Ken Saro-Wiwa

Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa was born on 10 October 1941 in Bori, in the heart of Ogoniland — a small, green homeland of creeks, mangroves and palm farms in the Niger Delta of southern Nigeria. He was a brilliant student, and he grew into one of the country's most loved writers. He wrote the famous war novel Sozaboy in a playful, invented English he called ‘Rotten English’, and he created the funny television series Basi and Company, watched by tens of millions of Nigerians.

But beneath the farms of Ogoniland lay vast fields of oil. For decades, drilling brought spills and pollution to the water and soil the Ogoni depended on, while the people themselves stayed poor. In 1990, Saro-Wiwa helped found the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) and helped write the Ogoni Bill of Rights, which asked for a fair share of the oil wealth, a clean and healthy environment, and a real say over Ogoni affairs.

Saro-Wiwa insisted the struggle be peaceful. On Ogoni Day, 4 January 1993, around 300,000 Ogoni — roughly half of all the Ogoni people — marched calmly together, carrying no weapons, only their voices and their hopes. The world began to listen, and Saro-Wiwa was honoured with the Right Livelihood Award (1994) and the Goldman Environmental Prize (1995).

In 1995, in a trial that observers around the world condemned as deeply unjust, Nigeria's military rulers sentenced Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists, remembered together as the Ogoni Nine. His life ended that year, but his words and his cause did not. Years later, a major United Nations study confirmed the very pollution he had warned of, and the long work of cleaning and healing Ogoniland goes on in his name.