On November 10, 1995, the Nigerian state, under General Sani Abacha, hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa for his activism against Shell’s operations in his homeland of Ogoni. By the time of his death, Saro-Wiwa had come a long way from his earlier role as a federal government supporter and official. He was now an enemy of the state by virtue of his mobilization for minority rights in the Niger Delta and his campaign against environmental degradation through the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). MOSOP and its leader believed in the right to self-determination and control of the oil wealth in the Niger Delta region and condemned the federal government’s control of oil proceeds while marginalizing communities affected by the despoliation of their environment by Shell and other oil companies. Abacha’s tyrannical regime, threatened by the agitation in Ogoniland, framed Saro-Wiwa and eight others for the murder of Ogoni elders killed by a mob of youths for their supposed government sympathies. Before his death, Saro-Wiwa prophesied that the government’s forceful silencing of peaceful dissent would encourage violent forms of protest in the region. That prophecy was soon realized in the militancy that has wracked the region since the late 1990s. Yet what Saro-Wiwa did not foresee—and what might be his greatest legacy—is the efflorescence of cultural productions focusing on environmentalism and sustainability that his martyrdom crystallized within Africa and beyond. Thirty years after his passing, the afterlife of Ken Saro-Wiwa coheres in the literary, filmic, and artistic projects he has inspired and the social movements and mobilization campaigns that bear the mark of his influence.
The broad influence of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s work is anticipated in the breadth of his career undertakings as a writer, businessman, TV producer, politician, and activist. Following his birth, early life, and education in present day Rivers State in Nigeria, the brilliant Saro-Wiwa enrolled at the University of Ibadan where he studied English and won departmental prizes. He taught briefly at the University of Lagos and the University of Nigeria Nsukka, where he was a lecturer in African literature. Supporting the federal government as the Nigerian Civil War commenced, he left Nsukka for Port Harcourt. Saro-Wiwa would serve as civilian administrator for Bonny and later as regional commissioner for education in Rivers State. Saro-Wiwa was also a successful businessman and TV producer whose popular series Basi & Company reached millions of Nigerians, as well as a writer and poet known for his novel on the war Sozaboy (Reference Saro-Wiwa1985) and for his plays. After earlier supporting and serving in Nigeria’s government, Saro-Wiwa would later become an opposition activist for his commitment to Ogoni autonomy, including over control of its oil resources.
Saro-Wiwa’s wide-ranging work and career, spanning multiple sectors, motivated a proliferation of cultural productions on an array of topics, including environmental degradation. We can start with examples from his local region, the Niger Delta, where poets including Ogaga Ifowodo and Tanure Ojaide have published poetry inspired by and dedicated to the martyred author and environmentalist. Take Ifowodo’s collection The Oil Lamp (Reference Ifowodo2005), for instance. Not only is the poem “The Agonist (For Ken Saro-Wiwa & The Ogoni 8)” dedicated to Saro-Wiwa, but he is also a recurring presence throughout the collection. Part III of the collection merits attention for its direct reference to Saro-Wiwa and its invocation of his ideas. This section of the collection, titled “Ogoni” begins: “I went to their leaders—no, not the Ken-Saro-Wiwas/of the foreign-sponsored MOSOP and NYCOP—/I went to the women, fishermen, farmers” (38). Here the poet invokes Saro-Wiwa, whom the Nigerian government denounced as the instrument of foreign sponsors in an effort to delegitimize him and his movement. As the poem proceeds, it becomes clear that it is galvanized by the same conception of land and oil as the commonwealth of the Niger Delta’s inhabitants. If the quoted lines draw a distinction between Saro-Wiwa and the community, the divisional tactic soon falls short. For when the poem’s persona, an agent of the state, asks: “‘Do you really believe you own the oil,’” the community’s response, from an old man, contrasts indigenous ownership of land over centuries with the nascent emergence of the Nigerian state from the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates in 1914. Reiterating their long-standing custodianship of the land—“the oil, the trees, the creeks, and the rivers”—Ifowodo’s poetic lines echo Saro-Wiwa’s challenge to the Nigerian state’s purported control of resources within the nation’s territorial bounds. With the figure of the old man, Ifowodo reinstates the indigenous sovereignty superintending Saro-Wiwa’s vision, one that sees the land, like the trees, creeks, and rivers, as provisions for sustenance in return for ethical custodianship. Where the poem persona speaks the language of ownership and control, the old man, like Saro-Wiwa, emphasizes an ethics of care. This ethics of care, grounded in an indigenous conception of environmentalism and sustainability in the Niger Delta, motors not only Ifowodo’s poetry but also the work of others such as Tanure Ojaide and the poet and activist Nnimmo Bassey.
Before turning to other regions, it is worth acknowledging that Saro-Wiwa’s ideas persist in the work of his children, including his daughter, video artist and filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa. Her Sarogua Mourning (Reference Saro-Wiwa2011), inspired by her father’s interest in the Ogoni deity of rain and war (Sarogua), performs the work of memorializing her late father as it turns the occasion of grief into one of public mourning. In this video, the sobbing daughter appears before the camera with a shaven head. Embodiment is critical to the work of mourning in this video and in the younger Saro-Wiwa’s other works, where she overturns trauma as the overriding structure of feeling in the Niger Delta. In works such as Table Manners (Reference Saro-Wiwa2014–19), among others, Saro-Wiwa’s daughter extols the Niger Delta’s beauty and its bounty of earth resources that sustain the human and nonhuman worlds. For the younger Saro-Wiwa, it is important to displace the primacy of oil and its devastation of the region in order to appreciate the rich ecological networks and sustainable ethics of care that her father once argued were threatened by the destructive activities of oil production in Nigeria.
Beyond the Niger Delta and Nigeria, Ken Saro-Wiwa remains a transnational figure of solidarity evoked by artists and social movements alike. One such artwork, a mural in County Mayo, Ireland, features Saro-Wiwa, with raised fist, alongside the names of the Ogoni Eight and text from his work encouraging resistance. The mural appeared as the Shell to Sea Movement in Mayo County protested Shell’s onshore gas refining plan, citing its health and environmental risks to the community. With the mural honoring Saro-Wiwa’s resistance and the choice of November 10—the anniversary of Saro-Wiwa’s execution—for a major protest, the Mayo protesters revive Saro-Wiwa’s campaign and ideas, pressuring Shell and their government to respect their right to a healthy environment and commit to preserving their rich natural environment.
The space of this editorial allows for only a few examples but the scope and scale of Saro-Wiwa’s impact extend beyond these instances. Richard North Patterson’s novel Eclipse (Reference Patterson2009), which centers the efforts of an American lawyer to secure the release of a freedom fighter in a corrupt African nation, is based on Saro-Wiwa’s life. His legacy also persists in the Ken Saro-Wiwa Rooms, a new museum in Port Harcourt, in songs such as “Ken Saro-Wiwa on kuollut” by the Finnish band Ultra Bra, in art, and in social movements. By killing him in 1995 and depositing his remains in an unmarked grave, the Nigerian government attempted to obliterate traces of Saro-Wiwa’s voice and vision. Thirty years later, his demand for environmental justice, predicated on local land practices, remains urgent as African communities and others across the world are riven by the impacts of environmental degradation and climate change, such as drought, flooding, and food scarcity. As Africans and African studies scholars grapple with these issues—the most consequential challenges of our time—we must return to Saro-Wiwa for ideas and inspiration.
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Like Saro-Wiwa’s oeuvre, the essays in this volume confront some of the most consequential challenges on the continent with rigorous historical attention and robust analytical insights whose broader implications extend across African studies. From their treatment of violence against queer pleasure to the elucidation of women’s discursive labor in Nigeria, from a treatise on sexual and reproductive justice in Zambia and an account of violence against the Murle people in South Sudan to an analysis of the waning influence of the United States in Sudan and an exploration of the promise and challenges of incorporating the African Diaspora as the sixth region of the African Union, these innovative essays advance interdisciplinary knowledge on Africa while promoting mutual belonging and flourishing among African communities and between the continent and its diaspora.
Nwando Achebe centers sexual citizenship as one such site of mediating belonging and flourishing in this issue’s opening article, “‘University of Benin F**k Porn’: ‘Lesbian’ Sex, Internet Voyeurism, and ‘Corrective Rape’ at a Nigerian University.” Achebe trains attention on a 2011 viral video showing female students at the University of Benin performing striptease and lapdances. This occasion of pleasure was, however, quickly recast as evidence of pornography as the video went viral. Analyzing the episode and the consequent punishment of the women—shaming and physical and sexual violence, for instance—Achebe “theorize[s] sexual citizenship, personhood, and violence in contemporary Nigeria.” Oriented around the Igbo philosophy of mmadu, or personhood, Achebe’s analysis situates digital queer visibility as an avenue for enacting, eliding, and contesting personhood in contexts of moral surveillance. With its attention to pleasure and punishment and appearance and repression, Achebe’s article intervenes in broader Africanist discourses on digital anthropology and gender.
Staying with gender and with Nigeria as its location of enunciation, Tolulope Akinwole proposes a comprehensive accounting for women’s labor in Lagos in “Holistic Articulations: On Women’s Discursive Labor in an African City.” Offering “holistic articulation” as an analytical tool for deciphering women’s labor across fields and genres and for enriching the study of urbanism in Africa, the author’s interdisciplinary exploration turns to social history, African literature, popular journalism, mythography, and everyday expressions to demonstrate his argument. In this humanistic rendering of the discursive labors of women, Akinwole “argues that the amplitude of women’s labor is best understood through a keen attention to their discursive and performative actions” scattered across multiple, interlinked archives.
The archive for Nomthandazo Malambo and Stephen Brown’s essay in this issue is supplied by the contested field of sexual and reproductive justice in Zambia. The article, “Navigating Ambiguity: Reproductive Justice and the Restriction of Abortion Rights, LGBTI+ Rights, and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in Zambia,” is based on document analysis and interviews with Zambians and Swedish and Canadian stakeholders active in the country. Malambo and Brown argue that while religious nationalists in Zambia delimit the possibilities of sexual rights and reproductive justice when they label abortion and LGBTI+ rights as un-Zambian and un-Christian, such delegitimating activities are the conditions of possibility for “building coalitions that connect advocacy for abortion, LGBTI+ rights, and reproductive justice to promote health service access and bodily autonomy for all.” Their work may be centered in Zambia, but the authors contend that its intersectional framing of the ambiguities surrounding abortion and LGBTI+ rights can inform local activism and coalition building in other contexts.
Whereas sexual and reproductive justice in Zambia underlines Malambo and Brown’s essay, Diana Felix da Costa delineates how rumors of infertility are weaponized to explain child abductions and justify systemic exclusion of the Murle people in South Sudan. Elaborating her ideas in “The Rumor-Myth of Infertility and Abduction: Murle Exclusion and the Politics of Life in South Sudan,” Felix da Costa articulates the abandonment of the Murle people and the forms of violence enacted against them by the state and other ethnic groups. In the author’s telling, the infertility rumor hardens into myth through repetition, casting “Murle lives as biologically deficient, socially threatening, and politically expendable,” that is, “a self-perpetuating discourse that stigmatizes the Murle while legitimizing punitive governance.”
Departing from the focus on power dynamics and contestations within the bounds of African countries seen in the first four articles of the issue, the final two essays turn to the continent’s engagement with the wider world. In “Missing Another Democratic Moment: America’s Self-defeating Policy in Sudan,” Rawia Tawfik assesses the efficacy of the United States’ engagement with Sudan since Omar al-Bashir was deposed in 2019. Tawfik underscores “the contradictions inherent in the US democracy promotion agenda, as well as the evolving theory and practice of that agenda in American diplomacy over the past two decades” as some of the obstacles impeding the United States’ ability to maintain significant influence in Sudan.
We are delighted to publish Abena P.A. Busia’s Hormuud Lecture, which she first delivered at the 2024 annual meeting of the African Studies Association, in this issue. The essay, “On the Demanding Forward Flight of the Diasporan Sankofa Bird: Reflections on the First Preparatory Congress of the African Union 6th Region,” draws on Busia’s work as Ghana’s ambassador to Brazil, accredited to twelve South American states between 2017 and 2024. In it, she posits the possibilities and challenges of mobilizing the African Diaspora as the sixth region of the African Union. Attentive to both the unifying characteristics of people of African descent and the sharp distinctions that mitigate against their harmonization, Busia nevertheless calls for “stronger transnational engagement, institutional clarity, and sustained educational and cultural exchange to strengthen Global African solidarity.”
The theme of global African solidarity at the core of Busia’s essay also animates Dotun Ayobade’s review essay on the exhibition, Project a Black Planet: Art and Culture of Panafrica, co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) and MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, in collaboration with KANAL-Centre Pompidou Bruxelles. The exhibition, held at the AIC between December 15, 2024, and March 30, 2025, was curated by Antawan I. Byrd, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Adom Getachew, and Matthew S. Witkovsky. In Ayobade’s telling, global blackness organizes the form and meaning of Project a Black Planet, with its “varied range of artistic media, advancing various but overlapping political concerns that coalesce into a sense of the planetary reach of Black cultural agents from the twentieth century to the present.” In a similar vein, Nnanna Onuoha Arukwe’s review essay identifies new developments in African historiography, showing how the reviewed books “illuminate violence, moral negotiation, state fragility, and spiritual reassembly” within the complexity of African life seen from below. The issue concludes with In Memoriam pieces celebrating the legacies of the Kenyan writer and theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, as well as book and film reviews reflecting the state of Africanist scholarship and the intertwinement of aesthetics and politics in cultural productions devoted to the continent.
