Appeals did come, from the Pope and Nelson Mandela and some prominent Commonwealth leaders. Mandela made one of the most tragic mistakes of his life (as he later admitted), calling for ‘quiet diplomacy’ with Nigeria, the old African National Congress ally. But the efforts that did come, came too late, and were to no avail. On the morning of 10 November 1995, in Port Harcourt prison, Ken and eight of his colleagues were hanged. Ken was the first, crying out as he was led to the gallows, ‘You can only kill the messengers, you cannot kill the message! You can only kill the messengers, you cannot kill the message! …’ The first attempt did not work due to a mechanical problem with the gallows. Ken was taken down from the gallows while the executioners attempted to remedy the fault. A second time the noose was placed round his neck, and a second time the lever failed to work. Ken was marched out again. More repairs were done and eventually the lever mechanism began to work. Then the executioners decided to make him watch all of his friends die. First of all John Kpunien, the youth leader of MOSOP, then Dr Barinem Kiobel, the former commissioner of Rivers State, then, one by one, the remaining six men. And then they hanged Ken. His final words were: ‘Lord take my soul, but the struggle continues.’
Five days later, it was announced that Shell and the Nigerian government were jointly launching a $4 billion liquefied natural gas venture in Nigeria. Brian Anderson stated that Shell ‘remains firmly committed to the long term future of the country and its people’.
The nine men executed on 10 November 1995:
Baribor Bera
Saturday Dobee
Nordu Eawo
Daniel Gbokoo
Barinem Kiobel
John Kpuinen
Paul Levula
Felix Nuate
Ken Saro-Wiwa
Shell Transport & Trading, London:
Mark Moody-Stuart, group managing director from 1991
John Jennings, chairman 1993–7
Philip Watts, managing director Shell Nigeria, 1991–4, director for
strategic planning, sustainable development, and external affairs,
Shell International, 1995–8
Brian Anderson, chairman, Shell Nigeria, from January 1994
Sir Peter Holmes, director from 1982
Sir Antony Acland, non-executive director from 1991
Professor Robert O’Neill, non-executive director from 1992
Sir William Purves, non-executive director from 1993
Jyoti Munsiff, company secretary from August 1993
Royal Dutch Shell, The Hague:
C. A. J. Herkströter, group managing director from 1989, president
from 1992
M. A. van den Bergh, group managing director from 1992
L. C. van Wachem, chairman of the supervisory board from 1992
K. V. Cassani, member of the supervisory board from 1989
J. M. H. van Engelshoven, member of the supervisory board from
1991
H de Ruiter, group managing director 1983–94, member of the
supervisory board from 1994
J. and I were in Glasgow when we heard the news. Ironically, we had been speaking at a conference celebrating the legacy of Joseph Beuys – how art could play a vital role in social change. We were staying with a Basque friend of mine in his shared flat. J. had gone out to get milk. I still remember exactly where I was sitting, in the little kitchen at the table, when J. reappeared with a newspaper, and held out the front page, ‘They did it. The fuckers did it.’
NIGERIA DEFIES WORLD WITH HANGING OF SARO-WIWA
I was uncomprehending. Like many others I’d thought the pressure being put on Nigeria would mean that they couldn’t carry out the sentences. Something in me burned at that moment, like a fuse blowing. A deep and vivid sense of unfinished business, of rage. I knew that the spotlight would soon move away from Nigeria and Ogoni – with the media’s habitually short memory span – but we would not. We would do exactly the opposite. We would never let this disgrace be forgotten. Nor the fact that none of this would have happened without the barbaric behaviour of an Anglo-Dutch oil company, over more than fifty years.
There was the predictable global outcry afterwards. Ken Wiwa (Saro-Wiwa’s son) felt that Shell had been jointly responsible for the killing of his father – ‘they didn’t tie the noose around my father’s neck, but without Shell’s intervention and encouraging of the military government it would never have happenedfn6.’ Even mild-mannered John Major managed to rise a little to the occasion and said that what Abacha had done amounted to nothing less than ‘judicial murder’. Mandela, stung by his own catastrophic misreading of Abacha, succeeded in getting Nigeria suspended from the Commonwealth. Shell and the other oil companies shed some crocodile tears in public, while no doubt being mightily relieved that this particularly effective activist had been silenced.
But these murders proved to be an astonishing watershed, as tens of thousands more activists joined campaigns against environmental devastation. In Platform we began our initiative, ‘90% CRUDE’, in 1996, to investigate the culture, the psychology and the impacts of the oil industry worldwide. We started to take Ken’s message all over the world: we organised conferences, created performances and published books and newspapers – all focussing on the nature of oil corporations and their responsibility, looking in detail at their global environmental and human rights impacts.
Returning from a conference in Pittsburgh in November 2003, I had an idea. Platform had given the keynote presentation on ‘Art and Social Change’ to a packed lecture theatre at Carnegie-Mellon University, and we ended, as we often did, with the filmed interview of Ken (the last he ever gave), speaking directly about the potential of art, at its most powerful:
What is of interest to me is that my art should be able to alter the lives of a large number of people, of a whole community, of an entire country, so that my literature has to be completely different, the stories I tell must have a different sort of purpose from the artist in the Western world. And it’s not now an ego trip, it is serious, it is politics, it is economics, it’s everything, and art in that instance becomes so meaningful, both to the artist and to the consumers of that art.
On the plane back to London I’d been rereading his book A Month and a Day and, very tired and jet-lagged on the Piccadilly Line on the way home, I came upon this particular passage: ‘this is why the Ogoni environment must matter more to me than to Shell International ensconced in its ornate offices on the banks of the Thames in London. But I cannot allow the company its smugness because its London comfort spells death to my Ogoni children and compatriots.’
It suddenly seemed obvious! Why not create a memorial to the Ogoni Nine in London, preferably outside the Shell Centre, unveiled in time for the tenth anniversary of the murders? I canvassed the idea with friends and colleagues, among them Anita and Gordon Roddick, and they put us in touch with Ken Wiwa and soon we were organising the first meeting under the banner ‘The Struggle of Humanity Against Power is the Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting’ (adapted from Milan Kundera’s famous quotation), at Platform’s workspace, next to the Thames near Tower Bridge. We were delighted by the response – many organisations sent representatives and we secured the involvement of directors at Greenpeace, Amnesty, Friends of the Earth and PEN.