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“... Ken Saro-Wiwa squints at us from the cover of his detention diary, the posthumous A Month and a Day. His moustache looks precise and trim; his eyes are alight; the distinctive gash scrawls across his temple. But the picture is governed by his pipe. It’s an intellectual’s accessory, a good pipe to suck and clench, to spew from and lecture with ...”

“... of crude oil revenue. The other, Sani Abacha, turned the country into a pariah state by hanging Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists on 10 November 1995 after a trial that everyone agreed was flawed. Saro-Wiwa had been charged with complicity in the murder of four Ogoni chiefs the previous year, although he ...”

“... Despot had ever flouted civilised standards with such impunity as Sani Abacha when he murdered Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow Ogoni activists on 10 November 1995. The rumours going the rounds over the following days only added to the widespread suspicion that we were about to enter a period of state-sanctioned brutality which would surpass the worst ...”

“... the ‘monster’ who had earned worldwide opprobrium following the 1995 judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa, appeared to have persuaded the international community to accept his transmutation into an elected civilian president, through the five political parties he had created and funded for that purpose. Soyinka believed that his own presence on ...”

“... Three African writers, from very different parts of the continent – Saro-Wiwa from Nigeria, Ndebele from South Africa, Macgoye from Kenya. My ignorance of all three regions being deep and extensive, I am obliged to accept these three books in great part as documentary reports, as information about unknown ways of life ...”

“... who runs an NGO that campaigns against environmental degradation. He models his work on that of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged in 1995 by the military regime of General Sani Abacha after drawing attention to the destruction of the delta by big oil, notably Royal Dutch Shell. ‘It is on record,’ Fyneface told me, ‘that the oil companies are ...”

“... a sober roll-call: Ida B. Wells, Aneurin Bevan, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Václav Havel, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Its portrayal of the first half of the century has solidity; you are in safe, if stubby hands. There are also some poignant contributions: the broken dreams of Communism reported by former believers; Rabbi Stephen Wise addressing an anti-Nazi ...”

“... oil became an international scandal when in 1995 General Sani Abacha’s military regime hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists who’d carried out a long campaign against environmental degradation and exploitation in the delta. In the early 2000s groups of armed militants who took on the oil companies – and fought among themselves ...”

“... of roughly half Nigeria’s external reserves. Abacha achieved international notoriety by hanging Ken Saro-Wiwa, along with eight other Ogoni activists, in November 1995. (When the doctor suggested to the main defendant that he was having psychiatric problems, he replied: ‘Yes, I must be, because all I can see on the benches are kangaroos.’) Most ...”

“... in films like The Prisoner of Zenda, decent enough but misled. 12 November. The judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues in Nigeria properly outrages world opinion. Quite apart from the merits of his case the death of this writer has more readily caught the public imagination for a very simple reason – the euphonious nature of his name. ...”

“... Take the Niger Delta, poisoned with an Exxon Valdez-worth of spilled oil every year, a process Ken Saro-Wiwa, before he was murdered by his government, called ‘ecological genocide’. The executions of community leaders, he said, were ‘all for Shell’. In my country, Canada, the decision to dig up the Alberta tar sands – a particularly heavy ...”

“... contraption’. Their anger was compounded by the judicial murder of their spokesperson Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995: he’d asked for a fair share of oil revenue for the inhabitants of the delta. Southern demands for autonomy didn’t play well in the north. Coming to an equitable federal arrangement with the ‘sons of pagan infidels whose fathers ...”