At that time, things were going terribly wrong in Ogoniland. Violence bred violence. The death sentence was handed down on October 31, 1995. In his last statement to the Tribunal, Saro-Wiwa said, After all your judgment, convicting me is a mere formality. From the second day of the killing of the fourth prominent Ogoni son, I ve been adjudged guilty.
Today is certainly a black day for the black man.
On November 11, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists, their ankles bound in chains, were taken to the gallows at the main Port Harcourt jail where they were hanged. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian author, described the hangings a blatant unrepentant defiance of civilised norms, an atavistic psyche is what has characterized this regime from the beginning, so there should have been no cause for surprise. We have warned, and pleaded. Now we are paying yet another heavy price for the comatose nature of global conscience. Several of the Ogonis neighboring minority groups, particularly the Ijaws, had launched widespread protests against international oil companies and the military government.