SOURCE: "Nigeria Crude: A Hanged Man and an Oil-Fouled Landscape," in Harper's Magazine, Vol. 292, No. 1753, pp. 58-68.

Hammer is a journalist working in Africa. In the following essay, he covers the trial and execution of Saro-Wiwa and examines conditions in the Nigerian government and Shell Oil.

The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point…. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes...