Chapter 8
Ken Saro-Wiwa lived in Nigeria,
Ken was no crony, he came from Ogoni.
Ken Saro-Wiwa worked in the media,
Shell Oil played a lethal hand when they destroyed his homeland.
That wasn’t his company,
That wasn’t his government,
Those aren’t his people
Running Royal Dutch Shell.
They hire private armies,
They have a foreign policy,
They’re making Dutch money
On African oil.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, killed in Nigeria,
Not for Nigerians but for the Netherlands.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, crucified by hysteria,
While they made grand after grand, they destroyed his homeland.
How long will they plunder his homeland?
Though they’re wrong, they seem to have the upper hand.
Ken’s gone because oil’s in demand.
With this song, we remember the man.
Ken Saro-Wiwa met his end in Nigeria,
Wouldn’t take their male deal, wouldn’t have his nation kneel,
Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa was born in Bori on the southern coast of Nigeria. He was a university instructor, grocer, writer of novels, plays, poems, television scripts, and children’s books, and a renowned columnist for three different Lagos daily newspapers. Ken’s tribal homeland is often called Ogoniland, although he wrote in his book A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary that he prefers the term Ogoni. He explained, “To the Ogoni, the land and the people are one and are expressed as such in our local languages.”[207]
Ogoni is in the Niger Delta, a hotspot for oil barons who control Nigeria’s vast oil reserves. Since the mid-1950s, Ogoni has been decimated by industrial pollution resulting from oil extraction. According to William Boyd, who wrote the introduction to Saro-Wiwa’s detention diary, “What was once a placid rural community of prosperous farmers and fisherman is now an ecological wasteland reeking of sulphur, its creeks and waterholes poisoned by indiscriminate oil spillage and ghoulishly lit at night by the orange flames of gas flares.”[208]
In America, pipelines are often located beside highways and roads, but Ogoni’s ran right down the middle of the dirt streets lined with homes. The oil companies installed the pumps without considering public safety, which meant pumps roiled in the center of towns, forcing children to play in the inevitable spillage. Royal Dutch Shell effectively turned Nigeria into an occupied territory.
Ken resisted the oil company. He held them responsible for their ecological calamities, attesting that they were contributing to a “slow genocide” that devastated his people. He openly protested this despoliation and demanded compensation from the Nigerian government and from the international oil companies benefitting from their land. Since the government and private corporations were already accustomed to working together, committing crimes far worse than anything Ken was ever accused of, it was easy for them to team up to bring about his demise.
In May 1994, four Ogoni leaders suspected of collaborating with the military were killed at a rally. Saro-Wiwa was prevented from attending because of a military roadblock. He was arrested anyway, along with fifteen others, and accused of incitement to murder. Imprisoned for more than a year, he was tried before a specially convened tribunal, which included a representative from Royal Dutch Shell. “On Thursday, November 2, [1995], Ken and eight co-defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. Suddenly the world acknowledged the nature of Nigerian degeneracy,”[209] and the power of a corporation over a nation.
At the end of the eighties, while recording an album with my band Soulside outside of Amsterdam, I learned about this devastation in Ogoni. I followed the resistance movement’s progress because I had been involved in the anti-Apartheid demonstrations in college in the 1980s. I was completely blown away when I learned of Saro-Wiwa’s story, not simply because he was a peace activist essentially executed by a corporation, but because I was made aware of his suffering during real time. George Jackson’s writing about global capital and its fascist nature were ringing in my head. I was astounded by the stark reality of these insidious corporate endeavors.
George Jackson wrote of monopoly capital in America at the end of the Civil War. “Prior to its emergence,” he explained, “bourgeois democratic rule could be said to have been the predominant political force inside Amerikan society. As monopoly capital matured, the role of the old bourgeois democracy faded in the process. As monopoly capital forced out the small dispersed factory setup, the new corporativism assumed political supremacy.”[210]
Jackson saw fascism as a core component of capitalism, especially when the economic system is in a state of crisis. What’s easy to miss is that even though its expression has nationalist qualities, fascism is ultimately an international movement, as Jackson points out. Most ominously, he wrote, “The ultimate aim of fascism is the complete destruction of all revolutionary consciousness.”[211]
Because of struggling economies in the 1930s, developed government “heroes” stepped in to “save” developing countries. “The key element that made the economic policy of fascist arrangements unique was the emphasis on ‘reform through government intervention,’” wrote Jackson. He contended that this brand of fascism flourished after World War II: “reforms” meant corporations forcing the government to act, or forcing the government not to act and thereby uphold their international policies. Jackson argued that the US slipped into international fascism by merging “the economic, political, and labor elites.”[212]
Reaganomics worsened international conditions due to the neoliberal economic polices shaped by Milton Friedman. The United States Agency for International Development, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank intervened in Nigeria, post-Apartheid South Africa, and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Naomi Klein gives a detailed account of the vast array of related misdeeds in her book The Shock Doctrine:
The movement that Milton Friedman launched in the 1950s is best understood as an attempt by multinational capital to recapture the highly profitable, lawless frontier that Adam Smith, the intellectual forefather of today’s neoliberals, so admired—but with a twist. Rather than journeying through Smith’s “savage and barbarous nations” where there was no Western law (no longer a practical option), this movement set out to systematically dismantle existing laws and regulations to re-create that earlier lawlessness. And where Smith’s colonists earned their record profits by seizing what he described as “waste lands” for “but a trifle,” today’s multinationals see government programs, public assets and everything that is not for sale as terrain to be conquered and seized—the post office, national parks, schools, social security, disaster relief and anything else that is publicly administered.[213]
Such Friedmanite interventions made President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Marshall Plan look generous. Domestically, FDR contended with formidable popular forces demanding economic independence. “In the 1932 presidential elections, one million Americans voted for Socialist or Communist candidates”[214]; many years later, avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders nearly nabbed the Democratic presidential nomination. But in the 2016 presidential election, more was needed to stem the tide of parasitic neoliberal forces. In Eastern Europe, neoliberals easily forced through much less cooperative initiatives because Russia had been transformed away from a Communist entity; Klein notes that “capitalism was suddenly free to lapse into its most savage form, not just in Russia but around the world.” [215]
Soulside’s 1989 tour took me to many locations discussed in The Shock Doctrine. The Iron Curtain had not yet come down, and drastic changes were about to be made in many Eastern Europe economies. We played in East Berlin and Poland six months before the Berlin Wall came down; we were in Yugoslavia just before it was torn apart by war. Things were heating up fast, so we drove straight through Kosovo and around Albania to reach Greece. Our travels in these countries felt timely and eye-opening, reflecting the tremendous amount of revolutionary activity happening around the globe.
At that time, going behind the Iron Curtain meant walking into completely different lifestyles from Western Europe and America. WWII-era bullet holes dotted the architecture. Goods were traded solely with the East, so there were no bananas in the markets, for example. In Poland, we played in cultural centers that looked like museums. We arrived a couple of weeks before the first free Parliament election, which eventually brought the Solidarity Party to power. On the way to Poland, we played an illegal show in East Berlin at a Protestant church. This was special and rare because punk rock was strictly forbidden at that time in East Germany.
One thing that immediately struck me in Poland was that even before Lech Wałesa and the Solidarity Party gained political power, the punks we talked to were already disillusioned with the movement. Kline states that these societies entered the global economy on neoliberal terms and were plagued by a central dynamic: although people could exercise political power, their governments had already signed away their economies. Without economic power, political power meant very little, as evidenced in South Africa when Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress assumed leadership in 1994.
The folks in the punk scene who brought us to Poland were given credit for teaching the Solidarity Movement about techniques in independent media, specifically via a fanzine called Antena Krzyku. In the eighties, it was one of the best-known underground Polish zines covering independent music and counterculture on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It was totally independent, which in late-Communist Poland also meant illegal, and it became somewhat of a nucleus for the Polish DIY community, leading up to the rise of Solidarity and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Nigeria and the Global Economy in the 1970s
The whole of Nigeria, like many of the countries afflicted by the policies of the World Bank and the IMF, endured a similar dynamic as what was happening in Ogoni, for companies like Shell were making huge profits and trickling just enough income to government tyrants in order to keep them happy. Naturally, none of the profits reached the people. For example, in 1978 Nigeria had borrowed $5 billion from the IMF, and by 2000 “had reimbursed $16 billion, but still owed $31 billion, according to President Obasanjo.”[216] The loan seemed to have been set up to cripple their economy.
Indeed, it is the IMF and World Bank that have dictated that Nigeria should focus its spending on debt servicing; rather than on education and health care. They are responsible for forcing Nigeria to liberalize every aspect of the economy. This has seen the Nigerian state clamping down on workers’ rights; privatizing every government function including health care and education; relaxing environmental laws; and allowing multinational corporations to repatriate all of their profits out of Nigeria. All of this has been done in order to meet the desires of the multinational oil companies that are operating in Nigeria; at the direct expense of the majority of people.[217]
The global capitalist economy from WWII up to the early 1970s was known as “regulated capitalism.” It had encouraged a period of sustained growth around the world. The expectation was that it would continue, but in the early 1970s global economic growth fell to half of what it had been previously. This prompted the US to internally abolish fixed exchange rates, which in turn changed the roles of the World Bank and the IMF.
Both of these institutions were created to help rebuild Europe after WWII. They were established as part of the Bretton Woods Agreement to administer loans and maintain fixed exchange rates for all currencies. After 1972, they focused on the so-called third world, requiring nations to accept structural adjustment programs, which lowered minimum wages, raised food costs, and ultimately failed their economies, causing them to be, among other things, reliant on foreign powers rather than remain self-sufficient. In Africa, corporations easily stepped in after the demise of colonialism.
Newly formed independent governments struggled to adapt to the globalization of their economies. Taking on debt seemed like their only path, and the “experts” assured them that it would be worth the risk. Unfortunately, the way countries’ borders were partitioned during colonialism also assured ongoing domestic social strife, as was evident in Nigeria after independence in 1960. The atmosphere set in motion a series of military coups, and dictatorial leadership flourished, morphing into what Ken Saro-Wiwa dubbed “domestic colonialism.” Speaking on behalf of the Ogoni in a 1992 presentation to the UN’s Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Saro-Wiwa said:
The nation which the British left behind was supposed to be a federal democracy, but the federating ethnic nations were bound by few agreements and the peoples were so disparate, so culturally different, so varied in size, that force and violence seemed to be the only way of maintaining the nation. In the circumstances, the interests of the few and weak such as the Ogoni were bound to suffer and have suffered.[218]
After a devastating civil war in Nigeria at the end of the 1960s, which largely revolved around controlling oil-bearing land, the ensuing “oil boom of the 1970s profoundly transformed Nigerian society from one based on agricultural exports to one based on exports of crude oil . . . Oil money was appropriated by indigenous capitalists who tended to invest abroad rather than locally. Much theft was geared toward conspicuous consumption and land acquisition.”[219] This devastated the smaller ethnic groups like the Ogoni, who had lived in the Niger Delta for generations.
After serving in numerous governmental posts, Saro-Wiwa became intensely active in setting up a nonviolent movement to defend his people’s rights and the rights of other marginalized ethnic groups. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People was formed, and Saro-Wiwa promptly drafted an Ogoni Bill of Rights, which detailed the movement’s demands: a fair share of the oil money made from their land, and a cleanup of the environmental damage the oil companies meted out.
Their plight was shaky at best, because grabbing their land had already been a primary focus during the civil war from 1967 to 1970. The postwar Nigerian Constitution ensured ethnic minorities living on or near mineral resources—oil—would have no real voice in Parliament, where the decision rested for the land’s sale. The minorities were dealing with a stronger central government that was completely dependent on oil. As a result, significant demonstrations flared up.
A newly radicalized Fela Kuti was determined to use his music as a weapon to expose Nigeria’s corporate and government corruption. Fela had been a jazz musician in London and his unchartered musical innovation led him to Los Angeles, where he was exposed to the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement. Fela soon became the father of Afro Beat, a musical genre so infectious that it gave the singer an international platform to express the people’s dissatisfaction with government and global corporations. In his song “International Thief Thief,” Fela chanted:
Many foreign companies dey Africa carry all our money go . . .
Them get one style wey them dey use. Them go pick one African man—a man with low mentality . . .
Him go bribe some thousand naira bread to become one useless chief . . .
Fela’s son Seun Kuti later penned a song called “IMF,” dubbing the institution an “International Mother Fucker.” It was clear to most Nigerians that their oppression was based not just on the whims of local despots, but also on the greed of corporate interlopers. The culture of capitalism that abounded not only aggravated ethnic relations, it also exacerbated gender relations. In Nigeria, though, women were not having it.
In Arise Ye Mighty People, Turner and Oshare point to the inherent marginalization of women in the global realization of capitalism. The authors speak of a “class formation,” in which gender roles are altered to fit the new economic model, elevating the role of men in the society at the expense of the women. Moving the conversation forward and looking at the results on the ground, Turner and Oshare are quick to determine that “alliances of solidarity between women and men are prerequisites for overcoming the power of capital and for organizing an egalitarian, cooperative society.”[220]
The story of women’s uprisings in Nigeria is stunning. In the eighties, women led two revolts against the oil industry. The earlier uprising in 1984 was more successful because the women confronted the subsidiary of a US company directly, without the state or the coopted chiefs coming between them. The 1986 Ekpan uprising differed, and so did the results. The decisive victory in 1984 of the smaller-scale Ogharefe women’s uprising benefitted from the support of the influential Council of Youth, as well as from men in their community. Yet women didn’t hand over leadership to these men, which Turner and Oshare place into a historical context. “Throughout the twentieth century,” they write, “Nigerian women have exercised the social power under their control in their own interests, and in the interests of the community.”[221]
As the post–civil war state sector grew, women’s spheres of economic activity suffered. Following a government decree in 1977, land not privately owned was confiscated by the federal government. The “male deal” meant the state formally recognized certain chiefs who supported the move, as detailed in Fela Kuti’s song “International Thief Thief.” This pitted the chiefs against their people, which worked in favor of the state and private companies in cahoots with the foreign oil industry. These factors eventually led to the 1984 uprising.
Highlighting the resourcefulness of the oppressed, one of the main weapons the women used against their foes was nakedness. In their culture, “disrobing by women in public is considered a serious and permanent curse on those to whom the women expose themselves,” which meant that a “foreign man subjected to this curse would lose his credibility (potency) in Nigeria and would be effectively neutralized.”[222]
The people of Ogharefe had not been compensated for their land, which was sold to a subsidiary of Pan Ocean, a US multinational corporation. The people also suffered “from skin rashes, stomach ailments and other health problems associated with hundreds of 24-hour-a-day natural gas flares and the discharge of ‘oil production water’ into the environment.”[223] The women demanded payment for the land and a free supply of well water and electricity. Their initial protests were unsuccessful, so they took things to the next level. Early one morning, thousands of women descended on the grounds of the Ogharefe Production Station and effectively prevented the next shift of workers from assuming their posts. When the Pan Ocean managing director showed up on the scene, the women had already taken off their clothes: “The sight of thousands of naked women of all ages was not one that these officials nor the police could withstand. They all fled without hesitation. The women’s demands were met almost immediately.”[224]
This was a powerful form of direct action. Previous to the next uprising, there had been a very successful tax protest, where a multiclass mobilization made it possible for people to defeat a key element of the IMF’s structural adjustment program. The IMF was forced to withdraw its directive to tax Nigerian women. Here’s what followed: “On March 29 and 30, 1986, some 400 Bonny Island residents, including oil workers, shut down Africa’s largest oil export terminal, claiming that the operator, Shell, had disrupted their lives and contributed nothing. Some 100 women sat on the Shell helipad to prevent any helicopter from landing at the tank farm base.”[225]
After so many years of the oil companies’ occupations, the people were finally rising up. Five thousand villagers held forty staff members of Shell hostage, protesting twenty-eight years of neglect. “The demonstrating women were estimated to be about 10,000 strong. The throng was made up of all age groups of women, including the very old.”[226]
But the tides turned in the 1990s. Nigerian authorities covered up an October 1990 massacre of eighty unarmed villagers protesting Royal Dutch Shell. Even with this level of repression, over 100,000 Ogoni women and men gathered together for a daylong demonstration in January 1993. This massive mobilization flowed from the wellspring of the eighties uprisings initiated by oil belt women. Turner and Oshare point to a swell of positive results despite so much devastation:
Industrialization led to land alienation which motivated women’s fight back. It elevated women’s political impact by offering them vulnerable oil industry targets against which to concentrate their collective social power. It prompted feminist militancy which reforged the reciprocity between women and men, but this time on the new basis of class solidarity. Out of this experience is emerging a new society with the force and reason of women, and their organization and consciousness at its forefront.[227]
Women’s Resistance in Africa Birthing a Movement in Jamaica
Rastafari has a deep well of connection to women and the fight against colonialism in Africa. The first mansion of Rastafari was named the Order of Nyahbinghi. Haile Selassie I was purportedly named the head of this order at a meeting of the Pan-African Congress in 1930. The word “Nyahbinghi” refers to both a singular figure and a popular movement in Africa, which became known to the Europeans in the late 1800s. In the early 1900s the movement was the driving force of the resistance against British colonialism in Uganda, the Germans in Rwanda, and the Belgians in the Congo. “The Nyabingi movement, influential in southwestern Uganda, was centered around a woman healer, Muhumusa, who was possessed by the spirit of Nyabingi, a legendary ‘Amazon Queen.’ Muhumusa organized armed resistance against German colonialists and was subsequently detained by the British in Kampala, Uganda, from 1913 to her death in 1945.”[228]
According to Robert Rotberg’s Rebellion in Black Africa, this women-centered popular movement “succeeded in immobilizing the administrative efforts of three colonial powers for nearly two decades, until its final suppression in 1928.”[229] Nigeria was represented at the Pan-African Congress, although they were still colonized by the British. There are few public sources mentioning this historic meeting other than a 1935 article published in the Jamaican Times, which was quoted in the 1960 “University Report on the Rastafari Movement” by the University of the West Indies, and was the first real documentation of the movement.
The decline of resistance, which came with the demise of the movement in Uganda and Rwanda in the late 1920s, mirrors what happened in Nigeria and all over the colonial world. The cause of this finality bears consideration: the absence of the self-determination actively exemplified by Rastafari people. A significant dynamic contributing to the decline of Nyabingi in Uganda and Rwanda in the late twenties “was the increasing incorporation of local Africans into the colonial administrative structure and into the local mission hierarchies. Through recruitment into these organizations, Africans were also absorbed into the underlying incentive system of the colonial power.”[230]
Widening the class divide (due to outside intervention) and forcing people to conform only promotes unrest among the disenfranchised—that is no way forward. This is a subject that appears frequently in reggae songs inspired by the Rastafari movement.
Structural Adjustment in Cuba and Peak Oil
Jamaica’s neighboring island Cuba had a remarkable response to their own economic crisis. In Cuba, the government dealt with its own form of structural adjustment, although theirs was self-imposed. The fall of the Soviet Union created an economic crisis in Cuba in the 1990s, because the island nation was largely dependent on trade with Russia. It experienced a loss of 80 percent of their export market and 80 percent of their imports, including food, medicine, and oil.
This challenge was to profoundly transform their economy. While places like Nigeria were forced to restructure their industries to primarily benefit the upper class and the foreign corporations, “the Cuban adjustment was designed to protect the standard of living of the Cuban masses and to preserve the social and economic gains of the Cuban Revolution, giving priority to the maintenance of the system of health, education and social security.”[231] Cubans actively sought citizen participation by having consultations with organizations of workers, peasants, students, women, and their revolutionary committees. As they decentralized their government-owned enterprises, they encouraged the formation of co-ops for the people instead of letting international corporations privatize their economy.
The transition toward a sustainable economy was not an easy one. With the absence of oil, transportation was essentially halted; the average Cuban reportedly lost thirty pounds. “There were great shortages, but not starvation; unemployment, but not alienation; there were tensions, but not uprisings, much less generalized repression, as would have been normal in the rest of the world. In the worst moments, the health system was maintained and the schools continued functioning with used books, paper and pencils.”[232]
The need to produce food locally, and the lack of chemical imports, meant the island had to develop systems to support organic agriculture. “In turning to gardening, individuals and neighborhood organizations took the initiative by identifying idle land in [Havana], cleaning it up and planting.”[233] Initiating this development in 1993, just a year before the final arrest of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Cuban government awarded a $26,000 grant to a group of Australian permaculturalists to set up what would become the first permaculture demonstration project. Later, an urban permaculture center was established in Havana to continue educating people on the practice.
In 2006, Megan Quinn reported on an engineer-turned-farmer who was raising food for his neighborhood on his rooftop.
On just a few hundred square feet he has rabbits and hens and many large pots of plants. Running free on the floor are gerbils, which eat the waste from the rabbits, and become an important protein source themselves. “Things are changing,” Sanchez [the urban farmer] said. “It’s a local economy. In other places people don’t know their neighbors. They don’t know their names. People don’t say hello to each other. Not here.”[234]
Previously focused on plantation agriculture, the island nation now had to turn away from tractors and turn to oxen, from exporting big mono-crops and spraying chemical pesticides on a large scale to following natural cycles and encouraging biodiversity. They were converting former plantations into organic production centers and trying to connect directly to markets in the US.
Cubans also employed ride-sharing as another community-based solution to deal with scarce resources. “In an inventive approach, virtually every form of vehicle, large and small, was used to build this mass transit system. Commuters ride in handmade wheelbarrows, buses, other motorized transport and animal-powered vehicles,” Quinn writes.[235] Carlos Alzugaray, the former Cuban ambassador to the EU and minister-councilor to the Cuban embassy in Ethiopia, put it this way when we met with him at an accounting co-op in Havana: “When it came to the US and Cuba, it was like what Roberta Flack sang in ‘Killing Me Softly.’ But we Cubans ended up more like Gloria Gaynor’s sentiments in her disco hit ‘I Will Survive’!”
Chris Maher from the National Co+op Grocers board, who was also on my trip to Cuba, participated in a panel discussion with Cuban construction and textile co-op representatives. Maher represented consumer co-ops, which Cuba lacked, so together we advocated for the community-owned model. We met with a couple of economics professors from the University of Havana who were interested in starting one. At the time, however, it was not possible under the existing laws to enact a consumer co-op. But one thing was clear from all our discussions: co-ops in the US benefit tremendously from our national organizations like the NCG and the NCBA. Cuban co-ops would do well to form an organization that could advocate on their behalf.
Meanwhile, the US has a lot to learn from the Cuban people, not to mention the Ogoni people in Nigeria. Megan Quinn addresses this point succinctly:
From the Community Solution’s viewpoint, Cuba did what it could to survive, despite its ideology of a centralized economy [at the time]. In the face of peak oil and declining oil production, will America do what it takes to survive, in spite of its ideology of individualism and consumerism? Will Americans come together in community, as Cubans did, in the spirit of sacrifice and mutual support?
As the US government and its corporate allies now face the unification of Native American leadership, the Black Lives Matter movement, and white leftists resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline, people should remember George Jackson’s warnings about fascism. The recent conflict in North Dakota is a blatant example of police forces serving and protecting an oil corporation against the will of the people, meting out legal violence against the original inhabitants of the land. This tendency absolutely reeks of a corporate-minded government and a recolonization of America.
As politicians continue to vie for such neocolonialist control, people need to rise up together with an informed perspective that honors all religions, just as Haile Selassie I espoused. He said we must cultivate “the ability to transcend narrow passions and to engage in honest conversation; for civilization is by nature ‘the victory of persuasion over force.’ Unity is strength.”[236]
In Nigeria the government made tampering with a pipeline a crime punishable by death. And in Saro-Wiwa’s case, merely speaking out against the injustice cost him his life.
In Nigeria, the government and military acted as appendages of the oil companies; similar to the US, where the CEO of Exxon is now the secretary of state, the oil companies put the leaders into power. This is the climate that led to the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa. In his closing statement to the Nigerian military appointed tribunal, Saro-Wiwa was somewhat foreboding, although he expressed confidence that his cause would be vindicated. He said, “I predict that the scene here will be played and replayed by generations yet unborn. Some have already cast themselves in the role of villains, some are tragic victims, some still have a chance to redeem themselves. The choice is for each individual.” He concluded by quoting the Holy Quran: “All those that fight when oppressed incur no guilt, but Allah shall punish the oppressor. Come the day.”