05 November 2015, The Tablet

Unfinished business


 
Twenty years ago this month, the Nigerian writer and activist was executed on trumped-up charges. An Irish missionary sister who worked with him in the oil-rich but devastated Ogoniland region says his work remains incomplete Even as he waited on death row in 1995, the Nigerian writer and environmental activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, kept up his correspondence with Sr Majella McCarron, an Irish missionary he considered a kindred spirit. She had collaborated with him to give a voice to the Ogoni people, whose ancestral lands in the Niger Delta were being ruined by the extraction of oil on a vast scale. She received his final letter while in Ireland on a sabbatical.“I think I got that last letter one month before he was executed,” she recalled. “The letters came faithfully to Ir
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