Sophia Evans

I still remember the great sadness and anger I felt when the writer and human rights activist Ken Saro Wiwa and eight more Ogoni leaders were arrested, framed on murder charges, and executed on November 10, 1995. In 1990 Ken Saro Wiwa started to mobilize his people, the Ogoni, one of 14 ethnic groups in the Delta, against the oil company Shell who were happy to take their oil, pollute the place, and invest nothing in their poverty-stricken communities. The Ogoni wanted schools, hospitals, jobs, a certain amount of autonomy, and an environmental clean-up. Their peaceful mass protests brought worldwide attention to the Ogoni and their charismatic leader. They managed to force Shell to stop all oil production activities in Ogoniland. But the demented and now expired dictator, General Sani Abacha, retaliated brutally. Ogoni villages were razed to the ground, protesters were raped and massacred, and Ken Saro Wiwa silenced for ever. The collusion of the oil company Shell was widely suspected.
I journeyed through the Niger Delta documenting the effects of the oil companies on the people and the environment. I went to Ken Saro Wiwa’s village, Bane, and met his father Chief Jim Beeson Wiwa, 99 years old! Chief Jim lives in pain and anger every day of his life since his people were slaughtered and his son executed. ‘My son did not die because he committed any crime, he died for human rights. My son made a Bill of Rights for the Federal Government of Nigeria which everybody in Ogoni signed – he gave a copy to Shell and the Government but their response was not alright… This matter of oil in Ogoniland was given us by God. If the international organizations of human rights cannot do anything for Ogoni people then Jehovah God in heaven will so something for Ogoni people. I leave everything in the hands of God.’

Oil exploration in the Delta has turned parts of it into a wasteland, where land, streams, and creeks are totally and continually polluted, the atmosphere is poisoned, charged as it is with hydrocarbon vapours, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and soot emitted by gas which has been flaring 24 hours a day for over 45 years in very close proximity to human habitation. Acid rain and oil spillages have devastated the land. Wild animals and fish have left due to the noise, the unbelievable heat, the pollution, and the illumination affecting their site caused by these gas flares.

This journey did not only show me the environmental damage caused by the oil companies but also that there is a sophisticated and unconventional war going on in which Delta people suffer oppression and tyranny, unable to speak up for their rights to continue as hunters and fishermen or even to be employed by the very people taking away their resources. It is a powerful combination of titanic forces from far and near driven by greed and cold statistics. How can this go on?

I would like to thank Canon, AFJ, and Jean Francois Leroy for their kindness and for the prize money which enabled me to take this journey.