Ogoni: Ethnography, Ethnogenesis, and the Issues of Communicating in a Neo-MOSOP Milieu, Nigeria

Abstract

The issues around Ogoni are many. The recommendations in the UNEP Ogoni Report, which assessed Ogoni environment as depleted and depleting, have been lying idle on the pages of the report since 2011. Moves by both national and state government actors, as well as by corporate interests, to resume oil production in Ogoni have been heightening. In the midst of these, other voices, some of them new, have been challenging the privilege of the Late Ken Saro-Wiwa's Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) as the leading voice of the Ogoni. This paper submits that these issues are the very kind of issues which Communication handles well. Tracing significant aspects of Ogoni ethnography and ethnogenesis, the paper shows how the tool of Communication can use Ogoni idioms, Ogoni semiology, and Ogoni folklore to not only do an effective job with those recommendations of the UNEP Report which have to do with health, environmental, and other kinds of awareness campaigns to the communities, but also to do an effective job with connecting the many voices in Ogoni with each other. The paper concludes that how Ogonis and all stakeholders handle the tool of Communication will determine to a great length what will become of the contentions between the representative organisations in Ogoni, what will become of the implementation of the UNEP Report, and what will become of the moves by government and corporate actors to resume oil production in Ogoni.