Antinomies of community: some thoughts

Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.

on geography, resources and empire

Michael J Watts
Community is a fundamental modality for the conduct of modern politics. This paper
explores the antinomies of community in an oil nation: Nigeria. Oil states stand in relation
to a particular sort of capitalism (what I call petro-capitalism) in which a key resource
(petroleum) and a logic of extraction figure centrally in the making and breaking of
community. I pose the following questions: how are communities imagined (or not),
territorialized (or not), identified (or not) and ruled (or not) at a multiplicity of scales and
in relation to a particular natural resource, namely oil? Each community is imagined, so
to say, through and with oil – the communities are ‘naturalized’ in relation to the effects,
social, environmental, political, of oil exploration and production – but produces forms
of rule and identity that are often fragmented, unruly and violent. The communities I
address are, in a sense, all oil-producing communities but of rather different qualities:
namely, the chieftainship as a local form of customary community rule at the level of the
village; the ethnic or indigenous community at the level of the region; and the nation,
or more properly the nation-state known as Nigeria. And standing at the heart of each
community is a fundamental contradiction. Nigerian petro-capitalism operates through
a particular sort of ‘oil complex’ (a configuration of firm, state and community) that
generates or refigures differing sorts of community, what I shall refer to as governable
spaces, in which differing sorts of identities, forms of rule and territory come into play.
These sorts of community emerge from oil extraction, but the dynamics of petro-capitalism
and the oil complex contribute to, and are constitutive of, a deep crisis of secular
nationalist development. Imperial oil and its concessionary political economy can be read
as a sort of enclosure or dispossession and it is out of this development crisis in Nigeria
that particular senses of community are being constituted – with and through oil.

key words community governable space oil Nigeria rule identity nation

Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

email: mwatts@socrates.berkeley.edu

revised manuscript received 29 April 2004

We seek to recover the . . . life of the community, as
neither the ‘before’ nor the ‘after’ picture of any great
human transformation . . . We see ‘communities’ as
creatures with an extraordinary and actually . . . quite
sinister political life on the ground of real history. (Kelly
and Kaplan 2001, 199)
Every social community reproduced by the functioning
of institutions is imaginary: that is to say, it is based on
the projection of individual existence into the weft of
a collective narrative, on the recognition of a common
name, and on traditions lived as the trace of an
immemorial past (even when they have been fabricated
and inculcated in the recent past). (Balibar 1991, 93)
If anything was learned from the events of
September 11th 2001, it was surely the indisputable
power of community, Hegel’s ‘struggle for rec-
ognition’, in the modern life-world. Mr Bin Laden
and his cave men speak of community, a global
community no less, made in the name of Islam. In
their case it is a radically insurgent vision, at once
anti-imperialist, utopian, chiliastic and militant,
deploying symbolic materials derived from Muslim
canonical texts and ideological motifs of a dis-
tinctively modern provenance (vitalist and social
Darwinist ideas, organicist conceptions of culture,
a romantic and restorative sense of politics1).

Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 29 195–216 2004

ISSN 0020 -2754 © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2004
196
Al-Quaeda’s sense of revolutionary (jihadi) community
– a War of Movement against imperial powers –
operates, however, at a number of levels (Lubeck
2001). There is the community of the vanguard, of
a revolutionary Islamist cadre – Sayyid Qutb is its
theoretician par excellence (Ruthven 2003) – fighting
the ultimate war against jahiliya (impurity). But there
is also a hyper-nationalist community, expressed,
for example, in the desire to purify Saudi Arabia
and to reclaim it from its status as ‘an American
protectorate’ (Bin Laden in Jacquard 2002, 174).
And not least, there is the transcendental and
transnational community of Muslims, the global
ummah. What distinguishes each community – and
thereby places these radical forms of Islamism on
a wider landscape of politics expressed through
an apocalyptic ultra-conservative vision of ultimate
war and death – is that they are all premised on
‘a shared repertoire of vitalist notions that were
unavailable before the era of modernity’ (Al-Azmeh
2003, 36, emphasis added). What passes as con-
temporary forms of Islamist political community –
whether in malignant insurrectional revolutionary
forms of Islamic Jihad or as the benign building of
a Muslim civil society through religious charities
and schools – all belong to a modern world (Roy
1994). Their conditions of possibility are precisely
those of European fascism and revisionist Zionism.
What is striking about contemporary Islamist com-
munities, and the so-called return to Islam, is an
historical shallowness and the fact that each draws
from a modern lexicon of universally available
political ideas (Al-Azmeh 2003, 39; Mamdani 2004).
Islamist communities as modern political pro-
jections are, from this vantage point, not too far
removed from what, in a trans-Atlantic setting,
has been dubbed the ‘revival of community’ (the
language is taken from Adrian Oldfield in Citizenship
and community (1990), but see Habermas 1987;
Rutherford 1990; Young 1990; Walzer 1991; Nairn
1997). It has in fact spawned its own intellectual
movement and theory of justice (communitarian-
ism) standing in opposition to liberalism, libertari-
anism and cosmopolitanism (Thompson 1998).
Communitarians such as Charles Taylor (1989)
attack the liberal notion of self, and relatedly liberal
ideas of justice and citizenship, principally for
their purported hyper-individualism and its forms
of political obligation. The meaning and possibility
of justice or democracy turns, in this view, on the
identification of individuals with their community
and its values. In practice the reach and appeal of
Michael J Watts
community – as a theatre of governance, identity,
rule and performance – stretches far wider. In
the field of development theory and practice, the
much-touted call for ‘decentralized participation’
turns on the purported powers of self-governing
communities, what Bardhan cryptically calls
‘anarcho-communitarianism’ (1997, 45). Community-
based management has become the rallying call
of green politics, indeed is held as a prerequisite
for environmental sustainability. Anderson’s (1983)
foundational work on nationalism revealed how
central is the imagined political community to the
very idea of a modern nation-state. Community,
then, is constitutive of modern politics, a keyword
whose meaning turns on questions of membership,
shared meanings, identity and imagination. It has a
long and chequered history – and a certain romance
(Joseph 2002; Amit 2002).2
In Keywords, Raymond Williams’ famous medita-
tion on the subtle historical metamorphoses of the
English vocabulary, every word is distinguished
by a complexity of meaning which is inextricably
bound up with the problems it is being used to
discuss. Community – ‘that difficult word’ (1973, 23)
as he dryly noted – is an almost archetypal keyword
in the sense deployed by Williams: it is a ‘binding’
word which sutures certain activities and their
interpretation, and it is also what he calls an ‘indic-
ative’ word in certain forms of thought. Deployed
in the language for at least 500 years, community
has carried a range of senses denoting actual groups
(for example, commoners) and connoting specific
qualities of social relationship (as in communitas).
The complexity of community thus relates to the difficult
interaction between tendencies originally distinguished
in . . . historical development: on the one hand the sense
of direct common concerns; on the other the material-
ization of various forms of common organization, which
may or may not adequately express this . . . Community
can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an
existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive
word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What
is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other
terms of social organization . . . it never seems to be
used unfavorably, and never to be given any positive
opposing or distinguishing term. (Williams 1973, 76)
Community spoke to membership and identity in
which interests, property and shared meanings
were at issue. There were signs, however, from the
seventeenth century of a sort of rupture in its usage
– which was to become especially important with
the advent of capitalist industrialization – in
Antinomies of community
which community was felt to be more immediate
than society. By the nineteenth century, of course,
community was invoked as a way of theorizing
modernity itself. Community – and its sister
concepts of tradition and custom – stood in sharp
contrast to the more abstract, instrumental,
individuated and formal properties of state or
society in the modern sense. Tonnies (1887) and
Durkheim (1893) formalized this distinction but
a number of other theorists of modernity – Marx,
Weber, Simmel among them – to say nothing of a
long line of populist thinkers, provided an account
of the modern precisely in terms of what Williams
sees as central to the complexity of community: the
tensions between issues of direct common concern
and forms of common organization and sociability.
A comparable shift in usage in the twentieth
century was also noted by Williams in which com-
munity came to be invoked as a way of discussing
a particular sort or style of politics distinct from
the formal repertoires of national and local politics.
Here the reference is direct action, direct commu-
nity participation and organization embracing,
typically, a populist notion of working with and for
‘the people’. Much of what now passes for grass-
roots anti-development initiatives, or the new sorts
of anti-system or ant-globalization movements,
would fall within the circumference of this more
polemical notion of community (Mertes 2003; Esco-
bar 1995).3 In much of this work there is a tendency
to read community as an unalloyed ‘good’: to high-
light, to the exclusion of all else, the purportedly
ethical, moral and social virtues of the community.
The ‘warmly persuasive’ qualities of community
have an echo in the related notion of civil society –
understood as a complex and dynamic ensemble of
legally protected, self-organizing and self-reflexive
non-government organizations in tension with one
another and the state (Keane 1998, 6 –7 ) – which is
often seen as a realm of freedom, pluralism, partic-
ipation and reflexivity. Civil society – and community
– suffer from a sort of Manicheanism that afflicts
the state with coercion and society with freedom,
as ‘good living, warm and whole’ (Foucault 1988,
168).4 But, as John Keane notes of civil society, the
community is ‘plagued by endogenous sources of
incivility’ (1998, 135).
Community, in my account, pays fidelity to its
modern political usage and at the same time
locates community explicitly with respect to
modern capitalisms. Community is an expression
of modern rule (it is in the business of disciplining
197
the liberal subject) but it is simultaneously, as
Joseph (2002) puts it, a ‘supplement to capital’ (it is
in business). There is no simple genealogy to the
modern deployment of community. It provides a
common currency across the differing expressions
of modern justice as Nancy Fraser (see Fraser and
Honneth 2003) sees them: the egalitarian redistribu-
tive sense of justice on the one side (communities of
class or social strata) and the politics of recognition
or recognitive justice on the other (communities
of identity and difference). But throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries the idea of the
community was ‘a fundamental political institu-
tion within European colonial systems’ (Kelley
and Kaplan 2001, 5); as Pandey (2003) puts in his
discussion of India, community was constructed as
part of the construction of the modern. Community,
not just of the modern imagined nation (Anderson
1983) but all manner of local community, are ‘polit-
ical’ (Pandey) and ‘represented’ (Kelly and Kaplan)
communities to be read against the modern state,
the nation and history. Communities (as much as
the state!) demand visibility, legibility and enumer-
ation as a precondition for claims-making and
thereby entry into the modern. But what is incon-
testable is the multiplicity of forms and historical
circumstances under which community reappears
as a basis for participation in public affairs, civil
society and in the circuits of capital. At this historical
moment we are awash in communities, and the
‘self-governing community’ is one of the defining
articulations of neo-liberal rule (Schofield 2002).
Rose (1999) suggests that the community resur-
gence of the 1980s and 1990s in the transAtlantic
economies – from community policing to commu-
nity partnerships – cannot be grasped outside of
the collapse of socialism and the so-called neo-
liberal grandslam. Here a new generation of commu-
nities arise from the ashes of state withdrawal and
speak the name of civic renewal (Putnam (2000) is,
of course, its avatar). Whether and how such
communities can become something subversive –
what Foucault (1982) called the movements of
subjugated knowledges and their resurrections –
depends in part on how deeply the state and
capital have penetrated the trenches of civil society.
Communities are, therefore, bound up with the
modern but they are also complicit with capitalism
itself, and to the operations of the marketplace.
David Harvey (1987), for example, has made much
of the ways in which invented urban communities
predicated on lifestyle, culture or ethnicity produce
198
built environments (and hence are sources of
value) that simultaneously work against class
antagonisms and absorb some of the surplus pro-
duction generated by the circuits of urban capital-
ism. Miranda Joseph sees communities as shoring
up the flows of capital by in effect legitimating and
creating forms of hierarchy and difference that are
‘implicitly required but disavowed by capitalism
(2002, xxxii). This type of analysis can be at least
traced to Polanyi, who famously pointed out in
The origins of our time (1945) that markets cannot
create social order, indeed they can colonize and
ultimately destroy it. The market destroys the
social character of three foundational but ‘ficti-
tious’ commodities (land, labour and money); its
corrosive effects underwrite class-based communi-
ties such as Chartism, the cooperative movement
and Owenism, each is a reaction to the destructive
process of commodification (see Burawoy 2004).
Re-embedding of markets, or the reactions to dis-
embedding, produce forms of association that serve
to maintain capitalist accumulation (the civil soci-
ety counterweight to the anarchy of the market). Of
course, there is now an entire academic industry
that turns precisely on how the bridges and
bonds of community (DiMaggio 1994; Amsden 2001;
Granovetter 2001; Lin 2001) provide a system of
compliance, trust, sanction, sharing and cooperation
in such a way that communities become ‘essential
underpinnings of the incentives to economic effort’
(Storper 2004, 16). Variations in society–community
interaction constitute the framework – that is to say
‘institutional confidence, distributional arrange-
ments and coalitional behavior’ (Storper 2004, 36)
– within which differing forms of capitalist
accumulation operate (see Rodrik 2003).
It is a defining feature of modern capitalism
that its competitive and ceaseless search for
profitability unleashes periodic waves of ‘creative
destruction’, and round upon round of uneven
development, through which communities are both
destroyed and remade (Hart 2003). Marshall Berman’s
magisterial account of the relations between
modernization and modernity starts precisely from
the contradictory experiences of being modern, its
vitality promises ‘adventure, power, joy growth
and transformation of ourselves and the world’
and yet ‘threaten to destroy everything we have,
everything we know, everything we are’ (1982, 23).
Over the last two centuries much utopian populist
thinking – often but not always draped in nostalgia
for a community lost – can only be grasped as a
Michael J Watts
counterweight to the destructive consequences of
industrial capitalism and what passes as develop-
ment. Working-class communities, peasant systems
of common property management, the moral econ-
omy of Islamic schools and so on are crushed by
the unfettered powers of the market and yet these
self-same conditions of destruction provide a
fertile soil in which the search for alternatives can
take root and flourish. The unmaking and remak-
ing of community, whatever their cultural or social
content, and whatever their historical circum-
stances, must always address questions of repre-
sentation (how they represent themselves and
what forms of political representation they hold
to), forms of rule, means of internal discipline and
‘purity’, styles of imagination and their relation
to accumulation and the economy.
The construction of collective identities arises out of
broader practices of defining and delimiting com-
munities. As a rule . . . these dissolve internal different-
iations within any given collectivity in favor of a common
external demarcation . . . The spread of such claims
is only possible in communities where religious (or
traditional) norms and affiliations have become shaky
or uncertain. Surrogate constructions then offer magical
formulae that suggest hidden ways of belonging, delimit-
ing and persisting . . . Formulaic constructions of collective
identity have become a symptomatic signature of the
present. They are ubiquitous wherever societies, regard-
less of their actual differentiation, are transfigured
into seamless communities, and assured of continuity
by symbolic demarcation and fabrication of meaning.
(Niethammer 2003, 80 –3)
Within the maelstrom of capitalist modernity,
the possibilities for community are almost endless.
I seek to emphasize three relatively unexplored
facets of the geography of community and modern
rule: first, the fact that community-making can fail
(often dramatically) because they may be unimagined or
unimaginable; second, that communities typically
contain both reactionary and emancipatory tendencies;
and third, communities (with their attendant forms of
identity, rule and terrritorialization) can be produced
simultaneously at different spatial levels (scale politics)
and may work with and against one another in complex
and contradictory ways. This claim stands against the
communitarian presumption that individuals have
fidelity to only one community. This trio of pro-
cesses are the antinomies to which my title refers.
My task is to explore the antinomies of community
in a rather particular postcolonial state, namely
the oil nation called Nigeria. Oil states – sometimes
Antinomies of community
called petro-states (Karl 1997) – encompass
considerable variability from sparsely popu-
lated surplus producers in the Gulf States to
industrial semi-peripheries such as Venezuela
or Russia. But each stands in relation to a part-
icular sort of capitalism (what I shall call petro-
capitalism) in which a key resource (oil) and a logic
of extraction figure centrally in the making and
breaking of community. Abdelrahman Munif’s
(1989 1993a 1993b) magnificent trilogy Cities of salt
is a powerful fictional account of the destructive
consequences of oil in a Persian Kingdom from the
1930s and its substitution by other forms of mod-
ern community, not the least of which is a reconsti-
tuted royal monarch and a new nation called
Mooran. I want to pose the question: how are com-
munities imagined (or not), territorialized (or not),
identified (or not) and ruled (or not) at a multiplic-
ity of scales and in relation to a particular natural
resource, namely oil. Each community is imagined,
so to say, through and with oil – the communities
are ‘naturalized’ in relation to the effects, social,
environmental, political, of oil exploration and pro-
duction – but produces forms of rule and identity
that are often fragmented, unruly and violent.
The communities I address are, in a sense, all oil-
producing communities but of rather different
qualities: namely, the chieftainship as a local form
of customary community rule at the level of the
village or an ensemble of villages; the ethnic or
indigenous community; and the nation, or more
properly the nation-state known as Nigeria. And
standing at the heart of each community is a
fundamental contradiction – what I have glossed as
an antinomy – which, as I hope to show, provides a
friction between these communities, making them
operate at cross purposes with, I think, rather
devastating consequences.5 My argument, then,
runs something like this. Nigerian petro-capitalism
operates through a particular sort of ‘oil complex’
(a configuration of firm, state and community) that
is territorially constituted through oil concessions.
The presence, and activities, of the oil compa-
nies constitute a challenge to customary forms of
community authority, inter-ethnic relations, and
local state institutions principally through the
property and land disputes that are engendered,
and via forms of popular mobilization and agita-
tion to gain access to company rents and com-
pensation revenues, and the petro-revenues of
the Nigerian state largely through the creation
of regional and/or local state institutions. The oil
199
complex generates differing sorts of community,
what I shall refer to as governable spaces, in which
differing sorts of identities, forms of rule and terri-
tory come into play; in some cases generational
forces (youth in particular), in others the clan or
the kingdom or the ethnic minority (or indigenous
peoples), and in others the chiefly or governmental
authorities and the forces of the local state. These
sorts of community emerge from oil extraction, but
the dynamics of petro-capitalism and the oil com-
plex contribute to, and are constitutive of, a deep
crisis of secular nationalist development. Imperial
oil and its concessionary political economy can be
read as sort of enclosure or dispossession (Harvey
2003) that is both enormously violent and paradox-
ically the harbinger of a bankrupt postcolonial
modernization project. It is out of this development
crisis in Nigeria (at once a crisis of nation-building, of
accumulation and state legitimacy) that particular
senses of community are being constituted – with and
through oil. The oil community as such, however,
operates at a number of levels – it is multi-scalar – and
they often stand in opposition to one another. Some
powerful communities emerge in other words –
and the echo with Islamism is strong and resonant
here – from the wreckage, degeneracy and atrocities
of a sort of failed modernization constituted in some
profound way by imperial oil. Either way, these
communities are not in any simple sense, to return
to Williams, warmly persuasive; equally they are
not simply supplements to capital either.
My understanding of these communities draws
upon Foucauldian senses of rule. The first is the
relation between resources (things) and commu-
nities of rule; the second is the relation between terri-
tory, identity and community. The former has as its
reference point Foucault’s notion of governmental-
ity (see Gordon 1980; Foucault 1984 2000; Mitchell
2002; Joyce 2003) for whom it implies an expansive
way of thinking about governing and rule in rela-
tion to the exercise of modern power. Government
for Foucault referred famously to the ‘conduct of
conduct’, a more or less calculated and rational set
of ways of shaping conduct and of securing rule
through a multiplicity of authorities and agencies
in and outside of the state and at a variety of spa-
tial levels. In contrast to forms of pastoral power of
the Middle Ages from which a sense of sovereignty
was derived, Foucault charted an important histor-
ical shift, beginning in the sixteenth century, toward
government as a right manner of disposing things
‘so as to not lead to the common good . . . but to an
200
end that is convenient for each of the things governed’
(2000, 211). At the centre of government lay a complex
notion of the governance of things. As he put it:
On the contrary, in [the modern exercise of power],
you will notice that the definition of government in no
way refers to territory: one governs things. But what
does this mean? I think this is not a matter of opposing
things to men, but rather of showing that what govern-
ment has to do with is not territory but, rather, a sort of
complex composed of men and things. The things, in
this sense, with which government is to be concerned
are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their
imbrication with those things that are wealth, resources,
means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities,
climate, irrigation, fertility, and so on; men in their relation
to those other things that are customs, habits, ways of acting
and thinking and so on; and finally men in relation to those
still other things that might be accidents and misfortunes
such as famines, epidemics, death and so on . . . What
counts is essentially this complex of men and things;
property and territory are merely one of its variables.
(Foucault 2000 [1978], 208–9, emphasis added)
I want to explore the relations between men
and resources (the ‘imbrication’ of people and
the ‘specific qualities’ of oil in the Niger Delta).
The second idea makes use of Rose’s notion of
‘governable spaces’ and the idea that conduct is
constituted geographically:
Governmental thought territorializes itself in different
ways . . . We can analyze the ways in which the idea of
a territorially bounded, politically governed nation
state under sovereign authority took shape . . . One can
trace anomalous governmental histories of smaller-scale
territories . . . and one can also think of these [as] spaces
of enclosure that governmental thought has imagined
and penetrated . . . how [does it] happen that social
thought territorializes itself on the problem of [for
example] the slum in the nineteenth century? (Rose
1999, 34 –6)
The scales at which government is ‘territorialized’
– territory is derived from terra, land, but also
terrere, to frighten – are myriad: the factory, the
neighbourhood, the commune, the region, the
nation. Each of these governable spaces has its own
topology and is modelled as Rose (1999, 37) puts
it – through systems of cognition and remodelled
through government practice – in such a way that
demands how such topoi have emerged: the social
thought and practice that has territorialized itself
upon the nation, the city, the village or the factory.
The map has been central to this process as a mode
of objectification, marking and inscribing, but also
Michael J Watts
as ‘a little machine for producing conviction in
others’ (Rose 1999, 37). People and oil, and govern-
able spaces as political thought territorialized,
provide the twin pillars of the communities that
are emerging with great force and violence in
Nigeria. Of course, the communities I describe –
their imaginings and unimaginings, the discipline
and undiscipline, their order and disorder – are not
ideal-typical Foucauldian systems of governmen-
tality. They are in some respects failed, or incomplete
and deeply contradictory. These are precisely the
qualities that Chatterjee (2004) sees as characteristic
of the politics of the governed in the South.
Oil and empire
Blood may be thicker than water, but oil is thicker than
either. (Anderson 2001, 30)
The annals of oil are an uninterrupted chronicle
of naked aggression, genocide and the violent law
of the corporate frontier (Yergin 1991). Iraq was
born from this vile trinity. In their own way, the
awful spectacle of oil-men parading through the
corridors of the White House, the rise of militant
Islamism across the Q’uran belt and the carnage
on the road to Baghdad all bear out the dreadful
dialectics of blood and oil. Paul Wolfowitz’ recent
confession, to the Asian Security Summit in
Singapore in early June 2003, that the Iraq war
could not be grasped outside of the ‘simple
fact’ that the ‘country swims on a sea of oil’6
is consistent at least with the last 80 years of US
foreign policy (Painter 1986). But there is another
oil story in train, bearing all the hallmarks of the
long, ugly history of petrolic violence. Two years
ago Vice President Dick Cheney predicted that
Africa would become the fastest growing source of
oil for the American market (as much as 25% of US
imports by 2015) and it is hardly a surprise to learn
that where oil reigns supreme, the military are sure
to follow. The Wall Street Journal reported several
weeks ago that the Pentagon, in the most radical
deployment of American forces since the end of
the Cold War, will move troops from Germany to
the Caucasus and West Africa to ‘protect key oil
reserves’.7 Protection demands, of course, keeping
the oil flowing by working hand-in-hand with a
phalanx of African dictators and political psychopaths
on the one side, and supermajors like ExxonMobil
and ChevronTexaco on the other, who, citing
confidentiality agreements, refuse to disclose the fees,
Antinomies of community
royalties and other services (paramilitaries and
security forces among them) made to the phalanxes
of well-placed African nomenklatura. In the last year
a raft of new reports inventory the appalling record
of oil-based economies in relation to corruption,
economic growth and poverty alleviation.8 Oil, as
Anderson says, is thicker than blood or water.
The thickness of oil made itself visible in Niger
long before the events of September 11th 2001. The
US Department of State in its annual encyclopaedia
of ‘global terrorism’ identified the Niger Delta –
the ground zero of oil production in Nigeria – as a
breeding ground for increasingly militant ‘impov-
erished ethnic groups’ for whom terrorist acts
(abduction, hostage taking, kidnapping and extra-
judicial killings) against foreigners were legion.9
At this time, Nigeria – the 13th largest producer of
petroleum which provides 80% of government
revenues, 95% of export receipts, and 90% of for-
eign exchange earnings – was providing almost
14% of US American petroleum consumption. 10
At about the same time, the Petroleum Finance
Company (PFC) presented to the US Congressional
International Relations Committee Sub-Committee
on Africa a report of the strategic and growing
security significance of West African oil whose
high quality reserves and low cost output – cou-
pled with massive new deepwater discoveries –
required, in the view of PFC, serious attention, and
substantial foreign investment. In the wake of
the Al-Quaeda attacks, and on the larger canvas of
the crisis in Venezuela and the Iraq war, West
Africa has emerged as the site of ‘the new Gulf oil
states’ (Servant, Le Monde diplomatique, January
13th 2003). Indeed by January 2002 the Institute for
Advanced Strategic and Political Studies was pro-
viding a forum for the Bush oil-administration to
declare that African oil is ‘a priority for US national
security’.11 In the last year, Africa’s black gold – in
Gabon, Sao Tome, Angola, Equatorial Guinea –
and its ugly footprint are rarely off the front pages.
Oil and blood flow together (Anderson 2000).
The mythos of oil and oil-wealth has been of
course central to the history of modern industrial
capitalism. But in Nigeria, as elsewhere, it has
ushered in a miserable, undisciplined, decrepit
and corrupt form of ‘petro-capitalism’. After a half
century of oil production, from which almost
US$400 billion in oil revenues have flowed directly
into the Federal exchequer (and perhaps US$50
billion promptly flowed out only to ‘disappear’
overseas), Nigerian per capita income stands at
201
US$290 per year. For the majority of Nigerians
living standards are no better now than at inde-
pendence in 1960. A repugnant culture of excessive
venality and profiteering among the political class
– the Department of State has an entire website
devoted to so-called 419 fraud cases – confers upon
Nigeria the dubious honour of sitting atop Trans-
parency International’s ranking of most corrupt
states. Paradoxically, oil-producing states in the
federation – the Niger Delta – have benefited the
least from oil wealth. Devastated by the ecological
costs of oil spillage and the highest gas flaring rates
in the world, the Niger Delta is a political tinderbox.
A generation of militant ‘restive’ youth, deep political
frustrations among oil-producing communities and
pre-electoral thuggery all combine to prosper in
the rich soil of political marginalization. Since early
2003, mounting communal violence, accounting for
at least 50 deaths, and the levelling of eight commu-
nities in and around the Warri petroleum complex
has prompted all the major oil companies to with-
draw staff, to close down operations and reduce output
by over 750 000 barrels per day (almost half of national
output). President Obasanjo has dispatched large
troop deployments to the oil-producing creeks,
prompting Ijaw militants, incensed over illegal
oil bunkering in which the security forces were
implicated and indiscriminate military action, to
threaten the detonation of 11 captured oil installa-
tions. The strikes on the off-shore oil platforms – a
long festering sore that rarely reaches the media –
were quickly resolved but nobody seriously expects
that the deeper problems within the oil sector will
go away. In fact, the Niger Delta stands at the con-
fluence of the four most pressing political issues in
the federation. First, the efforts led by a number of
Delta states for ‘resource control,’ or expanded local
access to oil and oil revenues. Second, the struggle
for self-determination of minority people and the cla-
mour for a sovereign national conference to rewrite
the federal constitution. Third, a crisis of rule in the
region as a number of state and local governments
are rendered largely ungovernable by militant youth
movements, the rise in intra-community and state
violence, and the rise of warlordism and political
militias. And not least, the emergence of what is
called a South–South Alliance linking the hitherto
excluded oil-producing states in a bulwark against
the ethnic majorities (the Hausa, Yoruba and Ibo)
that have dominated Nigerian postcolonial politics
since 1960. Against the backdrop of post 9/11 geo-
politics and new US troop deployments to the West
202
African Gulf States, there are those who believe that
Nigeria is another Colombia in the making.12
Imperial oil and communities of violence
in Nigeria
The ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony is characterized
by the combination of force and consent, in variable
equilibrium, without force predominating too much
over consent . . . [But] between force and consent stands
corruption-fraud, that is the enervation and paralyz-
ing of the antagonist or antagonists. (Gramsci, Prison
Writings, 1975, Volume III, 1638 cited in Anderson 2002)
The strategic significance of Nigeria is incontest-
able. One of every five Africans is a Nigerian,
Nigeria is the world’s seventh largest exporter of
petroleum and a key player in African regional
security, most recently in Sierra Leone. Nigeria is,
of course, an archetypal oil nation. Three-quarters
of government revenues, and almost all export
earnings, flow from black gold (Figure 1). A long-
time member of OPEC, and the fifth largest
supplier of oil exports to the US, Nigeria pumps oil
much coveted for its ‘lightness’ and ‘sweetness’,
yielding more gasoline and diesel than the ‘sour’
crude from the Middle East. Crude oil production
currently runs at over 2 million barrels per day.
The heart of Nigerian oil resides in the Niger Delta.
One of the great deltaic regions in the world, the
Figure 1 Oil and the Nigerian economy, 1965 –2000
Sources: Salai-i-Martin and Subramanian (2003), IMF Nigeria Statistical Appendix (2003), Frynas (2000),
Central Bank of Nigeria, Annual Reports 1995 –2000
Michael J Watts
delta is a vast sedimentary basin constructed over
time through successive thick layers of sediments
dating back 40 –50 million years to the Eocene
epoch. An immense coastal plain covering almost
70 000 square kilometres, its geographical perimeter
extends from the Benin River in the west to the Imo
River in the east and from the southernmost tip at
Palm Point near Akassa to Aboh in the north,
where the Niger River bifurcates into its two main
tributaries. A classic arcuate delta, the Niger Delta
is also endowed with very substantial hydrocarbon
deposits. The onset of commercial petroleum
production in 1956 in the heart of the Delta –
discovered in Oloibiri in current Baylesa State
– seemed to hold out the promise of rapid
development for the ethnic minorities. But the
presence of the transnational oil companies in joint
ventures with the Nigerian State (the Nigerian
National Petroleum Company [NNPC]) instead
produced enormous environmental despoliation
and a crisis of forms of traditional livelihood. By
the 1970s and 1980s, a number of ethnic communities
had begun to mobilize against the so-called ‘slick
alliance’ of oil companies and the Nigerian military.
The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni
People (MOSOP), led by Ken Saro-Wiwa, challenged
Shell for its environmental despoliation and human
rights violations and the Nigerian state for its
unjust control of ‘their oil’. Saro-Wiwa and the
Antinomies of community
Figure 2 The oil complex
MOSOP leadership were hung by the Nigerian
military in 1995, but since that time the Niger Delta
has become a zone of intense conflict, as more
oil-producing minorities (the Adoni, the Itsekiri,
the Ijaw, for example) clamour for compensation
and for the recognition of their claims for resource
control.
I want to make three fundamental points about
oil in Nigeria (see Obi 2001; Watts 2000; Khan 1994;
Forrest 1995). The first is that oil capitalism oper-
ates through what I call an oil complex (with
a broadly similar structure in say Venezuela or
Gabon or Indonesia) (Figure 2). It is composed of
several key elements, including a statutory monop-
oly over mineral exploitation (the 1969 Petroleum
Law, Decree 13 in 1970, the Land Use Decree of
1978), a nationalized oil company (NNPC) that
operates through joint ventures with oil majors
who are granted territorial concessions (blocs), the
security apparatuses of the state (and the private
security forces of the companies) to ensure that
costly investments are secured, the oil-producing
communities themselves within whose customary
jurisdiction the wells are located, and a political
mechanism by which federal oil revenues are dis-
tributed to the states (Figure 3) and to key actors.
In respect to the latter, there are four means by
which this is effected: a federal account (rents
appropriated directly by the federal state), a state
203
derivation principle (the right of each state to
a proportion of the taxes that its inhabitants are
assumed to have contributed to the federal excheq-
uer), the Federation Account (or States Joint
Account) which allocates revenue to the states
on the basis of need, population and other criteria,
and a Special Grants Account (which includes
monies designated directly for the Niger Delta,
for example the Oil Mineral Producing Areas
Development Commission [OMPADEC] established
in 1992). Over time the derivation revenues have
fallen (and thereby revenues directly controlled
by the oil-rich Delta states have shrivelled13) and
the States Joint Account has grown vastly. In
short, there has been a process of radical fiscal
centralism.
The second is that the dynamics of the oil com-
plex shapes the character and dynamics of Niger-
ian development. Oil is, of course, a biophysical; it
is also a commodity that enters the market with its
price tag, and as such is the bearer of particular
relations of production. And, not least, oil harbours
fetishistic qualities: it is the bearer of meanings,
hopes, expectations of unimaginable powers. Oil is
a constant reference point in the popular Nigerian
imagination (see Watts 1985). And third, Nigerian
petro-capitalism contains a sort of double-
movement, a contradictory unity of capitalism and
modernity captured in the fact that oil production
204 Michael J Watts

Figure 3 Oil revenue flows: Nigeria 2004

Sources: IMF Statistical Appendix (2003), Ahmed and Singh (2003)

in Nigeria has always been a joint venture, currently
with 14 transnational companies, in which joint
operating agreements determine the distribution of
royalties and rents. On the one hand, oil has been a
centralizing force that has rendered the state more
visible and globalized, underwriting a process of
secular nationalism and state building. On the other,
oil-led development, driven by an unremitting political
logic of ethnic claims making, has fragmented and
discredited the state and its forms of governance. It
produced a set of conditions that have compromised
and undermined the very tenets of the modern nation-
state. In short, one might say that this double
movement is encapsulated as the tension between
fiscal centralism and political dispersion and weak
citizenship. Coronil refers to this conundrum as
‘the Faustian trade of money for modernity,’ which
in Venezuela brought ‘the illusion of development’
(1997, 389). In Nigeria, too, the double movement
brought spectacle and illusion, but it also produced
forms of governable spaces that sit uneasily with
the very idea of Nigeria; spaces that generated
Antinomies of community
forms of rule, conduct and imagining at cross
purposes with one another, antithetical to the very
idea of a coherent modern nation-state that oil,
in the mythos of the West at least, represented.
How then can one grasp the imagination, cre-
ation and destruction of communities as governable
spaces in and through the oil complex and petro-
capitalism?
Community as the space of chieftainship
Nembe community in Bayelsa State stands at the
originary point of Nigerian oil production. In the
1950s, the Tennessee Oil Company (a US company)
began oil explorations there, but oil was not found
until much later when Shell D’Arcy unearthed the
Oloibiri oil field in Ogbia. Subsequent explorations
led to the opening of the large and rich Nembe oil
fields near the coast in Okpoama and Twon-Brass
axis. Currently, the four Nembe oil fields produce
approximately 150 000 barrels of high quality pet-
roleum through joint operating agreements between
the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC),
and AGIP and Shell. If Nembe is the ground zero
of oil production, it is also a theatre of extraordinary
violence and intra-community conflict, the result of
intense competition over political turf and the control
of rents from the oil industry. The violence can be
traced back to the late 1980s, when the Nembe
Council of Chiefs acquired power from then King,
Justice Alagoa Mingi IX, to negotiate royalties
and other benefits with the oil companies. The
combination of youth-driven violence and intense
political competition has transformed Nembe’s
customary system of governance and set the stage
for further challenges to the traditional authority
of chieftainship (see Kemedi 2000; HRW 2002).14
Oil became commercially viable in the 1970s, but
to grasp its transformative effects on Nembe politics
and community – that is to its genesis as a distinc-
tive governable space – requires an understanding
of customary rule and chieftainship in the Delta.
Indirect rule in the colonial period certainly left
much of the Niger Delta marginalized and isolated,
but it also, in the name of tradition, built upon and
frequently invented chiefly powers of local rule
which in the Nembe case were grafted onto a deep
and complex structure of kingship and geronto-
cratic rule. To understand the dynamics of Nembe
as a governable space, recall that land lay in the
hands of customary authorities (notwithstanding
the fact that the 1969 Petroleum Law granted the
state the power to nationalize all oil resources).
205
Land rights and therefore claims on oil royalties
were from the outset rooted in the amayanabo (king),
and derivatively the subordinate powers, namely
the Council of Chiefs, and the Executive Council.
Historically, the Nembe community possessed a
rigid political hierarchy consisting of the amayanabo
presiding over, in descending order, the Chiefs (or
heads of the war canoe houses15) elected by the
entire war canoe houses constituted by their prom-
inent sons. Although the Chiefs were subservient
to the amayanabo, they acted as his closest advisers,
supported the amayanabo in the event of military
threat and in turn were responsible for electing the
amayanabo from the Mingi group of Houses, that
is to say from the royal line. The current Nembe
Council of Chiefs is the assemblage of the recog-
nized Chiefs of Nembe ‘chalked’ by the King.
By the late 1980s, a popular sense of malaise and
frustration coloured Mingi rule. Accordingly, the
Nembe monarch’s ineffectiveness in dealing with
the oil companies led to a radical decentralization
of his powers to the Council of Chiefs in 1991,
headed by Chief Egi Adukpo Ikata. Insofar as the
Council now dealt directly with Shell, and handled
large quantities of money paid by the oil compa-
nies, competition for election to the Council was
intensified as various political factions struggled
for office. By 2000 the Council had expanded from
26 to 90 persons. Coeval with the evisceration of
kingly powers, the deepening of the Council man-
date and the expansion of the Council members
was a subtle process of ‘youth mobilization’. In
an age-graded society like the Nembe Ijaw, youth
refers to a person typically between their teens and
early forties who, whatever achievements they may
have obtained (university degrees, fatherhood and
so on), remain subservient to their elders. Central to
any understanding of the emergence of a militant
youth in Nembe town was the catalytic role played
by a former company engineer with Elf Oil Company
named Mr Nimi B.P. Barigha-Amage. He deployed
his knowledge of the oil industry to organize the
youth of the Nembe community into a force capable
of extracting concessions from the oil companies,
in essence by converting cultural organization into
providers of protection services. Chief Ikata was
quick to exploit the awareness and restiveness of
the youth to pressure Shell into granting com-
munity entitlements. A pact between Chief Ikata
and the young engineer was in effect instituted:
the engineer supplied the youth with information
regarding community entitlements, and the Chief
206
deployed his knowledge of military logistics to
organize the shutting down of flow stations, the
seizure of equipment and sabotage (Alagoa 2001;
HRW 2002).
Armed with insider knowledge of the companies
and an understanding of a loosely defined set of
rules regarding company compensation for infringe-
ments on community property, Barigha-Amage
pushed for the creation of youth ‘cultural groups’
who gradually, with the support of some members
of the Council of Chiefs, intermediated with oil
companies and their liaison officers, and manipu-
lated the system of compensation in the context of
considerable juridical and legal ambiguity. Liaison
officers, colluding with community representa-
tives, were able to invent ritual or cultural sites
that had ostensibly been compromised or damaged
by oil operations, for which monies exchanged
hands. As the opportunities for appropriating
company resources in the name of compensation
became visible through the success of the cultural
groups, other sections of the youth community
began to organize in turn around clan and familial
affiliations. In 1994, for example, a group called
‘House of Lords’ (Isongoforo) was created by a
former university lecturer Lionel Jonathan, and a
year later in 1995 Mrs Ituro-Garuba, wife of a well-
placed military officer, established Agbara-foro.
Inevitably, with much at stake financially, and con-
trol of the space between community and company
in the balance, conflicts within and among youth
groups proliferated and deepened. In turn, grow-
ing community militancy spilled over into often
violent altercations with the much-detested mobile
police (‘Mopos’) and local government authorities.
The regional state and Governor attempted to
intervene as conditions deteriorated, but a govern-
ment report, on which such action was predicated,
was never released for political reasons. A subse-
quent banning of youth groups had, as a result, no
practical effect (HRW 2002).
Slowly, the subversion of royal authority, the
strategic alliances between youth and Chiefs, and
the growing (and armed) conflict between youth
groups for access to Shell resulted in the ascend-
ancy of a highly militant Isongoforo. In an environ-
ment of rampant insecurity and lawlessness,
occupation and closure of flow stations, and ten-
sions between the companies, the service compa-
nies and local security forces, Isongoforo were
provided ‘stand by’ payments by the companies,
that is to say hired for protection purposes, and at
Michael J Watts
the same time colluded with the community liaison
officers to invent compensation cases. Isongoforo
occupied the centre of a new governable space
which they ruled through force rather than any
sense of consent or customary authority. These
vigilantes were funded by the large quantities of
monies that they commanded from the compa-
nies, and by the arms they controlled. This volatile
state of affairs collapsed dramatically as local
resentments and struggles proliferated. In February
2000 a ‘Peoples Revolution’ overthrew Isongoforo,
ostensibly precipitated by the humiliation of the
Council of Chiefs at the hands of Shell (backed
by the intimidating Isongoforo forces). The Chiefs
now orchestrated the occupation of flow stations
and undermined the powers of Isongoforo by
recruiting and supporting other youth groups. By
May 2000 Isongoforo had been sent into exile, but
they were promptly replaced in the wake of the
return of Barigha-Amage as High Chief of Nembe
by his own ‘cultural group’ Isenasawo/Teme. Teme
instituted a rule of terror and chaos far worse than
their predecessors. It too proved unstable in the
context of excessive youth mobilization and split
into two factions that resulted in a counter coup
and much bloodshed. A government Peace
Commission was established in January 2001 in a
desperate effort to bring peace to one of the jewels
in the oil-producing crown (Alagoa 2001).
Much of this later violence (after 1996) was
largely unregulable by the state authorities because
of its concurrence with the 1999 elections in which
some of the key youth leaders were expected to
deliver votes for the incumbent gubernatorial
race. In the creation of what in effect was a sort
of vigilante rule, there were complex complicities
between Chiefs, youth groups, local security forces
and the companies. The occupation of oil flow sta-
tions (for purposes of extortion) were often known
in advance and involved collaboration with local
company engineers; the youth were de facto com-
pany employees providing protection services, and
local compensation and community officers of
Shell and Agip produced fraudulent compensation
cases and entitlements. Nembe, a town with its
own long and illustrious history and politics, had
become a sort of company town in which authority
had shifted from the King to warring factions of
youth who were in varying ways in the pay of, and
working in conjunction with, the companies. The
Council of Chiefs stood in a contradictory position
seeking to maintain control over revenues from the
Antinomies of community
companies and yet intimidated and undermined by
the militant youth groups on whom they depended.
What I have described is the radical displace-
ment of a specific form of customary authority
(chieftainship) through the creation of a governable
space of civic vigilantism, a sort of thickening
of civil society, but not of the sort that Putnam
(2000) might endorse. Civic powers have expanded
by overthrowing a gerontocratic royal order.
Youth mobilization – whose political affiliations
and ambitions in any case were complex, reflecting
an unstable amalgam of clan, family and local elec-
toral loyalties – had thrown up a revolutionary
identity and subject, representing an unholy
alliance between civic organizations (presenting
themselves as cultural organizations) and private
companies. Community rule in Nembe is a realm
of privatized violence. In the context of a weak and
corrupt state, the genesis of this power-nexus bears
striking resemblances to the genesis of the Mafia of
nineteenth-century Sicily (Blok 1974).
Community as the space of indigeneity
The Niger Delta is a region of considerable, perhaps
one should say bewildering, ethno-linguistic com-
plexity. The eastern region, of which the Delta is
part, is dominated statistically by the Ibo majority,
but there is a long history of excluded ethnic min-
orities in the Delta dating back at least to the 1950s
when the Willinck Commission took note of the
inter-ethnic complexity of the region. Throughout
the colonial period prior to the arrival of com-
mercial oil production, there had been efforts by
various minorities, who saw themselves as dominated
by the Ibo, to established Native Authorities of
their own. In the 1960s, prior to the outbreak of
civil war, two charismatic local figures, both Ijaw –
Nottingham Dick and Isaac Boro – declared a Delta
Republic, a desperate cry for some sort of political
inclusion that lasted a mere 12 days. Isaac Boro and
the ill-fated Delta Peoples Republic in 1966 was the
forerunner of what is now a prairie fire of ethnic
mobilization by the historically excluded minorities
– now tagged as ‘indigenous’ in order to capture the
political and legal legitimacy conferred by the Inter-
national Labor Organization of the United Nations
(ILO169) (see Nelson 1999). The paradigmatic case
in the Delta is the struggle by Ken Saro-Wiwa and
the Ogoni/MOSOP. I shall concentrate here on
their case simply as a way of revealing a rather
different sort of governable space, one marked by
ethnic subjects and indigenous territory (Li 1996).
207
The Ogoni are typically seen as a distinct ethnic
group, consisting of three sub-groups and six clans
dotted over 404 square miles of creeks, waterways
and tropical forest in the northeast fringes of
the Niger Delta. Located administratively in Rivers
State, a Louisiana-like territory of some 50 000
square kilometres, Ogoniland is one of the most
heavily populated zones in all of Africa. Indeed,
the most densely settled areas of Ogoniland – over
1500 persons per square kilometre – are the sites of
the largest wells. Its customary productive base
was provided by fishing and agricultural pursuits
until the discovery of petroleum, including the huge
Bomu field, immediately prior to Independence.
Part of an enormously complex regional ethnic
mosaic, the Ogoni were drawn into internecine
conflicts within the Delta region, largely as a conse-
quence of the slave trade and its aftermath, in the
period prior to the arrival of colonial forces at Kono
in 1901. The Ogoni resisted the British until 1908
(Naanen 1995) but thereafter were left to stagnate
as part of the Opopo Division within Calabar
Province. As Ogoniland was gradually incorporated
during the 1930s, the clamour for a separate polit-
ical division grew at the hands of the first pan-
Ogoni organization, the Ogoni Central Union,
which bore fruit with the establishment of the
Ogoni Native Authority in 1947. In 1951, however, the
authority was forcibly integrated into the Eastern
Region. Experiencing tremendous neglect and
discrimination, integration raised longstanding
fears among the Ogoni of Ibo domination.16 Polit-
ically marginalized and economically neglected, the
Delta minorities feared the growing secessionist
rhetoric of the Ibo and consequently led an ill-fated
secession of their own in February 1966. Ogoni
antipathy to what they saw as a sort of internal
colonialism at the hands of the Ibo continued in
their support of the federal forces during the civil
war. While a Rivers State was established in 1967 –
which compensated in some measure for enormous
Ogoni losses during the war – the new state recap-
itulated in microcosm the larger ‘national ques-
tion’. The new Rivers State was multi-ethnic but
presided over by the locally dominant Ijaw, for
whom the minorities felt little but contempt.17
During the first oil boom of the 1970s, Ogoni-
land’s 56 wells accounted for almost 15 per cent
of Nigerian oil production18 and in the past three
decades an estimated US$30 billion in petroleum
revenues have flowed from this Lilliputian territory.
It was, as local opinion had it, ‘Nigeria’s Kuwait’.
208
Yet, according to a government commission,
Oloibiri, where the first oil was pumped in 1958,
has not a single kilometre of all-season road and
remains ‘one of the most backward areas in the
country’ (cited in Furro 1992, 282; see also Douglas
and Okonta 2001). Rivers State saw its federal allo-
cation fall dramatically in absolute and relative
terms. At the height of the oil boom, 60 per cent of
oil production came from Rivers State, but it
received only 5 per cent of the statutory allocation
(roughly half of that received by Kano, Northeast-
ern States and the Ibo heartland, East Central
State). Between 1970 and 1980 it received in rev-
enues one-fiftieth of the value of the oil it produced.
Few Ogoni households have electricity, there is one
doctor per 100 000 people, child mortality rates are
the highest in the nation, unemployment is 85 per
cent, 80 per cent of the population is illiterate and
close to half of Ogoni youth have left the region in
search of work. Life expectancy is barely 50 years,
substantially below the national average. If Ogoni-
land failed to see the material benefits from oil,
what it did experience was an ecological disaster –
what the European Parliament has called ‘an envi-
ronmental nightmare’. The heart of the ecological
harms stem from oil spills – either from the pipe-
lines which criss-cross Ogoniland (often passing
directly through villages) or from blow outs at the
wellheads – and gas flaring. As regards the latter, a
staggering 76 per cent of the natural gas in the oil-
producing areas is flared (compared to 0.6% in the
US). As a visiting environmentalist noted in 1993 in
the Delta, ‘some children have never known a dark
night even though they have no electricity’ (Village
Voice 21 November 1995, 21). Burning 24 hours per
day at temperatures of 13 000 –14 000°C, Nigerian
natural gas produces 35 million tons of CO2 and 12
million tons of methane, more than the rest of the
world (and rendering Nigeria probably the biggest
single cause of global warming). The oil spillage
record is even worse. There are roughly 300 spills
per year in the Delta and in the 1970s alone the
spillage was four times that of the much-publicized
Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. In one year alone
almost 700 000 barrels were spilled according to a
government commission. Ogoniland itself suffered
111 spills between 1985 and 1994 (Hammer 1996,
61). Figures provided by the NNPC document 2676
spills between 1976 and 1990, 59 per cent of which
occurred in Rivers State (Ikein 1990, 171), 38 per
cent of which was due to equipment malfunction.19
Between 1982 and 1992 Shell alone accounted for
Michael J Watts
1.6 million gallons of spilled oil, 37 per cent of the
company’s spills worldwide. The consequences of
flaring, spillage and waste for Ogoni fisheries and
farming have been devastating. Two independent
studies completed in 1997 reveal total petroleum
hydrocarbons in Ogoni streams at 360 and 680
times the European Community permissible levels
(HRW 1999).
The hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni
nine in November 1995 – accused of murdering four
prominent Ogoni leaders – and the subsequent
arrest of 19 others on treason charges, represented
the summit of a process of mass mobilization and
radical militancy which had commenced in 1989.
The civil war had, as I have previously suggested,
hardened the sense of external dominance among
Ogonis. A ‘supreme cultural organization’ called
Kagote, which consisted largely of traditional rulers
and high ranking functionaries, was established
at the war’s end and in turn gave birth in 1990 to
MOSOP. A new strategic phase began in 1989 with
a programme of mass action and passive resistance
on the one hand and a renewed effort to focus on
the environmental consequences of oil (and Shell’s
role in particular) and on group rights within the
federal structure. Animating the entire struggle was,
in Leton’s words, the ‘genocide being committed
in the dying years of the twentieth century by
multinational companies under the supervision
of the Government’ (cited in Naanen 1995, 66). A
watershed moment in MOSOP’s history was the
drafting in 1990 of an Ogoni Bill of Rights (Saro-
Wiwa 1992). Documenting a history of neglect and
local misery, the Ogoni Bill took head on the ques-
tion of Nigerian federalism and minority rights.
Calling for participation in the affairs of the repub-
lic as ‘a distinct and separate entity’, the Bill out-
lined a plan for autonomy and self-determination
in which there would be guaranteed ‘political
control of Ogoni affairs by Ogoni people . . . the
right to control and use a fair proportion of Ogoni
economic resources . . . [and] adequate representa-
tion as of right in all Nigerian national institutions’
(Saro-Wiwa 1992, 11). In short, the Bill of Rights
addressed the question of the unit to which rev-
enues should be allocated – and derivatively the
rights of minorities (HRW 1999; Okonta 2002).
In spite of the remarkable history of MOSOP
between 1990 and 1996, its ability to represent itself
as a unified pan-Ogoni organization – as a community
– remained an open question. There is no pan-
Ogoni myth of origin (characteristic of some Delta
Antinomies of community
minorities), and a number of the Ogoni subgroups
engender stronger local loyalties than any affilia-
tion to Ogoni nationalism. The Eleme sub-group
has even argued, on occasion, that they are not
Ogoni. Furthermore, the MOSOP leaders were
actively opposed by elements of the traditional
clan leadership, by prominent leaders and civil
servants in state government, and by some critics
who felt Saro-Wiwa was out to gain ‘cheap popu-
larity’ (Osaghae 1995, 334). And not least, the youth
wing of MOSOP, which Saro-Wiwa had made use
of in his own rise to power, which the leadership
were often incapable of controlling. What Saro-
Wiwa did was to build upon over 50 years of Ogoni
organizing and upon three decades of resentment
against the oil companies, to provide a mass base
and a youth-driven radicalism – and it must be said
an international visibility – capable of challenging
state power. Yet at its core the indigenous subject –
and the indigenous space – was contentious
and problematic. Ike Okonta (2002) has brilliantly
shown how, in the Ogoni case, it unravelled, shat-
tering into the shards of class, clan, generation and
gender. In short, community unimagined.
What sort of articulation of community – as
indigenous identity and political subjectivity – did
Saro-Wiwa pose? What sort of governable space
did it represent? It was clearly one in which terri-
tory and oil were the building blocks upon which
ethnic difference and indigenous rights were con-
structed. And yet it was an unstable and contradic-
tory sort of articulation. First, there was no simple
sense of Ogoni-ness, no unproblematic unity and
no singular form of political subject (despite Saro-
Wiwa’s ridiculous claim that 98% of the Ogoni
supported him). MOSOP itself had at least five
somewhat independent internal strands embrac-
ing youth, women, traditional rulers, teachers and
Churches. It represented fractious and increasingly
divided ‘we’, as the open splits and conflicts
between Saro-Wiwa and other elite Ogoni confirm
(Ogoni Crisis 1996).20 Second, Saro-Wiwa con-
stantly invoked the centrality of Ogoni culture and
tradition for the MOSOP project yet paradoxically
he also argued that war and internecine conflict
had virtually destroyed the fabric of Ogoni society
by 1900 (1992, 14). His own utopia, then, rested on
the re-creation of Ogoni culture and suffered like
all ur-histories from a somewhat mythical invoca-
tion of the past. Third, ethnicity was the central
problem of postcolonial Nigeria – the corruption of
ethnic majorities – and for Saro-Wiwa its panacea
209
(the multiplication of ethnic minority power). To
invoke the history of exclusion and the need not
simply for ethnic minority inclusion as the basis for
federalism, led Saro-Wiwa to ignore the histories
and geographies of conflict and struggle among
and between ethnic minorities. And the narrative
of Ogoni exclusion and internal colonialism proved
also to be partial, not least with respect to other ethnic
minorities in the Delta. Compared to many Delta
minorities, the Ogoni have fared well (with 12%
of Rivers State population, the Ogoni accounted for
one-third of the state’s commissioners). The Ogoni
produce no Rivers State oil currently; two other
small minorities with no political representation
account for 68 per cent.
Paradoxically Ogoni/MOSOP surfaced as a
foundational indigenous movement even though
its significance as an oil-producing region was
diminishing. By the late 1990s, moreover, as a
movement it had fallen apart and inter-group
struggles deprived it of much of its previous
momentum and visibility. Who might say that
Ogoni as a community was imagined and partly
unimagined in the course of its rapid ascendancy
on the world political screen. But it gave birth to
what one might call many Ogonis, as indigenous
movements among oil-producing communities have
proliferated. The same forces have spawned a
raft of self-determination indigenous movements
among the Ijaw (INC, IYV), Isoko (IDU), Urhobo
(UPU), Itsekiri (INP), Ogbia (MORETO), among
others (Obi 2001). MOSOP itself fell apart precisely
as these other movements gained power. Since the
return to civilian rule in 1999 there has been a rash
of such minority movements across the Delta calling
for ‘resource control’, autonomy and a national
sovereign conference to rewrite the Nigerian
constitution. At the same time, the Delta has become
ever more engulfed in civil strife: militant occupa-
tions of oil flow stations, pipeline sabotage,
intra-urban ethnic violence and, of course, the near-
anarchy of state security operating in tandem with
company security forces. The shock troops of many
of these indigenous movements are the youth, and
the multiplication of ethnic youth movements is
one of the most important political developments
in contemporary Nigeria. And it is here that the
politics of oil-producing communities meets up with
the politics of oil-producing indigenous groups.
The emergence of a national debate in Nigeria
over resource control in the late 1990s is precisely a
product of indigenous claims-making on the state,
210
a process by which ethnic communities must be
discursively and politically produced. The Ogoni
case shows that there is no pre-given ethnic identity
but complex and unstable genealogical histories
of identification that have emerged in the last
century. The indigene has to be made – interpo-
lated – around a strong sense of territory and in the
context of cultural, economic and political hetero-
geneity. In Foucauldian terms this was achieved
through an imbrication of things and people, oil
and ethnicity, and it has been generative of a pro-
fusion of indigenous communities not de novo but
as newly politicized, in which particular cultural
identifications have hardened and solidified. Indi-
geneity has in this sense unleashed the huge polit-
ical energies of ethnic minorities who recapitulate
in some respects the postcolonial history of spoils
politics in Nigeria. The effect of this multi-ethnic
mobilization was the production of political and
civic organizations and new forms of governable
space, a veritable jigsaw of militant particularisms.
The Kaiama Declaration in 1999 indicates that
there is in the making a pan-ethnic community in
the works, but its contours, its vision and its style
of imagining are at present murky and dimly
perceived (see ERA 2000; Douglas and Okonta
2001). What I have documented here, however, is the
multiplication of governable spaces which stand in
some tension or even contradiction with each other
– only in this way can one understand the explo-
sion of inter-ethnic tensions in the Delta – and with
the national space of Nigeria, to which I now turn.
Community as the space of the nation
One of the striking aspects of the governable spaces
of indigeneity as they emerged in the Delta is that
they become vehicles for political claims, typically
articulated as the need for a local government or in
some cases a state. Indigeneity necessarily raises
the question of a third governable space, that of the
nation-state, an entity that pre-existed oil and came
to fruition in 1960 at Independence. Oil in this
sense became part of the nation-building process –
the creation of an ‘oil nation’ (Coronil 1997). Nature
and nationalism become inextricably linked. But how
did petro-capitalism, understood as a state-led, and
thoroughly globalized, development strategy stand
in relation to the creation of the governable space
called modern Nigeria?
Here I want to start with the work of Mamood
Mamdani (1996) and his observations on postcolo-
nial African politics. Colonial rule and decentralized
Michael J Watts
despotism were synonymous, says Mamdani.
The Native Authorities consolidated local class
power in the name of tradition (ethnicity) and
sustained a racialized view of civic rights. The
Nationalist movement had two wings, a radical
and a mainstream. Both wished to deracialize civic
rights, but the latter won out and reproduced the
dual legacy of colonialism. They provided civic
rights for all Nigerians, but a bonus ‘customary
rights’ for indigenous people. The country had to
decide which ethnic groups were indigenous and
which were not a basis for political representation,
a process that became constitutionally mandated in
Nigeria. Federal institutions are quota-driven for
each state, but only those indigenous to the state
may apply for a quota. As Mamdani puts it:
The effective elements of the federation are neither
territorial units called states nor ethnic groups but
ethnic groups with their own states . . . Given this
federal character every ethnic group was compelled to
seek its own home, its NA, its own state. With each
new political entity the non-indigenes continued to
grow. (1998, 7)
Once law enshrines cultural identity as the basis
for political identity, it necessarily converts ethnicity
into a political force. As a consequence, in Nigeria
clashes in the postcolonial period came to be not
racial but ethnic, and such ethnic clashes, which
dominated the political landscape in the last three
decades, are always at root about customary rights
to land, and derivatively to a local government or
to a state that can empower those on the ground as
ethnically indigenous.
Into this mix that Mamdani brilliantly outlines
enters oil, that is to say a valuable, centralized
(state-owned) resource. It is a national resource on
which citizenship claims can be constructed. As
much as the state uses oil to build a nation and to
develop, so communities use oil wealth to activate
community claims on what is seen popularly as
unimaginable wealth – black gold. The governable
space of Nigeria is as a consequence reterritorial-
ized through ethnic claims-making. The result is
that access to oil revenues amplifies what I call
sub-national political institution-making; politics
becomes then a massive state-making machine.
Only in this way can one understand how,
between 1966 and the present, the number of local
governments has grown from 50 to almost 1000,
and the number of states from 3 to 36 (Figure 4).
Nigeria as a modern nation-state has become a
Antinomies of community 211

Figure 4 The evolution of federal states in Nigeria

Sources: Nigerian Government, Maps Division, Lagos; Steyn (2003). All maps drawn by David Jensen,
Department of Geography, UC Berkeley

machine for the production of ever more local
political institutions, and this process is endless.
The logic is ineluctable and, of course, terrifying.
What sort of national governable space emerges
from such multiplication, in which incidentally
the political entities called states or LGAs (local
government areas) become vehicles for massive
corruption and fraud – that is to say, the disposal of
oil revenues? The answer is that it works against
precisely the creation of an imagined community
of the sort that Ben Anderson (1998) saw as synony-
mous with nationalism. Nation-building whatever
its imaginary properties, whatever its style of imaging,
rests in its modern form on a sort of calculation, integ-
ration, and state and bureaucratic rationality which
the logic of rent-seeking, petro-corruption, ethnic
spoils politics and state multiplication works to
systematically undermine. Lauren Berlant has said
that every nation – and hence every governable
national space – requires a ‘National Symbolic’; a
national fantasy which ‘designates how national
culture becomes local through images, narratives
and movements which circulate in the personal and
collective unconsciousness’ (1991, 61). My point is
that the Nigerian National Symbolic grew weaker
and more attenuated as a result of the political
212
economy of oil. There was no sense of the national
fantasy at the local level; it was simply a big lie (or a
big pocket of oil monies to be raided in the name of
indigeneity). At Independence, Obafemi Awolowo,
the great western Nigerian politician, said that
Nigeria was not a Nation but a ‘mere geographical
expression’; 40 years later this remained true, but
more so. Any construction of a robust, meaningful
national identity, requires, as Clifford says, a
‘rigorous survey of the social body’ (1999, 114) to
determine its makeup and nature. A petro-state of
the Nigerian sort, wracked by corruption-fraud in
the Gramscian sense referred to earlier, is the very
antithesis of surveillance, or indeed of rigour. It is
as Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe called it in
Anthills of the savannas, at best, a big crummy family.
What we have in other words is not nation-
building – understood in the sense of governmen-
tality as a form of governable space – but perhaps
its reverse; the unimagining or deconstruction of a
particular sense of national community. Nicos
Poulantzas (1978) said the national or modern unity
requires a historicity of a territory and a territorial-
ization of a history. Oil capitalism and its attendant
governmentality in Nigeria has achieved neither of
these requirements. The unstable and fragile space
called Nigeria was always something of a public
secret. Forty years of postcolonial rule has made this
secret both more public as ethnic segregation has
continued unabated and undermined the very idea
of the production of governable subjects. The double-
movement of petro-capitalism within the frame of a
modern nation-state has eviscerated the governable
space of the nation, it has compromised it and worked
against a sense of Nigerian governable subject. The
same, incidentally, might be said of the impact of
oil on the Muslim communities of Nigeria (Watts 1998
2000). Oil and identity – people and things – have
produced an increasingly unimaginable community.
Nigeria’s future hangs precisely on the ability to
reimagine a robust sense of nationalism.
Oil, community and the crisis of secular
nationalism
Global sovereignty that would attempt to monopolize
violence in global capital’s defense is a case of reactionary
cosmopolitanism, because it lacks a radical’s sense
of social justice. Al-Quaeda and the exclusivity of
the fundamentalist struggle is a case of reactionary
radicalism because it lacks a cosmopolitan sense of the
public sphere. (Buck-Morss 2003, 37)
Michael J Watts
Petro-capitalism in Nigeria operates through a
particular sort of oil complex that is strongly
territorial, operating through local oil concessions
and, like oil complexes everywhere, is a militarized
and violent centre of economic calculation. It is
an instance of what Michael Klare (2001) calls
‘economization’ of security, for which Colombia is
perhaps the paradigmatic case. In Nigeria the pres-
ence and activities of the oil companies constitute a
challenge to forms of community authority, inter-
ethnic relations and local state institutions, prin-
cipally through the property and land disputes
that are engendered, and via forms of popular
mobilization and agitation to gain access to company
rents and the petro-revenues of the Nigerian state,
largely through the creation of regional and/or
local state institutions. The oil complex generates
differing sorts of communities as governable spaces
in which contrasting sorts of identities come into
play. My argument can be read as a contribution to
the geographical understanding of community in
the contemporary world and to the imagining of
communities that Anderson (1983) so provocatively
initiated in his treatise on nationalism. Anderson
brilliantly exposed print capitalism and the map
as ‘technologies’ of nationalist imagining, but I
emphasize three lines of thinking that are implicit
in his work. First, the differing ‘styles’ of imagining
(in my case through oil). Second, how communities
may be produced simultaneously which foregrounds
both the question of scale but also of the comple-
mentarities and tensions between scales. And finally,
to question whether communities are so readily
imagined (in whatever style) as much of the
post-Anderson literature suggests, and to pose the
question: might communities be ‘unimagined’ or
rendered ‘unimaginable’? Communities can fail as
a ‘style of politics’ and this failure turns on the fact
that standing at the centre of each governable space
is a community contradiction: for the oil community,
the overthrow of gerontocratic authority has gener-
ated ‘restive youth’ (to use the language of the
Nigerian state), which resemble Mafia-style rule.
At the level of the ethnic community it is the tension
between civic nationalism and a sort of exclusivist,
militant particularism expressed through the desire
to control ‘our oil’. And at the level of the nation one
sees the contradiction between the oil-based state
and fiscal centralization, on the one hand, and radical
state fragmentation characterized by an ‘un-imagining’
of Nigeria and a weak citizenship on the other. To
understand as Achille Mbembe puts it, why ‘regions
Antinomies of community
at the epicenter of oil production are torn apart by
repeated conflicts’ (2001, 280) is, in my view, to
unravel the complex geographies of ‘communities
of violence’ in contemporary Nigeria . . . or Iraq.
In tracing the relations between imperial oil and
community in Nigeria I have laid great emphasis
on the spectacular failure of development associ-
ated with a commodity – arguably the most global,
the most strategic – that has historically been posed
as the harbinger of unprecedented wealth and
potential. Oil’s fetishistic powers were not lost on
the great Polish journalist Rizard Kapucinksi who,
in his reflections on oil-rich pre-revolutionary Iran,
sardonically observed that:
Oil creates the illusion of a completely changed life,
life without work, life for free . . . The concept of oil
expresses perfectly the eternal human dream of wealth
achieved through lucky accident . . . In this sense oil is
a fairy tale and like every fairy tale a bit of a lie.
(Kapucinksi 1982, 35)
It is this lie, one might say, that Nigeria is currently
living. But this deception exposes something
more profound than massive corruption, corporate
irresponsibility or chronic resource-dependency
(see Collier 2003). The real deception is the
terrifying and catastrophic failure of secular
nationalist development. It is sometimes hard to
grasp the full consequences and depth of such a
statement. Between 1970 and 2000 in Nigeria the
number of people subsisting on less than US$1 a
day grew from 36 per cent to over 70 per cent, from
19 million to a staggering 90 million. All the oil
revenues (US$400 billion!), as the IMF blandly put
it, ‘did not seem to add to the standard of living’
and ‘could have contributed to a decline in the
standard of living’ (Martin and Subramanian 2003,
4). And it is here that my story of oil, community
and a secular nationalism in crisis in Nigeria meets
up with September 11th, the occupation of Iraq and
the new imperialism as Harvey (2003) calls it.
Oil, empire, neoliberal capitalism and the Cold
War made for a ferocious assault on, and radical
destabilization of, a number of postcolonial states.
Out of this maelstrom of failed secular nationalist
development have emerged powerful communities
of opposition and dissent articulated against both
failed local states and American hegemony. From
the ashes of failed secular nationalism can emerge
all manner of alternatives: drug-fuelled child militias
and war lords in Sierra Leone, the most retrograde
forms of Muslim rectitude among the Afghan
213
Taliban and ferocious ethnic xenophobia in the Balkans.
None of this is to justify the tactics or the project
of Hamas, of the ethnic cleaner, or crypto-fascist
local Mafias, of course. These are instances of the very
antithesis of warm and lovable communities. But
they are also not simply premodern either.
Quite the reverse. They are products of, and
partially constituted by, modernization and the long
durée of accumulation by dispossession. Commu-
nities growing out of the ashes of what are blithely
termed ‘rogue’ or ‘failed’ states can be radical and
oppositional, and indeed may be the bulwarks
against empire; some retain a secular or nationalist
thrust, others may propose a religio-political project
only loosely anchored in the community of the nation-
state. But radical movements – those that resist and
upturn the ruling order – are not necessarily demo-
cratic or cosmopolitan as Buck-Morss (2003) notes,
any more than cosmopolitan movements are socially
just. Running through my story of community in
Nigeria is precisely this struggle between the forces
of reaction and radicalism within and among
communities all framed within the unappealing
hothouse of imperial oil. Just like Iraq.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Oronto Douglas, Ike Okonta, Von
Kemedi and Donald Moore for their suggestions and
to various audiences at Syracuse, Harvard and else-
where (including the Berkeley Workshop on Environ-
mental Politics) for putting up with the presentation
of the ideas here and gladly offering their criticisms.
An anonymous referee was helpful in clarifying
my argument on governable space. The fieldwork
on which this paper was based was conducted in
January–February 2002, and 2004. The research was
made possible by the generosity of the National
Geographic, The John R. Guggenheim Foundation,
the US Institute for Peace and the Ford Foundation.
Darin Jensen drew the figures and maps.
Notes
1 I have taken this from Al-Azmeh’s brilliant account
of Islamism; see Al-Azmeh (1996 2003).
2 American history is punctuated by moments in
which the demise of community is lamented or the
call for community revitalization is energetically
preached. Christopher Lasch’s (1991) compendium of
late nineteenth-century cataclysmic populisms and
Thomas Bender’s (1978) book capture something of
214
both tendencies in recent American history. What
distinguishes the current revivalism, however, is its
situatedness in the realities of global capital flows, trans-
national movements of people, ideas and information,
and in the complex forms of political fragmentation,
centralization and violence which have accompanied
the end of the Cold War. It is no surprise that on this
canvas the question of transnational or virtual com-
munities and their relation to cosmopolitan democracy
has a particular saliency (see Archibugi et al. 1998).
3 Richard Sennett (1998) provides an exemplary case of
one expression of this twentieth-century deployment
of community. In his account of capitalist work, post-
war Fordism – rigid, routine-bound and hierarchical
forms of work organization – has been displaced by
flexible, transient, uncertain, risk-driven forms of
short-term teamwork, networking and corporate re-
engineering. Confronted with a destructive erosion of
common purpose, of integrity and trust in others,
Sennett’s deracinated workers must look, in the face
of the new political economy, to a ‘shared fate’ (1998,
139), to the ‘we’ of placed-based community. A sys-
tem which so indiscriminately corrodes character and
rewards disposability has as its antidote the commu-
nity: that is to say, ‘durable and sustained paths of
action’ (1998, 147) which can provide an answer to
the question ‘who in society needs me’?
4 Lash makes the point that hermeneutics has given the
community a new purchase but ‘the bad news is that
it has typically done so – in Heidegger, in philosophical
communitarians like MacIntyre and Taylor, in socio-
logical communitarians like Robert Bellah and Daniel
Bell . . . through assuming away power . . .’ (1994, 165).
5 For a different line of argument see Paul Collier
(2003) of the World Bank, who uses resource depend-
ency as a way of thinking about rebellion, especially
in Africa, and sees oil as central to the economics of
civil war and Michael Ross (2001) for whom oil is a
‘resource curse’ due to its rentier effect (low taxes and
high patronage dampen pressures for democracy), its
repression effect conferred by the direct state control
over sufficient revenues to bankroll excessive military
expenditures and expanded internal security appara-
tuses, and a modernization effect, namely the ‘move into
industrial and service sector jobs render them less
likely to push for democracy’ (2001, 357).
6 See Manchester Guardian, 4 June 2003, George Wright
‘Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil’.
7 Ike Okonta, Nigeria and the World, ThisDay, 22 June
2003, Sunday editorial.
8 See Gary and Karl (2003); Global Witness (2002);
Christian Aid (2002); Renner (2002); OXFAM (2001).
9 See http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2000, accessed
12 May 2002.
10 See US Department of Energy, and see http://www.eia.gov/
emeu/cabs/nigeria.html, accessed 14 December 2003.
11 http://www.iasps.org, accessed 20 July 2003.
Michael J Watts
12 Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Wash-
ington DC, ‘Alienation and Militancy in the Nigeria
Delta’, by E. Cesarz, S. Morrison and J. Cooke, Africa
Notes #16, May 2003.
13 By 1979 derivation (which was 50% in the early
1960s) had fallen to 3 per cent; currently it stands (in
theory) at 13 per cent.
14 The data for the case study were collected during a
visit to the Niger Delta in January and February 2001.
I also relled on the assistance of Von Kemedi and his
work (Kemedi 2000) and the Nembe Peace Commis-
sion (Alagoa 2001).
15 The war canoe houses were the units of the kingdom’s
defence forces. A war canoe house consisted of the
head of the house and a formidable number of able-
bodied men who are responsible for defending the
house and the King.
16 As constitutional preparations were made for the
transition to home rule, non-Igbo minorities through-
out the Eastern Region appealed to the colonial
government for a separate Rivers State. Ogoni
representatives lobbied the Willink Commission
in 1958 to avert the threat of exclusion within an Ibo-
dominated regional government which had assumed
self-governing status in 1957, but minority claims
were ignored (Okpu 1977; Okilo 1980).
17 The Ogoni and other minorities petitioned in 1974 for
the creation of a new Port Harcourt State within the
Rivers State boundary (Naanen 1995, 63).
18 According to the Nigerian Government, Ogoniland in
1995 produced about 2 per cent of Nigerian oil output
and is the fifth largest oil-producing community in
Rivers State. Shell maintains that total Ogoni oil output
is valued at US$5.2 billion before costs!
19 The oil companies claim that sabotage accounts for a
large proportion (60%) of the spills, since communities
gain from corporate compensation. Shell claims that
77 of 111 spills in Ogoniland between 1985 and 1994
were due to sabotage. According to the government
commission, however, sabotage accounts for 30
per cent of the incidents but only 3 per cent of the
quantity spilled. Furthermore, all oil-producing com-
munities claim that compensation from the compa-
nies for spills has been almost non-existent.
20 Saro-Wiwa was often chastised by Gokana (he him-
self was Bane) since most of the Ogoni oil was in fact
located below Gokana soil. In other words, on occa-
sion the key territorial unit became the clan rather
than the pan-Ogoni territory.
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