Twenty eight years ago, on this day, November 10, 1995, nine men, including the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa were executed.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 361ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Nigeria was a brutal dictatorship with local warlords making loads a money. Ogoni were getting screwed.
The military dictatorship in Nigeria had decided to execute a bunch of Ogoni leaders who were protesting against the despoilation and the extractivism that had been going on for decades as funded by what has perpetrated by outfits like our friends at Shell who were having a rough time of it in the second half of the 1990s.
What I think we can learn from this
That the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
What happened next
Nigeria stopped being an official actual military dictatorship. The shituation for the Ogoni is not hugely better.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
References
- Canadian author J. Timothy Hunt‘s The Politics of Bones (September 2005), published shortly before the 10th anniversary of Saro-Wiwa’s execution, documented the flight of Saro-Wiwa’s brother Owens Wiwa, after his brother’s execution and his own imminent arrest, to London and then on to Canada, where he is now a citizen and continues his brother’s fight on behalf of the Ogoni people. Moreover, it is also the story of Owens’ personal battle against the Nigerian government to locate his brother’s remains after they were buried in an unmarked mass-grave.[93]
- Ogoni’s Agonies: Ken Saro Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria (1998), edited by Abdul Rasheed Naʾallah, provides more information on the struggles of the Ogoni people[94]
- Onookome Okome’s book, Before I Am Hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa—Literature, Politics, and Dissent (1999)[95] is a collection of essays about Wiwa
- In the Shadow of a Saint: A Son’s Journey to Understanding His Father’s Legacy (2000), was written by his son Ken Wiwa.
- Saro-Wiwa’s own diary, A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary, was published in January 1995, two months after his execution.
- In Looking for Transwonderland – Travels in Nigeria, his daughter Noo Saro-Wiwa tells the story of her return to Nigeria years after her father’s murder.