Free Crude World by Peter Maass Page B

low-paying farmwork, migrated to the cities for the easier jobs they thought would be available there. The jobs weren’t there—the oil industry is not labor-intensive, and the Nigerian government, even if it hadn’t lost funds to corruption and waste, did not have enough oil revenues to pay for the infrastructure projects that would put such a large labor force to work. Instead, the migrants coalesced into an urban underclass, Dickens gone to Africa. Some used their financial and language skills to perpetrate Internet scams—Nigeria is the origin of many of the too-good-to-be-true e-mail offers that fill in-boxes across the world. Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish writer, noticed a similar abandonment of reason in Iran during the times of the shah. “Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all a great temptation,” he wrote. “It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength, fortune, power. It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts obligingly into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling shower of money. … Oil creates an illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. Oil is a resource that anesthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts.”
    Ironically, oil’s impact can be harshest on the communities where itis located. Instead of becoming rich and moving to mansions in fancy towns, as the fictional Clampett family did in the 1960s sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies , the people of the Niger Delta became poorer, watching as their land and water become polluted by an industry they did not own, had no control over and derived almost no income from. In the delta, once a vibrant marine habitat, fish died off and crops wilted. There was little compensation. Oil revenues that weren’t stolen went directly into the national treasury, because the government in the capital controlled the revenues. The ethnic groups in the delta were not powerful enough to get their way in national politics. The modest funds earmarked for local development were, for the most part, stolen by officials and chiefs before reaching the people who were supposed to be the beneficiaries.
    Rebellion, in such conditions, is inevitable. Early on, in 1966, Isaac Boro, an army officer born in the delta, cofounded the Niger Delta Volunteer Service and declared a breakaway republic. His revolt was crushed in twelve days by troops who rushed into the delta on boats supplied by Shell. Soon after, an accumulation of discord—partly over oil, but also over religion, culture and ethnicity—led to a massive and unsuccessful war of secession, the Biafran war, which killed as many as two million people. A new generation of activism emerged in the 1990s, led by the charismatic Ken Saro-Wiwa of the Ogoni tribe, which lived where oil was first found and whose people were its first victims. Saro-Wiwa formed a popular nonviolent campaign against Shell and the repressive military regime that was its partner at the time. In 1994, as martial law was about to be imposed on his restive home region, Saro-Wiwa predicted, “This is it, they are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell.” Soon after, on the orders of General Sani Abacha, the military dictator, Saro-Wiwa was arrested and later hanged after a show trial. Investigations after Abacha’s death several years later revealed that he’d stolen $4 billion in state revenues.
    Asari’s rebellion was a violent continuation of this history. It was low-intensity warfare that killed thousands of combatants and civilians every year, and it had a postmodern touch, because helicopter gunships were pitted against militiamen who wore bullet-stopping amulets (orso they believed). For the 30 million unfortunate souls in the delta—the country’s total population is nearly 150 million—life had become a hellish vision that was part Mad Max , part Waterworld , and, with the prevalence of adolescent fighters, a bit of Lord of the Flies .
    Port Harcourt, in the