The biopolitics of violence in the drama of the Niger Delta

Ajumeze, Henry  Obi

The biopolitics of violence in the drama of the Niger Delta

Doctoral Thesis

2018

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

African Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

The representation of the Niger Delta insurgency in cultural texts is often registered from the viewpoint of human history, an approach that foregrounds the politics of resistance against the multinational oil corporations in ways that ignore the contribution of the non-human elements in the historical struggles in the region. In this study, I seek to understand the ways that the Niger Delta landscapes and environment are imagined in the works that I describe as the Niger Delta drama. Drawing on a number of plays to reflect on the different historicizations of spaces in the region, I examine and analyse the ways in which these spaces exercise social and political agencies in the unfolding events in the region. I tentatively delineate the region’s history into two analytic epochs: pre-oil and oil modernity Niger Delta. Though noting the centrality of the creeks and swamps in both temporal contexts, I argue that the drama of the pre-oil modernity textualized the "ontology of water" as a site of socioeconomic and ecological relations with the people who inhabit the Delta terrain. In the event of oil modernity, these spaces and relationships are reframed in the material transformations of the region’s landscape and environment from a site of decay and degradation to that of material recalcitrance and revolt that petro-violence provokes. In that vein, I treat the spaces represented by the creeks as "spaces of exception" - a phrase coined by Giorgio Agamben to explain how political democracies exclude certain zones to legitimise state terror - in which biopolitical securitisations are programmatically unleashed on trouble-prone geographies in ways that reduce the citizens to the status of bare-life. Although Agamben has identified the concentration camps as the paradigmatic basis of the modern state of exception, I propose that the creeks of the Delta offer an exemplary case that is consistent with bare life - a space as much excluded as included in the sense of Agamben’s paradoxical formulation of homo sacer, where life is violently exposed to the state apparatus of repression. Texts situated within the frame of exclusion and violent geographies deploy a poetics of waste and decay, what I term "environmental scatology" to capture the condition of bare life in the Delta, and reflect on the state of abandonment and invisibility that underwrites the exclusion. At other times, the texts illustrate how the ontology of water and the knowledge that it enables construct the people's mode of resistance, articulating ways in which the seaweeds and crocodiles that inhabit the swamps are entangled in the violent political ecology of the region. I read these texts as inaugurating a truly environmental drama in which the human-nonhuman nature is entangled in the performance of political resistances in the violent geography of the Delta.

Keywords

anthropology

African Studies

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

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