Claude Ake

(1939 - 1996)

The Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake was the founder and director of the Center for Advanced Social Science, a think tank that applied science to environmental and development issues in Africa. In 1996 he was leaving the center’s headquarters in Port Harcourt and heading back to Yale University, where he was a visiting professor, when his plane crashed into a lagoon outside Lagos, killing him and the 141 other passengers on board. A year earlier, he had resigned from his role as an adviser to Shell Oil, protesting the execution of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and the unceasing pollution plaguing his country. “Power is everything,” he wrote in 1985, “and those who control the coercive resources use it freely to promote their interests.”