Ken Saro-Wiwa was a prominent Nigerian author, activist and television producer. He garnered attention by leading a nonviolent campaign against the multinational petroleum industry. That industry recklessly dumped petroleum waste in Saro-Wiwa’s home region, the Nigerian delta, which gave rise to severe environmental damage.
Saro-Wiwa was born on 10 October 1941 into a prominent Ogoni family. As a child, he demonstrated a talent for scholarship and, upon completing his secondary schooling at Government College Umuahia, he won a scholarship to read English at the University of Ibadan.
He taught briefly at the University of Lagos after graduating in 1965. But he soon left that position to pursue a bureaucratic career, and served as a federal administrator for the Bonny Island oil terminal. Nigeria experienced a civil war between 1967 and 1970, and during the conflict, Saro-Wiwa supported the government’s goal of preventing the state of Biafra from seceding. He gained an appointment as the commissioner for education in the Rivers State as a reward for his support.
He left government service in 1973 because he advocated greater autonomy for the Ogoni people. But he achieved considerable success in that decade in a variety of commercial ventures in real estate and retail. In the 1980s, though, he shifted his focus from business to television production, writing and journalism. He wrote a satirical television series, Basi & Company, which looked at looked at the lives of gang members in Lagos. The series was reportedly the most popular television series in Africa in its day. He also published books such as Sozaboy, and Forest of Flowers, and wrote a regular column for the Lagos Times. He managed to gain an audience beyond Nigeria due to his newspaper writing.
Saro-Wiwa served in one presidential administration in the late 1980s. But his service did not last for long and by the end of the decade he had come to believe that corruption was an entrenched feature of Nigeria’s successive military regimes and that that unfortunate state of affairs could not be challenged from within the existing political structure.
In 1990, he helped found the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). He also wrote the Ogoni Bill of Rights and worked with Greenpeace International. He became the principal opposition leader in Nigeria. And MOSOP was one of the most visible groups that stood in opposition to economic exploitation of Nigeria’s oil resources, and the concomitant environmental fallout.
But his position atop the oppositional hierarchy was far from secure. MOSOP divided into competing factions. Some people within the fold advocated and resorted to violence. And some Ogoni tribal leaders believed in ongoing negotiation with international oil companies. So he found himself between people with irreconcilable approaches.
On 21 May 1994, four people who opposed Saro-Wiwa were killed in an attacked orchestrated by a group affiliated with MOSOP. Saro-Wiwa had typically decried the use of violence. But he was arrested and tried by a Nigerian military court all the same along with eight other people. The defendants were referred to as the Ogoni Nine. Saro-Wiwa was sentenced to death. And despite international protestation regarding the unfairness of the procedure, he was executed by hanging on 10 November 1995 before he could appeal his conviction.
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I was in the doctor's office where even the fucking doctor has to shame me for wearing a mask. "Why are you wearing that, you don't have a cold do you?" I can't trust even a fucking doctor to care about a pandemic. Surely this place will provide only best care for their patients and definitely wouldn't act as a contamination hotspot.
Love that shit. Best healthcare specialists in the world, folks
It's so fucking bizarre. Even without a pandemic; I'm in the hospital, the place where all the sick people go when they're sick. Why wouldn't I wear a fucking mask? Like the idea that someone would just not want to experience the discomfort and disruption of having a disease is somehow this weird deviant thing. It's so fucking strange. Like even if you're not concerned about serious health problems arising from Covid, catching Covid is still up to two whole weeks of getting your ass thoroughly kicked by a really miserable illness. Why would you not avoid that if you could?
Even pre-covid it weirded me out how much people in my life hated masks. When I heard about cities in China normalizing masks during flu season, as an Evangelical zealot child, I thought it made a lot of sense and wondered to my family why we didn't do the same thing
CW racism
According to them, it's because we value Freedom and aren't part of a hivemind like they areSo many doctors are ideologically rotten and just in it for the money (which is why medicine shouldn’t be privatized)
Not as many as you would think. Depressed miserable and abusing substances to get by? Most of the ones I have worked with.
Must depend on where you live then
In Healthcare we have all given up. Originally we all wanted to catch covid so we could get if over with before the waves hit so we could get back to work. Then we were all good about masks. Then after dealing with more deaths a shift than I would see a year we all stopped caring. I was the last holdout at my workplace. In the end it just felt silly being the only one wearing a mask. Then after that the sheer exposure levels I couldn't prevent either in the break room or family or grocery store. It just started to gall that we even tried.