A Month And A Day

”‘Many people still remember how they felt when Ken Saro-Wiwa was judicially murdered. Some of us spent the period trying to forget, as a strategy to mask our pain, but in the end you come to realise, as the Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote: “the struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’” - Ken Wiwa from a speech at the ‘Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa’ Commemoration, London 22 March 2005.”

Ken Saro-Wiwa (10 October 1941-10 November 1995) was a Nigerian writer, television producer, environmental activist and businessman. In 1994 Saro-Wiwa was imprisoned by order of the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. He had strongly defended the rights of the Ogoni people of his homeland and criticized the government’s oil policy with Royal Dutch/Shell. Despite wide international protests, Saro Wiwa was hanged after a botched show trial with other eight Ogoni rights activists in Port Harcourt in Nigeria on November 10, 1995. This new Ayebia edition of A Month And A Day & Letters features a Foreword by the Nigerian Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka. It also includes a letter by Ken Wiwa to his late father 10 years on and previously unpublished letters smuggled to and from Saro-Wiwa in his final year in prison. Among these are letters from world leaders, writers and friends including Nelson Mandela, Nadine Gordimer, Ethel Kennedy, Anita Roddick and ordinary people from all over the world.