Palm Oil and Crude Oil: Environmental Damage, Resource Conflict, and Literary Strategies in the Niger Delta

Abstract

Foreign petroleum exploitation has long been a focus of writing from the Niger Delta, notably the work of Tanure Ojaide, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and authors following in their wake. In Nigeria, petroleum is an economic mainstay and “has saturated virtually every aspect of economy, polity and sociability” (Watts, “Crude Politics” 12). However, mineral oil is not the only contested natural resource that Nigerian authors examine. Existing ecocritical scholarship on literature from the Niger Delta by scholars such as Nixon (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor) and Caminero-Santangelo (African Fiction and Joseph Conrad) has focused on authors who engage with petroleum. While their analyses of the environmental, economic, and social problems that this causes are important, it is disappointing that Wenzel and Lincoln are among the few environmentally-engaged literary critics to examine literature about the area’s long history of resource exploitation before the discovery of petroleum. As historians have often argued, the palm oil trade had caused environmental and social problems in the Niger Delta during colonial and protectorate times; commodities such as ivory and rubber were also exploited.1 Although the environmental impact of palm oil cultivation and processing was nowhere near as severe as the destruction created by petroleum, it created conflicts over resources that are remembered in the work of several Nigerian writers. Equally significant is the way that certain authors strategically omit the conflicts and environmental problems created by the palm oil trade: this article contends that this is a strategy to throw into relief the problems brought by petroleum.