by Sonia Shah
And yet, for many years, the people of the Niger Delta could hardly resist. Years of colonial piracy and humiliation had convinced many of their inferiority. One writer from the delta, an Ogoni from Ogoniland, described the problem:I was teased at primary school because I was an Ogoni. . . . I grew up watching grown Ogoni men taunted by children in public. I was so ashamed of being an Ogoni that I used to beg my mother not to speak Khana [the Ogoni language] in public. I didn’t know of any Ogoni man or woman who had ever done anything significant in Nigeria. . . . People said we were dirty, that we were cannibals.
It never occurred to me . . . that the gas flares in Ogoni might be contributing to the acid rain that destroyed the aluminium roofing of the houses in the area. I had no idea that the incidence of oil spills in Ogoni was one of the highest recorded in the world. Our people had never stopped to consider that the pipelines that ran through our villages were responsible for polluting our environment. We rarely complained about the discrepancy between the wealth of the oil companies and the poverty of our people.
The Niger Delta’s Ken Saro-Wiwa was a successful businessman and prolific writer who had been offered jobs at Shell and even a post as oil minister. As a newspaper columnist, he railed against the fact that his native Ogoniland, “which should have been as rich as a small Gulf state, was one of the poorest corners of Africa.” Disillusioned with writing as a mode for social change in a country with 60 percent illiteracy,25 Saro-Wiwa turned to activism. In November 1992, Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni activists delivered their demands directly to Shell, Chevron, and the Nigerian authorities. They wanted compensation, an end to gas flaring, and a place at the negotiating table. They reckoned that the Ogoni alone—one of the hundreds of ethnic groups concentrated along the delta—were owed at least $10 billion in unpaid royalties and compensation for damages.26
Nobody noticed, not even the environmental groups in London that Saro-Wiwa approached for support. They ushered him out the door, “with a polite but condescending look that suggested he come back when a few more people had been killed,” as Saro-Wiwa’s son Ken Wiwa remembers it.27
Two months later, a massive show of popular resistance got their attention. Saro-Wiwa led an estimated 300,000 Ogoni on a protest march against oil exploitation in what he would later recall as the best day of his life.
In April 1993, a few months after the exhilarating march, a farmer spied Shell contractors digging up his farmlands. He had not been consulted, no environmental assessment had been done, nor had the farmer been compensated. He went out to confront the oilmen, and a curious crowd grew around him. But the Shell contractors, having been alerted to the possibility of trouble, had brought Nigerian soldiers with them. The soldiers shot at the unarmed crowd, killing a young man.
And then, with the government officials in daily contact with oil company executives, the Nigerian military unleashed another round of violence against the people of the delta. In July 1993, 132 unarmed Ogoni men, women, and children were massacred; in August, 247 more were slaughtered in an attack on the village market; in September, over a thousand were murdered.
Officials described the bloodshed as “ethnic conflict,” despite the fact that experts assembled to resolve the conflict could find no evidence of any dispute between the Ogoni and their neighbors. According to interviews conducted by Human Rights Watch, Nigerian soldiers had been tricked into attacking the unarmed Ogoni by leaders who told them to expect an armed invasion from Cameroon, and to thus shoot on sight.
Shell had pulled out of Ogoniland when the violence first started, but in October, the company resolved to return. Shell and Nigerian authorities held a sham peace conference, heralding an accord that declared Ogoniland safe for a resumption of oil production. When Ogoni people nonviolently protested Shell’s return, the company again called the military, and several unarmed Ogoni were killed.28
The campaign to crush Saro-Wiwa, however, went even deeper. Four prominent Ogoni leaders, including the brother of Saro-Wiwa’s estranged wife, were killed and Saro-Wiwa framed for the murders. The accusations split the Saro-Wiwa family down the middle, Ken Wiwa writes. While Saro-Wiwa sat in jail, his wife did not visit, his children avoided writing him, and some of his nieces and nephews—whose father had been murdered—publicly questioned Saro-Wiwa’s innocence.29
Meanwhile, a sustained campaign of rape, terror, and slaughter descended upon 126 villages in Ogoniland, under a deliberate news blackout. Nigeria’s Colonel Paul Okuntimo called for “ruthless military operations,” in order that the oil industry’s “smooth economic activities” could continue.30 Okuntimo had been trained in 204 ways to kill people, he bragged, and looked forward to showcasing the breadth of his repertoire.
Soldiers under Okuntimo told Human Rights Watch that “the idea was to go into villages, shooting in the air, and then when people ran, to grab some as prisoners. The orders were to shoot on sight able-bodied men, if they ran,” one said, adding that “the Ogonis, they lost many people.” The soldiers raped Ogoni women and girls of all ages. “First they beat me on my back with the butts of their guns,” one woman told Human Rights Watch. “One kicked me in the lower abdomen. Then they raped me,” she said. “They covered my mouth but I still tried to scream. . . . I was screaming until I couldn’t scream anymore. The breath finished from inside me.”31
The oil companies provided logistical support. “To do this,” Okuntimo later admitted to London’s Sunday Times, “we needed resources, and Shell provided these.” No fewer than thirty villages were razed altogether.
While the slaughter was going on, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s brother met with Shell Nigeria’s CEO Brian Anderson, pleading with him to use his connections with the government to end the carnage. Anderson agreed—as long as the Ogoni issued a press release stating that no environmental damage had been done in the area and called off the campaign against Shell. Wiwa refused. Anderson issued a cold statement, asserting that “a large multinational company such as Shell cannot and must not interfere with the affairs of any sovereign state.” Two days later, on November 10, 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni were hanged.32
Ken Wiwa describes how his father’s execution haunted him. “I couldn’t even bring myself to say the word ‘hang,’” he writes. “I would flinch whenever I heard it. You’d be surprised how often it comes up in conversation—hang on, hang up, hang around, hang the consequences.”33
After Ken Saro-Wiwa’s execution, South African president Nelson Mandela called upon the United States to impose sanctions against Nigeria. The U.S. government said it “strongly condemned” Saro-Wiwa’s hanging, but continued to buy Nigeria’s sweet oil. Whether anyone in Washington, DC, consciously noticed or not, a deal had been struck. Nobel-prize-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer spelled it out in the editorial pages of the New York Times in 1997: “to buy Nigeria’s oil under the conditions that prevail,” as the United States did, she wrote, “is to buy oil in exchange for blood. Other people’s blood; the exaction of the death penalty on Nigerians.”34
With lucrative markets firmly anchored in place, Nigerian authorities continued their campaign against dissent unhindered. In late 1998, activists in the Ijo community launched a campaign to extinguish the gas flares polluting their atmosphere. The Nigerian military responded with two warships and 15,000 soldiers, and more than 200 villagers were killed. In other confrontations, Chevron provided helicopters and called in the navy against unarmed protesters, resulting in more deaths.35
The PR game, however, did change after Saro-Wiwa’s execution. Oil companies still would not admit to any obligation to compensate locals for the disruption their activities caused or to negotiate with them on future developments. But many erstwhile silent executives found their voices in order to complain about the corruption and irresponsibility of their partners in the Nigerian government. Some started to devote modest sums to help “develop” the delta.
Extracting even small concessions from the oil companies, though, generally entailed
a struggle. Chevron had turned the old slave port of Escravos into a prolific oil terminal, protected by gates and guards from the villagers that surrounded it. Embankments sheltered the Chevron facilities from the encroaching waters pouring out of the creeks they had widened. American oilmen flew helicopters in and out of the terminal, venturing out only to wander down the short path the company had paved to the bar, where they were soothed by local girls turned prostitutes.
Outside the terminal, there were no paved roads and no telephones. The villagers’ shacks had no indoor plumbing. The village of Ugborodo didn’t even have a gas station. The rising waters of the creek that Chevron had widened were slowly washing away the village cemetery. “Before Chevron came to this land many years ago, we the people used to kill fish and crayfish,” remembers one local woman. “We could kill shrimps and big fishes in the creeks.” But all that was gone.36 When men and boys protested conditions in the delta, they set off a chain of violence. In the village of Ugborodo, the women decided to get organized. First they sent a letter to Chevron officials, to which they received, to their indignation, no response at all.
In July 2002, hundreds of women hijacked a boat and occupied Chevron’s Escravos facility. Once inside the facility, they saw air-conditioners, telephones, microwave ovens, and fresh fruits and vegetables. “When we got in there, it was really like paradise,” said one. “I saw America there,” another added. Clearly, Felicia Atsepoyi said, “They achieved something from this community for forty years.”
The women stayed put, trapping more than seven hundred Chevron staff in the facility and blocking the arrival of helicopters, planes, and boats that might bring fresh supplies to the oil workers. If Chevron didn’t listen, the unarmed singing protesters said, they would humiliate the men in the worst way possible. The women would take their clothes off. Stunned security staff didn’t know what to do. “Chevron ha[d] used armed forces to quell similar protests and takeovers,” wrote journalist Isioma Daniel, “but its armed security men had never received any training on how to contain an invading army of women singing solidarity songs.”
It took ten days for Chevron to agree to some of their demands. The company would share some of its plentiful electricity and clean water, and might build a few buildings amidst the rubble of the lands they had devastated. They would even, perhaps, start to construct a new place for the villagers to live, once the flooding they had unleashed submerged the village entirely.37
Environmentalists who encountered internal company documents about such community development projects, write Okonta and Douglas, found that the execs “had no sympathy for the plight of the Niger Delta communities, generally saw them as indolent, and also regarded the whole exercise as a waste of time.”38
One aid group traveled to the delta to examine Shell’s development program. “The region,” they reported in 2004, “is now a veritable graveyard of projects, including water systems that do not work, health centres that have never opened and schools where no lesson has ever been taught.”39
American consumers might have objected to this state of affairs, had they known the gasoline they poured into their tanks was streaked with the blood of Nigerian villagers. Yet most reports from the Niger Delta that reached the warm lit homes of the West described a familiar, if vaguely troubling, conflict that had little to do with them. The oil companies “have been plagued by ethnic violence,” the BBC moaned.40 They face “many security problems,” the Financial Times confirmed.41 “Nearly everywhere, the oil firms run the gauntlet of community protests, acts of sabotage, compensation claims, demands for protection money and the kidnapping of workers for ransom,” Reuters news service complained.42
Most news reports failed to describe oil companies’ environmental devastation and the military’s years of violence against dissent, generally trotting out the oil industry’s explanation for the mayhem, involving mercenary troublemakers and the envy of badly trained villagers. It was hard for the news media to know who to believe, after all. The welter of ethnic groups among the oil installations and the mix of organized activism and ad hoc vigilantism complicated the entirely conflicting claims of the oil companies and the people. “The competing claims . . . are virtually impossible to verify,” complained the New York Times.43 The news reports and corporate press releases left it to the reader to determine why the troubled impoverished Africans of the delta kept complaining, lashing out at each other and the generous oil companies that graced their lands. Many no doubt relied on old imperialistic standards involving mindless savagery in Africa’s heart of darkness.
For the United States government, Nigeria’s crude continued to be a flow of oil worth safeguarding. In April 2003, Shell once again publicly warned that “criminal elements” were targeting its facilities. First, President Olusegun Obasanjo responded, on cue, with a call for “firm action by security forces” to quell the “civil unrest.”44 Then, the U.S. government promptly donated seven patrol ships to assist the Nigerian navy.45
The curse of crude similarly struck the people of Colombia. Oil explorers had discovered recoverable oil in Colombia in 1905. It wasn’t a lot, but more could probably be found in the foothills of the eastern mountains, they thought. There, oil was seeping to the surface. Extracting Andean oil, however, would have to wait until Colombia’s infrastructure improved, as workers would have to build miles-long pipelines able to withstand landslides and floods along the Andes’ summits and valleys in order to do it.46
Between 1914, when the United States plowed a canal through Panama, significantly easing Colombia’s isolation from world markets, and World War II, Colombia transformed itself into a viable resource colony for the West. By the 1920s, Colombia was the second largest coffee producer in the world. Banana plantations run by the United Fruit Company sprouted across the region. Rainforests were cleared for rubber plantations to feed American tire manufacturers. Money started to pour into the government’s coffers, not least a $25 million indemnity from the United States for its capture of Panama.
As the Colombian government consolidated its power, strengthened on its new earnings, it sent forth its soldiers to suppress any troubles in goods-producing areas. On one day in 1928, when an American manager of a banana plantation got word that his workers were planning to strike, he contacted the Colombian president about the “extremely grave and dangerous” situation. The president dispatched the army, who, “infuse[d]” with a “spirit of conquest,” as historians Frank Safford and Marco Palacios write, unleashed a massacre, a pattern that was to become familiar.47 The bloodbath on the banana plantation was later enshrined in world literature by Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez in his 1970 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In 1943, a fungal disease decimated Colombia’s banana plantations. Then, with Europe embroiled in World War II, coffee exports foundered. According to Safford and Palacios, Colombia tumbled into a “vicious circle of export depressions-fiscal crises-civil wars.”48
La Violencia, as it came to be known, raged from the mid-1940s to the 1960s, a generalized civil war between supporters of the Liberal and Conservative parties that relentlessly vied for power in the capital. In what historian James D. Henderson called a “perverse bloodletting,” machete-wielding gangs murdered peasants throughout the rugged remote land.49 Some estimate that up to 400,000 died.
Under cover of the ongoing violence, gangs eked out a decent business, stealing coffee from abandoned farms and cattle from abandoned ranches.50 Intrepid oil explorers searched for more oil. In the early 1960s, Texaco and Gulf found the Orito oilfield, a modest yield of around 200 million barrels of oil, lying close to the border with Ecuador, and valiantly built a pipeline across the lofty peaks to the Pacific, while the blood of Colombians still flowed down the mountainsides.51
In the late 1950s, the warring parties agreed to a period of bipartisan rule. But by then, Colombians had adapted to life under siege. In their remote communities far from a sometimes hostile governmen
t that seemed to have neither will nor power to protect them, they organized private armies and vigilante self-defense groups. In the early 1960s, some of these aligned themselves with the Communist Party and Cuban revolutionaries, proclaiming their ambitions for political revolution in Colombia.
The United States, firmly in the grip of anti-Communist, anti-hippie fervor, nourished the Colombian military with aid to fight the nascent revolutionaries. As the 1970s rolled around, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), along with others, emerged as full-fledged, armed guerrilla groups. The aid-engorged Colombian military’s violent reprisals had effectively hardened their resolve, and the guerrillas would go on to bully Colombians for decades.52 Under pressure from the United States, Mexico had successfully stanched its drug trade, which promptly transplanted itself in the fertile ground of strife-ridden Colombia. By 1975, Colombia supplied the United States with 70 percent of its imported marijuana.53 As the drug business sustained peasant communities, they were zealously guarded by private paramilitary armies, which became in some parts of the country, “de facto governments.”
