Ken Saro-Wiwa

Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa (10 October 1941 – 10 November 1995) was a Nigerian writer, teacher, television producer and activist, a member of the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta (Wikipedia). Born in Bori, near Port Harcourt, he studied at Government College Umuahia and taught at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. His novel Sozaboy (1985) tells of a village boy recruited into the army in the civil war, and his satirical television series Basi & Company drew an estimated audience of 30 million.

As spokesman and then president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), he led a non-violent campaign against the environmental damage done to Ogoniland by oil companies, especially Royal Dutch Shell, and criticised the government for failing to enforce environmental regulations (Wikipedia).

His father, Chief Jim Wiwa, was a forest ranger from Bane in Ogoniland, whose people speak the Khana dialect of Ogoni. After secondary school at Government College Umuahia, where he won prizes in history and English, he studied English at the University of Ibadan on a scholarship, winning departmental prizes in 1963 and 1965 and touring with a drama troupe. He was briefly a teaching assistant at the University of Lagos before lecturing at Nsukka; when the civil war broke out he supported the federal government and returned to Bori (Wikipedia). A radio adaptation of one of his plays was produced in 1972, and in 1985 he produced Basi and Company, a television adaptation that ran until 1990.

He was tried by a special military tribunal on charges of masterminding the murder of Ogoni chiefs and was hanged in 1995 under the government of General Sani Abacha, together with eight others. His execution caused international outrage and, according to Wikipedia's article on him, led to Nigeria's suspension from the Commonwealth for more than three years.