Wiwa uses the word “saint” with hardly a trace of irony, though it is clear that Ken Saro-Wiwa elicits homage strictly as a political martyr. This tone of self-conscious mythologizing is further corrupted by clichés and banal truisms of the “those who forget the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them” variety.

Wiwa claims to want to be freed of his father’s shadow, yet his ardour to clarify his father’s achievements and heroism, and his own efforts to lobby against Nigeria’s chronic violations of democracy, keep him under that shadow. Despite the occasional tone of regret for a lost father, Wiwa continuously sentimentalizes both his and his father’s lives in order to protect his father’s legacy. But from chapter titles (many of which are borrowed from the like of Achebe, Ondaatje, and Borges) to far-fetched comparisons of his father with Prometheus, he turns Ken Saro-Wiwa into a saint who – as one of his prison letters reveals – knew all along that he’d be killed for his political stance.