Oil Exploration and Local Opposition in Colonial Nigeria: Understanding the Roots of Contemporary State-Community Conflict in the Niger Delta
ABSTRACT Scholarly and public analyses of oil conflict in Nigeria, especially its origins, often do not interrogate the nature and forms of relationships that evolved among the inland communities of South-Eastern Nigeria (where oil exploration began in the 1930s); the colonial state and the pioneer oil explorer, Shell D'Arcy; and the implications of these relationships for the management of the oil exploration process in Nigeria. This article explores the character of these relationships. It argues that although oil was not discovered in commercial quantity in these inland communities, the colonial legal/institutional framework for oil operations advantaged the oil explorers in special ways, and resulted in unmitigated socio-ecological dislocation, and hence, local opposition. For a proper understanding of this phase in the evolution of the Nigerian oil economy, the paper explores some of the basic issues that foreground postcolonial oil conflict in Nigeria; conflict that has persisted into the 21st century. The article relies on archival and ethnographic data collected from selected communities in South-Eastern Nigeria where Shell D'Arcy explored for oil for several years, before it struck commercial deposits in the coastal villages of the Niger Delta in 1956.