The Drama of Oil Production in the Niger Delta: An Obsession with the Spectacular

Philip Aghoghovwia responds to the The catalogue Last Rites Niger Delta. The Drama of Oil Production in Contemporary Photographs from the exhibition on which Delta Remix was based. The catalogue was edited by Christine Stelzig, Eva Ursprung and Stefan Eisenhofer; English ISBN 9 783927 270657

As one leafs through the pages of the catalogue, it is curious to note that the first sixteen pictures do not capture the major concerns of environmental pollution which provoke those instances of violence and scavenging that these pictures depict. It seems to me that the catalogue, while artistically telling the story of the oil encounter in a reverse manner, subtly sets out to mislead, if not misinform, the reader. I thought the catalogue should be able to tell the reader, in a chronological order, possibly, how the Delta has come to find itself in that atmosphere of commoditised violence and brazen criminality. 

What hits the eyes in the first page is a captured white man in the midst of gun-toting young black men. This picture no doubt, prejudices the reader’s judgement, for it invokes the now familiar (image) critique of Africa by the West: a crises-redden outback of filth, violence, sickness, hunger, insurgents, war and death. The Niger Delta embodies all these! From which perspective might we tell the story of the Oil Encounter in the Niger Delta? What happened to the polluted landscape, the farmlands, and the spilled-oil floating on the rivers, sea and the water bodies? Are these not compelling enough to be captured in the first pages of this catalogue? Why the obsession with the spectacle of survivalist fervour — which verges on the ridiculous — with which the poor people, the very wretched scramble to help themselves to the crumbs from burst petro-pipes? What’s with this obsession with the dramatic images of youth violence, which Michael Watts has described as “the masked militant armed with the ubiquitous Kalashnikov, the typewriter of the illiterate”? The catalogue confirms this romance with the spectacular by its laconic caption: “The Drama of Oil Production”.   

The picture which depicts the signpost that describes the first oil well in the region is captured without the weight of its significance. One notices the sorry state of the signpost: the fast-fading inscriptions, the rusty white board, which describes a supposedly significant beginning of oil exploration in Nigeria, and the bush growing around this signpost, that makes the board increasingly invincible. Isn’t this symptomatic of the invincibility of Oloibri — and perhaps the entire Niger Delta — in the context of social development, even when it [this village] bore the first fruits of the oil wealth for the Nigerian state?

It is hard not to notice the visible absence of the over 12, 000 gas flares that light up the Delta landscape; flares that burn off more than 70 million cubic meters of gas per day in this region that is so richly blessed, yet cursed, with fossil-fuel.

The picture I find most fascinating in this catalogue is that which juxtaposes a dilapidated, decrepit major ‘expressway’ that connects Lagos with the Niger Delta, and the well paved route of the pipelines in the heart of the delta. Ironically, that well-demarcated pipeline route now serves as a footpath for the villagers.

Philip Aghoghovwia is from the Niger Delta, and is a PhD student at the English Department, University of Stellenbosch

If we doubt ourselves, who will have belief in us?

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Assistant Professor of science, technology and society the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, speaks to the JWTC Blog.

Bruno Latour's work was very much at the center of the debates during the 2012 JWTC roundtable on 'Things of Nature|Nature of Things'. What, from his thought on nature/objects/things, should in your view be amended as he moves South?

Bruno Latour is obviously beginning to catch fire in the Global South. He is probably the next Foucault. Before Foucault there was, of course, Marx. One of Foucault’s most serious readers in African studies, V. Y. Mudimbe, has lamented the persistence of a “Western ratio” at the center of African thought. Mudimbe states very clearly that Foucault, despite his brief sojourn in North Africa, was not writing for or about Africa but (specific) Western societies. Nor was Marx; same for Latour.

We should, therefore, be cautious about what is universalizable about them; that does not mean they are not intellectually usable material. Even in Western academia, Latour has been criticized for his “executive approach” that privileges the lab engineer or scientist. This applies to actor network heuristics in general. My fear is that people bringing Latour or Science and Technology Studies (STS) into African Studies are simply going to trace the itineraries of Western artifacts derived from the labs that STS described, the infrastructures and thought systems transplanted to Africa from them, and make this the be-all end-all of science and technology in Africa.

 If that were to happen, my fear is that there will be no investment in investigating African modes of sciences and technologies—or the very idea that they exist. Latour does not have a formula for nonwestern ways of knowing (science) and means of doing (technology). Uncritical discipleship to him will be a trap because it saddles one with that baggage of theoretical insufficiency.

 What would be in your view the most efficient use of Latour and others in the African context?

I would urge that we critically utilize Latour as a methodology for writing narratives in humanities and social sciences, viz., to take seriously the role not just of humans but also nonhumans as actors (or actants), as heterogeneous actors in the making of the social.

He wants us to pay attention to the process through which things come to be constituted. And one would say Africanists have always been too human-centric or social-constructivist in their narratives, with animals, the physical environment, and technology as mere anecdotes, wax in people’s hands, or simply nuisances and hazards. Foucault made Africanists even more social constructivist. Two nonhuman elements, technology and ‘nature,’ are quite central to Latour’s analysis. The former constitutes some kind of Western idolatry—Western society is crazy about technology in the hi-tech sense - which means we must question what ‘technology’—alongside ‘experiment,’ ‘science,’ ‘nature,’ ‘environment,’ etc.—really mean in the context of African people’s lived realities.

Are you suggesting that we go beyond some of the foundational dualisms that have been so central to our craft?

Yes, definitively. The division between nature and culture (and spirituality) is tenuous to say the least in the African context. By contrast, Western orders of knowledge, since Hobbes and Boyle, follow a distinct Fact vs. Faith, Reason vs. Religion, dichotomy. In African contexts, this tradition of thought confronted another in which faith and religious structure anchor and inspire fact and reason - one that, like most Global Southern cultures, was more concerned with the whole (earth) than the bisected parts. Vivisection did not have a life of its own; it acquired purpose and meaning within the whole, hence as Joseph Needham remarked once, if one went into Chinese society looking for Science, one would not find it; only sciences.

Whereupon one might ask: As China expands into Africa, Africans into China, and as books get translated from Chinese to English, what might the growing collection of Chinese texts tell us about systems of thought similar to pre-European African modes, now that Western modes of thought have been around and are familiar to us? Is it time to expand our intellectual vista so that we no longer always have to look to Western philosophy for grounding our theories? Why must we always gain universality by looking West?

Should modes of theorization emerging from the South necessarily aspire to be "universal"?

Erudition in front of global audiences, or the desire to impress, should not drive our theory; it should be for the right reasons.

We speak with more strength, authority, and originality if we can tap into registers emergent from local creativities, and if we exercise patience in developing our ideas.

It should not be about taking the theories of others and running with them. Our own material can gain universal reference. We should endeavor to make ourselves aware and read in the registers of others, but never aspire to become miniature others, merely good imitations of Foucault, Latour, or Derrida. The exercise shouldn’t be one of wholesale consumptionism. The goal of literature reviews must always be as precursors to stating our own positions, not making them our own.

Our problem is always that we need to be like them in order to gain universal appreciation. I think we can speak from here with tools from here about materials from here and still acquire universal validity. Subaltern Studies did this.

How do you explain the poverty of theory in 'African studies"?

Any culture of writing and knowledge production emerges out of a specific moment or inspiration. Ours was the Hegelian framing that gave us no history. We were mere hostages to nature, mere moments in the Eurasian passages through space. Even nature (especially the wild) had history. We did not, unless we were part of the wild (hence my ambivalence about the concept of ‘nature’ or ‘the animal’). So it had to be a social history and anthropology searching for empirical evidence, as much of it as possible, wherever it could be found, to prove we had a history too.

My experience of ‘philosophy’ in university was of a syllabus on Thucydides, Socrates, and other foreign people—never about my ancestors’ proverbs and other idioms or their technological achievements, like Great Zimbabwe which, in any case, had been attributed to foreign construction. Until we take idioms generated from here seriously ourselves, they will always be caricatures to and of others.

It could be that the colonial system of education had no interest in making us thinkers. Our failure to decolonize our education system and foster a new way of training students to think and innovate, to be creative beings and not just potential employees, to move beyond a system where we were supposed to be only ‘baas boys’, good only at taking instructions instead of thinking critical, is the biggest liability we confront.

Spaces for creative thinking must therefore be utilized wherever they may be found, and our youth encouraged to take a kind of creative recklessness toward received registers. Governments and universities can facilitate the creation of these spaces.  Africa’s vast intellectual pool at home and abroad has enough networks now that could be marshaled into spaces of intellectual ferment—right here on the continent.

Any thoughts about the future of critique in Africa?

Originality and self-belief will be critical as we move forward. It is as if we are not confident to think we can stand on our own feet if we think and speak like Africans and engage the outside as such. If we doubt ourselves, who will have belief in us?

The Epistemologies of the Natures of Nature

Sabelo Mcinziba

I could not have imagined a better position for Achille Mbembe to begin his talk on Climate Change and the book of the Apocalypse than the position of epistemologies of nature. He claims that the conceptions of nature the world-over are not and have not been the same. This Western conception of nature can be characterised as instrumental, that is, in the European conception, nature is seen as “a giant complex of equipment” whose relationship is significant as it owes its usefulness to human beings, human beings themselves not nature but nature as an external relation that must be understood in order to be dominated.

In contrast or alongside to the European conception of nature is the African conception of nature – specifically West and Central Africa, with particular emphasis to the latter. This conception of nature is said to be located in the forest where nature is considered as a living organism which not only shapes the modes of thought in “life force” or vitalism but is also seen as a self-arising event and gift. Quite importantly was the argument made about the finitude of the physical environment as a Western conception and how the African idea is that of perpetual metamorphosis of life from one form to another, therefore rendering ideas such as ‘end of the world’ or ‘death’ of as a final stage mutually unintelligible. To this followed the conclusion that our understanding of nature as it stands today is a result of a certain epistemology of the world, to spell the obvious, the West’s.

Viewed from this perspective, there could be very little disagreement with this conclusion as it really tells the story of the world as the ‘battle of epistemologies’ between European gnosis and bodies of knowledge from other parts of the world. These battles have been ranging from economic and political governance and thought, spiritual rationalization, medicinal diagnosis and practice, forms of artistic expression, aesthetics of the physique, and so on.  As noted by Achille himself that this is a mere introduction to the characterizations of nature by Africa and Europe and in reality are not all that simplistic, they still leave us with a few potentially problematic understandings of both epistemologies.

On the first, one could ask whether the ‘instrumentalization’ of nature has not been useful to better the life of humans world-over if not the only constant practice that has allowed humans to move from the different Ages of our history. Europe, in this minimal regard, is no different from the rest of humans in all other parts of the world, perhaps the sharp distinction that even allows us to pointedly differentiate between the epistemologies of the nature of nature among humans is the development of capitalism in Europe. As capitalism developed, so did ideas to rationalise this environment and something akin to a body of thought developed, highlighted by the so-called Enlightenment. In Africa, before Europe developed Capitalism and as it was developing capitalism, the environment of social organisation was vastly different. Generally, being a place of historical abundance, Africa will have had as it did a different rationalization of its environment and how its humans think of themselves in relation to the environment vis-a-vis their European counterparts. Indeed, many Africans will confirm what Achille was asserting as the rationale of perpetual metaphormosis and that nature is a gift tied with the spiritual and cultural ways of existence. As delivered by Achille, and given that it was an introductory feature of his talk, it risks leaving itself open to criticism that Africans have never used nature instrumentally – and of course we know this not to be the case as Africans were the first humans and consequently the first manipulators of rock/stone into then complex tools and technologies that were useful to people at the time. The visit to the Origins Centre at Wits further crystallized this.

I think what ought to be taken strongly from Achille’s characterization of nature from the perspective of Africa and Europe is the cautionary tone against this radical instrumentalization of nature by humans under the shadow of capitalism brought to African life by colonization and colonialism. As a philosophy (capitalism) operating from a rationale of scarcity of resources and the finitude of the physical world, and through its global reach as a result of colonialism and universalization of its local realities, it makes (contextual) sense for Europe to build its epistemology of the nature of nature based on this ontology (“dark age/s” in Europe). As indicated, this epistemology of the nature of nature could not have emerged in Africa because the ontology of Africans was quite different and in fact its fertility and abundance (as opposed to scarcity) was the very drive for its colonization and appropriation for European needs and purposes. With much emphasis again, this is not to impress that the African epistemology would not allow for the usage of nature for the ends of humans (whilst it remains a gift), but the sharp distinction being that of orientation between Europe and Africa. Achille’s criticism takes place from the viewpoint of the South, particularly Africa, and it is situated in a world where one body of knowledge has had almost vanquishing power over another.

Africa itself being the victim of the most vicious form of capitalist labour exploitation, land and resources, human displacement and so forth, the epistemologies dominant in Africa have been those of a Eurocentric interpretation, including in the climate change debate, and the systematic organization of knowledge/s in Africa today through the university.

The university in Africa today struggles to theorise from the position of the South, as the framework of learning and thinking in Africa today is only such by geographical demarcations. This was clearest when Achille discussed the issue of the apocalypse, particularly as a Western concept, specifically a monotheistic one, perhaps more accurately to locate that monotheistic rationale squarely in Judeo-Christian thought. While it is true that there is no understanding of an apocalyptic event (Judgment Day/Hell) in the African epistemological framework but a perpetual metamorphosis of living organisms, it must also be recognised that that made more sense when Africans controlled what happened in their natural as well as social environment. In the age of Euro-American hegemony, where the ‘battle of epistemologies’ has been to the defeat of Africa, the university in Africa today cannot even thoroughly critique the West outside of Western thought and mannerism. The reality that Africa is experiencing now, is an experience forced onto Africa by Euro-American hegemonic forces and the real challenge for Africa today and the rest of the colonized world is build epistemology from ontology and more importantly that that ontology must emerge out of Africa’s own determination. Until the epistemologies from the formerly oppressed peoples of the world: racially, gender-based, queer, working class, etc. have power to their knowledge and an articulation of difference without the temptation to interpret difference hierarchically therefore justifying domination can we move towards a more humane existence.

Sabelo Mcinziba