Ken Saro- Wiwa's Shadow

Book excerpt: The Niger Delta region of Nigeria had a long standing history of crises even before the late Ken Saro-Wiwa helped to bring these crises to the attention of the world. The international community increasingly needs Nigerian oil largely because of the political dislocations and uncertainties in some of the major oil-producing regions of the world. But unfortunately the crises in the Niger Delta, which produces most of Nigeria's oil, have also been escalating to alarming proportions, often turning the region into a site of seemingly unending uncertainty and conflicts. The book focuses on Ogoniland - one of the oil-producing communities that make up the Niger Delta. It examines the colonial origins of these crises and their links to the dynamics of petroleum exploitation in the region as well as to the structure of Nigeria's contemporary political economy. It relates the ways in which the crises in Ogoniland are connected to the generalised turmoil in the Niger Delta and argues that they are often exacerbated - rather than attenuated - by the Nigerian federal process and its unique combination of militarism, ethnicity and religion.