He’s dead, but not forgotten. Three weeks after the hangings, Saro-Wiwa’s reputation is only growing. Stung by the global condemnations, the Nigerian government took out advertisements in a number of African newspapers last week asserting that Saro-Wiwa was indeed guilty of the murders of four moderate Ogoni leaders. A two-page ad in The New York Times on Wednesday, financed by a little-known foundation, also contended that Saro-Wiwa was a violent man who deserved his fate. Meanwhile, a kind of iron curtain is being drawn around the country. NEWSWEEK is one of very few Western news organizations to have been allowed into troubled Ogoniland. In an interview, local military administrator Col. Danda Musa Komo, who supervised the execution, insists that the junta is unfazed by worldwide criticism. “We buried each one in a coffin in his own grave,” he says. “We could have just thrown them all in a pit.”
Inside the country, authorities have stepped up a campaign to obliterate all traces of Saro-Wiwa’s influence. Police chase mourners away from the weed-choked cemetery in downtown Port Harcourt where the “Ogoni Nine” lie buried. During the last three weeks, a manhunt has intensified for fugitive officials of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, the grass-roots protest group founded by Saro-Wiwa to campaign against oil pollution and exploitation in Ogoniland. Next month the junta will begin trials of 19 more Ogonis charged in the mob killings of four elders in May 1994. “Saro-Wiwa was a liar who conned the entire world,” says Colonel Komo. “We have no regrets. We don’t owe anybody an explanation.”
The campaign of terror is effective, but not perfectly. When government escorts were out of earshot, Ogonis told NEWSWEEK how soldiers and mobile policemen had warned them against public displays of mourning for Saro-Wiwa. “We want to cry, but we must do it in secret, or we will be arrested,” said a tearful young village woman who refused to give her name. Other Ogonis said that in the days after the executions, soldiers beat up anyone wearing black, dispersed any gatherings and arrested a half dozen pastors for holding memorial services. “Ken’s name is on the lips of every Ogoni child,” says one local activist. “The Ogonis will mourn him for generations.”
The execution accounts leaking out now make Saro-Wiwa sound like a martyr indeed. The eyewitness said that Saro-Wiwa was the only one of the condemned men who wasn’t sobbing as he waited for execution. A priest recited the I.ord’s Prayer over their wails. Saro-Wiwa, calm and poised, told them to take heart and pray to God. Even the pastor broke down; he fled the cellblock. Nigeria’s military rulers are doing all they can to prevent this image from taking hold. But it’s the kind of story that may well outlast them.
title: “The Making Of A Legend” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-23” author: “Crystal Trout”
Many of the pictures in “Marilyn” (Taschen), an extravagantly produced showcase of de Dienes’s work coming in September, have never been seen before. Unseen Marilyn photos? You’d think there’d be a greater chance of discovering a new planet, but yes, indeed, the legend who personified the word “overexposed” just expanded her portfolio. Better yet, these are first-rate pictures, gorgeously reproduced. While a lot of them are corny by current standards (Marilyn with a volleyball at the beach, in a Heidi-like get-up posing with a lamb), even the tritest pose is sincerely affecting. Best of all, she doesn’t look altogether like Marilyn yet. Her hair is darker, curlier. Untrained and uncoached, she smiles too broadly, and she doesn’t quite know how to pose yet. She hasn’t been tweezed to perfection. She’s still wonderfully human.
It didn’t hurt that de Dienes had fallen in love with her the day they met, when she answered a modeling call at his bungalow in the Garden of Allah apartments in Hollywood. He couldn’t have asked for a more obliging model, who almost instantly consented to travel with him for a couple of weeks, from the California desert to the snows of Oregon. Sure, he spent most of the time trying to talk her into bed, and yes, she finally consented, and yes, there was talk of marriage. But for once, the back story is the least interesting part. It’s the pictures he took on that trip that matter.
De Dienes continued to shoot Monroe off and on, almost to the end of her life. The later pictures–including a photo essay for Life of Marilyn rehearsing with her acting coach–are less interesting: by then she and Hollywood had all but erased the Norma Jeane that glistens in the earlier shots. But de Dienes always found a sweetness that other photographers missed. She trusted him enough to remain vulnerable before his lens, and he reciprocated with pictures both affectionate and intimate.
During his lifetime, de Dienes published many of his Monroe pictures. But he kept hundreds of prints like secret treasure–a true eccentric, he once buried a lot of his work in his Hollywood backyard, where it sat for nearly a decade before he remembered to dig it up. (Fittingly, the new book comes packed inside a huge yellow box–like the Kodak boxes photographers use to store prints and negatives. It’s a triumph of design, with three components, including a facsimile of the photographer’s diary.) Not long ago, the book’s editor, Steve Crist, persuaded de Dienes’s widow to open her husband’s archive for the first time since the photographer’s death in 1984. Only then did anyone realize how much had been lost for so long: striking color photos that had been published only in black and white, dozens of shots never seen before and almost none given the restorative care that–at last–shows what a vibrant, sharp-eyed portraitist Andre de Dienes truly was.
