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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ive been thinking about how theres a certain group of jazz musicians who believe in the tough love kind of mentoring and how it leads me to the thought that whether or not music is always in a state of advancement. music as we know hasn't always looked this way, it has changed drastically and has appeared differently in different cultures. Also, there were musical dark ages where what we knew was loss and we got something else.
I think there's some kind of arrogance in just assuming that the rest of the world is wrong for not following the jazz masters and studying them deeply. the world is fucked up, music isn't guaranteed to be healthy and to carry on a lineage and in a way to me it feels like these people are desperately clinging onto an old world and a sense of familiarity that doesn't make the same sense in the modern era.
not that i disagree with the study of jazz masters it just seems like people don't focus on the right thing which is to me "how are people reacting to the dying planet and also the planet is dying"
Part of me is like this. They developed so far along a certain edge of all possible music (infinite). So like it feels like people not tryna learn from them and surpass them or constructively disengage from them feels like just reinventing the wheel and destroying history. Like not every mathmetician needa be Ramanujan with the initial development.
At the same time how you said about the "tough love", superiority complexes, and emotional violence put out by these guys make me feel like they not letting people 'constructively disengage' with grace.
So its like with science, it should be cumulative over the past but still allowed to break from the past. And also, the basis is nowhere near as rigid so even more reason to break and allow breaking.