| The people of the Niger Delta are known to have emerged from agrarian populations that once occupied the entire region. However, with the advent of oil exploration in 1956, farming activities gave way to oil pipelines and platforms, and thriving agrarian populations fell into decline. Today, they are deprived of what they consider their land and natural resources by legal institutions of the state that transfer ownership to the Federal Government of Nigeria. Yet, today, oil prospecting, flow stations, pipelines and platforms seen as symbols of oil exploration represent to many members of the Niger Delta an ancestral promise of wealth long circulating among villagers. For while many of the communities feel a sense of deprivation, the Nigerian state is seen by them as an impediment to the realization of this ancestral promise because of the ways in which the state is perceived as being in alliance with multinational corporations who exploit the oil resources. This has led to various claims and counter claims over ownership of land and natural resources, oftentimes, in ways that generate different levels of conflict.;This dissertation examine the ways that oil and land represents for those in the region a symbol of impending wealth, and how the mythic and pregnant quality of such forms of wealth drives the basis for claims by indigenous populations. I explore the ways that the production of such a mythic symbol of possibility intersects with the claims and counter claims of indigeneity, communal ownership and belonging to either a Yoruba majority or a possibly economically beneficial Niger Delta because of the importance attached to oil revenue. As the state and multinational oil corporations plays a critical role in shaping and creating policies which contribute to the redefining of communities and entitlements, I investigate the ways that contestations over oil and land resources and its related meanings are redefining and reproducing new forms of power, governance, and belonging. I examine how it is that the physical presence of oil drilling platforms, flow stations and pipelines within these communities represent a promise of widespread wealth, while at the same time the realities of resource control and legal institutions of the state has excluded local people from any of the benefits of oil modernity. This ethnography maps how these exclusions create conditions of possibilities for the establishment of competing governmentalities through the mobilization of political organizing against the state and multinational corporate control of land and oil in the Niger Delta. Further, I explore the crosscutting ties that local groups develop as members and intended beneficiaries of transnational human and environmental rights networks, resource distribution institutions, nodes of community organizing, and multinational operations. |
