Africa Kills Her Sun

In “Africa Kills Her Sun,” Saro-Wiwa satirizes Nigerian society by writing about a main character, Bana, who is happy that he will soon be executed. The story’s subtext, however, reveals that despite Bana’s renunciation and condemnation of life, Bana’s actions and attitude stem from his attachment to the living and his hope for a better future. Due to his Acceptance of Mortality, Bana chooses the power of determining his own death over prolonging his sentence to stay alive merely for the things and people he loves. Despite his consistently bitter and ironic tone, his belief in life’s potential prevails and is reflected in the very bones of the story’s epistolary form. Though Bana reaches closure at the end of the letter, his fear and sadness are still apparent.

Bana’s decision to write to Zole in the face of his execution is the story’s inciting incident. He writes to Zole to share his thoughts, feelings, and observations and thereby make his imminent death less terrifying. Without this connection to Zole and all she represents, Bana would not be able to make a meaningful human connection before his execution. Sharing his knowledge is presented as a joyful, meaningful act; readers share in this knowledge, like Bana hopes Zole will do, by reading Bana’s letter and learning about his life.

With its contradictions and internal conflict, Bana’s letter is characteristic of the satire genre. From the beginning of the letter, Bana has conflicting feelings about his relationship to life in a corrupt country and what that life entails. He weaves in and out of trying to distance himself from a life of pain and injustice while also Struggling to Overcome Alienation and seek a meaningful connection. This internal dichotomy between hope and cynicism—which is the piece’s central conflict—is apparent in the first paragraph. He must say goodbye to Zole, who is “condemned to live in [this world]” (290) while also effusively admitting that love is a quality which he “possess[es] in abundance.” In this chasm between not quite living and not dead, he uses writing to find some kind of solace and resolution. He also uses writing to define his worldview and leave a mark on the world. The letter is a mark of knowledge, clarity, and hope. While the ending is not ambiguous in the sense that Bana’s fate is certain death, the extent of his hopefulness for the future is unclear. The act of writing, however, is an implicit symbol of his hope that a better future is possible for his country. His contempt for the corruption he witnesses informs but does dominate his letter.

Bana’s satirical tactic for appearing to embrace his death is to employ irony, or to subvert expectations, rendering death as preferable to life, and a life of crime as preferable to complicity in a corrupt system. He juxtaposes government officials and criminals in order to show that no person in this system has any real agency or moral backbone, which is what gives life its meaning and vigor. Bana writes that the priest who will attend his funeral should pray for the living, for those whose lives are a daily torment” (299). The narrator’s subversion of expected roles and definitions further develops the theme of The Nature of Imprisonment. Here, the priest and others at the execution are condemned to live in a corrupt society while those who will be executed will achieve freedom.

The motif of nature, including the wordplay on “sun” and “son,” further develops the world-building of a suffering African nation where no one is free. Though the story is set in Nigeria—a clue being the Nigerian currency naira, which the government officials embezzled—the story’s setting represents all postcolonial nations in Africa and across the globe. Saro-Wiwa’s own expertise lies in the Nigerian context, but this context mimics those of other nations struggling for self-governance and self-determination after being freed from British rule. For many countries, this transition into postcolonialism involved great civil unrest, divided factions, and violent overhauls in government; these countries still suffer the effects of colonial rule to this day.

As an antidote to this alienation from the humane, Bana chooses crime and honesty rather than corruption and complicity. His seemingly incongruous choice highlights his story’s satire; the only way to be honest in his society is to be openly criminal. Bana increases his rhetorical questions to Zole throughout the letter as he begins to describe his own crimes. These questions contribute to the motif of seeing and illuminate Bana’s desire for understanding from Zole. He wants her to realize the honesty and morality within his actions. This desire for Zole to see is a microcosm of his overarching desire for his country to clearly see its crimes and, with that awareness, find a better way forward. In this way, the letter is an antidote and resistance to forgetting. It is a tribute to memory—both of goodness and of influential moments of connection with other countrymen. While memory represents freedom, forgetfulness is a form of incarceration, distancing oneself from one’s shared humanity. Memory binds people together and fosters feelings of camaraderie. His letter is populated with anecdotes that all, significantly, involve other people.

Bana’s desire to distance himself from life due to his ensuing death, as well as his immense suffering and the suffering he witnesses, is at odds with his struggle to become less alienated, a process that involves growing closer to life. Through the act of writing, Bana seeks to connect to a time when he himself was happy, and “the world was new” (291). Rather than solely focusing on his disdain for life and its people, he actively connects himself with memories of goodness that cast life in a beautiful light. The metaphor of the pond that he associates with Zole represents hope, freedom, and curiosity. The metaphor of the ocean reinforces the pond and speaks to the freedom afforded by nature, as well as the potential that people have. His decision to write to Zole demonstrates a hopeful, life-affirming part of Bana. This perspective is antithetical to the cynical part of him that scoffs bitterly at the demeaning and cruel nature of existence. Bana can be said to hate the present but thinks fondly of the past and has hope for the future.

In the end, the letter is a generative act, Bana’s own version of a sun or son for Africa. His insistence on leaving Africa this sun (or son), when Africa—a monolith representing all of its nations—inevitably kills them, is a radical act of hope that deserving, honest progeny will live and bring the light of awareness.