The media turn in African environmentalism: the Niger Delta and oil’s network forms

Abstract

African ecologies and the various media forms devoted to them remain marginal in the bourgeoning discourse of ecomedia studies despite the implication of the continent in mineral extraction, wildlife conservation, and the dumping of toxic wastes, just to mention a few examples. Turning to media focusing on Nigeria’s Niger-Delta region, the author argues that African cultural forms are crucial for extending the frontiers of ecomedia studies and for apprehending the perversities of oil culture. His analysis of a mural in Ireland’s Mayo County featuring the environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa (2005), the music video for Timaya’s ‘Dem Mama’ (2006), and Victor Ehikhamenor’s art installation, The Wealth of Nations (2015), shows that they deploy the visual in protesting the commodifying logic of oil extraction. This article adopts an infrastructural approach toward media as it underscores how oil consecrates the selected cultural objects as network forms. Focusing on African materials extends the geography and archive of ecomedia studies, but it has methodological implications too. The author orients scholarship in the environmental humanities toward working across media, encouraging the field to adopt ecological relationality as both the matter and the method.

Keywords

ecomedia environmental degradation infrastructure network form Niger Delta oil relationality

Violence spurs creativity and the Niger Delta, beset by decades of social conflict and ecological degradation, is no exception. Oil was discovered in this Nigerian region in commercial quantity in 1956, but the violence of oil exploration can be traced back much earlier: with the felling of trees, and the clearing of forests and seismic surveys, all activities related to oil prospecting (Moro, 2009; Okonta and Douglas, 2003). Inhabitants of the Delta have consistently responded to the degradation of their environment with nonviolent protests and the more recent volatile interruptions of oil activities by armed militants who bomb oil installations and kidnap oil workers for ransom. The interruption of the oil business by armed militants has brought the region and Nigeria into the international limelight (Adunbi, 2015; Obi and Rustad, 2011; Watts, 2008).

These developments in the Niger Delta have engendered a harvest of cultural forms. Literary productions on the region, including Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011) among others, have proliferated, while visual arts such as films, music, and other artistic projects have seen a boom. Yet, if we go by the critical output representing the ecocritical turn in African and postcolonial studies, one would easily notice a linguistic bent in the preponderance of essays and books devoted to literature (Caminero-Santangelo, 2014; Huggan and Tiffin, 2010; Wright, 2010). Left out or understudied in the current critical terrain is the rich visual archive inspired by the Delta crisis. In this article, I argue that these cultural productions – including music, murals, art installations, and film – have much to contribute to understanding the Niger-Delta crisis and that they have the potential to expand ecomedia studies beyond its Euro-American inclinations.

Ecomedia mediates human relationship to nature by critiquing anthropogenic exploitation of the environment and encouraging the cultivation of an ecological ethics entailing ‘alertness to others and to the world’ (Cubitt, 2005: 41). In Sean Cubitt’s term, the interpellation of ecomedia is an ‘invitation to being human to the fullest, to open communication with the human and natural worlds now and in the future’ (pp. 41–42). Ecomedia studies is a growing field concerned with conservation, ecologies of media production, distribution, and consumption, the affordances of various media genres, and oil culture, among others (Rust et al., 2015). African ecologies and the various media forms devoted to them remain marginal in the bourgeoning discourse of ecomedia studies despite the implication of the continent in mineral extraction, wildlife conservation, and the dumping of toxic wastes, just to mention a few examples.

African cultural forms are crucial for extending the frontiers of ecomedia studies and for apprehending the perversities of oil culture. Here I focus my analysis on a mural in Ireland’s Mayo County depicting Saro-Wiwa (2005), and the music video for Timaya’s ‘Dem Mama’ (2006), before concluding with a discussion of Victor Ehikhamenor’s art installation entitled The Wealth of Nations (2015). If Timaya’s music video directly depicts physical spaces from the Delta, the mural and the art installation evoke the Delta by indirection using associative symbols. In bringing these works together, I eschew the segmentation between popular culture and high art, and consider the various forms as tools to think-with for grappling with ecological degradation and state violence. These cultural artifacts critique what, following Macarena Gómez-Barris (2016: 30), can be called the ‘extractivist viewpoint’, marked by the reduction of everything, including human and nonhuman entities, into commodities, and can be subsumed within the genre of ‘visual activism’, the focus of a 2016 themed issue of the Journal of Visual Culture. As the issue editors describe this term, which they borrowed from the South African visual artist Zanele Muholi, in visual activism, ‘the realm of the visual is marshaled in the service of wider political efforts, [such] as corporate negligence, environmental damage, and worker mistreatment’ (Bryan-Wilson et al., 2016: 6). All three projects under scrutiny deploy the visual in protesting the logic of oil extraction and, in doing so, make the work of recalibrating and rethinking carbon dependence more urgent. While these cultural products invite an appreciation of the socio-cultural and ecological realities of the Delta, they also map themselves onto broader geographies of exploitation and dissent beyond the confines of the Nigerian nation.

This article extends the frontier of recent work on oil media. Mona Damluji’s writings on oil industry films in Iran, Rudmer Canjels’ on Shell films in Nigeria, and Brian Jacobson’s analysis of British Petroleum (BP) media provide excellent examples of this strand of scholarship. Where Damluji’s and Canjels’ writings underscore how these films promoted the idea that oil companies were indispensable for development in Iran and Nigeria, Jacobson identifies BP’s effort to document the good of oil modernity, including its contribution to environmental progress. Jacobson is correct to note that the unspoiled or uncontaminated environments proudly depicted in these industry films exclude the sacrificed environment, the site of degradation that makes the depicted possible. According to Jacobson (2019: 167), the ‘definition of environmental sacrifice zones has often meant pushing the damage as far out of view as possible or at least restricting the worst of it to areas inhabited by indigenous populations or other underrepresented minorities and the poor’. I build on Jacobson’s work by focusing on one such environmental sacrifice zone in West Africa and by turning away from industry films to what Damluji (2015: 163–164) terms ‘counternarratives that throw a wrench into the cogs of the public relations machine’. Focusing on African materials here extends the geography and archive of ecomedia studies, but it has methodological implications too.

My article activates a responsible model for reading African environmental media. African cultural productions, like the ‘dark’ continent itself, are often subject to neglect or misinterpretation, misinterpretations that apprehend them in naïve, simplistic anthropological terms or ones that abstract them away from the social context to produce ahistorical interpretations. I work against such methods by offering a model of interpretation that locates the cultural works within a Delta context and beyond. Both locally embedded and worldly, these projects invite a close and distant reading that cultural objects demand in an era of planetary degradation. Close interpretation examines the interaction of formal features and local contexts while distant reading involves reading the cultural object across space and time to underscore shared histories of exploitation as well as solidarities. Planetary degradation unfolds across space and across time. As such, local or national framings are inadequate for comprehending planetary problems, including the violence of oil degradation. My model proposes broad thematic and conceptual connections across media forms, geographical spaces, and temporal scales. In fact, reviewing scholarship on oil media for writing this article confirms the importance of the method I envisage here. Damluji’s work may focus on the Middle East but echoes of my Niger Delta examples abound in her work, just as the intricacies of BP’s media production resonate with those of Shell. Ecomedia scholars and scholars of visual culture may find this model useful not only for African materials, but also for deciphering cultural objects across spatial and temporal distances in a period of earthly decline.

An additional methodological import of this article is to encourage greater attention to the relationality of media in ecomedia studies and in the environmental humanities more broadly. The principle of ecology as relation should apply beyond thinking across spatial and species boundaries. Grounded in the notion of ‘transmedial storytelling’, entailing the unfolding of a story ‘across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole’, I orient scholarship in the environmental humanities toward working across media (Jenkins, 2006: 95–96). Ecocriticism has become renowned for its investment in literary texts while ecomedia studies privilege film and music cultures. It is axiomatic in these eco-subdisciplines to focus on one medium at a time, an approach that bypasses the opportunity to adopt ecological relationality as both the matter and the method. Working across media as method hues closer to the spirit of interconnection animating the environmental humanities. There is also the opportunity to bring together the best insights from ecocriticism and the productive achievements in environmental media toward the transformation of these areas of study and their archives. The fullest scope of ecological relations manifests not only in the interface of geographies and lifeforms but also when various media interact in the environmental humanities. Literature, film, music, sculpture, and other artistic expressions can be brought together in a process where each contributes to the discursive terrain without being limited to the unidimensional practices of dominant methodologies.

In my specific modeling of media trans-ness as method, studying mural, music video, and art installation together generates transformative insights into their shared project – the ecologies of the Delta – even as the process positions readers to appreciate the specificity of each medium in relation to the others. A transmedia approach draws on various sense perceptions – seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling – so that their multisensory affects mobilize and produce an array of social meanings. In short, the goal is a richer sensory experience and the cultivation of critical depth. The synergy of media forms in this article broadens the purview of ecomedia studies by facilitating immersive experience of phenomena and comprehensive critique. In broader terms, I advocate for bringing together an array of media in the environmental humanities by foregrounding their commonalities without erasing their divergences.

The transmedial approach, oil connective quality and temporal cum spatial interconnections inscribed on the media arts qualify them as network forms. As Caroline Levine (2015: 113) describes them, network forms are ‘defined patterns of interconnection and exchange that organize social and aesthetic experience’ and their primary affordance is ‘connectedness’. Network’s ambivalence maps well onto the Niger Delta where oil earns the country foreign exchange and links it to other parts of the world to which it sells its petroleum. In other words, Nigeria’s standing in geopolitics is determined by its oil just as the machinery of state and its perfunctory developmental projects derive funding from oil. Yet oil instigates social and ecological calamities in the Delta. Furthermore, petroleum leaks into oceans as it criss-crosses the world to satiate energy consumption.

Oil is conducive to a network analytic considering its movement from oil-producing states to sites of consumption, the criss-crossing of ocean and land, and the transfer of toxins from these processes to human and nonhuman bodies across spaces and into the atmosphere. We are in the presence of the kind of networks that ‘carry with them the most nonhuman and misanthropic tendencies’ even if they facilitate the functioning of modern life (Galloway and Thacker, 2007: 6). Despite their exploitative inclinations, networks have the potential for engendering ‘nonsovereign ways of being in the world’ (Jagoda, 2016: 177). These are nonhierarchical constitutions of bodies and places that promote ecological thriving and eschew the inequality and oppressive tendencies in the worst forms of networks. In the environmental humanities, this affirmative form of the network celebrates a non-anthropocentric commingling of human and nonhuman bodies, the kind that Ursula Heise (2008: 8) understands as ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’.

Taken together, the human–nonhuman assemblages that Heise analyzes combine with the conjunctions of temporality and of spaces to constitute the dimensions of networks in this article. The cultural productions that I study articulate both affirmative and derogatory valences of interconnections even as some – the mural and art installation, especially – owe their production and circulation to a transnational network and the artistic exchanges it supports. As such, it makes sense to consider these projects as examples of ‘network aesthetics’, works that deploy various techniques to constitute networks (Jagoda, 2016: 4). In what follows, spatial networks link Nigeria to other countries as well as humans and nonhumans in an ecological relation in the Mayo County mural and in Ehikhamenor’s work, while a temporal network undergirds the discussion of ‘Dem Mama’ in relation to Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s music.

From the Niger Delta to Mayo County: (re)membering Saro-Wiwa

An understanding of the mural must account for W. J. T. Mitchell’s (2005) claim that there are no visual media. Mitchell does not deny the existence of images of visual perception, only that the visual sense participates in the production of meaning alongside others. With this position, Mitchell develops further a point he made in his earlier work Picture Theory (1994) where he writes: ‘representation, not as that thing, but as a process in which the thing is a participant, like a pawn on a chessboard or a coin in a system of exchange’ (p. 420). The system of exchange involves the interaction of a given representation with existing works, even if they are physically absent from the given text. As Victor Burgin (1982: 144) puts it in the context of photographs, ‘these prior texts, those presupposed by the photograph, are autonomous, they serve a role in the actual text but do not appear in it.’ In the mural depicting Saro-Wiwa with a raised fist (see Figure 1), the textual accompaniment is crucial to meaning-making just as the colonial histories of exploitation of former British colonies and territories, including Nigeria, South Africa, and Ireland, along with the United States, are indispensable for achieving what Clifford Geertz (1973) would term a ‘thick description’ of this cultural text honoring Saro-Wiwa and the other Ogoni men killed by Abacha’s government.

Saro-Wiwa, writer, politician, businessman, and later environmental activist, was martyred in 1995 alongside eight other Ogonis for his activism against the exploitation of minority communities in the Niger Delta. The first commercial tanker left the Niger Delta region in the southern part of the country in 1958. As Nixon (2011: 106) asks, ‘who could have dreamed in 1958 that four decades and $600 billion of oil revenues later, some 90 million Nigerians would be surviving on less than a dollar a day?’ The region’s predicament is due to the connivance of oil companies such as Shell and the Nigerian government. Due to this unholy alliance, the government neglects its oversight function, permitting the oil companies to carry out their business with impunity. In this climate, the environmental policies that govern the operations of European and American oil companies at home are nonexistent. And when they are, they are hardly implemented. By the early 1990s, this development had resulted in extreme pollution of the region from oil spillage, gas flaring, and the dumping of toxic waste in the waters, among other nefarious practices. Receiving kickbacks from the oil companies and doing little to assist in the development of the communities, the negligence and ineptitude of the Nigerian government led to complaints of marginalization in these communities, where people wondered why they were so impoverished when they produced the mainstay of the nation’s economy.

Saro-Wiwa formed the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) in 1990 to pressure the oil companies and the government to develop the communities producing the national wealth. Given the neglect of the communities by successive governments, this movement gained considerable popular support, to the chagrin of Shell, the oil company operating in the area, and the military government of General Ibrahim Babangida, as well as that of General Sani Abacha who succeeded him in 1993. Both military autocrats used force to quell the opposition of the Ogoni people and other oil-producing communities. Ultimately Saro-Wiwa was arrested on the trumped-up charge of the murder of four Ogoni elders, who were perceived as government sympathizers by the Ogoni youth who killed them. The government tied the murders to Saro-Wiwa and the other men killed along with him. At the military tribunal put together for the trial of the accused men, witnesses were bribed and coaxed to implicate them in a judicial process that was considered a charade by Nigerians and the international community. The intervention of the international community did not stop the Nigerian government from killing Saro-Wiwa on 10 November 1995, which led to the country’s expulsion from the Commonwealth (Apter, 2005: ch. 7; Quayson, 1996).

Before his death, Saro-Wiwa predicted that the Nigerian government’s refusal to accommodate peaceful protests and enact reforms in the allocation of resources would lead to insurgency and unrest. This prophecy has been largely fulfilled with the spate of militant violence that has racked the region since the 1990s. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) is the best known of these groups, which has specialized in kidnapping oil workers and sabotaging oil installations since 2005 (Adunbi, 2015; Ikelegbe, 2011). The state of unrest in the region substantially decreased Nigeria’s oil earnings and created instability, leading the late President Musa Yar Adua to grant amnesty to the militants. Many dropped their weapons then and committed themselves to rehabilitation and reintegration programs sponsored by the government.

Since then, violence has reduced in the region even though there are still incidents of bombing oil installations and civil unrest. Shell ceased production in Ogoniland after the Saro-Wiwa affair and was forced to pay compensation to the victims and their families. The compensation followed an out-of-court settlement for a case filed against the company by aggrieved Ogoni people in New York. Unable to hold the company accountable in Nigerian courts, the plaintiffs turned to the American judicial system for justice (Cox, 2015: 229). The President Buhari-led government has declared its commitment to cleaning up the region, but this part of the world is used to political promises. Time will tell if this one will lead to concrete actions that will mitigate the risks to the flora and fauna in this complex ecosystem, deemed one of the most biodiverse in the world.

I have offered this overview of Saro-Wiwa’s commitment to the Delta cause and of the degradation of the region by Shell and other oil companies to provide a context for understanding the mural but also to begin to answer the question of why a community in Ireland’s Mayo County would find Saro-Wiwa’s image fitting for their activism against Shell’s decision to locate a gas pipeline and refinery on their land. The mural can be read as a ‘project of memory’ (Oguibe, 2004: 90). Since Shell received approval to commence operations in Mayo, its project has been stalled by citizen activism against the potential devastation to the land and the residents. The protest led to the arrest and detention of the Rossport Five, a group of five men convicted of contempt of court for disobeying a court order forbidding interfering in Shell’s operations. The arrest of these men galvanized protests across the world, including the Shell to Sea movement. This movement, since its 2005 emergence in Mayo County, has committed itself to activism against exploration activities that hurt local communities. One strategy in Mayo has been to connect its struggle to the Niger Delta’s to such an extent that a nickname for the protesters is Bogoni, a name that echoes Ogoni, the ethnic group to which Saro-Wiwa belonged (Cox, 2015; Gilmartin, 2009). Both the Delta and Mayo ‘are linked by the loose solidarity and information networks of the international anti-Shell and anti-petroleum campaign’ (Cox, 2015: 230).

Members of the Erris community in Mayo, like their Nigerian counterparts, have protested and have been sent to jail for their beliefs. As part of their protest, they recognize the worldmaking potential of artistic symbols, of which the Saro-Wiwa mural is a part. This mural serves against the forgetting of Saro-Wiwa, who gave his life for the struggle against the environmental and social degradation of his community. As Byron Caminero-Santangelo (2014) has noted, after ‘Saro-Wiwa’s execution by the state in 1995, his transformation into a potent symbol for resistance against petro-capitalism became even more pronounced’ (p. 134). In producing this mural, the community offers it as a bequeathal to the world to remember Saro-Wiwa and the cause he fought for: ‘the environmentalism of the poor’ (Guha and Martinez-Alier, 1997: 12). The memorialization is also strategic for this community in its ongoing battle with Shell. Shell would likely not operate the same way it did in Nigeria in a European territory but the Nigerian example that shines through the mural is a reminder of the detrimental consequences of oil exploration. It is because oil results in broken pipelines, oil spills, and poisoned human and nonhuman habitats as well as the violence that killed Saro Wiwa that the mural serves as a reminder of what might befall Mayo if Shell’s pipes go through the community. In other words, the project of memory works against the kind of materiality of oil in the Niger Delta.

I have treated the mural so far as a contact zone, as the site where Ireland meets Nigeria, where an oil-producing community wrecked by environmental degradation meets one just entering the business of fossil fuel. If we examine the image properly, we can find further indications that enrich its status as a contact zone and embellish its status as a network form.

A smiling Saro-Wiwa appears in the image with his right arm raised, but his fist is invisible. Since this image of Saro-Wiwa is a popular one emblazoned on his books and other media, we can fill in the gap, imagining the raised arm culminating in a clenched fist as the resonant Black Power salute. In other words, the ‘iconic Black Power gesture, the elevated fist, hovers in its absence’ in the mural (Crawford, 2017: 9). The martyr’s image is surrounded by names of the other men killed alongside him, which locates him as a member of a community, of a network of people. This communalization of Saro-Wiwa is important, for it reminds the viewer that his struggle was a collective one even though the other victims are often ignored in favor of consecrating Saro-Wiwa as a hero and martyr. This linking of Saro-Wiwa with the other men also invites the viewer to see resistance as a collective effort, as a process and product of collectivity.

We also see drooping leaves, which locate Saro-Wiwa and the other men as environmentalists. The leaves can be read as a symbol of what is at stake in anti-Shell activities beyond the danger the company poses to the human community: the threat to the nonhuman world. The mural invites a consideration of the environmental implications of oil exploration that lurks in the Shell films that Canjels (2017) analyzes. Whereas the forest appears in these films ‘as an object that could be invaded by humans and their machines, leaving carved out roads and production sites needed for oil exploitation and the consequent betterment of the country’, the mural challenges the developmental scheme underpinning Shell’s film productions (p. 73). By foregrounding violence – against humans and other ecological components – as the benefit of oil production in Nigeria, the mural challenges the modernization thesis of industry films.

The leaves are particularly significant for thinking oil’s materiality in the Niger Delta. Saro-Wiwa’s struggle against the exploitation of the Delta assembled humans and nonhumans as victims of oil exploration. Oil is a slicky matter that spills and sticks (Hitchcock, 2015). As spill, it chokes humans, animals, and plants. Even when the physical marker abates, oil remains potent beneath the surface; its toxicity poisons plants, which compromises the bodily integrity of the various beings in the Delta. As such, the leaves in the mural ought to be taken seriously, to be moved from the margin of the image to the foreground, in order to underscore an ecology of risk in the Delta under annihilation by oil. In positioning the leaves with the dead humans, the mural memorializes a shared vulnerability that cuts across species.

New life is also breathed into Saro-Wiwa’s poetry that appears in the mural in Gaelic. The men whose names appear on the mural are dead as is Saro-Wiwa, the environment is in peril of dying, and Gaelic is an endangered language. Death haunts this image and its constituent parts; the re-presentation in the mural is a life-affirming process that further serves the project of memorialization. If ‘the role of colonial statues and monuments is to resurrect, in the present, those who during their own lifetimes had threatened Blacks with the sword and with death’, as Achille Mbembe (2017: 128) proclaims, the mural here resurrects black men who faced the death squad because of their oppositional stance against neocolonialism. Against this logic of oppression, Saro-Wiwa’s raised hand implies a refusal to submit to the dictates of the state. Michael Taussig, in Magic of the State (1997), has written of the state’s desire to control the body and how national monuments are calibrated to ‘maintain the spectator’s body erect like a statue’ (p. 172). Saro-Wiwa was hanged because of his refusal to submit to Abacha, and the mural honoring him encourages the viewer to be nonconformist. It is significant that the poem excerpt on the mural exhorts readers to ‘dance the gun/to silence’, which buttresses the resistant bent of the raised fist. Whether it is in the raised fist or the injunction to dance repeated in the poem, body performativity is imperative for the recalcitrance against the state’s desire to keep bodies docile.

The international circulation of Saro-Wiwa’s image and the raised fist qualify them as instances of ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg, 2009). This transcultural kind of memory is characterized by ‘cross-referencing and borrowing’ and entails the ‘interaction of different collective memories’ in the public sphere (p. 3). Saro-Wiwa’s raised fist recalls the Black Power salute as a sign of protest in the civil rights era in the United States. The raised fist was also used by Nelson Mandela and the South African public in their anti-apartheid struggle, which culminated with democratic elections in 1994. This corporeal sign of defiance is connected to the power of people, of Saro-Wiwa against Shell and the government, of black South Africans against the white apartheid state, and of African Americans against the racist American state, especially during the civil rights movement. The raised fist may be Saro-Wiwa’s but it recalls Mandela’s and those of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, African American athletes in the 1968 Summer Olympics, who raised their fists during the singing of the American national anthem to protest against the ill-treatment of black people in the United States.

There is a long history of allusion to international figures and events in Irish murals predating the Mayo artwork (Rolston, 1991). The point of these allusions is to link the Irish struggle to a broader international tradition of resistance (Goalwin, 2013: 209). To return to the mural, choosing this particular image of Saro-Wiwa rather than the other popular one showing him smoking a pipe, like a member of the bourgeois class, is strategic. This image bolsters the mural’s function as ‘tactical media’ connecting the local struggle to iconic global ones.¹ As tactical media, this mural is indebted to a longer tradition of mural making by both the republicans and loyalists in Ireland. Goalwin (2013: 197) traces the first mural to 1908 when the loyalists used it to mark the Protestant defeat of Catholicism at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Since then, murals have served political and ideological functions in various struggles in Ireland. Bill Rolston (2013: 156) sees murals created by Long Kesh political detainees as ‘an attempt by politically motivated prisoners to win back the space in which they are confined, to control it, to aspire to creating a liberated zone in the most inhospitable of environments’. The mural depicting Saro-Wiwa shares with Rolston’s examples an inclination toward resistance but also toward the reconfiguration of space.

W. J. T. Mitchell (2012: 9) argues that ‘the images that promise to become monuments of the global revolution of 2011 – are not those of face but of space; not figures, but the negative space or ground against which a figure appears.’ In our context, both face and space are crucial for monument-making. The iconic face of Saro-Wiwa lends historical dimension and value to the mural but its occupation of public space is also crucial. Seen as a response to the expropriation of public land by Shell and the government, along with the desecration of ancestral land in communities across the world, including in the Delta, the mural stages a reappropriation of land for public use. The mural’s presence constitutes a demand to be seen and heard in the public sphere and to reconstitute this space as the property of the commons, not the state. In a nutshell, it is the people’s, not Shell’s. Saro-Wiwa contested the Nigerian state’s theft of public land in the Delta; the African American athletes also used a public space to denounce the restrictions black people face in public spaces in America; and Mandela would not let the geographical limitations of apartheid stop him from taking a public stand. The current mural stands on the shoulders of these giants to proclaim its message of subversion and to constitute a ‘counterpublic’ known for ‘their conflict with the norms and contexts of their cultural environment’ (Warner, 2002: 63).

Monuments may occupy physical space, but they also travel. As this discussion should have made clear, different parts of Saro-Wiwa’s mural come from disparate sources. Another form of travel for monuments is through pictures making their way in the world.² Saro-Wiwa’s mural is no exception, with its circulation in print and digital media. For instance, I first encountered it in Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). Nixon reproduces the image in his book with permissions from Wiki Commons, which is one platform on which the work circulates virtually. The work’s travel extends the public space it occupies. Whether seen on the ground in Mayo County or on the internet, the mural makes a case for resistance against the dominant capitalist desire to privatize all aspects of social and biological life.

If we turn to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000: xv) for guidance in reading the mural, we can glean a call for ‘a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges’ in the Mayo County project. African American, African, and European people cojoin in this image of resistance. The viewers of Saro-Wiwa’s mural (online and beyond) are invited to stand, raise their fists, and protest the capitalist exploitation of indigenous land and the ongoing threat to human and nonhuman lives in the name of capitalist development. If Saro-Wiwa’s mural does one thing, it promotes what in the words of Hardt and Negri is ‘the will to be against’ (p. 210). The mural encourages the rejection of subjugation and mobilization of the multitude for continuous resistance against every manifestation of hegemony.

To conclude this discussion of the Mayo County mural in an era of digital media, I would like to briefly return to an argument about the interesting ways of encoding memory in the ‘Medium, Memory, Image’ chapter of Oguibe’s The Culture Game (2004). Oguibe describes the danger of coopting monuments and landmarks by the state’s repressive and ideological apparatuses and by capitalist interests. Oguibe’s fears are well founded and understandable; yet the era of social media invites a reassessment of his position vis-à-vis the project of memory. Oguibe writes of the ‘fragility of memory’ and of how monuments are designed to safeguard against the erosion and erasure of memory (p. 91). Impermanent structures may well serve the era of Oguibe’s writing but the challenges of new media provoke new questions about the form of public memory. If, as Aloïs Riegl (1982[1903]: 21) already explains, monuments are ‘erected for the specific purpose of keeping single human deeds or events (or a combination thereof) alive in the minds of future generations’, how do we keep such events alive in the social media age, with the saturation of information and images? ‘Totalitarian regimes everywhere must discourage remembering that leads to thinking’, writes Johannes Fabian (1996: 214); how then do we produce art that fosters critical and creative thinking?

Projects such as the Mayo County mural can serve as a bulwark against the erosion of memory. At its physical location and in its circulation enabled by digital media, the mural recalls the struggles of the past, speaks to contemporary struggles against exploitation, and is aimed at inspiring the multitude to bring about a less exploitative world. Although the digital era, with its overwhelming amount of visual and textual data, poses challenges for cultivating memory, it also offers possibilities for murals and other artistic inscriptions vulnerable to whitewashing. The abundance of alluring images circulating online can easily distract viewers from the sober, critical work demanded by the mural depicting Saro-Wiwa; yet the mural acquires warranty for survival long after the physical markings have been obliterated, through its travel on the cameras of visitors and on the internet. The Black Power salute animating the mural defines the task of the multitude in Mayo, the Niger Delta, and everywhere: to weed out the structures of petro-capitalism and supplement them with a planetary ethics of care, unmoored from the primordial trappings of ethnicity, the parochialisms of the nation, and the violence of speciesism.

Critical mourning and dissent in Timaya’s ‘Dem Mama’

Timaya’s ‘Dem Mama’, a work of mourning for the Odi massacre ordered by the then President Olusegun Obasanjo in his first year as Nigeria’s democratically elected president in 1999, extends the examination of state violence in the Mayo mural. The crime of the Odi people was the death of policemen believed to have been killed by miscreants connected to the community. For this, the military leveled the town, leaving only a few buildings, and killing over 2,000 people (Akinyoade, 2017: 60; Ola and Akinbode, 2002). The Odi massacre in Bayelsa state, the same geographical area where oil was first discovered in the 1950s, must be understood within the context of state violence in oil-producing communities of the Delta, where government is keen to remove all barriers to successful exploration (Ibaba, 2007). It was only 10 years later, during the government of President Goodluck Jonathan, a Bayelsa indigene, that the community received compensation for their losses. In his memorialization of this tragedy in his True Story album and music video (see Figures 2 and 3), the Niger Delta-born Timaya lays the blame on governmental violence and ineptitude even as he recollects the loss of lives and property in the carnage. Ultimately the song forces us to acknowledge the body as a site for working through trauma and as a recalcitrant technology against the impositions of the postcolonial state. There is also the critique of the underdevelopment of Nigeria’s oil-producing communities in the song. It is significant that Timaya’s spatial orientation locates his country and state, with the latter foregrounded by a sign welcoming viewers to Bayelsa. The spotlight on Bayelsa – in the lyric and visual sign – is important because oil was first discovered in the state and it is one of the highest producers of crude. In fact, Bayelsa is synonymous with oil and underdevelopment in the Nigerian imagination.

The establishing shot locates us in the creek with a canoe foregrounding the riverine geography. This scene is followed by a shot of people running in confusion as helicopters fly overhead. This is clearly the simulation of the chaos and violence, after which we encounter young men led by Timaya himself as they stand facing uniformed military men. Re-enactment performs the role of artistic strategy here as it involves the ‘creative explorations of past performance materials’ (De Laet, 2013). Unfortunately, past performance in this case recalls the violence of the Nigerian state, its dramatization of repression to stifle dissent and deter future insurrections. Consecutive shots take us through the violence, the destroyed buildings, the kids who look blankly into the camera, the women with grave and emotionless demeanor and the wailing women. As Albert O Oikelome (2013: 37) explains it in his study of the song, ‘Timaya focuses his anger on the government and soldiers as mechanisms of exploitation and brutality’. The massacre is a tragic event and Timaya makes sure to capture this structure of feeling in the scenes shot indoors. In one early scene he is walking along a dark, narrow corridor that signifies the constriction imposed by the violent state on the community. In later shots of the artist singing in the studio, it is dark except for the artificial light used to illuminate his face. Found images from the disaster are incorporated to connect the video to the real event. Loss is registered at the visual level, but the lyrics and sound further underscore the trauma at the heart of Timaya’s music. In the song’s first part, Timaya provides an autobiography that also doubles as the history of a failed nation:

Nigeria na my country o

Bayelsa na my state o

This na reality o

Wey been happen for Bayelsa o

Nineteen Ninety Nine o

I swear I no go forget am o

When them kill the people o

And they make the children them orphans o

Any time wey I think am o

Water dey pour from my eyes o

Somebody say make I leave am o

But I say me I must talk am o

(Timaya, 2006)

Notice the grounding of the song in the linguistic ecology of the Delta with pidgin but what is of utmost importance, however, is the concretization of the event in space and time. Once the space-clearing gesture is concluded, the artist renders the poignant loss that occasions the work. The song tells us that water streams down his eyes as he recollects the past; the past here is steeped in blood of the parents killed and the tears of the orphans. He tells us at the end of this segment that someone asked him to forget but he insists on speaking about it. Timaya is bearing witness to the suffering of the Odi community, memorializing it in song to testify against government atrocities.

Repetition is at the heart of music, especially African music, so it makes sense that ‘Dem Mama’ is replete with recurrences of words and fragments. A closer look at what is repeated in this song shows a return to the site of trauma. In the chorus, Timaya sings,

I say them don kill them mama eh eh eh

Them don kill them papa eh

I say them don kill them mama

Them papa them mama them papa them mama eh

I say they don kill them mama eh them papa eh ah

Them mama eh ah

Wetin we go do o

Do o

(Timaya, 2006)

The chorus repeats the killing of fathers and mothers, which returns us to the traumatic event. As the song returns to the chorus again and again and with the musician’s vow not to forget: ‘I swear I no go forget am o’, it becomes clear that this past cannot be transcended. We can identify a melancholic trace of a victim fixed on the traumatic event. There is another sense in which this song, especially its chorus, returns to the past. This point will take us to Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s ‘Unknown Soldier’ (1979), which memorializes the attack on his Kalakuta Republic by Nigerian soldiers in 1978. Due to his social activism and the political character of his music, Fela had become a thorn in the flesh of the military rulers who invoked repressive measures in response to what Tejumola Olaniyan (2004: 50) calls his ‘dissident tunes’. One of many attacks on his residence, this siege was noteworthy because the soldiers threw Fela’s mother, the women’s rights activist and politician, Funmilayo Ransom Kuti, out through the second-floor window. She would not recover and died soon after the attack from its complications. In mourning his mother, Fela repeats the lines ‘Dem throw my mama’ and ‘Dem kill my mama’.

We can see a striking resemblance between these fragments and the lyric of Timaya’s song, especially his chorus. Both musicians concretize the violence of the postcolonial state and use repetition to foreground its severity and banality. More specifically, Fela and Timaya foreground violence against women. Although victims of the Odi Massacre encompass men, women, and children, the title, as if inspired by the well-known Fela song, centralizes a maternal figure as victim. The music video also foregrounds women survivors staring expressionlessly or wailing. Moreover, it is significant that the same Obasanjo, under whose watch as military president the 1978 invasion occurred, was president 20 years after as the Odi massacre unfolded. Both artistes critique the ‘postcolonial incredible’, Olaniyan’s term for the ‘crisis-as-norm’ – that is, the violence and other symptoms of what ails the postcolonial state in Africa (p. 2). They foreground violence committed against women to buttress the repressive character of the Nigerian state. Timaya’s music, like Fela’s, is oppositional.³

‘Dem Mama’ thus operates in the realm of performance that Fred Moten (2003) locates within the black radical tradition for its sonic articulation of resistance. The calculated defiance registered at the sonic level is borne out visually as well. After the initial scene of scampering kids, Timaya and his acolytes confront the soldiers and even engage them in a duel. Flight is over momentarily, and the multitude put their bodies on the line against the repressive state apparatus. In standing firm before the military, in the mime of physically attacking the state security officials, and in the dance captured in ‘Dem Mama’, Timaya captures not only the trauma of state violence but also the mobilization of the body in the protest against the state as well as the reclamation of the land and communal fabric destroyed in the catastrophe.

Timaya’s articulation of resistance at the visual level resonates with Fela’s as well. Describing a typical outing at the temple of counterculture in Lagos, the African Shrine, where Fela held court as entertainer, iconoclast, and social critic, Michael Veal (2000: 2) describes Fela’s appearance in a ‘tight purple jumpsuit’, raising his fist in a black power salute and smoking marijuana on stage. Veal adds how Fela’s act includes both verbal abuse of the political class and the mimicry of their bodily dispositions. Veal’s observation at the Shrine renders Fela’s opposition in visual terms. In a society that prohibits the use of marijuana, Fela flaunted his publicly in defiance of the state just as his wardrobe, sometimes only underpants, and his public action of marrying 27 women in one day, resisted the bounds of social propriety and laws.

In short, the mobilization of space for ‘possible modes of protest’ in ‘Afrobeat subculture’ is applicable to Timaya’s work (Ayobade, 2019: 32). If, in Ayobade’s work, the Shrine and the airport constitute sites of resistance for Fela and his Queens, the streets of the Niger Delta are appropriated for Timaya’s recalcitrant project. Carol Vernallis (2013: 217) has written of the preponderance of clouds in music videos; Timaya’s is no exception as the initial rapid shots reveal military jets locating viewers in a Delta under siege. The disturbing sound of the military carriers and the dark, gloomy clouds also predict the violence unleashed by soldiers standing in the foreground. After capturing the event motivating his song, Timaya proceeds to defy the military in his lyrics and visual performance. It is significant that the shot following the military scene depicts Timaya and his actors performing the black power salute against the invasion of their land. In a scene reminiscent of the mural’s depiction of the salute and Veal’s description of Fela’s performance, visual content collaborates with the song lyric to underscore resistance.

Like that of Fela, Timaya’s performance enlists visuality in order to critique the failures of the Nigerian state. How else should we describe the darkness permeating many scenes of the video and the ramshackle and makeshift houses that the video repeats at intervals? These houses are visual signs of underdevelopment, demonstrating incongruity between the oil wealth servicing the nation and the poverty of the places producing the oil. Timaya shuns an elaborate set with a documentary style that foregrounds the violence, bareness and infrastructural insufficiency of Odi. According to Vernallis, the ‘tracking shot has been an essential technique, because it supports the music’s pace in relation to the video’s environment and provides a respite from rapid editing’ (p. 224). In addition to providing respite from rapid editing, tracking shots allow Timaya to buttress the infrastructural state of Odi. As the camera moves across the landscape, the viewer observes a constellation of shacks with plastic covering and other improvisational materials. The tracking shot makes decrepitude and improvisation unexceptional, marking them as a feature of existence in Odi.

Whereas the oil industry film in Iran showcases development brought about by oil, as Damluji (2015) demonstrates, and the films analyzed by Canjels (2017) propose modernization as a benefit of Shell’s activities in Nigeria, Timaya counters the industry narrative by portraying destroyed and makeshift houses. Standing in front of these houses in many shots, Timaya bears witness to the plight of his people with a vocality marked by an angry tone. The viewer need not look beyond the structures in the background to locate the source of the musician’s angry tone, serious mien, and somber demeanor. Inhabitants of Odi, depicted wailing or in sad, gloomy states, are refugees in their own land, for whom underdevelopment and repressive violence are rewards of petromodernity. The repetition serving as a stylistic mode for Fela’s social critique is also the defining quality of Timaya’s music – lyrically and visually. The repetition of the black power salute in the video and the reiteration of the underdevelopment motif in scenes returning viewers to shacks, dilapidated structures and a poorly lit Delta environment enable the cultivation of an aesthetics of subversion in ‘Dem Mama’.

Oil and the wealth of nations

Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski’s (2015: 5) call for an ‘infrastructural disposition’ toward media, a kind attuned to media’s materiality, is useful for thinking about the ways oil animates these cultural forms as a network form. Oil makes the world go around or, to use Roman Bartosch’s (2019: 125) description, ‘part of the horror of oil is, of course, the inescapability of its consequences: it is everywhere, everyone is affected by it, and it dazzles the brain just as it chokes the senses.’ It is an example of ‘hyperobjects’ that are everywhere and it overwhelms us (Morton, 2013). Oil, like Morton’s hyperobjects, is ‘massively distributed in time and space’ and is ‘nonlocal’. Its ‘enmeshment in the “everything else” that we know and do’ underscores the pervasiveness of oil culture (LeMenager, 2014: 103). This commodity-object is at the heart of the Mayo County mural; it connects economies and countries through undersea and land pipelines. This criss-crossing deploys nodes of interconnection that are indissociable from toxic waste. Regular oil spills in Nigeria, for instance, have rendered communities hospitable to diseases by poisoning their food and water sources. Oil suffocates humans and plants literally, but it also does so indirectly. Saro-Wiwa and the other men may not have died from spills or other direct oil causes, but their demise is linked to oil’s suffocating power. Abacha’s government was acting to check the interruption of oil flow and on behalf of the oil companies when it hanged the Ogoni Nine. Their blood was the lubricant that the oil machine needed to continue its flow. The Odi massacre too derives impetus from the contestation between government forces and oil communities in the Delta over control of resources. Here too, oil was an indirect catalyst of the violence of the Nigerian state and of the underdevelopment fueling unrest among the people.

To conclude, I want to briefly mention Nigerian artist Victor Ehikhamenor’s installation The Wealth of Nations, another work steeped in a network. Produced in collaboration with Indonesian artists for the Biennale Jogja in November 2015, the installation features oil drums, symbolizing the shared history of oil exploration, pollution, and violence in both Nigeria and Indonesia. Some of these drums are suspended from the ceiling in the Indonesian museum, from where one of them leaks black liquid into a tub. This tub, filled with water, is a place where oil mixes with water, as it does in the Niger Delta where frequent oil spillage has polluted the land and water. The suspended drums also recall the murder by hanging of Saro-Wiwa 20 years earlier and the violence of the Nigerian state it connotes. At the entrance to the museum, close to 150 drums, rusty from age, are stacked against each other. This stacking brings the drums together in a collective that suggests the linkage of nations of the world through the flow of oil and the capital it generates. As the Nigerian writer and critic Toni Kan (2017) makes clear in a brief essay on the use of color in Ehikhamenor’s work, ‘they are, most often, monochromatic pieces in red and yellow or black and grey, or they feature a burst of bright colours.’ Ehikhamenor’s preference for bright colors is visible on his oil drums splattered in red paint as well as the green and black background decor. The color brightens an otherwise somber installation, but it also recalls the violence seared into the history of both Nigeria and Indonesia, especially under the dictatorships of Abacha (Nigeria), who hanged Saro-Wiwa, and Suharto (Indonesia). As in the mural, the green patterning evokes the vegetation of the Delta also imperiled by the oil violence that killed Saro-Wiwa and many others, while the black traces the flow of oil and the dark spots it introduces into the ecosystem. Mapping oil’s movement with the black color suggests the preponderant threat to ecological health from oil pollution. The Wealth of Nations (see Figures 4 and 5) indicates that oil wealth is predicated upon the suffering – if not death – of humans captured in the red color and nonhumans emblematized by the green.

The stacked drums, with visible markers of age and use, can also draw attention to the artisanal refining of petroleum products by Niger Delta youth who are left out of the formal economy. Sustaining this informal economy means resorting to oil bunkering, which involves sabotaging crude oil pipelines and refining the oil for onward transmission to ports, where it is shipped abroad. The local refining process, which adapts the process of brewing indigenous gin in the Niger Delta, uses drums such as those in the installation. In the absence of formal pipelines sanctioned by the oil companies and the state, drums also serve as a means of transporting the oil (Ugor, 2013). This artisanal process (see Figures 6 and 7) demonstrates the creativity and ingenuity of the Niger Delta youth, but it also raises the question of environmental pollution. Sabotaging pipelines sends oil into the land and water, and the refining process further contributes to environmental degradation. These young people, while creatively inserting themselves into a system from which they are formally excluded, contribute to destroying their ecosystem.

From the bottom of the tub holding water and the leaked oil in The Wealth of Nations shines ‘Oloibiri’, the name of the community in Bayelsa where oil was first struck in commercial quantity in 1956. Oloibiri lies buried in the water, strangled by oil, which speaks to its ongoing marginalization and despoliation of its environment by oil companies and the Nigerian state. Ehikhamenor’s project exemplifies the network form that I have explored here: its catalyst is a network form and commodity, oil, and it is further inspired by the unequal flow of oil proceeds in the current world order. The appearance of The Wealth of Nations as an art form is also steeped in collaboration across countries with a shared history of oil exploration, dictatorship, and violence. The Nigerian writer and critic Emmanuel Iduma describes the ‘oil drum as Nigerian monument’. Given the shared history with Indonesia and oil’s transnational and transoceanic flow and spillage, we can upgrade Iduma’s (2016) categorization of the oil drum to make it a global monument, an enduring monument of the Anthropocene marked with the social and ecological aberrations critiqued in Timaya’s work and the mural honoring Saro-Wiwa.

I have posited network as the appropriate heuristic for apprehending oil and the cultural forms under scrutiny. Encouraging the media turn in African environmental humanities, this article proposes a model for interpreting African visual culture that situates its formal features within a specific context, but which also allows for a planetary reading across space and time. In spite of the medium specificities of mural, music video, and art installation, all three projects discussed in this article – the Mayo County mural, Timaya’s ‘Dem Mama’, and Ehikhamenor’s The Wealth of Nations – visualize the violence of oil materiality in the Niger Delta even as they encourage linking the Nigerian space to other locations. They link the violence of oil capitalism and resistance against petromodernity in Nigeria’s Niger Delta to the oil culture in Ireland and Indonesia, among other sites. Bringing these media arts together enables a transformative engagement with the materiality of oil, but the transmedial approach is also a provocation for ecocritics and environmental humanists to work across media. The relationality undergirding ecological investigations should also motivate the archive and method.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Cajetan Iheka

Notes

Cajetan Iheka is Associate Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge UP 2018) and of African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP 2021). He coedited African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (Rochester UP 2018) and Environmental Transformations, a themed issue of African Literature Today (2020).

Address: Yale University, PO Box 208302 63 High Street, New Haven, CT 06520-8302, USA. [email: cajetan.iheka@yale.edu]

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