The government stationed soldiers in Ogoni villages and unjustly executed nine Ogoni activists, framing them for murder, reportedly with cooperation by the oil and gas company commonly known as Shell. The Ogoni formed their own political movement in 1992 to protect their rights, but by 1994 violence erupted and the Nigerian government began its campaign of military repression. Although only referenced in the novel, this violence refers to the conflict in the Niger Delta that initially began in the 1990s when several of the Niger Delta’s minority ethnic groups-primarily the Ogoni and the Ijaw-began to protest the presence of foreign oil corporations, who they felt were exploiting them and prompting the Nigerian government to force them off their land. Little Bee flees Nigeria as a refugee due to the violence of an unnamed oil war. Cleave lives in London with his French wife and three children. In 2012 Cleave published his third novel, Gold, and in 2016 published Everyone Brave is Forgiven, which immediately topped the New York Times Best Seller list. Little Bee suffered initially slow sales, but by 2009 word of mouth propelled it to the top of both the Sunday Times and the New York Times Best Seller lists. In 2008, Cleave published The Other Hand, titled Little Bee in American and Canadian editions. Cleave’s debut novel, Incendiary, won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award and made the shortlist for that year’s prestigious Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and has since become a film. Before becoming an author, Cleave attended the University of Oxford to study experimental psychology and worked in a variety of jobs, including as a barman, sailor, teacher, journalist, and early internet entrepreneur. Chris Cleave was born in London on May 14, 1973, but spent the first eight years of his childhood in Cameroon, which shares its western border with Nigeria.
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