Ken Saro-Wiwa

Ken Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian writer and activist, who spoke out forcefully against the Nigerian military regime and the Anglo-Dutch petroleum company Royal Dutch-Shell for causing environmental damage to the land of the Ogoni people in his native Rivers state. He was educated at Government College, Umuahia, and at the University of Ibadan. He briefly taught at the University of Lagos before joining federal forces in the civil war of the late 1960s. Afterward he worked as a government administrator until 1973, when he left to concentrate on his literary career. His first novels were Songs in a Time of War and Sozaboy ;both 1985; the latter, written in pidgin English, satirized corruption in Nigerian society. He reached his largest audience with Basi and Company, a comedic television series that ran for some 150 episodes in the 1980s. He was also a journalist and wrote poetry and children’s stories. From about 1991 he devoted himself full-time to the causes of the Ogoni, a minority ethnic group that numbered about 500,000 people. In mid-1992 he broadened the reach of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), an organization he led. In particular, he focused on Britain, where Shell had one of its headquarters. He criticized the destructive impact of the oil industry the main source of Nigeria’s national revenue on the Niger delta region and demanded a greater compensatory share of oil profits for the Ogoni. As a result of mounting protest, Shell suspended operations in Ogoni lands in 1993. Saro-Wiwa was arrested in 1994 after the deaths of four Ogoni chiefs at a political rally. In a trial by special tribunal that was denounced by foreign human rights groups, he was found guilty for alleged complicity in the murders. His execution by hanging, along with those of eight fellow activists, aroused international outrage and led to calls for economic sanctions against Nigeria, which was suspended from the Commonwealth a day after the executions.