Ken Saro-Wiwa, born Kenule Benson Tsaro-Wiwa on the 10th of October 1941, the eldest son of a prominent family in Ogoni, which is today Bori, Rivers State, Nigeria. Saro-Wiwa was educated at the Government college at Umuahia and at the University of Ibadan.
He later held a wide variety of administrative positions in the government, including education commissioner in Rivers State in the late 1960’s, and information and home affairs commissioner during the early 1970’s. In addition, he was a publisher and a writer, and served a tenure as president of the Association of Nigerian Authors.
Two of his best known works were drawn from his observations and experiences of the Biafran war. His magnum opus, ‘Sozaboy: a Novel in Rotten English’ a tale of a naive village boy recruited into the army. ‘On a Darkling Plain’, a diary of his experiences during the war.
During the Biafran war (1967-1970) he was a Civilian Administrator for the Port of Bonny, near Ogoni in the Niger Delta. He went on to be a businessman, novelist and television producer. His long-running satirical TV series Basi & Co was purported to be the most watched soap opera in Africa.
Ken Saro-Wiwa was consistent in expressing his concern at the treatment of the Ogoni within the Nigerian Federation and in 1973 was dismissed from his post as Regional Commissioner for Education in the Rivers State cabinet, for advocating greater Ogoni autonomy.
During the 70s he built up his businesses in real estate and retail and in the 80s concentrated on his writing, journalism and television production.
A constant feature of his work were references to the exploitation he saw around him as the oil and gas industry expolited the Ogonis leaving them polluted and disenfranchised.
In his book of short stories, Forest of Flowers (1986), he used the story Night Ride, to reflect his anger at multinational oil companies, like Shell, appropriating land from local people:
An old woman had hobbled up to him. My son, they arrived this morning and dug up my entire farm, my only farm. They mowed down the toil of my brows, the pride of the waiting months. They say they will pay me compensation. Can they compensate me for my labours? The joy I receive when I see the vegetables sprouting, God’s revelation to me in my old age? Oh my son, what can I do?
What answer now could he give her? I’ll look into it later, he had replied tamely.
Look into it later. He could almost hate himself for telling that lie. He cursed the earth for spouting oil, black gold, they called it. And he cursed the gods for not drying the oil wells. What did it matter that millions of barrels of oil were mined and exported daily, so long as this poor woman wept those tears of despair? What could he look into later? Could he make alternate land available? And would the lawmakers revise the laws just to bring a bit more happiness to these unhappy wretches whom the search for oil had reduced to an animal existence? They ought to send the oil royalties to the men whose farms and land were despoiled and ruined. But the lawyers were in the pay of the oil companies and the government people in the pay of the lawyers and the companies. So how could he look into it later?
In 1990 Saro-Wiwa helped found the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). He claimed that the oil revenue from Ogoniland, on the Niger River Delta in eastern Nigeria, was being used to enrich the Nigerian elite and that Ogoniland was being ruined by the consequent pollution. He started to dedicate himself to the amelioration of the problems of the oil producing regions of the Niger Delta. Focusing on his homeland, Ogoni, he launched a non-violent movement for social and ecological justice.
In 1992, Saro-Wiwa was imprisoned for several months, without trial, by the Nigerian military government.
Saro-Wiwa was Vice Chair of Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO) General Assembly from 1993 to 1995. UNPO is an international, nonviolent, and democratic organization (of which MOSOP is a member). Its members are indigenous peoples, minorities, and unrecognised or occupied territories who have joined together to protect and promote their human and cultural rights, to preserve their environments and to find nonviolent solutions to conflicts which affect them.
In January 1993, MOSOP organized peaceful marches of around 300,000 Ogoni people – more than half of the Ogoni population – through four Ogoni centres, drawing international attention to his people’s plight. The same year the Nigerian government occupied the region militarily.He was so effective in attacking the oil companies and the Nigerian government accusing them of waging an ecological war against the Ogoni and precipitating the genocide of the Ogoni people, that by 1993 the oil companies had to pull out of Ogoni.
MOSOP planned to boycott the June, 1993, presidential elections. Political opposition developed from within MOSOP over this issue and in May, 1994, a riot occurred at a meeting in Giokoo resulting in the death of four progovernment Ogoni. Although Saro-Wiwa was not present, he was arrested for allegedly instructing his supporters to “deal with” his political opponents. Human rights groups claimed that his methods were based on nonviolence.
Saro-Wiwa and four other Ogoni were tried and convicted by a special military tribunal and were refused the possibility of appeal. Saro-Wiwa was hanged with eight other Ogoni activists on November 10, 1995. Afterward several witnesses for the prosecution stated that they had been bribed to testify against him.
International reaction was unkind to the government of General Sani Abacha. The fifty-two-member Commonwealth, which includes Great Britain and most of its former colonies, threatened Nigeria with exclusion unless democracy were restored; no member had ever been expelled previously. Human rights groups and environmental advocates accused Shell and other oil companies operating in the Niger River Delta of doing little to secure the release of Saro-Wiwa and his supporters and therefore held them indirectly responsible for their deaths.
In 2009, after years of litigation, Shell settled out of court with the Saro Wiwa family for $15.5million as a “humanitarian gesture and a gesture of sympathy”.