Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, by the photojournalist Ed Kashi, documents the consequences of 50 years of oil extraction in the Niger Delta. Oil corporations have worked here for decades without any substantial monitoring of the environment. As a result, the delta, which is plagued by war and poverty, has been gradually driven toward environmental catastrophe. Villagers find it hard to survive on land, the water is contaminated by decades of oil spills, and crops do not grow due to acid rain produced by gas flares. In this photo journal, Sia Were - the author- analyses specific image artifacts from Kashi’s photo series to show how oil infrastructure is deeply embedded in everyday life, often in harmful ways: with the themes of industrial infrastructure in residential areas, toxic labor, and hardship for workers, suspicion within the community, and exposure to pollutants in everyday tasks. We invite you to share your feedback in the form at the end of the page.

-African Environmental Youth Advisory

Brief Analysis: To pull in Robert Johnson’s “Mineral Rites: The Embodiment of Fossil Fuels,” particularly, how the embodiment of the oil’s materialities is very tangible in this image. Ogoni people and other community members in the Niger-Delta are experiencing the abuses of subterranean resources, translating to neglect of surface level terrain. Two major themes directly correlate to the monstrous occurring in Ogoni in Johnkson’s “Mineral Rites.” (1) “Energy colonies” (Johnson 24) and the example in text was the Navajo Nation in North America, and how modern industries extract and pollute, thus making Navajo Reservation “an epicenter of Southwestern energy production” through coal and uranium mining. In terms of the Niger-Delta, the Nigerian government's emulation of colonial logic perpetuates mass ecocide, ethnocide, and genocide, all for capital drenched in oil. (2) “Global industrial corridors” (22), where governmental bodies sit and watch overburdened communities facing multidimensional poverty at the hands of petro-capitalism. The Niger-Delta region is a clear example of an industrial corridor, and to the extent that the Nigerian government barely tries to hide it. Here we see the subterranean infrastructures on the surface, lying heavily on the lands of the Niger-Delta communities.

Brief Analysis: Fossil-fueled economies usually have a colonial history; this is not a coincidence. The uninterrupted gas flares in the region; the color also alludes to extractive operations in Ogoniland, which played a central role in the political struggles that culminated in Saro-Wiwa’s murder.  Saro-Wiwa’s murder (iheka 117).  Oil companies have "given Dere people about ten years of continuous daylight” (iheka 108) by making their home a forever-burning fire. In Rob Nixon’s "Pipedream: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Environmental Justice and Micro-Minority Rights," this notion of “ethical absentees” (iheka 107) –which is a tactic to continue neocolonial regimes– points to the colonial logic. In the Niger-Delta region case, there is a use of mass militarization through the Nigerian government, where, by the time Saro-Wiwa was executed, the Nigerian military and Mobile Police force killed 2,000 Ogoni through direct murder and burning of villages (107). Ethical absentees can be further analyzed through Sora-Wiwa’s words: “he recognized that in a society with frail democratic forces and a thin intellectual elite, interventionist writing required versatility and cunning” (Nixon 108). All to say, neocolonial ties to newly independent African countries can cause a corruptive sense of accountability to their population.

Brief Analysis :With this question on consent, Michael Watts’ “Petro-Violence: Community, Extraction, and Political Ecology of a Mythic'' provides a detailed examination of the brutal extent of non-consensual subterranean disposition in the Niger-Delta region. Saro-Wiwa's “monstrous domestic colonialism” (Watts 194), especially when Ogoni has “an enormously complex regional ethnic mosaic” (193), thus Saro-Wiwa's organization of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) speaks to the severity of creating a successful pan-Ogoni organization. Yet, “internal colonialism” (194) flourishes in mass militarization and federal forces criminalizing and executing anyone and anything who strays from the status quo. A status quo predicated on a country that was forcibly taught to ascribe mass amounts of its population to degradation for the product of black gold: oil. Watts writes: The euphoria of oil wealth after the civil war [between Igbo and Ijaw and Nigeria gaining independence] has been displaced by ecological catastrophe, social deprivation, political marginalization, and a rapacious company capitalism in which unaccountable foreign transnationals are granted a sort of immunity by the state (195). Internal colonialism is rooted in mechanisms of neocolonial rule. For instance, “Shell, deemed the world's most profitable corporation in 1996 by Business Week, netting roughly $200 million profit from Nigeria, by its own admission has provided $2 million to Ogoniland in forty years of pumping” (198).

Brief Analysis: In the Petrocultures research group’s “Energy Impasse and Political Actors” chapter, specifically their “Transition after Capitalism” (Petrocultures research group 35) spoke to the root cause of why Ogoniland community members –through destruction of environmental terrain– become a sacrifice zone experiencing petro-violence at the hands of petro-capitalistic energy regimes. “Transition after Capitalism” states only, “by breaking a much broader system of capitalism, can we achieve transition out of carbon-based energy reliance” (35). The human environmental abuses occurring in the Niger-Delta at the hands of kleptocracy and neocolonialities to oil in the region propagate brutal human exploitation and harmful natural extraction as the fastest means to gain capital. Thus, imagining a reality transitioning forward from the greedy, careless capitalist nature predicated on fossil fuel energy regimes’ mass commodification and hyper consumption should not be just a ponder but an active effort to delegitimize these injustices. Why has the detachment from fossil fuel economies not come to fruition just yet? Because gaining capital is an addiction, and the more you have, the more the kleptomania grows. 

Part Two: Case Overview A theme is apparent in the artifacts, and Nixon’s work articulates it best. Nigeria's Delta faces slow petro-violence, leaning from Nixon’s slow violence and further encapsulated by malpracticed oil extraction at the expense of the Ogoniland community through ecological genocide and immoral exploitation. Furthermore, the Nigerian targeted militarized attempts to stifle MOSOP and Saro-Wiwa to maintain their elitist neocolonial kleptocracy place Ogoniland into a sacrifice zone, which is a geographic area permanently changed by hazardous and harmful environmental alterations or mass economic disinvestment because of a resource curse. Thus, the Niger-Delta faces a compounded crux of non-consensual subterranean land dispossession at the hands of the petro-capitalistic nature: slow petro-violence, a sacrifice zone, resource curse, and grand corruption. These all translate to multidimensional poverty suffocating the Niger-Delta community. Watts calls it a “socioeconomic paradox” (Watts 195) because this region produced 15 percent of Nigerian oil during the first boom (“an estimated $30 billion in petroleum revenue” (195)), yet “few Ogoni household have electricity; there is one doctor per 100,000 people; child mortality rates are the highest in the nation …” (Nixon 195). What does this inform one about, the prioritization of oil extraction at the expense of human economic development. 

What is more, Niger-Delta community members are locked out of their natural resources, where “the consequences of flaring, spillage, and waste for Ogoni fisheries and farming have been devastating” (Nixon 196). These artifacts are proof that Nigeria's government neglects to prioritize and provide basic, adequate health facilities and provisions for the communities in the  Niger-Delta. What is more, how neocolonial value systems are emulated into elitist models in African politics, which ultimately perpetuates harm for any small-scale communities and overall citizens in said nation. Hence, this case study demonstrates how oil and water don't mix by how the Ogoni community is forced to survive in an area heavily oil-contaminated (with less access to clean fresh water; without water, humans cease to exist) and a hazardous industrial hotspot globally. Petro-capitalism through kleptocracy becomes a mechanism to hinder the Ogoni peoples’ “environmental health self-determination” (107). Once more, the caption in the photograph from Kashi’s Curse of the Black Gold reads: “Women baking krokpo-garri, or tapioca, in the heat of a gas flare” is further emphasized with iheka’s words: In the example of the image with the women baking garri, the caption moves it away from aesthetic pleasure, something for enjoyment, instead orienting us to the health challenges and the infrastructural lack— amid plenty—that informs their action. (iheka 120). 

Ogoni faces petro-violence and is scorched by its infrastructures, and who is to blame for the petro-capitalists? 

Works Cited

Johnson, Bob. “Mineral Rites: The Embodiment of Fossil Fuels,” Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy. 

 Cajetan Iheka. (2021). 3. Ecologies of Oil and Uranium. Extractive Energy and the Trauma of the Future. Duke University Press EBooks, 108–151. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478022046-006 

African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics, Duke University Press, 2021, pp. 108–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1w7v2c6.8 . Accessed 27 Apr. 2024 . 

Nixon, Rob. "Pipedream: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Environmental Justice and Micro-Minority Rights" Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. 120-144. 

Petrocultures research group. “Energy Impasse and Political Actors”. After Oil (2015), pp. 29-40, 55-66. 

Watts, Michael. “Petro-Violence: Community, Extraction, and Political Ecology of a Mythic Commodity,” Violent Environments. Edited by Peluso, Nancy Lee, and Michael Watts, Cornell University Press, 2001, Pp. 189 - 212.