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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2022
Between 1990 and 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa led a prominent peaceful campaign for the recognition and just treatment of his community by the military dictatorship of General Abacha. As author and activist, he wrote - and generally self-published - across a huge range of genres: novels, plays, short stories, children's tales, poetry, histories, political tracts, diaries, satires, and newspaper columns. He used the versatility of the written medium to speak out internationally about the abuses suffered by his small Niger Delta minority community, the Ogoni. Meanwhile, his efforts at home as leader of MOSOP, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, helped to mobilise a mass protest, 300,000-strong, against Shell Oil in January 1993, following which the company withdrew from the area. He was hanged on 10th November 1995 on trumped-up murder charges along with eight fellow Ogoni activists.