A unique collection of private correspondence from renown-ed Nigerian social activist Ken Saro-Wiwa written while he was on death row has been donated to NUI Maynooth.
The correspondence, be-tween Saro-Wiwa and Irish missionary nun Sister Majella McCarron, was smuggled out of the detention centre in bread baskets between 1993 and 1995.
Sr McCarron was on hand to personally donate the letters at the Russell Library in NUI Maynooth last Thursday 10 November.
Guests learned more about Nobel Peace Prize nominee Saro-Wiwa, who handwrote 30 letters to Sr McCarron while awaiting execution by hanging. The letters detail the harsh realities of life as a political prisoner and the deprivations he suffered. The correspondence also speaks of the increasing political turmoil in Nigeria, and of Saro-Wiwa’s hopes for a peaceful future both there and in Northern Ireland.
Sister McCarron, originally from Fermanagh, first met Ken Saro-Wiwa during the early 1990s when she worked as a missionary in Nigeria for the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles.
During her more than three decades in Nigeria, she taught in the University of Lagos and became interested in the struggle of the Ogoni people, whose homeland in the Niger Delta was being taken over by foreign petroleum companies.
Saro-Wiwa, who led a peaceful campaign to secure basic rights for the Ogoni people, was murdered 1995 by the late military junta General Sani Abacha.
