4 Following the executions of the Ogoni Nine, Nelson Mandela launched a scathing attack on Nigeria and Abacha, calling for immediate sanctions, saying:
‘What we are now proposing are short and sharp measures which will produce the results Nigerians and the world desire. We are dealing with an illegitimate, barbaric, arrogant, military dictatorship which has murdered activists, using a kangaroo court and using false evidence,’ he told the newspaper … Mr Mandela also lashed out at the Shell petroleum company for its decision to go ahead with a $4bn (pounds 2.5bn) gas project in Nigeria, despite worldwide calls for the project to be shelved. He said he told Shell executives in Johannesburg last week that South Africa expected the company to suspend the project as a mark of protest.
‘And when they hesitated to do so, I warned them that we are going to take action against them in this country, because we can’t allow people to think in terms of their gains when the very lives of human beings are involved. That is the extent to which I have gone in this regard.’ Mr Mandela has threatened to call for a boycott of Shell in South Africa. Following the meeting, Shell South Africa placed full-page advertisements in the South African press, defending its human-rights record in Nigeria.’ (From the Independent, ‘Mandela Guns for Nigerian Dictator’, 27 November 1995.)
5 Birnbaum published a further report on the tribunal and verdicts in December 1995, called A Travesty of Law and Justice: An Analysis of the Judgement in the Case of Ken Saro-Wiwa and Others, published by Article 19 in December 1995. Birnbaum’s conclusion was that ‘The judgement of the Tribunal is not merely wrong, illogical or perverse. It is downright dishonest. The Tribunal consistently advanced arguments which no experienced lawyer could possibly believe to be logical or just. I believe that the Tribunal first decided on its verdict and then sought for arguments to justify them. No barrel was too deep to be scraped.’
6 ‘I’m in good spirits … There’s no doubt that my idea will succeed in time, but I’ll have to bear the pain of the moment …’ This letter to William Boyd is also published as the end of the preface in A Year and a Day.
It’s clear that Ken Saro-Wiwa thought a lot about his possible death in the years before he was killed. There is a remarkable stoicism and clear-sightedness about the potential risks of his activism. His father, known as Pa Wiwa, recounted this story before he died in 2005, to another activist, Ike Okonta:
He told me of the morning, now so long ago when Ken came to him and sought his permission to lead the Ogoni to freedom from the tyranny of Shell and the Nigerian state. ‘It was a difficult decision for me to make,’ Pa Wiwa told me.
‘I asked my son, who will bury me after they have killed you? I asked him this question three times. But he was still determined to do something to save our people. In the end, I gave him my blessing.’ (Quoted in The Next Gulf, by Rowell, Marriott and Stockman.)
It is also striking that – on two occasions – in his fiction writing Saro-Wiwa has protagonists facing execution the next day. In ‘Africa Kills Her Sun’, a satirical short story about the systemic nature of corruption in Nigeria, published in 1989, Bana the main character faces death by firing squad in the morning, together with two colleagues. He writes a last letter to his childhood girlfriend and tells her ‘what is going to happen later this morning is welcome relief from burdens too heavy to bear. It’s … you the living who are in prison … your happiness is the happiness of ignorance.’ In Lemona’s Tale, a novella published posthumously in 1996, a former prostitute recounts the story of her life to a special visitor, the day before she is going to be hanged. Although the story has simplistic and melodramatic aspects, it is a remarkable exercise in empathetic imagination, and an extremely sympathetic portrait of a woman’s growing politicisation in a highly patriarchal society such as Nigeria. At one point she observes: ‘And that was my problem wasn’t it? Everything was happening to me. I did not happen to anything or anyone. Each time I tried to happen, disaster resulted.’
7 The John Berger quotation ‘the powerful fear art …’ is from his short, and extraordinarily powerful, essay ‘Miners’, from the collection Keeping a Rendezvous.
Chapter Nine: From a Desk in Waterloo to a Cell in Port Harcourt
1 The poem with the refrain ‘And yet you will weep and know why’ is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Spring and Fall’.
2 ‘It is not our business to try and influence a trial … Our business is to continue the business of petroleum.’ This comment by Brian Anderson, Shell Nigeria managing director, is from Reuters, London (Paul Harris, London Newsroom), reporting Shell’s AGM on 15 May 1996: ‘Royal Dutch Shell said on Wednesday that it would not intervene in the case of 19 Ogoni activists jailed … in Nigeria … Shell Nigeria managing director Brian Anderson told the firm’s annual meeting that intervention was not the firm’s role.’
Chapter Ten: The Invisible Corporation
1 The excerpts taken from Moody-Stuart’s legal deposition are verbatim quotations from the transcript-between pages 106 and 135 – of the ‘Deposition Upon Oral Examination of Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, KCMG, on Thursday, April 15, 2004, commencing at 9.35 am, taken at the offices of: Leigh Day & Co. Solicitors, 25 St John’s Lane London EC1M 4LB England, Reported by: Thelma Harries, MBIVR, ACR’.
2 ‘I WOULD SHOOT ALL IDLERS …’ from Deterding’s autobiography, An International Oilman.
Material in this chapter on Deterding’s and Shell’s links to Nazism, and the corporate funding of Nazism more generally, comes from The Most Powerful Man in the World: The Life of Sir Henri Deterding by Glyn Roberts, Doing Business with the Nazis: Britain’s Economic and Financial Relations with Germany 1931–1936 by Neil Forbes ,Company Man by Anthony Sampson ,Tycoons and Tyrants by Louis Lochner, Who Financed Hitler by James Pool, Hitler – A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock, Montagu Norman: A Biography by John Hargrave, Germany Puts the Clock Back by Edgar Mowrer, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order by William Engdahl, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler by Antony C. Sutton, Shell Shock: The Secrets and Spin of an Oil Giant by Ian Cummins and John Beasant, Hitler’s Fortune by Cris Whetton and the post-war Affidavit of Georg von Schnitzler, Member of the Board of Directors of I.G. Farben, 10. November 1945, Regarding a Meeting of Industrialists with Hitler in February 1933, at which Schacht Proposed the Raising of an Election Fund – as well as other articles and miscellaneous research from my wide reading in this area. Many newspaper accounts from the 1930s are also a critical source of material, as referenced in the chapter itself.
On the corporate funding of Nazism I’ve also drawn upon Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Regarding the significance of the 20 February 1933 meeting, Tooze writes: ‘The meeting of 20 February and its aftermath are the most notorious instances of the willingness of German big business to assist Hitler in establishing his dictatorial regime. The evidence cannot be dodged.’
For a – very limited – view of Shell’s corporate relationship with Nazi Germany it is also instructive to read the official history of the company – From Challenger to Joint Industry Leader, 1890–1939: A History of Royal Dutch Shell, by Jan Luiten van Zanden and Joost Jonker.