The Extracted Oil

Oil dominates Zina Saro-Wiwa’s art film Karikpo Pipeline (2015) , George Osodi’s photographic series Delta Nigeria: The Rape of Paradise (2011), and Jeta Amata’s Nollywood film Black November (2012). Shady racial capitalist dealings with the earth’s black entrails result in rainbow-slicked agricultural fields, omnipresent gas flares, plumes of toxic smoke, and rusted infrastructure. Exposing the enflamed guts of Delta Nigeria, Saro-Wiwa, Osodi, and Amata ruminate on concepts of justice in the wake of oil extraction and the plunder of their homeland; all the while, their work makes mirrors out of oil’s opacity to better counter corporate ‘Shellspeak’ in the Delta. I read their visual works as new masquerades, made to honour the environment and the dead and to convey the ongoing refusal of such plunder.