30 pages • 1 hour read
Ken Saro-WiwaAfrica Kills Her Sun
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1975A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Rhetorical Questions
Bana’s questions throughout the letter to Zole are attempts to connect with her, and to remember who he is specifically writing to—Zole’s identity is important, for she represents light, love, and hope. These questions highlight Bana’s search for connection and for someone to understand. Among the nameless spectators, Zole is a person with a name and a face, someone whom Bana remembers and someone who can remember him. She can keep him from the anonymity that the government and public desire or accept. This refusal to be anonymous does not come from an ego, but from hope that his death can move the needle. He is also trying to reconcile himself with the idea of dying.
The questions showcase the limitations of the letter, for Zole can never confirm or deny if she is seeing what Bana wants to be seen. These injections are at times jarring, for Bana has not seen this woman in 10 years, but he calls out to her by name, and at times he guesses what she may be thinking. The rhetorical questions allow Bana a sense of intimacy that transcends a one-way letter. This intimacy with another person is necessary for hope and overcoming a state of imprisonment.
Irony and Satire
The subversion of expectations drives Bana’s satirical narrative, and irony is present in almost all of the stories he recounts. In Bana’s world, everything represents its opposite. He changes his career trajectory due to a conversation with a sex worker, a profession usually looked down upon and relegated to the margins of society. She inspires him to seek a more meaningful career, which leads him into the corrupt government, another subversion of his expectations. Government officials and the police are in league with the criminals, and all legally sanctioned professions are complicit in the criminal system.
The largest example of irony in the story may be Bana’s view of honesty. While honesty is often linked with lawfulness, Bana becomes a criminal to live an honest life. Like Robin Hood, he steals from the rich to feed his gang of robbers. There are moral implications to stealing people’s salaries and engaging in violence, which Bana does not address, but part of the story’s satire is that even this is preferable to stealing from within the system. Bana undermines any trust in “honest professions,” placing value instead in a person’s social awareness, loyalty, and truth-telling.
Juxtaposition
Saro-Wiwa uses a variety of forms of juxtaposition to compare and contrast elements of the text. The Nature of Imprisonment and Acceptance of Mortality are two central themes he develops through juxtaposition. Bana is trapped between condemning life and seeing that life as the very thing that will save Africa’s nations. Within this condemnation of life lies an adjacent juxtaposition, where the roles in government are only nominally positions of promoting public good—no one, regardless of hierarchal status or gender, is innocent. He places criminals and government workers side by side to underscore the facades of goodness. Honesty and awareness—regardless of one’s activities—are the most important values. Symbolic juxtapositions include images of light and darkness, which emphasize Bana’s moral struggle.
Anecdote
Bana uses anecdotes of his encounters with people to provide context for his actions and way of thinking; they support the narrative that he is an honest, self-aware, thoughtful person. With these anecdotes, he also exhibits his own ability to let nature and people affect him. He is not impervious to what surrounds him, and he never dulls his pain or turns away. These anecdotes connect to the broader motif of memory and the themes of connection and imprisonment. Connecting with people and retaining memories are ways toward freedom and rejections of imprisonment. These anecdotes are symbols of Bana’s humanity, as well as the idea that humanity cannot exist in isolation. The anecdotes are not the artifacts of an activist’s life, but nonetheless they are the artifacts of a life devoted to reflection and intention. The most important anecdote is the one about the man who was executed while clutching his walking stick and photographed afterward. While Bana presents seeing the photograph in the paper in a flippant tone, the horror of the image underscores the reality he is about to face. His desire to have such a photo of himself sculpted and placed on a symbolic grave shows that he wants his death to be a lasting reminder of the system’s cruelty.
