Purpose
This paper explores the historical roots of environmental accountability in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria by focusing on the campaigns for social and environmental justice by writer Ken ...Saro-Wiwa and the indigenous Ogoni people.
Design/methodology/approach
The methods consist of an analysis of books, diaries, letters and poems written by Ken Saro-Wiwa as well as books, reports and audio recordings of panel discussions which capture the Ogoni struggle, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s activism and its impacts. The authors’ approach to the data is sensitised by Foucault’s notion of counter-conduct as it enables the authors to better grasp the creative agency of Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni as they struggle and campaign for political autonomy, environmental justice and accountability.
Findings
The authors’ findings illustrate how Ken Saro-Wiwa’s books, letters, poems, diaries and articles provide early accounts of environmental injustices and the absence of accountability in the Niger Delta. They highlight how Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni movement deploy counter-conduct to subvert existing power and accountability structures through innovative strategies, effective mobilisation and communication at local and international levels. The authors’ findings also highlight how these have led to specific forms of accountability for human rights and the environment at local and global levels. They also show how Saro-Wiwa’s activism and the Ogoni struggle have inspired a new generation of environmental activists and new ways of demanding accountability.
Originality/value
This paper presents, for the first time, an account of the historical roots of environmental accountability practices from an African and developing country context. Its focus on the historical roots of environmental accountability is also unique as it expands the view beyond the origins of environmental accounting to look more broadly at the origins of environmental accountability practices.
In November 2011, Sister Majella McCarron donated 28 letters and 27 poems written by Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa to the library at Maynooth University (MU). The letters were written to ...Sister Majella in the two years leading up to his execution. Saro-Wiwa had been leading a peaceful protest against the environmental destruction of his homeland Ogoni in the Niger Delta, by the international petrochemical industry. Despite widespread international protest, including the intervention of Pres Bill Clinton, he was executed, along with eight others (the Ogoni Nine), by the then Nigerian military regime. The letters to Sister Majella were smuggled out of military detention in food baskets. She kept the collection among her personal belongings for sixteen years. In her mid-seventies she had concerns about the future of the collection, recognising their potential value to researchers and human rights activists. She approached MU, which has strong associations with missionary activity and a range of courses dealing with social justice issues, as a suitable home for it.
On 4 August 2011, United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) submitted an unprecedented, scientific, groundbreaking environmental assessment report (EAR) on Ogoniland to the Nigerian government. This ...was the outcome of a 14-month intensive evaluation of the extent of pollution. The intention was that UNEP’s recommendations would be implemented to restore the devastated environment, on the one hand, and on the other, counteract the numerous environmental health issues that have for decades, plagued Ogoniland. However, five years post-EAR, and despite the seriousness of the situation, no significant resolution has occurred on the part of the government or the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) or Shell. To date, millions of Niger Delta residents particularly those living in the oil-bearing communities, continue to suffer severe consequences. Although the assessment was conducted in Ogoniland, other communities in the Niger Delta are also affected. This article explores prevailing issues in the Niger Delta, using Ogoniland (a microcosm of the Niger Delta) as an example. A multidisciplinary approach for sustainable mitigation of environmental health risks in the Niger Delta is paramount, and environmental management tools offer valuable strategies. Adopting the UNEP’s recommendations for addressing environmental health problems requires implementing the environmental management/environmental management system (EM/EMS) model. However, the persistent lack of political will on the part of the Nigerian government, and the grossly nonchalant attitude by Shell remain major obstacles towards executing UNEP’s recommendations.
We are pleased to introduce Volume 60, Number 3, of the African Studies Review. We begin this issue with an ASR Forum titled "Land Disputes and Displacement in Postconflict Africa," which includes ...articles by Susan Reynolds Whyte and Esther Acio; Lotte Meinert, Rane Willerslev, and Sophie Hooge Seebach; Ingunn Bjørkhaug, Morten Bøås, and Tewodros Kebede; Amanda Hammar; and Sara Berry. The Forum was conceived of and organized by two guest editors, Daivi Rodima-Taylor and Lotte Meinert, to whom we extend our appreciation and gratitude. The second half of the issue presents a commentary on Ken Saro-Wiwa's "Africa Kills Her Sun" by Angela L. Rodrigues, an analysis of views on Canadian migration among Nigerian youth by Charles Adeyanju, an article about the political authority of chiefs in Sierra Leone by Peter Albrecht, an article on oil extraction in Uganda by Andrzej Polus and Wojciech J. Tycholiz, and an analysis of monument "vandalism" in South Africa by Sabine Marschall.
Religion and the Making of Nigeria is divided into two sections: how colonialism, Islam and Christianity have affected the development of Nigeria's three major regions and the modern state; and how ...sharia (Islamic law) has influenced contemporary Nigeria.The British preferred to rule indirectly through Indigenous rulers in Nigeria....the Christian British often favoured Islamic leadership in northern Nigeria at the expense of Christian missionaries where the religions converged.The Nigerian civil war against Biafra, contested authority of regions, increased religious violence, and the execution of the Ogoni human rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, are components of the book's analysis of the relationship between Christianity and Islam and the emergence of modern Nigeria.
This study draws on recent research into the social function of archives and their web-based delivery to explore how a community-based archive project in Nigeria might provide a site of collective ...trauma healing and contribute to existing community-based development programs. The Ken Saro-Wiwa Digital Archive project aims to catalogue and make available the digitized personal papers of executed Niger Delta activist-author Ken Saro-Wiwa, who spoke out internationally against government mistreatment of his native community. The digital archive project seeks to provide an online community space as well as an internationally accessible exhibition of the archive. After an exploration of the relevant challenges facing community identity, it is argued that the interactive, online and community-based nature of the Ken Saro-Wiwa Digital Archive presents a unique opportunity for a disadvantaged ethnic minority group to take back ownership of their own story in the present, as well as shape their future, via a deliberate 'restor(y)ing' of their past. The archive of a prominent executed community activist, which documents the injustice and trauma experienced by that community, might in this way become a source of positive identity formation and empowerment by documenting the assertion of community autonomy and identity in the face of opposition.
The 17th annual Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF), which took place in November 2015, commemorated 20 years since Ken Saro-Wiwa's passing. Its central theme was 'Texts of Self-Determination'. The ...event was a concerted effort to interrogate the various dimensions of Saro-Wiwa's legacy in a generally positive light. Many internationally renowned authors graced the occasion, essentially to pass on the torch to the younger generation. However, the question of passing the torch is moot due to radically shifting cultural and political parameters. This article examines Saro-Wiwa's influence and legacy from a number of perspectives. First, there is some focus on the impact of his activism in generating radical interrogations of the Nigerian nation-building project by disparate oppositional sects and movements. It also addresses the negative reactions to his activism by some of his detractors. In addition, it re-examines the cultural impact of his literary legacy as an engaged public intellectual. Undoubtedly, these apparently different perspectives overlap and there are indeed a few significant interconnections reflecting the vicissitudes of the Nigerian nation-building project and the manner it could be questioned by movements and citizens who are disenchanted by it.
This essay compares Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus (1669) and Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy (1985), approaching them as picaresque war novels that tell the story of a vernacular language becoming literary ...through brutal war. Despite differences of language, nation, and time, the novels of Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa share a structural similarity traceable to their respective postwar contexts. These novels rewrite the expected relation between war and language. Instead of privileging the damage done to speech, they authorize a spoken language through the medium of a highly mobile rogue protagonist. Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa contend with the question of whether a language, lacking the official status guaranteed by a sovereign state, is strong enough to constitute and represent a territory divided by civil war. In their works, war tears apart a territory and lays the foundation for its autonomous postwar culture all at once.
...he was appointed as a Senior Counsel to the Courts, known in the UK as Queen's Counsel. ...the note lacks any references to Bimbaum's considerable reporting on Ken Saro-Wiwa's so-called trial, ...such as that in Nigeria: Fundamental Rights Denied-Report of the Trial of Ken Saro-Wiwa and Others in 1995 for the Article 19 organization. Silence Would Be Treason is a valuable assembly of annotated first-hand documents that contribute to the body of works on international struggles to save our environment from multinational spoliation, as well as on Ken Saro-Wiwa's leadership and sacrifice-articulated in his own words and thoughts.
My article starts by disproving the established critical consensus that Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy features a child soldier. Instead, I argue, we see a tactical psychopathy at work, in which the adult ...soldier's flattened moral choices and fluid political affiliations become expedients to ensure his survival. As a consequence, I argue, the soldier's libidinal attachments become insecure. Correspondingly, objects in the world of Saro-Wiwa's book become animated and partially autonomous. My article turns to the autonomous partial object to pioneer a model of non-anthropocentric environmental agency, which I term an “environmental unconscious.” I establish this argument with the help of Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic work on part-objects. Klein allows us to infer that the infant's earliest introjective identifications with the breast and its projective identifications with feces involve fantasies of consumption and pollution. These identifications contribute to the eventual making of the subject and its subsequent psychic dispositions. That is to say, the part-objects from which all of our later identifications proceed are always already enmeshed in an early environmental politics. Within this conceptual schema, the autonomous partial object (which Zizek terms an “organ without a body”) becomes readable, in relief, as an obdurate environmental agency whose independence both retains and exceeds human attachments. Accordingly, Sozaboy's repeated emphasis on renegade organs, disembodied voices, and Mene's involuntary bodily response can be thought of as moments in which the environment speaks what the befuddled human protagonist is unable to formulate. I argue that what is articulated in such moments is the silent but ever-present legacy of oil production in the Niger Delta, which becomes something like the unconscious of Saro-Wiwa's book. Moreover, the ambivalence of Kleinian object relations allows us to sustain, without contradiction, the three mutually exclusive outcomes for Mene's mother and Agnes in Saro-Wiwa's plot. My article an unspoken genocidal impulse.27 This riverine imaginary expresses no fallen world—pronouncements of cataclysm invite an unspoken managerial impulse. Instead, this is a world in which the dead remain half-present, in which the inert are part-enlivened. Like ancestors or shades, their ways and relations are opaque. All told, Sozaboy's distorted extremities of the human (patterned for instance, in Mene's dropsical “elephantiasis” 114 or in his priapic “snake”) amount finally to modes of environmental restitution (received, for instance, via the elephantine and the serpentine tout court). In Biafra's figurative throes of the human, a habitable landscape returns startlingly on the page-plane to assert its viable alternatives of promise. Perhaps, in our own good time, we might imagine an embattled partial object or two happening upon this spirit-scene and offer our determination that these animated newcomers will flourish—a “man,” a “snake,” standing “small small,” a “Johnny-Just-Come.”
PDF
