Yereba “Yemmy” Kina, Ogoni journalist, passes
By Chris King
Of the St. Louis American
St. Louis is a strange and wonderful place that scarcely knows itself, so it’s no surprise that few people know that this city was once home to the leadership of an exiled African revolution.
One of those revolutionaries, Yereba “Yemmy” Kina, died on November 25, 2006, while on a trip back home to Ogoniland, in southern Nigeria.
Kina was one of a dozen activists from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), who were resettled here by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in 1996. They were political exiles, relocated from a refugee camp in Benin.
The Ogoni had escaped to Benin from neighboring Nigeria when the dictator who then ruled that West African nation, General Sani Abacha, authorized the Nigerian military to hunt down and kill key MOSOP activists.
Abacha issued this order after Nigeria executed Ken Saro-Wiwa, the president of MOSOP, and eight other Ogoni leaders on November 10, 1995, yet received no meaningful sanctions or reprisals from the Western nations that buy Nigerian oil, including the U.S.
Saro-Wiwa and the rest of MOSOP were targeted by the Abacha regime for their courageous protests of the ecological damage done to Ogoniland through the exploitation of its oil reserves, principally by Shell Oil. The Ogoni’s peaceful protests were met with brutal attacks by the Nigerian military and its allies. In classic “divide and conquer” fashion, Nigeria armed neighboring tribes and paid them to assault Ogoni villages.
MOSOP uncovered evidence that Shell Oil, the main oil developer in Ogoni, was complicit in funding the military campaigns against the Ogoni. In his closing address to the military tribunal that condemned him to death, Saro-Wiwa accused Shell of waging “dirty wars against the Ogoni people.”
Saro-Wiwa was, by trade, a writer. I was teaching his work and the MOSOP story in an African studies cluster at Lindenwood College at the time of his execution. I assumed that it signaled the end of the Ogoni struggle.
So I was surprised when a vice president of MOSOP, Noble Obani-Nwibari, was advertised to speak at Washington University. “I thought those guys were dead,” I said to myself. In fact, some Ogoni were alive, and I was amazed to learn that a dozen of them were living in South St. Louis.
I told their stories in the pages of The Riverfront Times, which was at the time a locally owned progressive community newspaper. (It has since been purchased by a newspaper chain based in Phoenix.) I also helped the Ogoni deepen their connections in the local activist community, drawing upon groups such as the American Friends Service Committee, Amnesty International, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Gateway Greens.
It helped their cause that a major local grassroots effort to halt the burning of dioxin from Times Beach had failed, and there was a large coalition of environmental activists looking for the next campaign. The Ogoni became that campaign.
We started monthly protests of local Shell stations. We arranged a trip to the nation’s capital, where we lobbied the State Department and the Congressional Black Caucus. Our efforts were successful enough for Shell to fly officials here from Dallas, London and Nigeria in attempts to persuade us to stop our protests and lobbying efforts.
With a local sound engineer, Adam Long, we began producing radio shows about the Ogoni that we overnighted to a rebel station in London, which broadcast them to Nigeria. These shows gave the people in the Ogoni villages the first evidence that their exiled leaders were still alive. When Noble Obani-Nwibari slipped up and mentioned Adam Long and myself on the radio, our names went onto Abacha’s death list alongside our Ogoni friends.
Abacha died June 8, 1998. As a result of the efforts of MOSOP and other dissident groups, Nigeria was virtually forced to hold democratic elections, and early the next year General Olusegun Obasanjo was elected president.
By then, I was living in New York, and I heard through the grapevine how my Ogoni friends were able to travel back home at last and see their loved ones again. By then, most of them – including Yereba “Yemmy” Kina – had married and started families and businesses in St. Louis. Though they visited Ogoniland, they now considered St. Louis their home.
Yemmy was living here until the day he died. He died on a trip to Ogoni. All we know at this time is that he grew dizzy while visiting at his home village and asked to be taken to the hospital. He died before he arrived.
To the extent that this is an obituary, it is unusual in that it has concentrated on a group – the Ogoni people, and more specifically, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People – rather than the individual, but I am confident Yemmy would approve of this approach. Ogoni people and MOSOP activists have a strong group identity. They fight among themselves, of course, and fall in and out of favor with one another like any group of friends or family, but an Ogoni man is an Ogoni first and an individual man second. Yemmy lived that way, and that is the way I will bury him here.
His Ogoni brothers and sisters who moved with him to St. Louis are amazed to see one of their own die so young, and so peacefully. Understand that these are people who made choices that put a death sentence on their heads. Yemmy was a successful journalist at a mainstream publication, The Vanguard, when he began to work underground for MOSOP. He could have gone about his business safely and ignored the needs of the people back home in the villages. That was unacceptable to him. He helped to shoulder their burden, and as a result he had to flee for his life.
Most journalists keep with them a file of clippings of their work. That was not an option for Yemmy, who had to flee for his life, suddenly, one day, and never look back.
He did keep one clipping from his years at The Vanguard that had made it with him out of Nigeria, to the refugee camp, and finally to St. Louis. It was titled “Blues for a Prodigy,” and it was a personal obituary for Ken Saro-Wiwa. Writing about Ken in such a positive, personal way after the Nigerian military government had put him to death was one of the decisions that marked Yemmy for execution.
I remember reading Yemmy’s piece and being deeply moved by it. And, now that he has been taken away from us himself, so young, I know much, much more about those blues.