Short stories
Africa Kills Her Sun
Ken Saro-Wiwa · 1989
Synopsis
Three men condemned to death spend their last night in a cell: a armed robber writing to a childhood friend, a companion who prays, a third who stays silent. The letter fills the whole narrative. The man writing it tells how he came to this, refuses to be pitied, and sets his theft of a few banknotes against what the men who condemn him take every day. He asks that no one come to watch him die.
Context
The short story appeared six years before its author was hanged, with eight other Ogoni activists, at the end of a trial before a special tribunal: he led a non-violent movement against oil pollution of Ogoni lands, which Shell had been exploiting for thirty years. The Commonwealth countries suspended Nigeria after these executions, and Shell, which had halted its operations in Ogoniland in 1993, has never returned there. The text, whose narrator awaits his execution, has been read differently ever since.
Who it is for
A very short story, in the first person. The context of the author's own execution has changed how it is read.
Prizes and reception
Taught in East African schools and studied by academic critics, the short story is the text by which its author is most widely read outside his country.