Execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa

Date: November 10, 1995 • Location: Rome, Italy

Writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People were executed by the Nigerian military regime led by Sani Abacha.

Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian writer, teacher, television producer, and social rights activist. He was a member of the Ogoni people, an ethnic minority in the Niger Delta whose homeland, Ogoniland, has been targeted for crude oil extraction since the 1950s and has suffered extreme environmental damage from decades of indiscriminate petroleum waste dumping.