Ken Saro-Wiwa was a writer and activist. He was one of the leaders of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, a community-rights and environmental movement which challenged the power of oil companies and the Nigerian government.

In 1994, the Nigerian government launched a concerted offensive against the Ogoni people to make the region safe for oil multinationals. 3,000 people were killed. In 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian government.

His poem The True Prison bases itself on a recurring and striking anti-capitalist trope —that actual prisons are merely reflections and extensions of the shackles imposed on humanity by capitalism. The poem, written two years before he died, damns the state.

The Ruby Kid

It is not the leaking roof

Nor the singing mosquitoes

In the damp, wretched cell

It is not the clank of the key

As the warden locks you in

It is not the measly rations

Unfit for beast or man

Nor yet the emptiness of day

Dipping into the blankness of night

It is not

It is not

It is not

It is the lies that have been drummed

Into your ears for a generation

It is the security agent running amok

Executing callous calamitous orders

In exchange for a wretched meal a day

The magistrate writing into her book

A punishment she knows is undeserved

The moral decrepitude

The mental ineptitude

The meat of dictators

Cowardice masking as obedience

Lurking in our denigrated souls

It is fear damping trousers

That we dare not wash

It is this

It is this

It is this

Dear friend, turns our free world

Into a dreary prison