The Ogoni Nine were a group of nine activists from the Ogoni region of Nigeria, including outspoken author and playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa, Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawo, Daniel Gbooko, Paul Levera, Felix Nuate, Baribor Bera, Barinem Kiobel, and John Kpuine, who were executed by hanging in 1995 by the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha and buried in Port Harcourt Cemetery.
In what follows, Noo, writer and daughter of the late Saro-Wiwa remembers these heroes twenty years on.
Finding Africa considers itself fortunate to have had its first seminar inaugurated by Brendon Nicholls and his insightful new reading of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy. In bringing together a consideration of environment, psyche and objects, Nicholls was able to argue for the existence, in the text, of an embedded environmental consciousness. The significance of his reading is twofold in its relation to Ken Saro-Wiwa as an activist and figure of resistance, and in respect to Kleinian Object Relations and their applicability to postcolonial African texts.
On the 10 of November 1995 Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged by his government along with eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). Sara-Wiwa’s activism had at its heart a concern for his Ogoni people, which in turn led him to lead a protest against the environmental damage to Ogoni lands carried out by the Shell oil company. In what has been considered a landmark victory against global exploitation, Saro-Wiwa’s campaign successfully managed to kick Shell out of the Ogoni region in 1993. The circumstances of Saro-Wiwa’s execution two years later have left little doubt regarding the government’s complicity with corporate exploitation and the price one pays for taking a stand against it. Continue reading
We are pleased to announce that Brendon Nicholls will be giving our inaugural seminar on the topic of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: Environment, Psyche and Objects on Wednesday, 29 October 2014. The event will be at the Treehouse located in the Berrick Saul Building at the University of York at 17:30. This seminar opens the dialogue in the Literature and Psychoanalysis stream of Finding Africa.
Nicholls lectures in the School of English, University of Leeds. He is the author of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading (Ashgate, 2010) and Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (Routledge, 2011). He is currently working on a monograph titled Africas of the Mind: Environmental Psychoanalysis and Black Spirit Vernaculars.
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