Nigeria's favourite sitcom writer became the voice of the oil-polluted Ogoni
Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote a television comedy watched by an estimated 30 million Nigerians and a war novel in what he called Rotten English. Then he devoted himself to the Ogoni people, whose land had been drilled for oil since the 1950s, leading a nonviolent campaign against Shell that ended with his execution in 1995.
Born on 10 October 1941 in Bori, near Port Harcourt, he was the son of a forest ranger and chief, and grew up in an Anglican home in Ogoniland, where the Khana dialect is spoken. A scholarship took him to study English at the University of Ibadan, where he won departmental prizes and toured with a drama troupe. He lectured in African literature until the Nigerian Civil War, when he sided with the federal government, served as civilian administrator of the port of Bonny, and later became a Rivers State commissioner. He was dismissed in 1973 for backing Ogoni autonomy.
Business in retail and property made him wealthy, and his pen made him famous. Basi and Company, a farce about a streetwise Lagos schemer forever chasing millions, ran from 1985 to 1990. His novel Sozaboy, published the same year the show began, follows a naive village boy drafted into the civil war, told in a blend of pidgin, standard and broken English. In 1987 he accepted a role in General Ibrahim Babangida's promised transition to democracy, then resigned, doubting it was sincere; Babangida annulled the 1993 elections.
From 1990 he concentrated on the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, becoming its spokesman and then president. Its Ogoni Bill of Rights demanded autonomy, a fair share of oil revenue and cleanup of land and water damaged by decades of petroleum waste, and it blamed Shell above all. In January 1993 around 300,000 Ogoni, more than half the population, marched peacefully through four towns. He was repeatedly detained.
In May 1994 four Ogoni chiefs from a rival faction were killed. Saro-Wiwa, who had been barred from Ogoniland that day, was charged with inciting the killings and, with eight others later called the Ogoni Nine, sentenced to death by a special tribunal under General Sani Abacha. Defence lawyers quit in protest, and at least two prosecution witnesses later said they had been bribed. He received the Right Livelihood Award and the Goldman Environmental Prize before being hanged on 10 November 1995. Nelson Mandela led the outcry, and Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth for over three years.
Source: Ken Saro-Wiwa
