PART THREE
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The Violence of a Corporation
8
‘Lord take my soul, but the struggle continues’
24 November 2006
J. and I are in a black cab speeding over Tower Bridge and through the City of London, heading for Clerkenwell, and the hotel where we’re going to collect the renowned activist and writer Professor Angela Davis, who is on her first visit to London for many years to support our launch of the Living Memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight at City Hall tonight. These are the kind of days we dreamed of when we started Platform, so we’re high on adrenaline, hoping to make this evening as powerful as possible. It’s the culmination to three years of work. Three years to make this happen, to move from just a thought in my head to material reality. But it’s been much longer since we first heard about what was happening in the Niger Delta. The early 1990s, more than ten years now. When we first heard the name Ken Saro-Wiwa spoken, and first saw those images we couldn’t believe – of vast plumes of fire burning continuously, in a land far away. And this being done by Shell, a partly British company. Shamelessly, at the end of the twentieth century.
What was it about this particular combination of environmental degradation and human rights abuses that so outraged us? To live as any kind of activist in our world, no – that’s too specific, to live as any kind of half-aware human being in our world, is to live with knowledge of ongoing atrocities, torture, epidemics, poverty, starvation, extreme inequality, despoliation, pollution, and catastrophic, human-made ecocide. But this knowledge can lead to a kind of overload of information about suffering, which in turn may create what we could call ‘digital paralysis’ – where even to process the facts, let alone respond to them, is beyond the capacity of most people.
(At one point, perhaps the late fifteenth century, it may have been possible for an extremely long-lived, curious – and wealthy – individual to read everything that existed in print in their language. A gloriously mad, Borgesian thought. Closer to our own time, I heard Brian Eno on the BBC World Service a few years ago, saying that when he was a teenager in the 1960s, it would still have been theoretically possible to listen to every single recording ever made on vinyl in a particular musical genre, such as New Orleans jazz or Scottish folk ballads. Because the relatively expensive recording technologies meant that there were limits. Every single recording! I remember gasping with a kind of shocked delight hearing this. Today, of course, with the explosion in digital technology and distribution, there are limitless multitudes of music available, and though the liberation implicit in an infinity of music or books or anything seems alluring at first, I wonder if it isn’t a little like the experience of looking at a summer night sky of stars in the mountains, far from any light pollution. You start staring in amazement, moving from one constellation to the next, astonished at the clarity of the Milky Way, at myriads of stars never seen before, and, after a while, a celestial dizziness descends, and soon an existential drunkenness takes over; all seems utterly pointless, what meaning does anything we do down here really have? All our loving and grieving and passion, all our work and striving and pain is, from the perspective of even the smallest, closest star, quite absurd. Less than absurd, simply of no consequence. Zero. To deal with this challenge of infinity we filter all the time. Many of us now spend most of our days staring at computer screens. Or our mobiles. Or both. An enormous amount of mental energy is taken up with simply deciding what information to take in. We have all become filterers. This filtering now extends into all parts of our lives. We filter the news we receive, the entertainment we watch. We even filter our friends and families now. It’s becoming a rare phenomenon to actually talk to a person on the phone. Why bother talking, when messaging or texting takes a fraction of the time? And this avoids the potential dangers of emotional involvement as well. Lives, like everything else, are now abbreviated, filtered.)
But, to return to Nigeria and Ken Saro-Wiwa – we were receiving the first news about Shell and the Ogoni in 1993 before the web really existed. That meant we actually had to read articles in the newspapers, and watch documentaries on Channel 4 and BBC2. We had to seek out the information ourselves, not simply type something into a search engine, and, as a result, what we learnt had a different quality to it. We would pass articles to each other, we would track down recordings of documentaries and then share them.
We found out that Nigeria had the seventh-biggest oil reserves in the world, that 95 per cent of its GDP came from oil, and yet the average income for the people living there was less than a dollar a day. We learned more about the history of the country – how in the 1670s the Royal African Company (backed by the English navy) began its trade in human slaves along the coast of what is now Nigeria. Vast profits from what has been called the ‘Black Holocaust’, which eventually claimed almost 40 million lives, returned to London, establishing the city as the financial and banking centre of the world. In the late nineteenth century, after the abolition of the slave trade, the Royal Niger Company (with its own substantial private army) moved into the lucrative palm oil market, in the process conquering territory far inland. In 1899 the British government revoked their charter, and established ‘protectorates’ (Niger Coast, Northern Nigeria and Lagos – which were later consolidated into ‘Nigeria’ by the British government in January 1914) in the territories which the Royal Niger Company had invaded. Lord Salisbury commended the founding directors for their work as ‘pioneers of English civilisation in the dark places of the earth’.
As a natural extension to this unnatural relationship, British oil companies (the forerunners of today’s Shell and BP) actively began prospecting for oil in Nigeria in the 1930s and 40s. The first major discovery came in 1956 at Oloibiri in Ijawland, and the first shipment of the high-quality oil, ‘Bonny Light’, left Port Harcourt in February 1958. Between then and today it is estimated that, the Anglo-Dutch company Shell, the ‘largest and most important oil company operating in the Niger Delta’,fn1 has derived over £350 billion in income from Nigerian oil, while the average Nigerian annual earnings are around one billionth of that – £250 per year. We also found out that other oil companies had interests there – Chevron (American), Agip (Italian), Total (French) – and that the area where the majority of the oil reserves were – the Niger Delta, where the River Niger reaches the Gulf of Guinea on the west coast of Africa – was approximately 450 km long and reaching around 150 km inland. We learnt more about the process of oil extraction and the staggering levels of pollution. We saw photographs like this:
And this:
It was a process called ‘gas flaring’. It was, we learnt, cheaper for the oil companies to release the gas (the by-product of drilling for oil) into the air – to burn it off like this, than to capture the gas or inject it back into the rock. This process was banned in most of the world, but apparently the oil companies thought it was acceptable to do it in this part of Africa. Even in the middle of villages and settlements. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, turning even the darkness to light. The effect of this was that the land immediately around effectively becomes ‘carbonised’ – burnt to a deep level and incapable of growing anything. The rate of respiratory illnesses in villages where flaring happened, not surprisingly, increased dramatically. Oil pipelines criss-crossed much of the Delta and spills and explosions were frequent. Hundreds have died from such accidents since oil was first exported. The resulting pollution has found its way into many of the waterways and mangrove swamps, and toxified what had once been rich fishing grounds.fn1