A non-violent campaign for environmental protection that sought to protect land and communities from international petroleum extraction and industry in Nigeria, working through grassroots methods of political writing and decrying the ecological and social violence inflicted by extractive industry
Context
In 1957, Shell struck oil in the Niger River Delta, a richly fertile area of land where Nigeria’s Ogoni people live, farm, and fish in small-scale communities. Over the following decades, oil extraction and refinery devastated lands, waterways, air quality, and animal habitats in Ogoniland, and made farming and fishing almost impossible. In 1990 local people joined forces to create the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. They initiated a non-violent campaign against corporations including Shell, arguing that extractive capitalism and its violent impacts on people and the planet required exposure and overturning. Campaigns to raise awareness of specific instances of pollution such as oil spills and Shell’s refusal to take responsibility for them were the Movement’s major focus. The Movement also publicised the Nigerian government and military’s close involvement and financial incentives for collaboration with Shell and other corporations. Over 80 percent of Nigeria’s national revenue came from its crude oil extraction, and yet less than 1 percent of this wealth trickled down to everyday Nigerians including the Ogoni. Using a holistic approach to think about ecosystems and communities simultaneously as being under threat, the Movement challenged extractive capitalism’s central practices of exploiting natural resources and social justice, and violating local people’s spatial rights.
Practice
The Ogoni Nine was the name given to nine central members of the Movement, who included the activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Throughout the early 1990s the Nigerian police and military continually harassed these activists, preventing them from travelling abroad to speak at UN and environmental events, holding them under house-arrest, and confiscating their passports. At the same time, conflict between Ogoni and other local groups worsened due to disputes over access to scarce and already polluted waterways. Tensions increased in 1995 when the Ogoni Nine were framed in a murder which has subsequently been attributed to the Nigerian government. In a matter of days, the Ogoni Nine were tried by a military tribunal coordinated by Nigeria’s dictator General Sani Abacha, and hanged. The executions provoked international outrage. The question of Ogoniland’s fate and future remains open, with corporations continuing to exploit the area on the one hand, and many activists, writers, and artists continuing to denounce these activities on the other.
The Ogoni Movement communicates climate breakdown in a vivid way through the situated stories of people and a place that have direct relevance beyond Ogoniland, and beyond the data-led or technocratic ways in which environmental damage is so often presented as global statistics unmoored from localities and lived experience. The Movement’s communication of the close relationship between Indigenous culture and land on one side, and exploitative colonial capitalism and pollution on the other, offers a lesson in the networked relations of capital, human rights abuses and climate breakdown. Environmentalist activists elsewhere, including the Inga people of Southwest Colombia (see Ñambi Rimai) are working with similar aims, to protect communities, habitats, ways of life, and systems of learning, from the devastating effects of extractivist and neocolonial capitalism. Artists including Sammy Baloji, meanwhile, are also working to expose and challenge the damaging relations of extractive capitalism. Put simply, such initiatives encourage us to ask: where is x material coming from? Is it derived from a petro-chemical process, or reliant on petroleum for its shipping? Who was involved in its extraction and were they harmed? Are there other materials I can (re)use instead?