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The Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa used an English education to try to mould his son in his own image. But how do you live as the child of a martyr? Ken Wiwa recounts a story of reconciliation

I would love to know what was on my father's mind when he decided to name me after him. Whatever the reason, that decision defined me in a way that my father might never have suspected when he decided to name his first son Kenule Bornale Saro-Wiwa.

Although my father's name is well-known around the world, I wonder how many people would be able to tell the difference between Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa and Kenule Bornale Saro-Wiwa? In idle moments I wonder whether my life would have turned out any differently had I been given a second name that didn't begin with the letter B.

I probably would still have ended up being known as Ken Saro-Wiwa Junior - which is what I am called when I am in Nigeria. Everyone blankly refuses to call me Ken Wiwa, even though I have made it clear that this is the name I have adopted.

I changed my name by deed poll in 1994. I was 24 and my father was in detention in Nigeria and one year away from being martyred. I had been itching to change my name since I began to suspect that my father was trying to relive his life through me. I cannot pinpoint when I developed the paranoia about my father's ambitions for me. I suspect it was in my teens when the virus struck - we all reach that age when you start hating everything about your parents and reject everything that reminds you of them.

And because my father had already made his intention clear with the name thing I tried almost everything to disabuse him of any notion that I might turn out like him. The very idea that I looked like him used to horrify me, which might explain my penchant for wild haircuts, weird clothes and perhaps my pathological refusal to take my studies seriously. I think I was determined to cut off my nose to spite my father's face.

He did his best to put up with the haircuts and the clothes but my refusal to take school seriously crushed him. Whenever he saw phrases like "could do better" in my school reports my father would blow his fuse. In his frustration he would often resort to emotional blackmail, threatening to send me back from England to Nigeria unless I decided to "buck up my ideas". I would go back to school promising to do better but would promptly revert to my slack old ways.

My father never lost faith in me despite all the evidence that I was never going to fulfil my academic potential. He had high, high hopes for me - that I would attend Eton or Harrow, then go on to Oxford or Cambridge to study law. I would then return to Nigeria and sign up to his lifelong ambition to bring the plight of our people to national and international attention. That was his plan for my life when he decided to send me, aged ten, to Stancliffe Hall prep school in England in 1978.

That is when my idyllic, football-playing Nigerian childhood ended - early in 1977. Arriving home from work one day, my father looked at me, smiled to himself, and said: "I'm sending you to England."

England. I was ecstatic. I had goosepimples remembering how often I used to pore over our place mats that featured scenes from London's landmarks. And now my father was telling me that I was going to see these places for myself.

Change is a traumatic experience at any age, but at ten, hovering as you are between childhood ignorance and adolescent terror, change can be totally disorientating.

I don't remember much about coming to England in January 1978 but two things stick in my mind: the unbelievable cold and the hours we spent in that cold wandering up and down Oxford Street looking for some famous store called Harrods.

At the end of the 1970s, Nigeria's economy was still experiencing the boom that had started when the Arab-Israeli conflict escalated oil prices and pumped petrodollars into the economy of oil-producing states. In those heady days the naira was stronger than the dollar. We were so giddy with money that our head of state at the time declared that our problem was not lack of money but "how to spend it".

General Gowon's phrase is often lazily hauled out to illustrate Nigeria's spend-happy attitude to money, but what he actually meant by it was that Nigeria's greatest problem was a chronic inability or unwillingness to invest its money for a rainy day.

This was why the education system was, by 1978, so underfunded that those who could afford it seriously considered sending their children abroad. Many of my father's generation had been educated during the colonial era when Nigeria's schools were run by ex-pats and missions. Those colonial schools were modelled on British public schools and turned out smart kids versed in Latin and Greek, familiar with Dickens, Shakespeare and Tolstoy. My father and his peers received a classical education, the kind that was unavailable in the Nigeria of 1978.

So my father sent me abroad. He was determined, no matter what the cost, to give me the same start in life that he had been given, first at Government College Umuahia and then later at Ibadan University, where he graduated in English. Ibadan University was Nigeria's equivalent of Oxbridge. Most of Nigeria's best-known personalities, including Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, graduated from Ibadan.

My father was determined that I should have the same kind of education, even if it meant having to go abroad for it. The cost, as long as Nigeria's economy remained buoyant, was negligible. What stopped many Nigerians who could afford it from sending their children abroad was the cultural value of an English education. Although many Nigerians would have gladly taken their children out of the local system, there was a general fear that those who were educated abroad often came back with ideas and values that were useless in Nigeria and had to spend years readjusting. That perception was largely down to one man - Dillibe Onyeama.

The son of an eminent Nigerian judge, Onyeama was the first Nigerian to attend Eton and he wrote a notorious memoir of his experiences at the school. I remember during the summer holiday of 1983, my first since starting at Tonbridge school, my father tossed me a copy of **** at Eton to read.

It did not tell me anything I did not already know - that Africans have a hard time at boarding schools. Teasing is a fact of life at school and it can either make or break you. I cannot deny that I was affected by prejudice at my schools but some people handle it better than others. Onyeama never quite got to grips with it and he went on to write an even more depressing book, John Bull's ****, in which he displayed such a self-loathing that he concluded that the black man was nothing more than an animal.

To a proud black man like my father, a man who cut his political teeth on Negritude and the black power movements of the 1960s, Onyeama's attitude was the very antithesis of his image of black manhood. The fashionable analysis in Nigeria was that Onyeama had tried to be white and had been rejected by the inherent racism of British society. I expect my father had me read **** at Eton to illustrate his warning that English society would never accommodate an African and that it was wise to see my time in England as training for the time when I would return to Africa where "everything has been set up for you".

Eton no doubt traumatised and confused Onyeama but one of the things I remember reading in his book was his view that Africans should not send their children abroad at an impressionable age. Onyeama felt that he might have adjusted better had he been grounded in some African values before being sent to Eton. The problem, he felt, and I had sympathy for this view, is that when an African boy is sent to a school in England at a young age, it is inevitable that he will become culturally confused.

An English boarding school, at least my experience of it, is no place to celebrate diversity and difference. Conformity is the thing.

This was the atmosphere I grew up in during my teens. At school I aspired to be like my English friends. At home I slipped into a straitjacket provided by my father. I slipped in and out of my two identities, African and English, as I moved between school and home. My school friends never knew or suspected that I lived in a political house and my parents probably suspected but never knew how much I was being depoliticised by my experiences at school.

You can keep flitting in and out of your various identities but there comes a time when you want to dip your toe in the world, take control of your life. And then you have to make some choices about who you are and where you want to be. When I was starting to make these choices, I was very much aware of my father as the man I had to get past before I could stake my own claim in the world. That was why it was inevitable that I would reject my African heritage. Because only by rejecting Africa could I reject my father's vision of my future.

I suspect that everything I did or did not do between the ages of 14 and 25 can be explained by some unconscious desire to suppress any traces of my father in me. Although he hoped I would go on to Oxbridge to study law, I gave it a go before finding my own level, opting to study history at London University. My father was horrified at the choice, but accepted my vague explanation that history was the recommended degree subject for anyone with aspirations to go into journalism. Although I disappointed his academic expectations of me, I think he was secretly thrilled at the prospect that his son might follow in his footsteps.

When I was done with history at the ripe old age of 20, I spent the next three years cruising the foothills of journalism. That was when my father reassured himself that I was a late developer despite a writing career that was stalling in first gear. He tried to help from time to time, but I always rejected his advice. Besides, he could only help me in Nigeria and that was the one place I did not want to be.