The Burning Ground

Dear Reader,

In 1995, the Nigerian government executed Ken Saro-Wiwa, an environmental activist, along with eight of his colleagues, for their activities in opposition to oil companies’ despoilation of the wetlands of the Niger Delta. Thirty years later, his daughter, the British writer Noo Saro-Wiwa, returns to the delta and finds a haunting and dispiriting situation.

For forty years, oil companies, abetted by a series of corrupt Nigerian governments, turned what had been a kind of natural paradise into an area plagued by oil spills and gas fires, where very little of the money extracted from the earth made its way into the hands of the people who lived there. After Ken Saro-Wiwa’s death, the local protest movements became increasingly militant—and, in time, corrupt. They turned to stealing oil from the companies and setting up informal refineries that were even more environmentally destructive than the companies’ own activities. The government’s attempts to curb the militants’ activities or to coopt them have had a mixed record at best.

With reportorial energy and literary grace and power, Noo Saro-Wiwa tells this story in a way that is intended like all crusading journalism, to draw the sympathetic attention of the world to a situation it has ignored for too long. We are publishing it with pride and in the hope that it will have an effect.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Lemann
Director, Columbia Global Reports