temporarily disconnected

Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa

schomburgcenter:

By Ann-Marie Nicholson, Editor, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

“The writer cannot be a mere storyteller; he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely X-ray society’s weaknesses, its ills, its perils. He or she must be actively involved shaping its present and its future.”

 Nigerian environmentalist, author and television producer  Ken Saro-Wiwa lived and died by these words above. Born  on October 10, 1941, Kenule “Ken” Beeson Saro Wiwawas  an Ogoni (an ethnic minority in Nigeria). Ogoniland, located  in the Niger Delta, is rich in oil that has been looted by the  petroleum industry—with the explicit consent of the  Nigerian government—for decades. As a result, the Niger  Delta is listed as one of the most polluted places in the  world; its population is poor and powerless. Saro-Wiwa  spent a great deal of his life and resources trying to fight  against the environmental destruction of the land and  waters of Ogoniland. 

 In 1994, the Nigerian government under General Sani Abacha charged Saro-Wiwa and eight others with inciting the murders of four conservative Ogoni chiefs. Despite numerous evidence of witness tampering, the nine men were convicted and sentenced to death by a military tribunal. In his closing statement, Saro-Wiwa called out both his government and the Royal Dutch Shell Company: 

I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated…. I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is on trial…. On trial also is the Nigerian nation, its present rulers and those who assist them. Any nation which can do to the weak and disadvantaged what the Nigerian nation has done to the Ogoni, loses a claim to independence and to freedom from outside influence.

Despite international outcry and numerous threats of international sanctions, on November 10, 1995 Nigeria summarily executed Saro-Wiwa and his eight co-defendants.

Today, Ken Saro-Wiwa is remembered as an international symbol of environmental causes. To read more, click here.

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