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Ogoni's Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria
Abdul Rasheed Na'Allah (ed) Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998 PP 388
Before I Am Hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Literature, Politics and Dissent
Onookome Okome (ed) Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000 pp 224
Ken Saro-Wiwa: Writer and Political Activist
Craig W McLuckie & Aubrey McPhail (eds) Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000 pp 291
Ken Saro-Wiwa: A Bio-critical Study
Femi Ojo-Ade New York: Africana Legacy Press, 1999 pp 300
Among his countrymen Ken Saro-Wiwa was best known as the writer, producer and director of the hit television series Basi and Company which ran from 1985 to 1990 and attracted an estimated 30 million viewers per week-making it arguably the most successful local television show ever produced in Africa. Beyond a select group of African literary scholars and committed environmental and human rights activists, however, Saro-Wiwa was largely unknown outside Nigeria until 1993, when the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOp) staged the largest peaceful demonstrations ever held against a transnational oil company. On 4 January 1993 some 300 000 Ogoni (out of a total population of 500 000) protested against the environmental devastation of their homeland and demanded a greater share of oil revenues. The subsequent government crackdown on the Ogoni population left more than 2000 civilians dead and tens of thousands homeless. It also led to a sham trial against a number of MOSOp leaders that concluded on 10 November 1995 with the hangings of Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogonis in a process that former British prime minister John Major aptly termed `judicial murder'.
The four books under review here represent the first generation of scholarship to evaluate Saro-Wiwa's life, legacy and martyrdom. While various authors in these volumes address the complexities of Saro-Wiwa's life as a whole, all four books follow a similar format of compartmentalising his work into discrete pieces that can then be analysed separately-poetry, short stories, novels, journalism, activism, and the like. Of the four of them, McLuckie and McPhail, despite a few weak chapters, is clearly the strongest and most consistent overall volume. While Misty L Bastian's voyeuristic tourist look at a demonstration in commemoration of the executed Ogoni leaders is overblown and melodramatic, most of the chapters...