To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and Climate Crisis in Africa

by Nnimmo Bassey

Overview

People in Africa argue that natural resources are a blessing; it is the way these are plundered and used that can turn them into a curse. The continent has plenty of experience of such plunder. Rich in resources, Africa is a net supplier of energy and raw materials to the North. The climate crisis confronting the world today is rooted mainly in the wealthy economies' abuse of fossil fuels, indigenous forests and global commercial agriculture. But, without agreement about how to tackle this reality, the question often becomes what can be done about Africa. Or, sometimes, for Africa. This book looks at what has been done to Africa and how Africans should respond for the good of all. Bassey examines the oil industry in Africa, probes the roots of global warming, warns of its insidious impacts and explores false 'solutions'. Crucially, his intelligent and wide-ranging approach demonstrates that the issues around natural resource exploitation, corporate profiteering and climate change must be considered together if we are to save ourselves. What can Africa do? And can the rest of the world act in solidarity? If not, will we continue on the path laid out by elites that brings us ever closer to the brink? Many live in denial even as ecological and social disasters increase, but this is not inevitable and Bassey suggests how Africa can overcome the crises of environment and global warming.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781906387532
Publisher:	Pambazuka Press
Publication date:	04/04/2012
Pages:	204
Sales rank:	1,140,498
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.43(d)

About the Author

Nnimmo Bassey is an activist, a poet, the executive director of Environmental Rights Action inNigeria, and the elected chair of Friends of the Earth International. He is one of Time magazine s 2009 Heroes of the Environment and the corecipient of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award. He is the author of Genetically Modified Organisms and Oilwatching in South America."

Read an Excerpt

To Cook a Continent

Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa

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By Nnimmo Bassey

Fahamu

Copyright © 2012 Nnimmo Bassey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-906387-54-9

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: the pull of Africa

Placed on the slab
Slaughtered by the day
We are the living
Long sacrificed

ONE OF THE worst gas flares in the Niger Delta is at a former Shell facility at Oben, on the border of Delta and Edo states. They have been roaring and crackling non-stop for over 30 years, since Shell first lit them. The flared gas comes from the crude oil extracted from the oil wells in the Oben field. As at more than 200 other flow stations across the Niger Delta, these gas flares belch toxic elements into the atmosphere, poisoning the environment and the people. Globally, gas flares pump about 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. Here in Nigeria, the climate is brazenly assaulted both in the short term by gas flaring and over the long term because of the CO emissions from this filthy practice. In the hierarchy of gas flares infamy, Nigeria is second only to Russia.

Gas flares and oil spills have attracted the attention of the world as the two most visible assaults on the Niger Delta. It was no surprise that when the Dutch parliament decided to hold a hearing on the activities of Shell in Nigeria, journalists and parliamentarians from the Netherlands decided to visit the region to see things for themselves.

I was at Oben on 18 December 2010 just after the United Nations' climate negotiations disaster at Cancun, accompanied by Sharon Gesthuisen, a Socialist Party member of the Dutch parliament, along with a Dutch diplomat and Sunny Ofehe of the Hope for the Niger Delta Campaign. Our journey started in Benin City early in the evening after the parliamentarian had flown in from Lagos. Escorted by a team of Oben community people, we set out on the hour-long ride along the highway from Benin City to Warri, a road noted for the high number of military checkpoints. They would make anyone think that Nigeria was at war. We meandered through the hazardous roadblocks made with trash hurled from nearby bushes and veered off the highway at Jesse, just before Sapele, from where we took a narrow winding road to Oben. Jesse is important in the tragic history of the Niger Delta: it was the community where a petrol pipeline fire killed about 1,000 poor villagers in 1998.

We got to Oben at about 7pm and were waved through a military checkpoint set up to guard the oil flow station and the belching dragons. Gaining entrance to the heavily guarded facility was easy; leaving was not. As soon as we arrived, a worker whom we happened across gave us a little talk about what went on there. People from the community complained about how they had had to put up with the flares for more than three decades while their dreams of jobs and development projects faded away.

The Dutch MP was amazed by what she saw. She was happy she had made this trip, otherwise she would have had to depend solely on the chaperoned visits arranged by the oil giant Shell in a bid to show how environmentally friendly they are. The flames leapt and roared relentlessly. We inched as close as we could before having to turn away because of the unbearable heat. As we turned to leave, the brightness of the village sky contrasted with the darkness of the homes that lacked electricity. But we could not leave.

Our cars were surrounded by soldiers of the Joint Task Force (JTF), a military force that became infamous when an armed unit was created specifically to punish the Ogoni people in the 1990s. The soldiers demanded to know by what authority we visited the gas flare site. They would not let us leave without producing an authorisation letter from the JTF headquarters. All our explanations that we were there at the invitation of the community fell on deaf ears. The presence of a Dutch parliamentarian as well as a diplomat meant nothing to these guys, who apparently knew their script. Hours went by. The darkness of the night struggled with the glow of the gas flares. The soldiers stuck to their guns.

The JTF men demanded our car keys and threatened to deflate the tyres. We would not leave the location that night, they insisted. Threats followed. Rifles were raised and then lowered. They would not call their superiors. They were the lords working at the behest of capital.

Eventually a Nigerian journalist who was on our team placed a call to the media relations officer of the JTF. After much foot dragging the soldiers wrote down the numbers of our cars and took our names, addresses and statements before letting us go at midnight. We rode back to Benin City in silence, each mulling over the hazards faced by communities living in the oilfields and the human rights abuses inflicted regularly on those who monitor or question the evils that go on in the land. To the Dutch parliamentarian, the events of the evening were a good introduction to the Niger Delta and the operations of the oil companies: exploit, degrade, abuse and punish the environment and the people. The scenario replays across the continent.

The African resource pull

The African continent has exerted a strong pull on the world for a long time. At first outsiders saw the continent as nothing more than a coastline. Beyond the coastline lay a dark, unknown land. While the land remained unknown to outsiders, kingdoms flourished on the continent and people lived in harmony with their environment in a cultural and spiritual relationship that held up a picture of sustainability that appears alien and exotic in today's world.

To Europeans, early knowledge of Africa was largely restricted to the Mediterranean fringes and later on to the southern tip, where from 1652 their foothold, established as a way-station for the India trade, left indelible marks. Even before then, slavery and looting were common. Arab merchants and their collaborators on the east coast were some of the first to see the black body as a resource to be extracted. But the English, Spanish, French and Portuguese colonialists took 20 million from the west and southern coasts.

When adventurers went deeper inland, the land yielded rich resources that astonished these so-called discoverers. Through the 18th century, Africa became the storehouse, with inexhaustible minerals, plant life and animals, as well as people.

Thomas Pakenham's The Scramble for Africa termed Africa a 'lottery': a winning ticket brought glittering prizes. David Livingstone, one of the early adventurers, claimed that Africa could be saved through the tripod of commerce, Christianity and civilisation. Pakenham rightly responded that the invasion was four-legged and the fourth leg was conquest. He should have added that settler colonialism was a bizarre deviation from Christianity and civilisation, whereas commerce and conquest have persisted in a diversity of ways till today.

Often we read about how the invaders conned the continent with a bible in one hand and a musket in the other. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has remarked, when the missionaries came to Africa, they had the bible and we had the land, but they asked us to close our eyes and pray, and when we opened them, we realised they now had the land while we had plenty of bibles. While we will not belabour that analysis, it is nevertheless important to note that by the 19th century, there was a convergence of thought in Europe that sought to proclaim the conquest of territories as a matter that was inevitable and God-given. Writing in 1853, even Karl Marx argued that 'England had a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating — the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundation of Western society in Asia.' When 'Asia' is replaced by 'Africa', the thought pattern is even more explicit. Indeed, there was the thinking that massive destruction of cultures and nature would ultimately be to the benefit of the plundered.

Conquest meant division and disunity across the continent. Conquest meant the splintering of nations and kingdoms into different blocs; it meant the amalgamation of disparate units into new wholes in a tensile state that promised no peace. Conquest and division laid prostrate vast civilisations in Africa, the Americas and Asia, siphoning off resources to fuel the industrial revolution in Europe.

Genocidal actions of one African ethnic nation against another cannot be separated from this history. In any situation where nations or groups compete for power or access to resources, conflict can rise from mere murmurs into open fratricidal wars. The goriest case of genocide in recent history is the one that occurred in Rwanda. Archbishop Tutu visited Rwanda a year after the genocide: 'I saw skulls that still had machetes and daggers embedded in them. I couldn't pray. I could only weep.'

From the early years of colonialism, fissures on the continent separated Africans into boxes: anglophone for those under British rule, francophone for those ruled by France, lusophone for those under the thumb of the Portuguese. Of course, there were others who fell under the rule of the Italians, Belgians, Germans and Spanish. National boundaries were drawn arbitrarily, sometimes using a ruler rather than knowledge of ethnic national affinities on the ground. Not that that would have mattered much to the conquerors, whose sole aim was unfettered access to resources needed by the capitals in Europe.

While Britain tended to favour the strategy of indirect rule in running her colonies, France preferred to go the way of assimilation. Through indirect rule, the British made use of local middlemen or compradors to run the territories while maintaining a grip on the central power structures. Such middlemen included local chiefs and a rising group of elites. The French, on the other hand, drew in the Africans in their colonies, giving them a sense that they were citizens of France when they were nothing of the sort. Assimilation included seats for African representation in the French parliament.

Over time, the stranglehold of the United States over Latin America as well as the strong influence of Russia and China over Asia were seen as strong reasons for a Eurafrica union. In an article on the subject dated 1957, Time magazine commented on the Eurafrica proposal, referring to the statement by Christian Pineau, French foreign minister:

Pineau said France has vast and beneficent plans not only for Algeria but for all its African territories. Said he: 'On the day when the [European] Common Market ... has been created, [France] would like to promote the formation of a Eurafrican whole. Europe in its entirety, bringing to Africa its capital and its techniques, should enable the immense African continent to become an essential factor in world politics.' Pineau's vision of Eurafrica did nothing to dampen the perfervid anti-colonialism of the Arab — Asian countries.

Leaders who pushed this idea included African statesmen such as Léopold Senghor of Senegal, who perceived that the relationship would be mutually beneficial. Detailed provisions were made in the Strasbourg Plan of 1952 but were rejected. To the most powerful Europeans, Africa was clearly an excellent backyard where they could exert continued influence, extract resources to meet their needs and also mobilise a ready army when combat situations warranted it. They were not, however, ready to give other European states unfettered access to the resources and trade in territories under their control nor to become involved in the colonial politics of other European governments.

Slaves and other energy sources

Access to raw materials and cheap labour made the plunder of Africa irresistible. One slaver was quoted as saying that slaves were 'free'; all you needed was to gather them in. Bloodletting and easy dispensation of native lives meant nothing. Thus the early drive into Africa was fuelled by a liberty to do as one pleased within the sandwich of commerce and conquest.

The level of labour exploitation that occurred in those early years is unimaginable when considered today. Take as an example the exploitation of tin ore in the Plateau area of Nigeria. According to James Coleman, before a railway line was built to the mines in Jos, Nigeria, 23,000 Africans had to carry tonnes of the ore on their heads over a distance of 320km. Africans also covered vast distances to fight wars that were not any concern of theirs: 374,000 Africans served in the British army during the Second World War and many were sent to the front in far-off Burma. It is on record that the bodies of fallen African soldiers were mutilated by some of Hitler's soldiers while at least 3,000 African prisoners of war were massacred in France. It would appear that the African soldiers not only fought other people's wars, but also became objects for sport and barbaric entertainment.

There were other dislocating effects back home. In Sierra Leone, for example, the conscription of young men who had been engaged in farming, led to food shortages in 1919. A cup of rice that previously went for one penny was then sold at five pence. The impact on workers was particularly hard and they pressed for wage increases. The government imported rice to lessen the impact of the scarcity, but it was too little, too late.

Africa offered ready sources of raw materials as well as a market for finished products. The stimulation of Africa's appetite for foreign goods was ensured by exertion of political control and imposition of Western cultural and consumerist norms. The strength that comes from unity, and the potential inherent in using one's own raw materials for development, were duly denied any conquered territory.

Colonisation of the continent can be understood as a stage in relations whereby the European powers took over the roles that had earlier been played by commercial entities such as the Royal Niger Company, which held sway in the Niger Delta. The power of America's Firestone Company conveniently ensured that Africans living in what is now known as Liberia were free from formal colonial rule. In southern Africa, the emergence of colonial authority relieved the British South Africa Company of direct political and administrative distractions. The companies stepped up their work of exploiting resources while the colonial governments provided security as well as the necessary backdrop for unhindered profiteering.

This model continued working into the so-called post-colonial (actually neo-colonial) era. In fact, the companies, aware of the rent-seeking nature of resource-financed and dependent regimes, exploit this vulnerability, while reaping massive profits. Things have never been better for companies, as their officials lord over the corridors of power, thereby ensuring that government policies further their interests irrespective of the impact on the people supposedly represented by these governments..

As the colonial era took its first steps in Africa, a handful of Europeans held the levers of power over millions of local peoples. After a few wars and a number of skirmishes, they had the continent prostrate before them. Thus it was that fewer than 2,500 white people who lived in Rhodesia had claim over 50 per cent of the entire land area before 1980, while 87 per cent of the land of South Africa was taken up by settlers.

The overrunning of Africa did meet with resistance, but it was overpowered through sheer firepower or the subtle deceptions of the invaders and betrayals by compatriots. One thing cannot be denied. Spears can hardly withstand canons. While the spear or arrow may whistle silently, the canon boomed with a noise that could intimidate a strong warrior with no experience of such weapons of mass destruction.

Another factor that may have made the invasion easier is the intrinsic belief of the African that a person's humanity is inextricably linked to the humanity of the other person. This is the philosophical construct known as ubuntu. Archbishop Tutu captures this concept:

The first law of our being is that we are set in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God's creation. In Africa recognition of our interdependence is called ubuntu in Nguni languages, or botho in Sotho, which is difficult to translate into English. It is the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks of wholeness; it speaks about compassion. A person with ubuntu is welcoming, hospitable, warm and generous, willing to share. Such people are open and available to others, do not feel threatened by others, willing to be vulnerable ... They know that they are diminished when others are humiliated, diminished when others are oppressed, diminished when others are treated as if they were less than they are. The quality of ubuntu gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanise them.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from To Cook a Continent by Nnimmo Bassey. Copyright © 2012 Nnimmo Bassey. Excerpted by permission of Fahamu.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Preface,
Part 1 - Unpacking Africa,
1 - Introduction: the pull of Africa,
2 - Africa is rich,
Part 2 - The scramble and the grabbing,
3 - The wheels of progress,
4 - The steps of the advisers,
5 - Destructive extraction,
6 - Climate chaos and false solutions,
7 - Leaving the Niger Delta's oil in the soil,
8 - Swimming against the tide, connected by blood,
We thought it was oil ... but it was blood,
Notes,
Earth Grab: Geopiracy, the New Biomassters and Capturing Climate Genes,
Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice,
Food Sovereignty,
The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry,

Editorial Reviews

"A provocative critique of contemporary resource extraction (perhaps more properly, resource exploitation) in sub-Saharan Africa. In his convincing, and at times searing, analysis, Bassey presents an engaging and comprehensive critique of Africa's social and environmental crisis." Chatham House"

"Africa and their environment. His refreshing style makes his insights extremely accessible. His sweeping analysis of the continent's challenges, coming from one of Africa's foremost environmentalists, is an inspiration to action." David Fig, Chair of Biowatch South Africa and author, Staking Their Claims"

"An extremely insightful and eloquent book about what Africa can do to stop the new forms of colonisation that are being exaggerated by the chaos of climate change." Pablo Solon, former Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations"

"For those who are still skeptical of the effects of climate change, this will leave you not only bothered and troubled, but also fired up to do something about it." Nigerian Compass"

"From slaves to diamonds to oil, overconsuming countries have taken what they want from Africa for too long. Bassey lays out this history in rich detail and makes clear what Africa wants: Justice. Read it and join Bassey's call." Annie Leonard, author, The Story of Stuff"

"This powerful indictment of greed and ravaging of Africa's riches yet offers prospects for hope." Camilla Toulmin, Chair of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)"

From the Publisher