Why do Shell and other oil companies believe such behaviour is permissible? Whatever the reason, or reasons, the result has been a racism of thinking that has had lethal consequences for more than sixty years now. Nigerian governments (for much of this time a series of military juntas) must also bear their share of responsibility but we should remember that the international oil companies had been operating with impunity in Nigeria for thirty years before the country had its own government.
I never met Ken Saro-Wiwa, but his activism made an enormous impression on me and many thousands around the world. I feel I’ve been travelling with him, in some way, for the last twenty-five years. His writing and his interviews dance with a brilliant rage. His use of satire and irony is devastating but never loses touch with his humanity. As with so many of the most effective activists, he was never the dour puritan, but rather a man with enormous appetites for life. A wicked and irreverent laugh, a love of fine brandy and smoking, an intense curiosity about others. Full of inconsistencies? Maybe so. Like virtually all of us. He was an extremely successful businessman before he started writing, yet he sometimes described himself as ‘poor’; he railed against the inequities of British colonialism yet sent his children to English public schools. But, in the totality of his life, these are not important. What was extraordinary was his ability to articulate the anger of his people, the Ogoni – a tribal group of around 400,000 people in one of the areas of the Delta most devastated by oil. Saro-Wiwa was able to bring to reality the spirit that Brecht extols in his remarkable poem ‘In Praise Of Doubt’:
But the most beautiful of all doubts
Is when the downtrodden and despondent raise their heads and
Stop believing in the strength
Of their oppressors.
Ken Saro-Wiwa helped the Ogoni people to realise the power that they possessed. Together, over time, they simply stopped believing in the oil companies’ strength, and in the Nigerian government’s supremacy. This process took many years: in the late 1980s, Ken gave up his very successful writing career (he wrote the novel Sozaboy, and Basi & Company – the most popular TV drama in Nigeria – amongst many other works), and began to campaign strongly for an end to the appalling treatment of the Ogoni, and what he saw as their ‘slow genocide’ at the hands of the oil companies. In 1990 he established, together with a young lawyer, Ledum Mittee, and other community leaders in Ogoni an organisation called MOSOP (Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People). In the same year they published a small manifesto which had an enormous impact across Nigeria – The Ogoni Bill of Rights. This spelt out the injustice that the Ogoni had experienced for the preceding thirty years and their demands for radical reform and increased rights from the Nigerian government, and an end to the ‘complete degradation of the Ogoni environment’ by Shell and the other oil corporations.
He soon realised that to achieve change in his part of Nigeria, in an increasingly globalised world, he needed to activate the engagement and concern of the international community. He began to get the UN involved, he travelled to Geneva and New York and spoke passionately to any group that would listen, often showing the footage of the devastation in Ogoni that he’d filmed himself. Audiences were stunned at first, then outraged that such things could be going on in the 1990s, and that Western oil companies were colluding so grotesquely in this. Ken, above all, was brilliant at articulating the responsibility of everyone in the West; having spent a lot of time in Europe he understood the power of saying to Westerners, ‘This is being done in your name! Do you want this on your conscience?’:
You have an atmosphere that has been poisoned by hydrocarbon vapour, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, and this flaring of gas has gone on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, morning, noon and night, in sunshine and in rain, for 33 years! Now, the result of all this is you have acid rain all the time … this is an area of very heavy rainfall and so the acid rain gets back into the soil, and what used to be the breadbasket of the delta has now become totally infertile … Shell does not care, actually its habits are racist because they know what [they should] do. Why is it that it’s only in Ogoni, in Nigeria, that they’ve flared gas for 33 years, sometimes in the middle of villages? Why is it that they do not care at all? … [that] Shell is able to get away with murder? They have destroyed the Ogoni people, they have destroyed other ethnic minorities everywhere they prospect for oil.
I’m trying to mobilise opinion, particularly in the West, among the shareholders of Shell, among the governments, the people of Europe, of Britain, of Germany, of France, of Italy, all those whose companies prospect for oil in Nigeria, [to get them] to realise that they are ruining the environment and dehumanising the people. So my mission has been to inform the West of the truth of what is happening in Nigeria, which has been hidden from them. I believe if the people knew what has been happening they’d do something about it, and stop this robbery and murder that is going on in broad daylight at the end of the 20th century. All the oil which is produced in Nigeria is bought by America, and the West and Japan. If they insisted – ‘look we are not going to buy this oil unless you ensure that the environment is protected … that the people who live on oil-bearing land are not being dehumanised by the search for oil’, then it would be a different story altogether. The Nigerian government couldn’t continue to do what it is doing now. So the West has a big responsibility. The profits from oil come to Britain … it is … western credit that is keeping Nigeria alive … So [the West] has a moral responsibility to intervene in the situation.
In June 1993 he met Anita and Gordon Roddick, founders of the Body Shop and also, more significantly, activists with a global reach. Together they strategised campaigns, and dramatically improved the media profile of the campaign. Soon further documentaries were being made, more articles written in newspapers throughout the Western world; the Nigerian government and the oil companies began to feel real pressure for the first time. The skeletons were leaping out of the cupboards and beginning to dance. On 4 January 1993, the newly proclaimed ‘Ogoni Day’, 300,000 people came out onto the streets in an incredible demonstration of unity. Soon afterwards, Shell bowed to the inevitable and ceased all oil operations in the Ogoni areas – a staggering achievement for a people who’d always been taught they were a powerless minority in their own land. And all done using Gandhian principles of non-violent resistance, with women at the forefront of the fight. As with all such struggles, they cannot only be judged by the outcome – the political result – the process of such resistance involves the radicalisation of a whole community, people understanding that education is central to power, and that fighting for equality involves not just challenging the power of authorities but changing the power dynamics among those fighting too.
The implications for the oil companies and the Nigerian government of the Ogoni campaign were serious. If Saro-Wiwa’s success was replicated in other regions of the Delta it would threaten the entire oil industry in Nigeria. Not just the lucrative profits for Shell, Chevron and the rest that would be lost, but the very survival of the military government, massively dependent on oil revenues, would be threatened. And Ken, ambitious as he was, and buoyed by the incredible success of getting Shell out of Ogoni, was now wanting to go further. Throughout 1993 the campaign grew, and the Nigerian military government began to panic. What could be done to stop the Ogoni campaign and get Shell back operating there?