Revolutionary Pressures In Niger Delta Literatures (1)

Being a keynote address by Prof. G. G. Darah

Of the Dept. of English and Literary Studies, Delta

State University, Abraka at the annual convention of the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artistes, SONTA, University of Benin, Benin on Thursday, May 15, 2008

“To fight for national culture means in the first place to fight for the liberation of the nation, that material key stone which makes the building of a culture possible.” (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth)

THE radicalisation of the Niger Delta political space has had its effect on the themes and rhetoric of works by the region’s writers, activist thinkers, and cultural mediators. I am currently working on a book of essays on Niger Delta literature as a follow-up to my recently edited anthology, Radical Essays on Nigerian Literatures: Volume I which appeared in 2008.

For the past 20 years or so, I have written passionately about the situation in the Niger Delta region. I have done so through the mass media and in public lectures and discourses. The common theme that runs through my interventions all these years is that a revolutionary process is unfolding in the oil-rich but economically and politically colonised Niger Delta. The manifestations of this political upheaval are more visible in the theatres of politics and movements of change or self-determination.

The vision and trajectory of these movements and actions are to promote a radical change in Nigeria’s political configuration so that the nations and peoples who are victims of local colonialism can emancipate themselves. The nations and peoples of the Niger Delta are determined to enjoy the freedoms and privileges that should flow from their resource endowment and strategic location in the world’s economy. My position is that the themes and idioms of this liberationist endeavour are reflected in the arts and literatures produced in the region. This address aims to highlight the manner this politics is reflected and refracted

Let me pre-empt my conclusion by saying that all classical traditions of world literature are fostered by environments, where there are intensive struggles against great evils for the restoration of human dignity. This is the type of situation that created the great traditions of literature in Russia in the 19th century. Leo Tolstoy and other writers who constituted that heritage were ranged against the monster of decadent feudalism, the struggle against which culminated in the Russian Bolshevik socialist revolution of 1917.

Radical thinkers, philosophers and writers in 18th and 19th century France were also motivated by similar circumstances and they employed the power of their creative and expository works to mobilise the populace to overthrow feudalism. The final outcome of this intellectual fervour ushered in the 1789 French revolution that gave birth to some of the cherished freedoms that have defined democratic governance over the past two centuries.

We can detect a similar ideological energy in the output of Irish writers from Jonathan Swift to the era of W. B. Yeats and Synge. The flourish of Latin American and African American writings, music and allied arts since the 19th century was made possible because of the great battles waged by the victims of racism and economic exploitation to regain the humanity denied them by slavery, colonialism and violent capitalism.

As Omafume Onoge argues in his essay, “The Crisis of Consciousness in Modern African Literature: A Survey” (1974), African literature fostered in the milieu of anti-colonial mobilisation has redefined the aesthetics and discourse of world literature because the literature memorialises the mass uprisings of Africa against what Chinua Achebe aptly describes as imperialist “things fall apart”. The most eloquent illustration of this tendency in African letters is furnished by the output of writers of Southern Africa who deployed the weapons of words and action to defeat the apartheid system. This is perhaps one reason why South Africa has given Africa two of its Nobel laureates in literature in the space of one decade.

My position in this address is that a titanic struggle for human dignity and freedom from oppression has been going on in the Niger Delta since the mid 1960s. The early intimations of this trend can be discerned in 18th century writings such as those of Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography of 1789, which focused on the evils of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. However, since the end of the Nigerian Civil War in 1970, the nations and peoples of the Niger Delta have been engaged in another war; a war of verbal weapons to emancipate their territory and natural resources from the avaricious grip of the Federal Government and its international allies.

This struggle has taken several forms; sometimes it is ideological and political and sometimes it is waged through armed politics. The armed idioms range from insurgency and militant groups such as Isaac Adaka Boro’s Niger Delta Volunteer Force of 1966 (revived by Alhaji Dokubo-Asari) to the present Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). What then has literature got to do with this swelling drama? This is the question that I will attempt to answer in this short address. But first, let me attempt some definitions of geography and concepts.

THE NIGER DELTA
THE geographical Niger Delta refers to that region of Nigeria that borders the Atlantic seaboard and stretches from Cross River State near Cameroon in the east to the western boundary of Delta and Edo State near Ilaje country. Geological history shows that the Niger Delta is about 120 million years old. Available and verifiable anthropological evidence of human habitation is no more than several thousand years, at least as current science of research can explain.

The Niger Delta region is made up of six of Nigeria’s 36 states, namely, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo, and Rivers. The area is defined primarily by the River Niger and 21 other major rivers that drain into the Atlantic Ocean. The River Niger and these 21 rivers braid into hundreds of channels and rivulets. Nearly half of the territory is permanently under water for most of the year. The political definition of the Niger Delta has recently been enlarged to include all nine oil-producing states, namely, Abia, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo, Imo, Ondo and Rivers. However, the six oil-rich states mentioned above constitute what is known as Nigeria’s South-South geopolitical zone.

About 100 of Nigeria’s 402 languages are spoken in the Niger Delta, the most populous being Ijaw, Urhobo, Edo-Bini, Esan, and Ibibio, and Igbo. Nearly 30 of the 100 languages are to be found in Cross River State whose northern section bears a babel linguistic feature akin to that of Taraba and Adamawa to its immediate north. According to the political cartography of the Nigerian ruling class, the nations in the Niger Delta are “minorities” which must be confined to the margins of power in order for to survive.

The most ancient, centralised administrative and linguistic infrastructure in the region would appear to be the Benin Empire whose eastern extremity goes as far as Ahoada in Rivers State. At its peak of military power in the 16th and 167h centuries, the Benin Empire spread as far west as present-day Republic of Benin, as that nation’s name advertises. Benin influence was also visible in present-day Togo and the eastern frontiers of Ghana. What is now Lagos was probably founded by Benin emperors and military generals. “Lagos” is of Portuguese origin, being the name of the town in Portugal of the sailors that first anchored in Kuramo waters near the Eko Holiday Hotel now. The same name “Lagos” is replicated in Mozambique which the Portuguese also visited during the age of discovery. But the local name the Benin Empire gave to Lagos is “Eko” by which the place is still known today. In Bini and Edoid languages, the word “eko” means “camp”.

The territory of the Benin Empire at its zenith also included northern areas such as Owo (Ogho is the Bini spelling), Akure, the southern fringes of Kogi State and portions of Igala. My history sources show that both Owo and Akure in Ondo State are Benin towns in Yoruba political territory. If stretch the probe further and you will find that there are folklore versions that claim “Ondo” to be a corruption of the town of Udo in the Okomu forest area of Edo State. All the communities and kingdoms east of Edo State, from Ika (Agbor) through Aniocha towns to Asaba had early Benin Empire systems, although they are all acculturated in Igbo language from eastern Nigeria.

The most notable relic of the power of the Benin Empire across the River Niger is Onitsha in Anambra State. Those who seek additional anthropological verity in the matter should interrogate the Onitsha monarchical institution of Obi (a corruption of Oba; all Igbo royal titles are called “Eze”). The sobriquet of the Obi of Onitsha is “Agbogidi”, which is the title of a military generalissimo in ancient Benin. This vast space of the eastern extensions of the Benin Empire and its influence in ancient times are memorialised in mythical and legendary narratives on which Professor Isidore Okpewho of the State University of New York has done excellent documentary work.

The historical and political identity of the Niger Delta is also furnished by the fact that it was the first region of Nigeria to encounter and interact with European nations in the late 15th century. Several centuries ago, Benin emperors exchanged ambassadors with European powers such as Portugal and Holland. The Niger Delta monarchs and merchant princes initiated the tradition of racial inter-marriage with Europeans, a daring effort that produced the early generation of mixed race children or mulattos as they are sometimes called.

Benin princes attended the Portuguese academy set up at Elmina Castle now in Ghana in the early 16th century. A Catholic church was opened in Benn City in 1505, making it the first place in mainland Nigeria where the Bible was preached. In 1555, that is 50 years later, another Catholic church was set up in Ode-Itsekiri, the capital of the Itsekiri kingdom. I think the first of such evangelical institutions in the Yoruba south-west was in Badagry in 1845. The long hiatus between 1555 and 1845 is accounted for by the holocaust of the Trans-Atlantic Slave during which European nations abandoned the hypocrisy of Christianity for the raw barbarism of capitalist exploitation and profit-making.

The significance of the Niger Delta can be attested to, too, by the fact that it was the first area of Nigeria where the British initiated the process of cloning together what became Nigeria in the late 19th century. Remarkably, that building block of Nigeria was called the Oil Rivers Protectorate to underscore its endowment in oil palm produce. The protectorate was taken over from the Royal Niger Company (later United African Company) by the British colonialists in 1885 to start the construction of the Nigerian state.

The Niger Delta was also one of the cradles of modern European education. It is not known how many Benin princes graduated from the Portuguese institution in Elmina Castle in the former Gold Coast, now Ghana. But the first West African to obtain a university degree was Prince Dom Domingo of the Itsekiri kingdom in 1610. He graduated in Theology and became king (Olu) in 1625, the first African south of Egypt to achieve that feat. In 2010, it will be 400 years since that history was made.

In the years after slave trade (the (1850s), Yoruba returnees were probably among the first people in West Africa to produce university graduates. Their pioneer secondary school was C. M. S. Grammar School, Bariga, Lagos, in 1859. But the Ijaw of Bonny now in Rivers State had their pioneer university graduate in 1856. He was Herbert Jumbo who obtained his degree as an external candidate from the University of London. The second Ijaw graduate was John Jumbo, also from Bonny, from the University of Durham in 1878. The third Ijaw graduate was Robert Abrakassa-Igbeta from Nembe, Bayelsa State. He had his degree from the Isles of Man, United Kingdom, in 1888. The fourth university graduate of Ijaw was Josiah Akidiye Butubo from Buguma, Rivers State. He earned his degree in English Literature from Colwyn Bay in the United Kingdom in 1909.

The records show that one of the first two graduates produced by the University College, Ibadan, in 1950 was Birinengi Eferebo Idoniboye, an Ijaw from Obuama (formerly Harry’s Town) in Rivers States. The other student was Amiel Modupe Fagbulu, a Yoruba. From the account above, it can be argued that the Niger Delta was an early centre of higher education.

The pioneer university graduate in Northern Nigeria was produced in 1950, that is, 94 years after the Ijaw had had theirs. Those who wish to analyse the semiotics of Ijaw radical nationalism today ought to bear these matters in the mind. It is not a pleasant experience for a people to start the climb of the tree of modernisation so early only to end up 150 years later as vassals of those who were not at that pedestal at the time. The Federal Government of Nigeria is not likely to win sympathy in its misgovernment in the Niger Delta by simply invoking the cant words of “militants” “criminals” and “illegal oil bunkering”. There is more palm oil below the waters of revolts in the lands and waterways of the region.

The records available to me show that the first Igbo university graduate was Rev. Dr. Samuel Wadiei Martin from Issele-Uku in present-day Delta State, who earned a degree in Technical Education from Topeka Industrial Institute, Kansas, United States of America, in 1917. The second Igbo graduate was Akanu Ibiam of Arochukwu in 1925. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe from Onitsha who graduated in History/Political Science in 1930 from Lincoln University in the United States was the third from that area. For these archival materials I have relied on research done by Amayanabo Daminabo in his 2005 book, Ken Saro-Wiwa – 1941-1995: His Life and Legacies.

I have had to refer to these historical matters in order to underline the point of the anteriority of the nations and peoples of the Niger Delta. My position is that the importance of the region should not be measured only by the presence of hydrocarbon reserves of oil and gas. Yet the truth must be told repeatedly that the Niger Delta oil and gas provide over 90% of Nigerian government’s revenue. Let us recall the point that the Niger Delta was the foundation of modern Nigeria. By virtue of its strategic importance to the survival of Nigeria and her numerous beggarly, neighbouring countries, the Niger Delta is to Nigeria what the Nile River is to Egypt. Just as there can be no Egypt without the Nile, so also there can be no Nigeria, as presently constituted, without the wealth that flows from the bowels and waterways of the Niger Delta.

TRADITIONS OF LITERATURE
I USE the term “literature” in this address in the restricted sense to refer to all imaginative works, both oral and written. The emphasis is on fictional works, but reference is also made to non-fictional materials such as biographies, essays and documentaries. There is a vast field of oral literature such as music, songs, stories, and other narratives. Unfortunately, documentation and translation are yet to unearth the rich repertories that are extant. Therefore, my references to literary materials will be biased in favour of the written traditions.

When we examine the entire Nigerian scene of creative writing, it would appear that the Niger Delta currently has the largest number of acclaimed literary artists. This is a tentative assessment which must await more rigorous census of writers. The written tradition of literature in the Niger Delta dates back to the immediate years after the end of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the 1850s. But we can take a backward glance to locate the origins in 1789 when Olaudah Equiano published his anti-slavery autobiography issued by Heinemann in 1967 as Equiano’s Travels.

I am aware that Professor Catherine Acholonu has adumbrated the point that Equiano was from Owerri district of what is now Imo State. She reached this conclusion from her anatomy of the name Essaka which appears in the book as Equiano’s place of nativity. Yet a more discerning linguistic probe of the name tends to support the view that its spelling in the book is a corruption of the name Ashaka near Kwale in Delta State. The sociological details of culture, indigenous administration and kinship networks provided by Equiano seem to me to be closer to Benin influence than they are to the Imo side of the River Niger. Aboh on the western bank of the River Niger was the biggest slave port in the Ukwuani area in the 18th century when Equiano was probably captured and sold to slavery. Literary historiographers will help us to unravel the difficulties of geography implicated in the Equiano text.

The next phase of African literature mediated by the European presence was initiated by the works of Dennis Chukwude Osadebay from Asaba (he was a former President of the Nigerian Senate and pioneer Premier of Midwestern Region created in 1963). His poems appeared in journals in the 1930s and they exhibit a strong aroma of Negritude ontology. Osadebay’s Africa Sings volume of poetry published in 1952 (?) was the first in English language in West Africa. The themes and idioms of Poems of a Nationalist published in 1970 resonate with similar Negritude energy. The Efik medical doctor, James Ene Henshaw published his This Is Our Chance drama book in 1945. He inaugurated the Nigerian tradition of literary drama and he shares the historical limelight with the Ijebu-Yoruba folk dramatist, Hubert Ogunde.

It was after these Niger Delta pioneers of written literature that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) blazed the trail in African fiction in English. The late Professor Sam Asein of the University of Ibadan did excellent research on earlier Nigerian fictional writings in English language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Lagos. He gives the examples of Segilola and Pharaoh’s Daughter, which appeared in the late 19th century.

Achebe and his contemporaries in Africa are celebrated also for their initiation of what is described as anti-colonial discourse. Achebe was born in 1930, the year that Dennis Chukwude Osadebay of Asaba in Delta State started publishing poetry that was unambiguously anti-imperialist in themes and temper. Osadebay belongs to the generation of Negritude poets such as Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, David Diop, and Leopold Senghor.

In my essay, “Ideological Orphanage: The Intelligentsia and Literary Development in Colonial Nigeria” (1984 and 2008) I have observed that the tradition of Nigerian letters probably started in Northern Nigeria with poets of the Sokoto Caliphate after the triumph of the Islamic jihad in the early 19th century. Nigerian writing in English did not emerge until the 1930s. This fact should enable us to reconstruct the history of Nigeria’s written national literature. I refer readers to chapter 13 of my edited book, Radical Essays on Nigerian Literatures (Malthouse Press, 2008).

WHAT I have attempted to do in the foregoing paragraphs is to show that modern Nigerian written literature in English originated in the Niger Delta region. In the rest of the address, I will indicate some major themes and tendencies in the literature of the region and how explore the currency of political movements for change and justice.

RADICAL THEMES AND TRENDS
As evident in the early works by Osadebay and Henshaw, Niger Delta literature shared in the ideology of anti-imperialist protest that dominates the discourse of most of African letters. Osadebay titled his first volume of poetry Africa Sings. Most of the entries in the volume valorise the attributes of African civilisation before the colonial conquest by European nations. In one of the poems he urges his foreign readers not to look upon African values and traditions as some curious fantasies favoured by anthropologists. Like Senghor and his Negritude associates, Osadebay celebrates his African “tigritude” in his poems. He was in the frontline of the Nigerian anti-colonial movement and his writings did not shy away from proclaiming the pre-colonial esteem of the continent. The temper of Osadebay’s poems pulsates like the apostrophising echoes of Azikiwe’s Renascent Africa (1938) and Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya.

Dr. Henshaw’s This Is Our Chance (1945) eulogises the healthy features of African traditional culture, a theme that pervades most of his dramatic works. Henshaw’s dramatic output includes Children of the Goddess, Dinner for Promotion, Jewels of the Shrine, Medicine for Love, Companion for the Chief, and Enough Is Enough. John Pepper Clark is the most accomplished dramatist and poet of the region. After his Song of a Goat in the mid 1960s, he seemed to have unhinged his dramaturgy from Greek moorings. With The Raft Clark appears to have settled down to exploring the folklore of the Niger Delta waterways and wetlands. He employs the idioms of the peculiar aquatic environment to draw attention to the dilemmas and predicaments in the troubled country called Nigeria. The most politically radical of Clark’s themes and rhetoric are to be found in his The Wives’ Revolt and All for Oil.

The two plays deal with the subject of local colonialism and inequity being suffered by the people of the Niger Delta on account of being richly endowed with oil, the “wealth of the nation”, to invoke the phrase used by Adam Smith of Britain to capture the philosophy of capitalist primitive acquisition in 18th century England. The Wives Revolt is an allegorical tale about communal conflicts between wives and their husbands over the sharing of little spoils of oil revenue that excludes the womenfolk. In frustration, the women emigrate from the community to that of their husbands’ rival and this causes dislocation in familial relations.

In the concluding paragraph of All for Oil, Clark says that “It is honey on all our tongues, oil for our lamps in the whiteman’s new night market he calls Nigeria.” This is an epigrammatic rendering of the political economy of the exploitation of resource-endowed nations of the Niger Delta by powerful ruling classes. In the immediate post-amalgamation years (1900-1930) that the play explores, the oil refers to palm produce which made the British to colonise much of southern Nigeria in the first place. Recall the name, “Oil Rivers Protectorate”. In economic lexicon of post-civil war Nigeria since the 1970s, oil means petroleum whose stupendous wealth has emboldened the neo-colonial ruling class in Nigeria to exploit and impoverish the Niger Delta. The titles and subjects of some of Clark’s poetry collections from the 1970s share in the political mood of protest and revolt identified in the two plays under reference. We can detect these nuances in Casualties, A Decade of Tongues, State of the Union, and Mandela and Other Poems.

Gabriel Okara never encourages a doubt about the political leaning in his works. His poetry is a tribute to the marvels and tragedy of the Niger Delta water-logged areas. The idiom and cultural bias of his popular poem, “Piano and Drums” are similar to what we encounter in Osadebay’s output and even Aime Cesaire’s Return to My Native Land. The lachrymal tone of Okara’s The Fisherman’s Invocation and “The Cry of the River Nun” is self-evidently a protest against environmental degradation and violence. Okara’s novel, The Voice (1964) is an early denunciation of marginalisation of so-called minority peoples, a theme that receives more dramatic exploration in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s On a Darkling Plain: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War and Elechi Amadi’s Sunset in Biafra. Nearly all of Saro-Wiwa’s writings clearly demonstrate a commitment to the predicament of the Ogoni people and, by implication, other nations of the Niger Delta region.

In assessing how acutely the literature prefigures revolutionary change, it is helpful to note the Marxist postulate that ideas and art forms are reflections of concrete, lived conditions of human beings. To understand the changes taking place in the Niger Delta we also need the weapon of theory as the former president of Guinea-Bissau, Amilcar Cabral, admonishes. The struggles for self-determination and equitable socio-economic relations in the Niger Delta can be traced to the 19th century when merchants and princes of the region tackled European capitalists and colonisers over fair deals in trading. The heroes and martyrs of that era include Jaja of Opobo, Nana of Itsekiri, Oba Ovonrawmen Nogbaisi of Benin, Ovie of Agbarha-Otor (the four were arrested and deported by the British colonial regime). Others in this class are Ambakederemo of Kiagbodo-Ijaw who opposed British injustice in the affairs of Warri Province, and Oshue Ogbiyerin of Urhobo who led the mass uprising against taxation which the British imposed on the Warri Province in 1927.

In Ukwuani area, Obi Ossai Ossai of Aboh was also an intransigent fighter against British domination. The Aboh monarch had the audacity to detain Richard and John Lander, the two British brother-navigators who attempted to reach the Atlantic mouth of the Niger in the 1930s. They were detained for their foolhardy failure to obtain permission from Ossai Ossai before venturing into the Aboh section of the River Niger. The two hapless brothers were later ransomed by the Ijaw king of Nembe.

In the decades after World War II (1945 to 1960) various movements sprang up in the Niger Delta region to articulate the demand for autonomy and freedom from local, hegemonic powers of Igbo and Yoruba political and bureaucratic elite. The movement for the creation of Rivers state started in the 1940s. The Calabar-Ogoja-Rivers (COR) autonomy movement was founded in 1953. Dr. Udo Udoma who headed the group had his Ph. D degree in law in 1944, probably the only West African to attain that academic height at the time. The Benin-Delta party headed by Oba Akenzua II of Benin was inaugurated in the late 1940s. One of its fruits was the creation by plebiscite of the Midwest Region in 1963.

On the eve of Nigeria’s independence several constitutional conferences were organised by the British to design a suitable federal format for the country. In all the conferences from Lagos to Lancaster House in London, the minority nations of the Niger Delta and those of the Middle Belt insisted on having regions created for them to be freed from the political bondage of majority ethnic supremacists. The British authorities, swayed by lobbying by the Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and Igbo majors demurred and procrastinated. But they were pressured to set up the Henry Willink Commission in 1957 “to inquire into the fears of the minorities and how to allay them”. The Commission’s report released in 1958 disappointed the minority agitators in lying that the problems of marginalised nations would not be solved through the creation of more regions. The report added that such an exercise could delay the granting of independence which was scheduled for October 1960.

The only palliative Henry Willink offered was the establishment of the Niger Delta Development Board (NDDB) which came into being through the Act of Parliament in October 1960.

The Board was almost exclusively for the Ijaw of eastern Nigeria whom the Commission described as occupying a difficult and hazardous terrain which for no fault of their own had suffered neglect for centuries. (The present Niger Delta Development Commission – NDDC) is a laughable parody of that NDDB). The Federal and the three regional governments at the time were to subscribe funds to run the Board. All of them reneged on this constitutional proviso and the scheme died naturally within a few years. This betrayal was to fuel the insurrection by the Isaac Boro militant group in February 1966. Those who truly wish to mine the etymology of the term “militant” are advised to go back four decades before 2009.

After 1960, the calls for more autonomy from the regional hegemonies of Yoruba and Igbo intensified in the minority areas of the Niger Delta. The military coup of January 15, 1966 beclouded opportunities for dealing with the demands. It was the fear that the Ijaw would not have a fair deal in the military dispensation that instigated Boro and his comrades to declare the Niger Delta Republic in February 1966. That “Twelve-Day Revolution” as it is now known changed the geometry and calculus of minority power struggle in fundamental ways. Boro and his colleagues were tried and sentenced to death for treason. Let us recall the prophetic remark made by Boro in his book, The Twelve-Day Revolution (1982): “If Nigerian governments refuse to do something drastic to improve the lot of the people, inevitably a point of no return will be reached…” Permit me to add my humble comment to Boro’s prophecy. What the oil will do to Nigeria is akin to the suicidal greed of the honey bee which guts itself in the palm pot and dies in the process.

General Jackson Yakubu Gowon, the head of the military junta from July 1966 created 12 states, including Rivers, on May 27, 1967. Three days later, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu led the Igbo to the Biafra secession on May 30. The Nigeria-Biafra civil war broke out in July 1967 and lasted till January 12, 1970. At the outbreak of the war, Gowon’s government needed the logistical advantage of the Niger Delta creeks and the solid support of the minorities of the south-east to fight rebels. That was why Gowon granted amnesty to Boro and his comrades in August 1968. Boro joined the Nigerian Navy the same year and died on the way to liberate Bonny from rebel control.

That was also the year that military regime made a law compelling all oil companies in the war zone to relocate their head offices to Lagos, the then federal capital. The following year, 1969, the military junta enacted the Petroleum Decree 51 that empowered it to grab all 100% of oil revenue. This was the final act of infamy that completely disinherited the oil-producing states of their wealth. These two legal instruments channelled the oil riches of the Niger Delta to outside of the region. They also induced oil-related businesses and professionals to migrate from the Niger Delta to centres of political power in the country. Urban and regional double-speak may call this economic haemorrhage a radical shift in investment flow. I call it simply state robbery and local colonialism.

In cruelty and sadism, the Petroleum Decree 51 is similar to the apartheid South African land law of 1913 which stole all lands of the majority blacks. The iniquity of the apartheid legislation was finally (?) resolved in 1994 when Nelson Mandela became the first black ruler of that country. Millions perished in the 81 years of that obnoxious law. Lest we forget, Nigeria’s financial and diplomatic muscle was decisive in compelling the apartheid tyrants to “step aside” from power. All the money that funded Nigeria’s involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle came from the oil wealth of the Niger Delta. The same is true of the $13 Billion (N2.34 Trillion) Nigeria expended in waging ECOMOG wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

We must add in parenthesis that the relocation of oil company head offices to Lagos and the Petroleum Decree fuelled the treasury of the Federal Government and encouraged it to spend lavishly to transform Lagos from a modest port city to Africa’s most populous and boisterous metropolis within the space of 24 years. The 10-lane highways, the flyover bridges, FESTAC 77 Town, the splendour of high-rise structures in Lagos Island, Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Lekki and beyond were made possible by the providential riches from oil. Abuja later replaced Lagos as the bottomless pit of Federal extravaganza and it is ranked the fastest-growing capital in the world. The stupendous growth of Lagos and Abuja, the state capitals, the highways and expressways, the airports, seaports, banks and finance houses is a direct consequence of the diversion of money from the Niger Delta.

The exponential expansion of educational institutions, communication infrastructure, bloated bureaucracies, the ostentatious riches of the Nigerian bourgeoisie and the pomposity and buffoonery of the political elite are paid for by the oil revenue hijacked from the Niger Delta people. The frequency and blood-soaked military coups, the ferocity of armed robbery in the country, the flourishing crimes of fraudsters (419), the killing of the country’s industries, and importation of petroleum products and all manner of junk from foreign lands are all bequests of the oil money looted from the exploited Niger Delta.

The contradictions and fury generated by the injustice perpetuated by the Nigerian ruling class are what animates the literary and artistic output of the Niger Delta, albeit that of the progressive segments of the country’s literati. Creative writers, musicians and griots, media communicators, radical religious clerics, and patriotic politicians are articulating the same resistance but employing different idioms and semiotics. The gun-wielding category of advocates demonised as “militants” by the government-favoured media are only deploying non-verbal but lethal weapons to propagate the same gospel of a long walk to freedom as Nelson Mandela epitomised this motive in his autobiography. As the young German philosophers, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, observed in the context of crisis-riddled Europe of the mid 19th century, the revolutionary pressures that assail the Nigerian system are so pernicious that neither bishop, nor pope, nor monarch nor capitalist can escape its impending consuming tornado. Nigeria is currently adrift in a similar stormy sea and it needs the compass of justice and fiscal federalism to make the shore safely.

Let me return to the historiography of the movements of change sketched at an earlier section. It is logical to say that the spirit of Isaac Boro’s short-lived revolution has been raising consciousness and mobilising combatants since 1966. The long darkness of military dictatorship in Nigeria (1966-1999) overshadowed the efforts of the movements for autonomy and economic self-determination. That truce was broken in 1990 when the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) and the Ijaw National Congress (INC) were founded. Their visions and strategies for political autonomy and socio-economic equity have been guiding other groups for the past two decades. The murder by hanging of Saro-Wiwa and eight Ogoni nationalists in November 1995 transformed the situation of peaceful protests into revolutionary pressures as Professor Claude Ake would say.

The blood and echoes of the Ogoni Nine flowed till December 1998 when youths from 500 Ijaw communities met in Boro’s birthplace of Kaiama in Bayelsa State and issued the historic “Kaiama Declaration” for resource control and political autonomy. Two months earlier, that is October 1998, an oil pipeline fire holocaust killed about 1,000 persons in Jesse (Idjerhe) near Sapele in Urhobo area of Delta State. The outrage generated by this environmental disaster united the nations of the Niger Delta against the Nigerian government and its multinational oil allies and cohorts.

In November 1999, barely six months into the civilian regime of President Olusegun Obasanjo, soldiers invaded and destroyed Odi town in Bayelsa State under the pretext of searching for alleged killers of some police personnel. Reactions to this act of government brutality came from civil society movements in Nigeria and the world. As it became clear that the government would not brook any protest that disturbs the free flow of oil and dollars, various youth groups changed their tactics into guerrilla insurgency. The unrest has upset oil production in vital ways, resulting in a sharp reduction in Nigeria’s daily output. The emergence of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) in the past few years is the high tide of this development. How has literature and the arts responded to these momentous and tumultuous situations?

The flourish of literary works by both old and young Niger Delta writers since the 1970s clearly justifies our assessment that the region is the most active site of literary creativity in Nigeria, albeit Africa. The well known names include Dennis Osadebay, James Ene Henshaw, Gabriel Okara, Mabel Segun, Frank Aig-Imoukhuede, J.P. Clark, Ola Rotimi, Zulu Sofola, Elechi Amadi, Buchi Emecheta, Neville Ukoli, Okogbule Wonodi, and Ken Saro-Wiwa. The most epiphenomenal of all the literary products to emerge since the 1970s is J. P. Clark’s The Ozidi Saga, a monumental oral epic of the Ijo narrated in seven days and nights by the bard, Okabou Ojobolo, translated by Clark and published simultaneously by Oxford University Press and Ibadan University Press in 1977.

Much of the quintessential artistic quest for a revolutionary redemption of the Niger Delta is foreshadowed in this epic. It explores the dialectics and complexities of a long, determined struggle for justice-yielding vengeance. Ozidi Senior, a patriotic general in Orua’s military hierarchy is ambushed and murdered by his envious comrades-in-arms. His posthumous son, Ozidi Junior, grows up to learn of the crime. He is inducted and fortified by his grandmother, Orea, with physical and metaphysical powers to avenge the father’s brutal murder. He fights with and eliminates all of his father’s adversaries; he is overwhelmed by excesses and is struck down by the smallpox. His rehabilitation through indigenous medicinal agencies leads to the restoration of his moral energies and those of the chaotic state of Orua. Note that Clark did not compose the epic; he only transcribed and translated the text performed to him by an unlettered poet-dramatist. Yet you can discern in the theme of the story an almost primordial connectivity to the fundamental issue of justice that must be done and be seen to have been done to victims of blood-thirsty ruling oligarchs as was the case with the Orua generals.

The strident note of justice-or-nothing in the Ozidi epic reflects the equalitarian world view of pre-colonial Ijo people. There are barrels of allegorical lessons to be quaffed by Nigerian oppressor rulers in the Ozidi story. We have to add that The Ozidi Saga is the best surviving specimen of the oral epic in the world now. Even if J. P. Clark had not written or produced any other literary work, he would still have earned the applause of and eventually reward by the jury of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The works of writers after the generation indicated in the foregoing sections exhibit a more radical political temper. Saro-Wiwa’s output marks a watershed in this development. His books based on the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) show his partisanship on the issue of minorities and the politics of the Nigerian nation. As already indicated, On a Darkling Plain is typical of this political tendency. A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary (1995) revisits the central themes of the former book. These fictional and biographical writings were elaborated in Saro-Wiwa’s articles in newspaper columns where he advocated an equitable resolution of the Ogoni debacle. His positions had thematic and ideological relevance for the rest of the Niger Delta.

Marxist ideas of class relation and conflicts are articulated in the fictional works of Festus Iyayi who may be classified as Nigeria’s counterpart of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o of Kenya and Ousmane Sembene of Senegal. The title of Iyayi’s first novel, Violence, advertises its ideological bias. With his second book, The Contract, Iyayi shows that he is committed to exposing the machinations of the Nigerian capitalist bourgeoisie whose greed for primitive accumulation reproduces millions of rural and urban poor.

Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty draws attention to the social and moral dilemmas generated by the war situation. However, in Heroes, also based on the Civil War, Iyayi adumbrates the possibility of a third force of lower rank military officers who would end the rule of the corrupt generals and set up a more just political system. There have been robust exchanges amongst interpreters and critics about the dialectical solvency of transferring this historical burden to the armed forces rather than the proletariat and its intellectual fellow travellers. But that is another debate altogether.

The poetry of Tanure Ojaide and Odia Ofeimun fits into the tradition of outrage against political injustice, exploitation and environmental disasters. On the basis of sheer output, Ojaide is the most prolific in the Niger Delta region. From his titles one can discern an abiding concern with the fate of the Niger Delta people. Examples are Labyrinths of the Delta, Delta Blues and Home Songs, The Eagle’s Vision, The Fate of Vultures and Other Poems, and The Blood of Peace. Many of the poems in these collections are verbal missiles directed at political despots whose rule has brought misery and distress to the region. Ojaide’s most political prose work is The Activist which celebrates young academics and freedom fighters who combine courage with intellect to advance the cause of popular resistance against exploitation by the Federal Government and its foreign collaborators.

Advocacy for environmental safety and justice is a strident theme in the poetry of the late 1990s. This is evident in Nnimmo Bassey’s Patriots and Cockroaches, Ibiwari Ikiriko’s Oily Tears of the Delta, and Reverend Father Uba Ofei’s Beyond Fear and Fury, and After Fire. These works show how much literature has become an extension of the politics of emancipation and human rights.

Ben Okri’s eleven books of fiction, two of essays and two collections of poetry offer a rich mine of knowledge and experience about the embattled people of the Niger Delta. His The Famished Road (1991) won the prestigious Booker Prize of that year. The title itself proclaims the dilemmas of a people famished but determined in their struggle to have fulfilled life in a hostile environment of poverty and disillusionment. Notwithstanding the density of his mythopoetic diction which reaches its most challenging form in his Starbook: A Magical Tale of Love and Regeneration (2007), Okri compels our admiration primarily because his works celebrate humanity in its relentless quest for freedom and rebirth.

As the fascistic excesses of military regimes grew worse in Nigeria of the 1990s, their impact on the Niger Delta also became more devastating. The literary arts became an arena for radical debates and the crossfire of opposing views and interests. Drama articulated the exuberant spirit of the era when civil society movements rose to do battle with military dictatorship. The fiasco of the June 12, 1993, presidential elections added fuel to the outrage of the writers of the region. To some extent, the plays of Sam Ukala, especially those in his Akpakaland collection, bear witness to this tendency. The celebration of the heroic past and lament for the disappointments of the present age are the distinctive features of Barclays Ayakoroma’s plays such as A Matter of Honour, A Dance on His Grave, and Once Upon a Dream.

The biggest harvest of drama is in the artistic barn of Tess Osonye Onwueme. With a dozen plays in two decades, she has proved to be the most vivacious female voice in Nigeria’s dramaturgy since the 1980s. Zulu Sofola’s drama alerts us to the fate of women in tradition-bound societies of Nigeria. Buchi Emecheta has extended the discourse with her focus on the disabilities of the female gender as can be seen in her titles such as The Slave Girl, Double Yoke and Joys of Motherhood. Yet Onwueme has taken the feminist debate from the phallic level to a higher ideological site by provoking polemical questions on gender and social justice in Nigeria and Africa. We can detect this radical streak in plays such Tell it to Women, Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen, and The Missing Face.

The angry diction of J.P Clark’s All for Oil and Ikiriko’s Oily Tears of the Delta echoes stridently in the Ogaga Ifowodo’s The Oil Lamp (2005). The poetry volume is dedicated to “The thousand-and-one/gone in the struggle/for a liveable/Niger Delta/ a just Nigeria”. The first section is a narrative elegy for the over 1000 persons who perished in the 1998 oil pipeline fire disaster in Jesse, Delta State. Other sections are devoted to Ogoni and Odi, two other places where the ferocity of the military might of the Nigerian neo-colonial state has been visited with heavy casualties. Ifowodo’s kindred spirits in poetry include names such as Hope Eghagha and Harry Garuba.

The fictional works on ecological matters have been enriched by documentaries and journalistic polemics such as Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil by Oronto Douglas and Ike Okonta, and Ibiba DonPedro’s Oil in Water: Crude Power and Militancy in the Niger Delta. In this category, we can include Egbe Ifie’s Friends and Enemies of the Niger Delta: A Compilation of Collected Writings of Comrade Joseph Evah on the Niger Delta Problem. My Niger Delta Challenge (in press) falls into this pedigree.

As the self-determination struggle of the Niger Delta intensifies, more writers are staking their stand in solidarity with the martyrs and leading lights. One new voice with promise is that of Richard Maduku whose Just Another Soldier and Arigo Again explore the situation of ordinary victims of the politics of marginalisation and impoverishment attendant on the oil economy. Ben Omonode’s Shattered Dreams and Try Another Leg have some sparks of solid realism.

The most exciting discoveries in the field of fiction are young women. Joy Chinwokwu’s After Midnight and Clouds at Sunrise show that she is a writer to watch. Bina Nengi-Ilagha’s Condolences and Crossroads have given her respectable mention in entries of major literary prizes. In this vineyard of feminist labour, Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow novel of 2006 has the qualities of aesthetic elegance that can take her in future to the pantheon of the likes of South Africa’s Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer. Agary’s debut novel won the prestigious Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas prize in 2007.

Nigeria’s field of literary critics and essayists is crowded by great names from the Niger Delta. J.P. Clark is a notable pioneer in this respect. The pantheon includes Ime Ikiddeh, Dan Izevbaye, Steve Ogude, Sam Asein, Theo Vincent, and Obi Wali. Among the giants of criticism and polemical essays are Abiola Irele, Omafume Onoge, Biodun Jeyifo, Thomas Okpako, Joseph Egberike, Aguonorobo Eruvbetine, Simon Umukoro, Atiboroko Uyovbukerhi, Odia Ofeimun, Funso Aiyejina, Emevwo Biakolo, Tony Afejuku, Onookome Okome, Nduka Otiono, Mabel Evwierhoma, and Asomwan Adagboyin. This is truly a shortlist since there are many more interpreters of literatures in higher institutions in Nigeria and abroad than can be mentioned here.

But Isidore Okpewho who has two novels and an anthology of African poetry is in a class of his own because of his outstanding position in oral literary scholarship. In the challenging area of oral literature field research and translations, Okpewho is the African equivalent of the late Professor Albert Bates Lord of Havard Univeristy who led the scholars like a colossus from 1935 till his death in the 1990s. Since 1979, Okpewho has published very original critical works on very important traditions of oral literature in Africa. His Myth, Hegemony and Identity (1998) based on tales of the western Igbo of Delta State stretches the harvest of political writing to the inexhaustible vineyard of folklore and oral literature.

In his edited book, Before I Am Hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Literature, Politics and Dissent (2004) Professor Onookome Okome observed that the “tales coming out of the Niger Delta are not evidence of dead dreams. Rather, they are examples of dreams which the suffering people are trying to make into reality”. From the genres and generations of literature that I have reviewed in this address, we can confirm our tentative judgement that the Niger Delta is both the locomotive of the Nigerian economy as well as the centre of gravity of the best traditions of the nation’s literatures and letters.

___________________________________________________________Professor Darah is of the Department of English and Literary Studies, Delta State University, Abraka. This is a slightly revised version of the address he delivered at the 2008 Convention of the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artistes at the University of Benin.

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