Late last thursday, hauwa saro-Wiwa had some idea that the end might be near for her husband Ken, a leading political dissident. When she tried to bring him a meal in the military prison where he had been held virtually incommunicado for 18 months, she was turned away. "Oh, God, what am I going to do?" she asked, sobbing at a news conference in Port Harcourt in southern Nigeria. "He is the only thing I have in the whole world." The following morning she presented a calmer but no less despairing front: "It is all over," she said simply.

She was right. That day Ken Saro-Wiwa, 54, one of Nigeria's most prominent authors, environmentalists and political activists, along with eight other members of his minority tribe, the Ogoni, was taken from his cell shackled in ankle chains and moved to the main jail in Port Harcourt. At 11:30 a.m., all nine men were hanged. When prison officials emerged bearing the corpses, hundreds of people lining the streets of the city wept. Said a nephew of Saro-Wiwa's: "The devil has had its way."

The military government of General Sani Abacha, who seized power in the aftermath of annulled elections in 1993, claimed that Saro-Wiwa was responsible for the murder of four Ogoni chiefs. While it is known that the chiefs were killed at an open-air rally by pro Saro-Wiwa youths, the Saro-Wiwa trial before a military tribunal was condemned by world leaders and human-rights groups as a sham. Prosecution witnesses have even admitted they were bribed to testify. Saro-Wiwa, who all along protested his innocence, was sentenced to death, actually for his eloquent words and effective tactics aimed at stopping the government and the oil industry from exploiting the land and waters of his homeland, Ogoniland, in southeastern Nigeria.

Shocking as the executions were, what is more remarkable is General Abacha's audacity: the men were hanged even as Premiers from the nations of the Commonwealth, which includes Nigeria, were gathered in Auckland, New Zealand. Among the hot topics of discussion were measures against the Nigerian regime and calls for the release of its political prisoners. After the executions the Commonwealth called an emergency meeting and agreed to suspend Nigeria from the group pending discernible progress toward democratic reforms. "This heinous act by the Nigerian authorities flies in the face of appeals by the world community for a stay of execution," said South African President Nelson Mandela. Saro-Wiwa's political activities had long galled the Nigerian government, which depends on oil for about 80% of its exports. A successful writer of children's books and novels and a producer and writer of a hugely popular TV series, which mocked the rich and famous, the cultivated, pipe-smoking Saro-Wiwa founded the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People five years ago. Saro-Wiwa contended that the Ogoni, who number 500,000 in a nation of 90 million with some 250 different tribes, were victims of oil drilling on their lands by subsidiaries of Royal Dutch/Shell, the petroleum giant based in Britain and the Netherlands. While the Ogoni lived along the Niger delta in deep poverty, mostly without running water or electricity, Saro-Wiwa pointed out, the oil industry was poisoning the air, fouling the land and killing the fish in their waters--without giving the Ogoni a share in the billions of dollars of oil revenues. In October, Saro-Wiwa was nominated for the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, and just last April he won the Goldman Environmental Prize, which is a prestigious $75,000 award given every year by a San Francisco foundation to "grass-roots heroes" who fight for environmental protection. But the accolades and international pressure had little influence on Nigeria's military leaders.

Even from jail, Saro-Wiwa retained influence. By 1993 his Ogoni movement, which sometimes included violence, sometimes civil disobedience, had led Shell to cease drilling in Ogoniland. And after he was sentenced to death, even the company futilely condemned the Nigerian government's actions: "Although it is not our business to interfere in the process of government," said Brian Anderson, managing director for Shell Nigeria, "we believe that on humanitarian grounds, the commutation of the death sentences would have helped in the process of reconciliation in Ogoniland." The company has vowed to cease development there unless the inhabitants can receive some economic benefits.

Just one day before his father's death, Saro-Wiwa's son Ken, 27, felt what he called a sense of "horrible inevitability about all this." After seeing a videotape of Saro-Wiwa--the first time the son had glimpsed his father in nearly two years--the younger Ken was both emotionally devastated and angry at the world's tolerance for Nigeria's actions. "In the end this is about people," he told Time. "It's not about abstract bits of information on bits of paper. It's about people. We are the ones who are suffering." And in the end, he said, the death of his father must resonate not just across Africa but across the rest of the world as well. "We must start to do something [as Nigerians]," he said, "that will make people proud." Or, as his father defiantly told the court in October, just before being sentenced to death: "I am a man of ideas in and out of prison. My ideas will live."

--Reported by Gilbert da Costa/Abuja and Simon Robinson/Auckland