Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

In this chapter, Nixon continues to grapple with the growing inequity of oil exploitation between “subnational minorities and transnationals” (119). He turns to Nigerian writer-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995), who wrote about his people, the Ogoni, an ethnic micro-minority group living in the Niger Delta, and about the human rights violations inflicted on them by Shell and the Nigerian government (the Abacha regime). The Nigerian government executed Saro-Wiwa for his writings and advocacy.

As with the Bedouins, the discovery of oil in the Niger Delta should have transformed the economic livelihood of the Ogoni people. Instead, it poisoned their future. Most of the Ogoni people live on less than a dollar a day, despite transnational oil companies and the Nigerian government extracting $30 billion worth of oil from beneath their homeland. The oil extraction poisoned their land and water, so they are unable to supplement this “daily dollar with untainted crops and fish” (106).

The Ogoni people represent less than 0.5 percent of the population of Nigeria. They lack the political power and protection to claim the wealth that transnational oil companies and the Nigerian government have extracted from their land. At the time of Saro-Wiwa’s death, the Nigerian government was responsible for the deaths of several thousand Ogoni people “through direct murder and the burning of villages” (107).