Palm Oil and Crude Oil: Environmental Damage, Resource Conflict, and Literary Strategies in the Niger Delta

Abstract

The exploitation of petroleum reserves in Nigeria’s Niger Delta by foreign oil companies has been widely condemned as environmentally damaging, and even neo-colonial. Existing ecocritical scholarship on literature from the Delta by scholars such as Nixon (2011) and Caminero-Santangelo (2014) has focused on literature that engages with the extraction of mineral oil. While their analyses of the environmental, economic and social violence that this causes are important, it is disappointing that Wenzel (2006) and Lincoln (2012) are among the few environmentally-engaged literary critics to examine writing about the area’s long history of foreign resource exploitation. This article analyses the different literary strategies employed by key prose writers, poets and playwrights, and shows how some engage with the transition from a palm oil economy to a petroleum economy, while others present a pastoral picture of the Niger Delta before oil in order to throw the damage caused by petroleum into relief. Although its impacts were nowhere near as severe as those of petroleum exploitation, the palm oil industry caused water pollution, deforestation, riots and conflict long before mineral oil was struck in Nigeria in 1956.