Environmental Writing and the Niger Delta in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Fiction and Prose

Ken Saro-Wiwa's literary and political writing occupies a unique position in Nigerian literary history as the work of an author whose creative production was inseparable from his environmental and political activism on behalf of the Ogoni people, and a study of his fiction and prose within the context of global environmental writing illuminates the specific contribution of the Niger Delta literary tradition to world ecological literature. This study examined Saro-Wiwa's A Month and a Day, Sozaboy, and selected essays as literary texts in which the environmental destruction of the Niger Delta is simultaneously a personal, political, and cosmic catastrophe. An ecocritical and postcolonial comparative methodology drawing on Lawrence Buell's environmental imagination and Rob Nixon's slow violence theory was applied. The study compared Saro-Wiwa's literary treatment of ecological devastation with comparable approaches in the environmental writing of Wangari Maathai in Kenya and Arundhati Roy in India, examining how all three writers situate environmental degradation within frameworks of racial capitalism, corporate impunity, and state violence against indigenous communities. The analysis showed that Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy, written in Rotten English, is particularly powerful as a formal enactment of the environmental and linguistic degradation inflicted on the Niger Delta community by oil extraction. The study recommends Saro-Wiwa's work as essential reading for environmental literature courses at Nigerian universities, with particular resonance at institutions in the South South geopolitical zone.

Keywords: environmental writing, Niger Delta, Ken Saro-Wiwa, ecocriticism, postcolonial ecology