ally lantz
AVID TRAIL RUNNER
colonialism
eats the earth
If you mention colonialism’s modern day effects to citizens of former colonial countries, you often receive a response like ‘how can you blame the people of today for past oppressions?’ which is basically like saying ‘can’t you just forget about the past?’ But that’s not how trauma works, especially when the effects of the trauma are ongoing.
Former colonial nations benefit today from the link between capitalism and colonialism — two systems of production and extraction that have shaped and defined the world’s deeply unequal global structures whilst causing the vast majority of historical fossil fuel emissions in the process. Colonial trauma to the people, environment and economies of former colonies has restricted development and prevented mutually beneficial relationships with natural resources. Any environmental justice movement must look to recognise the role of colonialism in contemporary environmental relations.
extractivism in Ogoniland
One major aspect of colonialism is the ideology of extractivism, a philosophy deeply tied to the Judeo-Christian worldview where the rights of white man supersede the rights of non-white people and their land. In practice, this meant colonial powers sucked all the valuable assets out of colonial countries and exported them back to their own countries. These processes of extraction were enacted without any regard for the people or land they abused, leading to visible geographical and psychological scarring that persists to this day. The developmental benefits of effectively stealing resources over centuries, have been instrumental in the accumulating a disproportionate chunk of global wealth, concentrated in the hands of former colonial powers to this day.
Even more insidiously, colonial powers made it almost impossible for these resources to be extracted or used independently of the colonising country - locking entire regions of the world into a unilateral “contract” that continued to profit colonial nations long after occupation of the colonies ended. As Lawrence Wood, author of The Environmental Impacts of Colonialism, puts it: “colonial powers developed their nations off of a surplus extracted at the expense of the people of Africa, Asia, Latin, and South America”
The Ogoni people are an indigenous community that have lived in the southeast of Nigeria for 500 years. They are reliant on agriculture, fishing and livestock herding for trade and have always lived sustainably. The land that is home to their communities, cultures and customs has one of the highest population densities in Africa but it is also ecologically rich and highly valuable. Britain had invaded Nigeria in 1885 and, in 1956 near the end of their colonial rule, they realised the fecundity of the area and supported exploration of the Niger Delta region for oil by the Royal Dutch Shell oil corporation.
After identifying oil, they began the same process of profit-driven extraction that colonial countries throughout history have recklessly carried out. The Social Development Integrated Centre’s article on Ogoni people vs Shell details how “Shell began extraction in 1958, a venture that was hugely profitable for both the corporation and the British crown but which led to thousands of oil spills in Ogoniland in just the first fifteen-year period. An estimated 2.1 million barrels of oil were spilled during this time, accounting for 40% of the total oil spills of the Royal Dutch Shell company worldwide, with appalling environmental and social consequences.”
British rule in Nigeria ended in 1960 but their commercial stranglehold never left. Shell stayed in the country and continued to pollute waterways, make land infertile, displace the Ogoni people and extract wealth from Nigerian land to make profits for Britain. With the egregious damages these spills caused to the land and practices of the Ogoni people, you might think that the Nigerian government would have been on their side. But in another insidious aspect of colonialism’s legacy, national governments who have been placed at a global financial disadvantage by extractivism, often side with neocolonial companies such as Shell in order to share in the profits from the resource extraction process.
When the Ogoni people organised in protest against Shell’s oil operations in the Niger Delta, Shell paid groups of the Nigerian military to crack down on the Ogoni. Nigerian soldiers used deadly force and massive, brutal raids against the Ogoni people throughout the early 1990s to repress a growing popular movement against the oil company. This crackdown culminated in the torture and execution of acclaimed writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders, known as the Ogoni Nine, on November 10, 1995.
The killings caused international outcry and led Ken Saro-Wiwa’s family to bring a legal case against Shell in Nigerian and American courts. After years of trying to get the company into a courtroom, Shell eventually paid a legal settlement of $15.5m in 2009, which was a small price to pay to avoid proper legal scrutiny and continue their exploitation of the region.
Even with the uproar around the killing of the Ogoni Nine and multiple court acknowledgements of the damage oil spills have had on land and livelihoods, Shell are still operating in Ogoniland. Like a parasitic tree sucking Nigeria’s natural resources from its land and stealing its profits, Shell continues its vampiric relationship with Ogoni land — The tree’s trunk acting as a visible neocolonial monument to shell’s continued influence, held up by the subterranean roots planted by British colonialism centuries ago.
