São Tomé and Príncipe government has charged 38 people for allegedly trying to topple President Fradique de Menezes last Thursday, government has confirmed. Last Friday, justice ministry spokesman Justino Veiga announced the arrest of a group of men after the foiled coup and the confiscation of more than 310 assault rifles in the home of one of the opposition party leaders.

The recent two-percent drop in HIV prevalence in Zambia may not be a true reflection of the state of the pandemic in the country, health officials have warned. UNAIDS Monitoring and Evaluation Advisor Dr Michael Gboun told IRIN/PlusNews that while there has been a marked decline of HIV in the general population, some geographical areas and groups were showing an alarming increase.

Dibussi Tande reviews the following blogs:

Kanmi Iyanda
Africans in Minnesota
George Ngwane
House of Chiefs

And they asked him:
Why do you sing?
And he answered, as they seized him:
I sing because I sing

And they searched his chest
But could only find his heart
And they searched his heart
But could only find his people
And they searched his voice
But could only find his grief
And they searched his grief
But could only find his prison
And they searched his prison
But could only see themselves in chains

From Poem Of The Land, Mahmoud Darwish
(Written to commemorate five Palestinian girls killed by the Israelis, 30 March 30 1976 at a demonstration to protest Israeli seizures of Arab land).

Environmental Rights Action (ERA) demand that obscene oil company profits be used to clean up the environmental and social mess inflicted upon the Niger Delta population. Concerned about the government’s inability to tackle the problem of gas flaring, Bassey and the ERA propose a concerted endeavour to stop gas flaring, audit all oil spills and bring about a thorough clean-up of the region in order to detoxify the land once and for all. With a view to moving Nigeria away from its dependence on crude oil exports, Bassey and the ERA argue that offering new oil blocks should be resisted and oil kept in the soil.

This is and dissection of the IPS' Social Action & Leadership School for Activists

With Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez having successfully won voters’ backing through a referendum on the removal of official term limits, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem considers the dangers of allowing leaders of revolutionary clout to remain in power indefinitely. As a marked contrast from the country’s former imperially-backed political leaders, Abdul-Raheem points to the Chávez administration’s great achievements in health and education and continuing popularity with the poor. But if democracy is truly to function and sustain itself, the author argues, presidents must not be permitted to simply entrench themselves in power.

President Hu Jintao’s Friendship and Cooperation visit to Africa ended on a high note. With more than US$380 million loans and grant agreements signed during the whistle-stop visit to Mali, Senegal, Tanzania and Mauritius, President Hu put to rest any speculation or confusion regarding Beijing’s long-term strategy in Africa and reaffirmed its economic assistance during times of financial uncertainty and crisis. But the real significance of this visit was the keynote speech President Hu delivered in Tanzania entitled .

cc. In an extensive piece examining the reactions of Niger Delta women towards the militarised violence of the Nigerian state and its multinational oil company allies, Sokari Ekine discusses the iniquitous contrast in wealth visible in the abject poverty of the Delta region’s locals and the hugely profitable resource extraction of external players. Amounting to an estimated US$30 billion in oil revenues over a 38-year period, this plundering of resources has become progressively rooted in the institutionalisation of violence directed towards dissenting local groups. Though suffering terribly at the hands of government forces, local women, Ekine writes, have spearheaded the defence of local livelihoods through organised protests which cut across regional ethnic divisions.
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Nigeria has for the past 39 years been a militarised state, even when so-called civilian governments, including the present one, have been in power. Militarisation consists of the use of the threat of violence to settle political conflicts, the legitimisation of state violence, the curtailment of freedom of opinion, the domination of military values over civilian life, the violation of human rights, extrajudicial killings and the gross repression of the people (Chunakara, 1994). Turshen describes the militarised state as one in which ‘violence becomes a crisis of everyday life, is disenfranchising and politically, physically and economically debilitating’ (Turshen, 1988: 7). The Niger Delta is a region of Nigeria that has been subjected to excessive militarisation for the past 13 years, where violence is used as an instrument of governance to force the people into total submission (Okonta and Douglas, 2001; Na’Allah, 1998). It is where, by far, the majority of the people live in abject poverty and where women are the poorest of the poor (Human Rights Watch, 2002; 2004; 2007). This region has little or no development, no electricity, no water, no communications, no health facilities, little and poor education. In contrast, the region generated an estimated over US$30 billion in oil revenues over a 38-year period in the form of rents for the government and profit for the multinational oil companies (Rowell, 1996).

The multinational oil companies – mainly Shell, Chevron/Texaco and Elf – have treated both the people and the environment with total disdain and hostility (Okonta and Douglas, 2001). They have worked hand in hand with a succession of brutal and corrupt regimes to protect their exploitation of the land and people by providing the Nigerian military and police with weapons, transport, logistical support and finance. In return the Nigerian government has allowed the oil companies a free hand to operate without any monitoring. In fact, the oil companies in the Niger Delta have one of the worst environmental records in the world.[2]

DESTRUCTION OF THE ECOLOGICAL SYSTEM

The Niger Delta has become an ecological disaster zone, a place where rusty pipelines run through farms and in front of houses (Rowell, 1996). Day and night huge gas fires rage in massive pits and towers, spewing noxious gases and filth into people’s homes and farms. Oil spills and fires are a regular occurrence, often causing the death of local people as well as the destruction of wildlife and property. Michael Fleshman of the New York-based Africa Fund describes what he saw at the site of one oil spill:

The impact of the spill on the community has been devastating, as the oil has poisoned their water supply and fishing ponds, and is steadily killing the raffia palms that are the community’s economic mainstay. Lacking any other alternative, the people of the village have been forced to drink polluted water for over a year, and the community leaders told us that many people had become ill in recent months and that some had died. The sight that greeted us when we finally arrived at the spill was horrendous. A thick brownish film of crude oil stained the entire area, collecting in clumps along the shoreline and covering the surface of the still water. The humid aid was thick with oil fumes (Fleshman, 1999).

Often, the spillages lead to raging fires, as in the case of the Jesse fire (17 October 1998[3]) when over a thousand people were killed and thousands more horrifically burned and left homeless. To date, not a single person has received compensation. Indeed, in a region where medical care is scarce and only available to the rich, it is easy to envision the fate of these people. Ponds, creeks, rivers and land are soaked with thick layers of oil. Terisa Turner, co-director of the United Nations NGO, International Oil Working Group (IOWG), describes one particular oil spill that she personally witnessed as follows:

150,000 residents of the community of Ogbodo battled a massive petroleum spill from a Shell pipeline, which burst on 24 June, churning crude into the surrounding waterways for 18 days until Shell clamped the pipe on 12 July. Severe environmental damage and threat to life by Shell’s neglect is the other side of the ‘corporate rule’ coin of ever-expanding neo-liberal license. The dangers to human life, human rights and the environment were dramatically experienced by Ogbodo community members in Nigeria’s ‘Shell-Shocked’ oil belt (Turner, 2001: 11).

This scene is typical. The common response of the oil companies to such spills however, has been to blame the villagers for sabotage. The question is, why would the villagers commit acts of sabotage that will only worsen the environmental damage and pollution of their land and prevent them from engaging in their livelihoods, namely farming, fishing and trading? In this particular case, the pipeline in question was buried six feet deep (many pipelines in the region are built above ground, running through farm land and through villages), and split underneath the ground (Turner, 2001). In addition to air and water pollution and other kinds of environmental degradation, lands have been expropriated and personal property damaged. The people have received only very little compensation for the land taken or damages from oil spillage and fires. Indeed, efforts at compensation have been ‘case(s) of broken promises, development programmes that are abandoned halfway, poor quality facilities that break down and simply rust away as soon as they are installed’ (Okonta and Douglas, 2001: 106).

MILITARISATION

As the dispossessed communities demand corporate responsibility, environmental, economic and social justice and proper compensation, their protests have been met with violence including extrajudicial killings and mass murder, torture, rape, the burning of homes and property, and increased military presence. As such, the Niger Delta has become completely militarised and ‘secured’ by unrestrained and unaccountable Nigerian military personnel. The report by Human Rights Watch, ‘No Democratic Dividend’, notes that violence in the region continues despite the change from military to civilian rule (Human Rights Watch, 2002).

The Niger Delta is a particularly extreme example of a culture of violence that is woven into the fabric of a society ruled by military dictators. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo was a key player in no less than three successive military regimes. He was a senior officer under General Gowon and participated in the 1975 coup d’état that overthrew General Gowon. He then served as the deputy supreme commander under Brigadier General Murtala Mohammed until the latter’s assassination in the 1976 coup. General Obasanjo then took over as supreme commander until he handed power to the second civilian government of Shehu Shagari in 1979. Four more military regimes followed this brief interregnum, including the particularly brutal regime of General Sani Abacha between 1993 and 1998. It was during this period that Ogoni activists, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, were murdered. Despite the fact that the Obasanjo government, which ruled from 1999 until 2007, was viewed as a transition to civilian rule, the level of violence in the region continued to escalate. Examples of this escalation include:

- The intensification of the military option to control the oil fields and pipelines. Through the specially created Nigerian Military Task Force for the Niger Delta with specific orders to ‘shoot-to-kill’ protesting indigenes, Obasanjo demonstrated his propensity to use brute force to compel silence and acquiescence.[4]
- The invasion of Odi Town on the direct orders of Obasanjo in retaliation for the murder of 12 policemen by youths in the town in 1999.
- The brutal raping of women and young girls by Nigerian Army personnel in Choba.
- The gunning down of unarmed youths who protested against unemployment in Bonny Island.
- The ravaging of communities in Ke-Dere in Rivers State for protesting the unwanted and forceful return of Shell Oil to Ogoniland.
- The killings of women and children, and the burning and looting of property in Oleh town in Isokoland.
- The massacre on 17 October 2000 of 15 youth protesters in Tebidaba in Bayelsa State (INAA, 2000).

The government of the newly elected president of Nigeria, Umaru Yar’Adua, continues the policy of militarisation of the region in response to the increased militancy of local people.

FORMS OF RESISTANCE

Resistance can take many forms, some of which are explicit in their actions and consequences and others less so. Despite the intangible nature that resistance can sometimes take, any forms of resistance are nonetheless worthy of recognition and can be just as powerful as overt acts. Women experience oppression in the domestic sphere, within the context of the community, cultural and traditional roles and mores, as well as through formal organisations and social institutions controlled by men (Hill Collins, 1990). Often women experience all three simultaneously and may engage in acts of resistance that challenge all three levels of oppression either singularly or simultaneously.

In Gender Violence in Africa, December Green uses a schema developed by Jane Everett, Ellen Charlton, and Kathleen Staudt to illustrate the efforts of women to protect themselves and their interests in areas where they have little formal power as ‘strategies of disengagement’ (Green, 1999). This schema is a useful framework to analyse the acts of resistance of women of the Niger Delta. As Green (1999: 154) states, the schema is not rigid and one or more strategies may be used at any given time. It also allows for the inclusion of a broad range of actions and forms of resistance. The schema consists of four categories:

‘The management of suffering occurs when women living under imposed hardships seek out survival or coping mechanisms. Although survival requires active pursuit, this activism is often regarded as passive. Insulation consists of a turning inward to family and kin as an alternative way of gaining recognition, power, and resources. In collective action, women as a group, confront authority in order to resist its growth or to demand adherence to norms of behaviour. Escape, the fourth type of resistance, is often taken as a last resort and is perhaps the most extreme, escape is often ventured under only the most dire circumstances’ (Green, 1999: 154).

The ways in which women engage in acts of resistance range from everyday simple acts, which when maintained over a period of time can become transformational and extreme, leading to organised and confrontational acts (Green, 1999). Women in the Niger Delta have used and continue to use a variety of forms of resistance such as dancing and singing, collective action including demonstrations and strikes, testimonies, silence, and the use of culturally specific responses such as stripping naked. They have also refused to alter work routines and habits such as opening up market stalls, collecting water, participating in women’s meetings and they have struggled to maintain their daily routines amidst the chaos and violence that surrounds them. These acts of resistance are bound within local cultures as well as with the socioeconomic and political context.

RESISTANCE AND RESPONSES TO STATE-SPONSORED VIOLENCE

One of the most common forms of violence is destruction of property: burning homes and shops, looting and stealing money. Communities often respond to these attacks by fleeing either to a nearby village or to a hiding place in the bush (forest). In Green’s (1999) schema, escape is considered to be the most extreme form of resistance as it is usually ventured only in the direst circumstances.

During the invasion of Odi town in 1999, many townsfolk escaped, leaving behind their meagre possessions accumulated over a lifetime, often losing family members during the escape, and eventually returning to find other family members killed, their homes burnt to the ground, and property looted. For women, this was particularly difficult as the following interviewees explain:

‘I left everything to run for my dear life and pleaded with people to let me in their canoe with my children… I pleaded with people to take my children. I don’t even know the destination they were, where they ran to. I started to trace my children… As God would have it none of them died and at the end all of us came here. When I saw my house I cried… People were hugging me. We will survive this thing with God.’ (Charity, Odi Woman)

‘When the soldiers came we were in our various houses, we only heard that soldiers have come and surrounded everywhere. Since the soldiers were coming we were all afraid. Everyone started packing and running away, we were not able to stand soldiers. We carried a few things and we left. When we came back we saw all our houses, food had been burned down, all burned down money that we left in our houses. Since then we have been trying to manage with nothing again. We are lying on the ground nothing to sleep on.’ (Amasin, primary school teacher, Odi)

‘We ran to a nearby village called Odoni. We were crying our houses are finished. We also heard the gunshots and knew people were being killed. Others ran to the bush. Those who could not get boats ran to the bush… Women, not men, only women, the men were dead. One woman was captured, she came out with her children because they couldn’t stand it (the bush) so the army were feeding her with gari (cassava). The soldiers did that – gave people burnt gari to drink and burnt yams to eat.’ (Imegbele, school teacher, Odi Town)

During this invasion, however, many of the elderly women refused to run with their families and therefore witnessed the horror of shooting, burning, and looting by soldiers, including those of their own homes. One elderly woman explained how soldiers broke the doors of her house and started packing her personal property to steal. They came with a big lorry to pack all the things they looted. According to her, some of them even slept in her house. However, these women were protected from physical violence by their status as elderly women and mothers/grandmothers. In some instances, the soldiers ended up giving them food, albeit very meagre amounts. These elderly women were able to command sufficient respect to protect them from the abuse of the soldiers.

The testimonies in Blood and Oil (Ekine, 2000) and in other interviews conducted by activists and researchers in the region are all examples of women speaking out about their personal and community experiences of violence. Women narrated their stories of rape, beatings, sexual harassment, burning of their property, arrest and murder of their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers. They spoke of the loss of their fishing ponds and farmlands to pollution, and the poverty of their lives. They also mentioned the lack of employment opportunities for the male family members, the harassment of their young sons by police and army personnel. Moreover, these women talked about both the support and, in most cases, the lack of support they received from their husbands and traditional elders in their activism. They discussed their decisions to take action and the consequences of those actions.

SILENCE AS RESISTANCE

Closely related to the act of speaking out is the act of silent resistance, by which I mean not speaking and choosing to do nothing. The question of whether silence constitutes resistance, an exercise of choice, is worth exploring.

Before undertaking fieldwork for Blood and Oil,[5] I had never considered silence as an act of resistance. However, during the interviews with groups of women, I observed that there would often be some women who did not speak or spoke very little. As a researcher and observer, although ‘listening to their silence’ was difficult, I was very conscious of the need to respect it. I became aware of the power of these silent voices. I saw their silence as an act of defiance and strength and also a way to manage the pain in their lives. Traci West (1999) states that resistance includes any coping mechanism used for survival, including silence when it is used as an aid to the survival and healing of the individual. Building on this, Mamphela Ramphele includes as part of women’s coping mechanisms ‘the decision not to act as a powerful act in itself’ (cited in Green, 1999: 153). In other words, what may appear as doing nothing is, in effect, making a choice not to do anything. In local parlance, this kind of deliberate inaction is referred to as ‘sitting on oneself’.

One example of silent resistance took place in the small town of Kaiama in western Ijaw. Here, on 11 December 1998, representatives of over 40 Ijaw clans issued a communiqué known as the Kaiama Declaration and created the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) to administer the affairs of the Ijaw youth. The communiqué called for an end to 40 years of environmental damage and underdevelopment in the region and asserted the right to ownership of resources and land by the indigenous people. In response, the Nigerian government created a Naval Special Task Force and, on 29 December, sent 1,500 federal troops to the nearby state capital at Yenagoa and occupied it and the surrounding area. Following a massacre, rape and burning of properties in Yenagoa on 1 January 1999, the army invaded the town of Kaiama on 2 January. On 4 January, using Chevron helicopters and boats, the army invaded seven other Ijaw towns.

During interviews with women, one woman stood out because she was not interested in speaking. We learned that her son had been killed on the day of the invasion. Whereas most people had fled upon hearing that the soldiers were coming, he had run back to the house to collect an item he had forgotten and was fatally shot in his stomach. Standing face to face with her silence was an overpowering experience which conveyed her profound grief and loss at least as effectively as speech. In this case, a woman had survived by a silence that allowed her to disengage herself from her surroundings and she continued to live and hold herself with a dignity that denied her violators any sense of victory. Given that Kaiama is still under occupation today, she lives a situation in which she has to face her son’s murderers everyday, possibly even having to sell them foodstuffs from the stall she runs in order to earn a living to support her surviving children. Her silence, her stance and her body language thus serve her well in an inescapable situation, that many other women living under occupation share.

RESPONSES TO SEXUAL VIOLENCE

Rape, sexual slavery, and forced prostitution by the military are all acts of violence and demonstrations of power used in times of war and conflict. Rape serves to gratify the soldiers, feeding their hatred of the enemy while also being used as an effective weapon of war, especially to spread terror amongst the people (Turshen and Twagiramariya, 1998). In this instance, rape also has an ethnic dimension as the military and police deployed in the Niger Delta are not indigenous to the region, with many of them coming from the north of the country.

In the Niger Delta, rape and other forms of sexual violence such as forced prostitution have taken place repeatedly in communities that have been invaded by the Nigerian army, where paramilitary forces have been used to quell demonstrations, or simply to make a particular town or village an ‘example’ of what would happen should the people assert their human rights.

Blessing, one of my interviewees, explained that the soldiers and police often forced girls to ‘befriend’ them. If they refused, they were threatened with rape and beatings. She had managed to avoid being ‘befriended’ by her lack of fear and sheer stubbornness. She explained that at first she had tried to make friends for protection and was bought drinks following which the soldiers attempted to force her into having sex with them. She said, ‘the pressure was terrible and most girls just gave in.’[6] Another woman reported seeing a soldier walking into the bush with a girl of about 12 years. After the abuse (the woman did not know what actually took place) they came out and the soldier gave money to the child.

The responses to rape have varied from community to community. Several factors explain the varying responses of the women, the male members of their families, and their wider community. Using two different incidents of rape in two different ethnic groups, I will examine the different responses.

The town of Choba is an Ikwerre community in Rivers State and the headquarters of a pipeline construction company called Wilbros Nigeria Ltd (a subsidiary of Wilbros Group, a US company). Community relations between Wilbros and the people of Choba were poor, mainly because of two reasons. The company demonstrated disdain and disinterest in Choba and its people and they failed to employ local people, even at lower unskilled levels. This led to a number of demonstrations against Wilbros. In June 1999 the youth of Choba began a series of demonstrations and sit-ins outside the company gates. The youth demanded that Wilbros replace 600 of their employees with Choba residents. On 28 October, the mobile police – a paramilitary group – invaded Choba and once again unleashed murder, the destruction of property and rape on the people of the town. The rapes of women by soldiers were captured on film by a journalist and published in the Nigerian daily press. President Obasanjo’s response was to declare the photographs a fake, asserting that his soldiers would never do such a thing. The response of the women of Choba was one of insulation, turning inward towards their community. These women not only had to cope with the trauma of being publicly raped but also with the shame that they and their community felt when the photographs were published in the newspaper. Some months later, a local journalist spoke anonymously to some of the rape survivors.

‘It is a taboo to rape a married woman…(now) these women cannot sleep with their husbands and cannot cook for them. It is our tradition and we have to respect it, not just for the sake of respecting our custom but because there are grave implications for disobedience…’

‘At the time, we rallied our women to protest to the wife of the governor so that she can help us to push the case but we were arrested and detained for four days. It took the intervention of well-meaning elders before we were released… We, the women of Choba, appeal to those behind the ugly event to come and do the necessary things to appease the gods… This is important to us because without this, these women are as good as divorced.’

The community did not judge the women survivors totally negatively. On the contrary, they acknowledged the women’s pain and suffering. The women supported each other and organised themselves according to traditional ways. They sought help from their village elders and the governor’s wife. Their response was part of their healing process and, seemingly, of the community, so they could all move past the trauma to some kind of normalcy in their lives.

The responses of rape victims and their families in Ogoniland were very different from those of Choba. The Ogoni Bill of Rights (OBR) was launched on 26 August 1990. The OBR, like the declarations and communiqués of other ethnic groups, articulated the basis of a struggle for ethnic autonomy and self-determination for the Ogoni peoples and challenged both the Nigerian government and Shell’s legitimacy to determine the economic and political affairs of the Ogoni people and the entire Niger Delta communities (Ekine, 2000). The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni peoples (MOSOP) was to become the mechanism to carry out the objectives of OBR along with the Federation of Ogoni Women’s Organisations (FOWA) (Turner, 2001). The troubles in Ogoniland came to a head in November 1993 when the Nigerian military government began a three-year campaign of violence, murder, rape, burning, looting, beatings and torture, against the Ogoni people.[7] For the Ogoni women, resistance was a daily norm as they faced both the impact of Shell’s destruction of their environment and the presence of the Nigerian army and mobile police everyday. Women were harassed on the way to their farms, on the way to their markets, in their villages minding their homes, and at night when they were asleep.

In interviews with members of FOWA, woman after woman stood up, said their names, and described in graphic detail the rapes and other types of sexual violence they had been subjected to.

‘They started beating the women, dragging them into the bush. And they started loosing their cloth and raping them…my mate was with pregnancy. One army man just used his leg and hit her stomach and she miscarry. That was the beginning of suffering in Nyo Khana.’[8] (Comfort Aluzim)

‘They started beating us; all that we were carrying to the market to sell, they took. They took our things, our bags. They asked us to raise our hands and jump like frogs. There was an old woman with us that could not jump. What the army man did was to use his double barrel gun to beat the old woman’s back and she fell down.’ (Mercy Nkwagha)

‘One day we were demonstrating. We sang as we moved from our town to Ken Khana. Singing near the main road we met face to face with the army…they asked us to lie down on the road. After using the koboko (whip) on us they started kicking us with their foot. They dragged some of the women into the bush. We were naked, our dresses were torn, our wrapper were being loosed by a man who is not your husband. They tore our pants and began raping us in the bush. The raping wasn’t secret because about two people are raping you there. They are raping you in front of your sister. They are raping your sister in front of your mother. It was like a market.’ (Mrs Kawayorko)

Unlike in Choba, the Ogoni women were able to stand up and publicly speak about the violence they had suffered. Through the actions of FOWA and MOSOP, the women became highly politicised and engaged actively with elders and youth in the struggle against Shell’s activities and for the political autonomy of their land. Together with the youth branch of MOSOP, FOWA was given ‘unprecedented power within a democratic configuration…a steering committee was created in which each of the nine constituent organisations had three votes’ (Turner, 1997). Thus, FOWA was able to use a strategy of collective action as an act of resistance in their struggle and coordinate their activities with men in the community. Another strategy of the Ogoni women was to use their position and status as mothers to work with the youths who were, in effect, their sons or the age of their sons:

‘During the period, the women of Tai kingdom suffered a lot… Many of the women were beaten; many of the houses destroyed. At that time the women decided that come dead or alive they would still hold their meetings. FOWA women had their meetings in the bush. We arranged with the youth wing of the movement, the youth of Tai dug a very big pit in the ground and we the women entered the pit and the youth used bushes to cover us.’ (Ogoni woman farmer)

Women were not ostracised or excluded because they had been raped, as
explained by a FOWA member:

‘Our men just take it as what happen because they know their wives did not just go out like that but it was forceful. Also the other women took it the same way.’ (Ogoni woman)

FOWA, in opposition to some local politically motivated traditional leaders, actively advocated the boycott of the 1993 presidential elections. Diana Barikor-Wiwa explains:

‘Of course they spoke with their men – if that is translated into English, it’s a bit like ‘bedroom talk’. They tried to work on that within the home. But besides that they had a lot of strife with their children, especially their sons. It was most effective with their sons, and of course, somebody’s husband is another woman’s son. And so it was, there was always that bond. It’s a traditional thing. You were a great man if you could respect your mother. So they did that.’ (Barikor-Wiwa, 1996)

The women became agents of change by using culturally specific methods and their position as mothers to persuade their husbands and sons, thereby MOSOP, to take the decision to boycott the election.

FOWA’s response to violence was a combination of collective action, individual courage and sheer defiance in the face of military aggression and environmental destruction. More recently, women of the Niger Delta have used both collective action and traditional methods in response to the complete neglect of their ecosystem: natural environment, health, education, infrastructure, employment and general underdevelopment by the government and multinationals.

MASS PROTESTS

Between June and August 2002, thousands of women occupied no less than eight oil facilities belonging to Chevron/Texaco and Shell Petroleum including Chevron’s main oil terminal at Escravos in Delta State. This series of direct action by women in the Niger Delta was unprecedented for a number of reasons.

First, never before had so many women taken a series of actions against an oil company within such a short period of time. Second, the actions, in particular the initial occupation of Escravos oil terminal, were highly organised. The women divided themselves into seven groups, each occupying a different strategic area of the complex, including the main office building (Okon, 2001). Third, because the actions taken by the women – all mothers and grandmothers whose age ranged from 30 to 90 – had been organised collectively in the interest of the community at large, they had the complete support of their communities including their husbands, the youth, elders and chiefs. Finally, and most importantly, although in the first instance the actions were taken separately by women from three different ethnic nationalities, in the final occupation, for the first time women from three different ethnic nationalities, Ijaw, Itsekiri, and Ilaje, came together in a united action against corporate irresponsibility, putting aside previous inter-ethnic hostilities and grievances.

One of the strategies used by both the multinational oil companies and successive Nigerian governments has been to deliberately exploit existing tensions between the various ethnic nationalities in the region and to encourage antagonisms between youth and women, elders and youth, and elders and women in towns and villages. Therefore, the importance of the solidarity between women in this instance is indeed major. This solidarity across different ethnic divides was forged because the situation had become so desperate that many women realised that such cooperation was essential for their success. Their political awareness of the divide-and-rule tactics encouraged them to put aside previous hostilities and fight the common enemy together.

The women occupied the operational headquarters of Chevron/Texaco and Shell, singing songs of solidarity to protest years of plunder of their rural environment by the oil companies (Okon, 2001). In this particular siege, about 800 women were injured during a particularly brutal encounter with security forces belonging to the oil companies. The voices of the women speak of their coming together and their grievances:

‘The rivers they are polluting is our life and death. We depend on it for everything… When this situation is unbearable, we decided to come together to protest. Ijaw, Itsekiri and Ilaje we are one, we are brothers and sisters, it is only people who do not understand that think we are fighting ourselves. Our common enemies are the oil companies and their backers’. (Mrs Bmipe Ebi (Ilaje))

‘We don’t want Shell, Chevron, Texaco or any other oil companies again. They should leave us alone. We don’t have guns, and we don’t have any weapon to fight them. Since they have treated us like this. We are prepared to die.’ (Mrs Rose Miebi (Ijaw))

‘If Chevron no keep the promises, next time I ready to go naked.’ (Mrs Funke Tunjor (Ilaje))

The women were relentless in their protest and demands. In a final act of defiance, they confronted the oil companies with one ingenious and powerful weapon: they threatened to remove all their clothes in what is known as the ‘curse of nakedness’. The stripping off of clothes, particularly by married and elderly women, is a way of shaming men, some of whom believe that if they see the naked bodies they will go mad or suffer great harm.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, I have discussed the types of violence and violent situations to which women in the Niger Delta are subjected and I have commented upon some of their responses. It is indeed necessary to look beyond one’s own expectations and preconceptions about resistance to violence to avoid the risk of neglecting the entire range and variety of women’s responses in different cultural and political contexts. What may appear initially as passive inaction may actually be a show of strength. For example, ‘sitting on oneself’, that is, to stand silently with dignity as a mature woman, is a response that becomes a very powerful act. Individual acts such as these are ways of managing suffering on a personal level by turning inwards for strength.

Women in the Niger Delta resorted to using the ‘curse of nakedness’ as a weapon after they had failed to have their demands met through more conventional protest actions. Though greatly feared and rarely used, nakedness as a form of protest is legitimate within the cultural context of the Niger Delta. In this instance, it was one of the few occasions when women were able to manoeuvre themselves into a position of power. Also, because it is used only under extreme provocation, it has remained a powerful weapon of women’s collective resistance. It is also critical to note that while the scale of destruction and violence within the Delta is overwhelming, at a day to day level women continue not just to survive but also to put up resistance within the territories, using the means at their disposal: If Chevron no keep the promises, next time I ready to go naked.

* Sokari Ekine blogs at www.blacklooks.org.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

* This article was first published in

cc. In an emotive piece about a country largely distant in the world’s consciousness, Fernando Gamboa discusses the entrenched hold of the brutal Obiang dictatorship in Equatorial Guinea. Underlining the relentless ability of the presidential clan to systematically plunder the central African nation’s abundant natural resources, Gamboa evokes the shocking practices of torture and robbery imposed upon a long-suffering populace. Situating the country’s demise in Spain’s rushed decolonisation process of 1968, the author appeals to the cultural unity of contemporary Spaniards and Equatoguineans, with a view to fostering greater awareness and international pressure to undermine tacit global support for uncompromising oppression.

Remarking on the apparent strangeness of electing a figure renowned for intolerance towards differences of opinion within his own country and support for militia groups around the world, Tim Murithi stresses that Muammar al-Gaddafi’s new appointment as chairperson of the African Union reflects internal competition within the union over the extent of its influence over its member states. Highlighting African leaders' ambivalence in electing a head of government not known for his commitment to democratic governance, Murithi wonders whether those voting for the Libyan leader were tacitly heralding ‘one of their own’, and concludes by arguing that instead of interminable debates over integration, the continent’s figures of authority should prioritise addressing their peoples’ impoverishment.

cc. Outlining the essential differences between sex and gender, Audrey Mbugua discusses the damaging general incomprehension of transsexualism within Kenyan society. Drawing upon personal experience of prejudice in the field of work and life at large, Mbugua states that transsexual people deserve the same respect and treatment as any other member of society, and urges those uneducated about transsexuals to think before opening their mouths.

In an interview with the World Press Review, the Zimbabwean author Valerie Tagwira talks about the background to and influences behind her work.

cc. Surveying the plethora of problems faced by women in Africa, Marie-Claire Faray-Kele and the Women's International League for Peace (WILPF) argue that while divided in the diversity of their backgrounds, African women are united in their collective voice. Highlighting the detrimental role of spurious assumptions about ‘tradition’ in preventing women from speaking for themselves, the authors state that overcoming gender inequality represents the key solution for tackling poverty on the continent and allowing the wisdom of Africa’s women to be harnessed.

Chinese President Hu Jintao's upcoming visit to Tanzania will further enhance bilateral economic cooperation and help both countries tide over global financial crisis, said a senior Tanzanian investment official in a recent interview with Xinhua. Emmanuel Ole Naiko, executive director of Tanzania's Investment Center, said Tanzania and China will not only overcome the international financial crisis through cooperation of mutual benefit, but also deepen long-standing friendship between the two countries.

Somali pirates released a Chinese fishing vessel and its multinational crew Sunday from nearly three months of captivity, as Japan announced plans to dispatch two destroyers to the African coast to protect its commercial vessels from piracy, reports said.

The visits by Chinese leaders to African, Latin American and some other nations would promote China's friendship and cooperation with these countries, while Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's latest European trip has boosted confidence in jointly tackling the global financial crisis. Chinese President Hu Jintao will visit Saudi Arabia, Mali, Senegal, Tanzania and Mauritius from Feb. 10 to Feb. 17. Vice President Xi Jinping left here Sunday morning for official visits to Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Malta.

The president of the Republic of Congo, Denis Sassou, inaugurated a Chinese-built project for national radio and television broadcast in the capital city Brazzaville on Thursday, according to reports reaching here. Chinese Ambassador in the central African country Li Shuli attended the inauguration of the cooperation project of 7.5 billion FCFA (15 million U.S. dollars).

The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on a notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians. The operation was led by Uganda and aimed to crush the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group that had been hiding out in a Congolese national park, rebuffing efforts to sign a peace treaty. But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack town after town in northeastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way.

WIBG, an open-access, peer-reviewed, online feminist journal, publishes and supports work from around the globe that analyzes and works to change the status and conditions of women in global households, prisons, and cities. We publish interdisciplinary analyses, creative expressions (including film and music), reports from the field, interviews, and artworks that are committed to feminist praxis, understood as analysis and action focusing on the empowerment of women.

The Center for Global Development (CGD), an independent Washington-based think tank, invites applications from leading scholars in developing countries for a visiting fellows program sponsored by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The program offers one-year sabbatical support for a senior researcher from a developing country on leave from his or her host institution.

One of the most important vehicles by which CODESRIA has sought to mobilise national-level research capacities and to channel these into organised reflections has been the National Working Groups (NWGs) which it has encouraged African researchers to organise autonomously on priority themes of their choice. NWGs have been supported by the Council in over forty African countries and have resulted in some of the most interesting studies on politics, economy and society in contemporary Africa.

INTERIGHTS defends and promotes human rights and freedoms worldwide through the use of international and comparative law. We achieve this through a range of activities designed to strengthen human rights jurisprudence and obtain redress for people whose rights have been violated. INTERIGHTS is pleased to announce a call for applications to lawyers who would like to participate in a forthcoming litigation surgery on women’s human rights. Applicants are required to submit cases involving women’s human rights violations.

The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) is committed to working with local, regional and international partners to fight human rights abuses based on sexual orientation and gender identity worldwide. In mid-2007, IGLHRC opened a regional office for Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, to more effectively manage its operations on the continent and to build partnerships with African LGBT and human rights organizations. The Africa Program Coordinator will manage this office and IGLHRC’s Africa program.

The Policy Development and Evaluation Service has created a "Witchcraft and Human Rights Network". It is an informal network where information about new developments, research and news related to witchcraft can be shared. The first article we would like to share with the network is an Article written in New Issues in Refugee Research by Jill Schnoebelen called "Witchcraft Allegations and Displacement".

One of the major weaknesses of contemporary social research in and about Africa is its lack of careful attention to epistemological and methodological issues. This weakness has made itself manifest at a time when the increasing complexities of the social dynamics that shape livelihood on the continent and the wider global context call for a greater investment of effort in the refinement of the procedures and instruments of investigation and analyses with a view to achieving a more accurate and holistic assessment of rapidly changing realities.

On Thursday, 12th February, 2009 at 9.00 am, Justice Nyamu of Nairobi’s High Court, once again sat to listen to the landmark citizen instituted case against the Parliamentary Service Commission (PSC) in which 17 representative Kenyans are seeking orders that the PSC be declared unconstitutional along with the law that created it and further that the High Court order the recovery of all the money estimated at KES 7 billion and other resources the PSC has squandered on Parliamentarians since 2003.

In the span of 24 hours between December 31st, 2008 and January 1st, 2009, three Black men were the victims of racial profiling at the hands of various law enforcement agencies throughout the US. Oscar Grant, a 22-year old father, was shot and killed by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police while laying face down and handcuffed after leaving a New Years Eve party. Adolph Grimes, was killed after being shot 14 times, 12 times in the back, by several New Orleans police officers in front of his home after leaving a New Years Eve celebration. Robbie Tolan was critically shot in the back by police in Bellaire, Texas, a suburb of Houston, after being falsely accused of a suspected robbery of his parents SUV.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is kicking off a five-city tour of the United States aimed at highlighting the horrors faced by thousands of Congolese rape victims, while calling for an end to impunity for the perpetrators of the worst kinds of sexual violence. Simple everyday tasks, such as gathering wood and fetching water, expose thousands of girls and women to vicious abuses in the conflict-ridden eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), “where rape is used as a weapon of war,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman.

After years of disappointments, AIDS researchers have announced results from a trial in which a vaginal microbicide appeared to offer promise in preventing HIV infection in women. According to findings from a clinical trial involving more than 3,000 women in Malawi, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe and the United States, the microbicide PRO 2000 gel was 30 percent effective.

Oxfam is hiring two consultants to conduct state capacity needs assessments in Nigeria, Liberia and Tanzania to determine the problems, challenges and opportunities being faced by the respective states which affect their ability to ratify and domesticate the African Union Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa.

The Harare Magistrate's Court on Thursday granted bail to 10 detained members of a Zimbabwe pressure group, Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), who had staged “Valentine’s demonstration”, the pressure group said in a communiqué.

Two Sudanese migrants were shot by border police and a third was detained after they were spotted along the border with Israel, an Egyptian security source in Sinai Peninsula told PANA. One woman was shot in the stomach and the man was hit in the left shoulder. According to the official, the guards ordered the three migrants to stop and when they refused, the guards opened fire.

50,000 Somali refugees are to be relocated from Dadaab Refugee Camp in eastern Kenya to Kakuma Camp this year. UNHCR is coordinating the project and plans to relocate 10,000 Somali refugees per month. Current targets are set to transport about 3,000 Somali refugees to Kakuma on a weekly basis. KANERE spoke to Somali community leaders and recently relocated Somali refugees about the operation.

Just a day after Kenyan MPs blocked government attempts to set up a local tribunal to try those who orchestrated the violence that rocked the country last year, mediator Kofi Annan says he will act in the "spirit, letter and intent" of the Waki Report, giving strongest indication poll violence suspects will now face justice at The Hague.

Morgan Tsvangirai spent his first full day in office visiting political prisoners he wants to see freed from a jail near Harare. The prisoners were given no promises of release, but the prime minister told them their cases would be processed more quickly, his spokesman said. Tsvangirai was sworn in as PM on Wednesday by long-time rival President Robert Mugabe.

The teachers union in Tanzania is considering legal action after 19 school teachers were given the cane. The primary teachers were caned by a police officer after an inquiry into poor exam results at three schools. The report blamed teachers for being late or not showing up for work and not teaching the official syllabus.

A court in Belgium has decided not to proceed with a prosecution against two Rwandan generals. The two were accused of involvement in shooting down the plane carrying the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, which triggered the 1994 genocide. A French judge issued an arrest warrant for the pair in 2006.

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has said he will seek a third term in elections in April. "I announce my candidature as an independent," Mr Bouteflika told a crowd of cheering supporters in the capital Algiers. Mr Bouteflika is widely tipped to win the elections.

Former child soldiers and other youth representing a grassroots campaign from around the world will present thousands of symbolic "red hands" to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to demand stronger action by international leaders to end the use of child soldiers.

President Kgalema Motlanthe on Thursday officially proclaimed 22 April as the date for the country's general election. In a statement issued on Thursday, the Presidency said President Motlanthe had signed the proclamation confirming 22 April as the date on which the national and provincial elections will take place.

Last July, my young son was enlisted in an armed group during a recruitment campaign near his school. Despite my repeated attempts to intervene, he was covertly sent into military training", a Chadian man recently told JRS. On Red Hand Day, 12 February, JRS calls upon the government, with the support of local and international communities, to increase efforts to prevent the use of children in armed groups through the creation of safer schools.

International Monetary Fund member countries, keenly aware of the need to give emerging nations more say in running the global economy, are considering a new policy-setting council that would more accurately reflect their rising economic clout. According to people familiar with the discussions, the council of ministers would be similar in make up and size to the Group of 20, and shift power more towards rising economic powers from the handful of industrial giants that have dominated post-World War Two policymaking.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has strongly condemned the humiliating and degrading treatment suffered by four women journalists who were stripped naked in public in Kenema, Eastern Sierra Leone where they were covering events to mark the International Day against female circumcision.

United Nations officials has called on Côte d’Ivoire’s leaders to set a timetable as soon as possible for much-delayed presidential elections so that the vote can take place in the divided West African country in the latter half of this year. The number of identified voters has passed the 4.6-million mark and the operation should be completed by spring if the current trend continues, the UN Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) said in a news release.

Roy Bennett, MDC Treasurer General and Deputy Minister of Agriculture designate has just been abducted by Police from the Law and Order section at Prince Charles airport just outside Harare. The police were led by one Assistant Commissioner Nyongwe. He was taken in a white Toyota with registration number is AAP 4851. We understand that they are taking him to Marondera, where there is notorious torture and interogation base, the same place MDC Secretary General Tendai Biti was taken upon his return from South Africa. Details to follow .

Findings from two Ugandan studies suggest that home-based HIV counselling and testing may augment traditional HIV counselling and testing services in important ways in some settings, both by increasing acceptance and uptake of HIV testing, but also by impacting attitudes toward HIV at a population level. The results of both studies were presented to the Sixteenth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) on Wednesday by Sundeep Gupta of the Centres for Disease Control, Uganda, on behalf of the investigating teams.

This comment paper analyses the results of the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA), adopted in September 2008 in the capital of Ghana, from a gender perspective. It reviews the mobilisation process of women’s rights organisations in the lead up to Accra, going on to analyse the results obtained, and mentioning some of the challenges and opportunities which lie ahead in the lead up to the IV High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness which will take place in 2011.