Lost history · 1993–1997
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Ken Saro-Wiwa's name is the one the world remembers. But the strongest arm of the Ogoni movement was its women, who fed refugees, rebuilt villages and, in 1997, signed and thumbprinted a resolution declaring Shell unwelcome in Ogoni.
Ogoni sits in the oil-rich Niger Delta, in today's Rivers State. The account written by Diana Barikor-Wiwa for Cultural Survival describes about 500,000 people living in roughly 404 square miles, getting their living from fishing, farming and trading. The Ogoni were not poor. They grew a lot of the food eaten in the Delta.
For women, land meant something very specific. By tradition, when an Ogoni woman married, her husband had to give her a piece of land to farm. From that farm she fed her family and grew extra to sell, so she could buy what she did not grow. It gave her a measure of independence. Older women told Barikor-Wiwa that in the good years, with rich soil and big harvests, there was time left over for art, dancing, singing and pottery, and less tension at home.
Then came oil, discovered in the 1950s. The money did not come back to the people. Farmland was taken without compensation, pipelines ran across fields, gas was flared close to homes, and old equipment leaked oil into farms. Young men could leave for the cities. Women and children mostly could not. Polluted streams meant women walked further for water. Between 1958 and 1993, by this account, only about 50 Ogoni people got jobs in the industry, mostly as cleaners and drivers.
Even old customs suffered. After a woman's first child she would traditionally spend a year in the "fattening room", resting inside the family compound while older women taught her childcare and local medicines. As farmland shrank and pressure grew, that year was cut to two months or less, and the knowledge started to slip away. The women decided this was cultural damage caused by the oil industry, and they decided to organise.
On 4 January 1993, the Ogoni staged an enormous protest against nearly four decades of environmental damage. Barikor-Wiwa writes that over 300,000 of the 500,000 Ogoni took part, and not a single stone was thrown. Women did a great deal of the organising.
That same year the Federation of Ogoni Women's Associations, FOWA, was set up as one of nine units of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, MOSOP. The others were groups for youths, churches, professionals, traditional rulers, students, teachers and a central union. FOWA was independent but followed MOSOP's policies, and it came to be widely seen as the strongest of the nine.
The first violence came fast. On 28 April 1993, a woman named Mrs Karalole went to her farm early in the morning and found it being bulldozed by Wilbros, a contractor working for Shell, with armed soldiers guarding them. She tried to save what was left of her crops and was badly beaten. She went and told the village. Thousands of people came out carrying leaves, a sign of protest, and marched peacefully. The soldiers fired into the crowd. A man named Mr Atu was killed and several others were badly hurt. One of them was Mrs Karalole, who later lost her arm to the gunshot wound.
FOWA did not back down. It set up branches across Ogoni, eventually 126, one in every village. And it did more than protest. It worked to revive pottery and basket weaving, ran programmes on health, family planning and girls' education, and taught young women about sexually transmitted diseases. The money came from membership fees and women's cooperatives.
In August 1993 a new wave of military attacks hit Ogoni. Barikor-Wiwa reports that by August 1994, 30 villages had been destroyed, over 2,000 people killed, more than 3,000 injured and around 100,000 people driven from their homes.
The women moved the money they had raised for development into food and medicine. Every Ogoni woman was asked to give something. In under three weeks they filled a garage with food. Working with MOSOP's relief committee and a Catholic agency, the Daughters of Charity, they handed out aid. By July 1994 their resources were gone, and the market squares where women traded had been wrecked. So FOWA started a scheme for Ogoni families to take refugees into their own homes. With help from Canada and another international group, seven villages were rebuilt, including a school and a big market at Kaa.
On 21 April 1994 Ken Saro-Wiwa was arrested. A military Internal Security Task Force was sent in, and its commander spoke of setting out to "sanitize Ogoni". Soldiers beat, killed, looted and extorted, and women were often targeted, including with rape. Through all of it, the women kept feeding the hundreds of Ogoni detainees and kept holding prayer meetings despite arrests and threats.
On 25 April 1997, over 300 FOWA leaders, speaking for 57,000 registered members, made six resolutions. Those who could write signed. Those who could not pressed their thumbprints. One read: "It is resolved that Shell cannot and must not be allowed in Ogoni... we say no to Shell as it remains Persona non grata in Ogoni."
The farmers whose husbands had once given them land had put their names, and their thumbs, to the most direct statement of the whole struggle.
