Customs
officials impounded Sokari Douglas Camp’s sculpture, in the form of a
steel bus, when it arrived at Lagos port on 8 September, on grounds of
its “political value”. Leaflets and reports sent by courier to
commemorate Saro-Wiwa’s life and death were also seized.
Subsequent efforts by the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni
People, Social Action and other pressure groups have failed to secure
the work’s release and a memorial vigil in Bori-Ogoni may have to go
ahead without it.
Celestine AkpoBari, national coordinator for the Ogoni Solidarity Forum-Nigeria, has spent the past two months working to secure the release of the sculpture, called The Bus - Living Memorial, from a secure area of Lagos port and remains determined to get it to Ogoniland, nine hours’ drive from Lagos, next week.
"I have been fortunate to see the bus in London but it will be so
exciting to see it in Nigeria, I don’t know if I might faint," he told
the Guardian. "It will give so much happiness and strength and every
Ogoni will want to come home and see it. We are still looking forward to
hearing the good news, we need the bus because it is the symbol of our
struggle now that Ken is not with us. We will use the presence of the
bus to begin another era of our campaign for justice."
The Bus was commissioned following a competition to mark the 10th
anniversary of the executions andfirst exhibited outside the Guardian's
London offices in 2006. The artist described her work as a “spectacle”
and symbol of the importance of transport to environmental debate. It
was given to the Ogoni people by UK campaign group Platform, to show
solidarity with them.
The Bus spent four days at the bottom of the Thames in August, after it was dropped while being loaded on to a ship at the Port of Tilbury in Kent, and was repaired before leaving the UK for Lagos on 19 August. The plan was for it to make several stops in Nigeria en route to its final destination in Ogoniland.
Source: The Guardian
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