The last time I visited the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa in Port Harcourt, two years before he was hanged in the city’s prison, the naked corpse of a man lay on the sidewalk of the Aggrey Road, about a hundred yards from his office. Broiling in the noonday sun, the body was so inflated by the gases of decomposition that it looked as if it might ascend to heaven of its own accord, in a halo of black flies.

Meanwhile, the radio appealed for the “owner” of the corpse, which had so far remained unclaimed for three days, to take it away as it was causing a public nuisance. All things considered, however, life seemed to be proceeding around it normally enough, as if a naked corpse in the street were nothing very remarkable. Which in Nigeria, perhaps, it isn’t.

I mentioned the corpse to Saro-Wiwa, who was only too aware of its presence nearby, and of the unavailing radio appeals to the public spirit of its owner. Though he was only small in stature, Saro-Wiwa’s basso profundo laugh shook the whole room. Whenever he laughed, it was with every fiber of his body: as if he had somehow understood the absurdity not just of Nigeria, but of existence itself. For above all, life was funny.

We discussed how the hallucinatory nature of everyday reality in Nigeria provided Nigerian writers with inexhaustible subject matter for their work, but Saro-Wiwa said that there were few writers nowadays