Kenule "Ken" Beeson Saro Wiwa (October 10, 1941 – November 10, 1995) was a Nigerian author, television producer, environmental activist, and winner of the Right Livelihood Award and the Goldman Environmental Prize. Saro-Wiwa was a member of the Ogoni people, an ethnic minority in Nigeria whose homeland, Ogoniland, in the Niger Delta has been targeted for crude oil extraction since the 1950s and which has suffered extreme and unremediated environmental damage from decades of indiscriminate petroleum waste dumping. Initially as spokesperson, and then as President, of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), Saro-Wiwa led a nonviolent campaign against environmental degradation of the land and waters of Ogoniland by the operations of the multinational petroleum industry, especially the Royal Dutch Shell company. He was also an outspoken critic of the Nigerian government, which he viewed as reluctant to enforce environmental regulations on the foreign petroleum companies operating in the area.

Bernard Alexander Montgomery Grant (17 February 1944 – 8 April 2000), known simply as Bernie Grant, was a politician in the United Kingdom, and was Labour member of Parliament for Tottenham at the time of his death. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and took up the British government's offer to let people from colonies move to the UK to do blue-collar work, in 1963. In the mid-1960s he was for a period a member of the Socialist Labour League. He quickly became a trade union official, and moved into politics, becoming a Labour councillor in the London Borough of Haringey in 1978.

When the Conservative government introduced "rate capping", Grant led the fight against it in the borough^{[citation needed]}. This split the local Labour party, but through this split Grant became the Borough of Haringey leader in 1985.

He took control of the rebuilding project of Alexandra Palace which had been partially destroyed in a fire. The project had £15 million in cash, but the lack of financial control saw this surplus turn into deficit and interest payments eventually took the debt to a total of £80 million.^{[citation needed]}