Free Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa by Howard W. French

Okuntimo, the local security task force commander in Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State, responded with a plan that called for “wasting operations,” or what amounted to murderous raids on Ogoni villages. In May of that year, Saro-Wiwa himself was caught in the dragnet and arrested, but not formally charged, for ordering the murder of more conservative rivals among the Ogoni leadership.
    The following March, I flew into the Ogoni area, at the invitation of Shell. By then, Okuntimo had completely sealed off the region and a corporate invitation was the only sure way in or out. It is difficult to say with precision what responsibility for the welfare of the local people a company like Shell should bear when it interlopes and extracts billions of dollars worth of oil, fully aware that virtually none of the money is being locally reinvested by the government. But if Western countries have slowly become sensitized to the need to help recover the wealth stolen by dictators like Mobutu and Abacha, in countries like Nigeria and Congo-Brazzaville and Angola, they must also acknowledge the fact that extraction without local development equally amounts to theft.
    The Shell helicopter that ferried us around that day flew in low over the glistening Niger delta. It was such an extraordinary maze of wetlands and wending waterways that for a long time after their arrival in these parts, Europeans who came in search of gold and slaves had no idea that this vast area was the mouth of a single huge river.
    The crew pointed out Oloibiri, the village where oil was first discovered in Nigeria in 1958. Back then, the villagers had demanded sacrifices from the Dutch oil explorers—chickens and the like—to bless the site. It is reported, too, that libations were poured, to celebrate. Now, search as one might, it was impossible to find anything amid the thick foliage and swamplands below that looked substantially different from how it must have looked thirty-seven years earlier, except, that is, for the huge flares that burn off the natural gas emanating from the wells all around the area. Millions of barrels and more than $300 billion in national oil revenue later, Oloibiri remained a little village in the mangrove swamp, lost in time.
    Tracts of dead swampland surrounded many of the other sites we were allowed to approach. The heat from gas flares had burned off all of the aboveground vegetation, and the oozing of oil, slow and steady over many years, had killed most of the aquatic life.
    At the little village of Aminigboko, where we landed, the Shell folks proudly pointed to a village school they had built for 1,250 students, one of forty or so they claimed to have built in the district. “These are some of the things we have done,” said Lawson Jack, a Nigerian Shell spokesman, with a hint of weariness. “We tried agriculture first, but the people said that it was of no help to them. So we began building schools, and turning them over to the government. The government was neglecting them, though, so we took over their maintenance, too.”
    Small children observed us shyly but playfully from a safe distance, their torsos nude and their feet bare. The only adults around seemed to have been urged to turn out by Shell, perhaps for promises of drinks or small cash handouts. In any event, we had been told that a busy schedule lay ahead, and that we could spend only a few minutes on the ground, so there was no way to interact.
    When the tour ended I returned to Port Harcourt and went to see Claude Ake, a respected Nigerian intellectual and an expert on the local political and environmental situation, to hear what he had to say about Shell’s public relations effort. “When the soldiers were running rampage through Ogoni-land shooting people, and we were asking for aid for the wounded, where was Shell? They didn’t contribute anything. Their callousness is breathtaking. The building of those classrooms is just a trivial matter. They