Ken Saro Wiwa, an oil martyr
Africa's geography is surely dotted with many anonymous heroes who died to defend their own dignity and that of their communities without this ultimate sacrifice being recorded in any forgotten chronicle of any provincial newspaper. The sordidness of the regimes imposed in most of the artificial countries, drawn with square and square, since their colonisation, the lack of appreciation for the life of the native people, whose germ comes from slavery, and the corruption installed to this day, have contributed to this as hallmarks of both political and economic powers that defined a century of shadows in the near continent.
To give just one example, the Ogoni people of Nigeria have been fighting for more than half a century against the savage pollution that European oil companies, such as the Anglo-Dutch Shell, but also the French Total or the Italian Agip, have caused in their territories in the Niger Delta, something that the United Nations used to denounce from time to time, and which involves the toxicity of their waters a thousand times higher than the permitted levels, so that, according to an investigation by the multilateral organisation, some 2,100 million litres of crude oil per year were found to be contaminated by the oil companies. 100 million litres of crude oil were flooding its shores, an ecological disaster of gigantic proportions, equivalent to the sinking of an Exxon Valdes every year, and which apparently very few Western media outlets are still interested in reporting on to this day.
Last November was the 26th anniversary of the execution of one of these martyrs who crossed the double standard machinery that continues to plunder African natural resources with impunity, after the Nigerian army killed thousands of them. The writer, Nobel Literature Prize nominee and university professor Ken Saro Wiwa (1941) was hanged along with seven other prisoners of conscience by General Abacha's government in 1995 for opposing the devastation, an attitude that was officially labelled seditious, despite pleas for clemency from the UN, the OAU and the African Commission on Human Rights, among other transnational organisations.
Apart from the attempts by these oil companies to divert attention and silence the obvious, such as the publication urbi et orbe of supposed codes of respect for people's basic rights, the truth is that they were corporations that functioned as small offices of interests embedded in the palaces of African dictatorships and that did not transfer to these conquered empires the same canons of social, economic and environmental conduct that apply in the democratic countries from which they originate. Shell, for example, admitted to having urged local leaders to use the military to intervene against protesters and even facilitated the provision of weapons to defend its extractive facilities.
Saro Wiwa paid with his own life for defending his rights and those of his millenary community as citizens of the world, something that has apparently not helped these multinationals, protected and defended by our advanced and civilised states, to stop bogging down the third world with waste of all kinds and technological waste in order to amass fortunes with which to play on the stock exchanges of the world's leading stock exchanges.
What less would be needed than for the European Union to take retroactive legal action against these companies and a much-needed and costly ecological rehabilitation campaign to reverse at least some of the devastation, since the souls of dead Ogonis, like Wiwa, are now sadly irretrievable.