by Oyeintarimoboere Azebi, Master of Arts, Department of Global Studies
In 2002, in an oil field in the Niger Delta, 200 to 300 women, farmers, mothers, and grandmothers from the Ijaw and Itsekiri villages walked onto a Chevron exploration site and simply refused to leave. They had no weapons. Their only threat was one that struck terror into the company’s representatives: they undressed, and, in their culture, for a woman to bare herself before men who have wronged her community is an act of profound, irreversible shame upon those men. This demonstration lasted ten days, after which Chevron promised to build new schools, clinics, and provide jobs for their husbands and sons. By 2003, none had materialized. So more than 600 of the women came back and took nearly 700 oil workers hostage until their demands were met (Ikelegbe 2005).
The Niger Delta is one of the most oil-rich places on earth. It sits on the Atlantic coast of southern Nigeria, sprawling across 70,000 square kilometers of creeks, mangrove forests, wetlands, and fishing communities. In 1956, oil was discovered in Oloibiri, Bayelsa State. Over 60 years, the region has experienced what a 1983 report by Nigeria’s own national oil corporation quietly described as a situation in which “there has been no concerned and effective effort on the part of the government, let alone the oil operators, to control environmental problems.”
Between 1976 and 2001, there were 6,817 recorded oil spills in the Niger Delta (UNDP 2006). Environmental damage costs the Delta an estimated $758 million every year. Gas has been flaring illegally, the Nigerian courts declared it a constitutional violation in 2005, yet as recently as 2011, Shell had not stopped. The United Nations warned that reversing the damage could take 25 to 30 years (UNEP 2011). In Bodo, a community in Rivers State whose very name means “on the sea,” two pipeline ruptures in 2008 and 2009 released over 560,000 barrels of crude into the rivers, leaving mangroves blackened, fish washed ashore dead, and women who had gathered periwinkles and crabs from those waters since childhood with nothing (UNEP 2011).
In communities like Ikarama and Obunagha in Bayelsa State, women make up 60 to 80 percent of the agricultural labor force (Okon 2002). They fetch water, grow cassava, yams, and plantains, feeding their families from the soil. When a river is poisoned by an oil spill, it is a woman who discovers it because she went to collect water or harvest her crops. When gas flares coat the crops in black soot and vegetables stop growing, it is a woman who watches the harvest fail and wonders what her family will eat that night. Ebi, an environmentalist from Bayelsa State, who founded a youth organization called Youth for Environmental Sustainability and Development after witnessing the damage oil spills brought to host communities, described it plainly: “As women, we are the backbone of our communities. Our contribution includes food security, economic stability, and family well-being. Our voices are crucial.” And yet, for most of the Niger Delta’s modern history, those voices have been precisely the ones left out of the room. Whenever there are meetings with multinational oil companies, women are rarely invited, and when they are, their concerns are noted and set aside. Compensation flows only through male community leaders, fathers, and first sons, whom Nigerian customary law recognizes as landowners. Women whose farmland has been destroyed receive nothing for their land, their contaminated water, or the cancers that stem from the pollution. When I asked a community development chairman why no woman had ever held his position, despite women being most affected, he acknowledged the tradition plainly. “Women were not meant for these roles,” he said. It had been that way since his forefathers.
In Bodo in 2015, women dressed in tattered sackcloth and carried their fishing nets to a demonstration. They were not performing poverty, they were living it, and they made the world look. Their protests contributed to a landmark compensation agreement with Shell. In Obunagha, women gathered health data on their sick children and filed petitions. In Ikarama in 2022, after another major spill, women blocked access roads until state environmental agencies arrived. Organizations like the Kebetkache Women Development and Resource Centre, founded in Port Harcourt in 1999, have built something that functions almost like a parallel governance system, training women to understand their rights, document pollution, and speak at shareholder meetings in California on behalf of communities in Rivers State. Their executive director once stood before Chevron’s CEO and described what oil had done to the bodies of women in the Delta: early menopause, cancer, infertility. She was speaking for people who could not afford a plane ticket, but whose suffering had traveled the world anyway.
What is happening in the Niger Delta is not a distant environmental story. It is a story about who gets to decide what happens to a place, and who bears the cost when those decisions go wrong. Decades of law-making have produced over 120 environmental acts in Nigeria (Aghalino 2004), yet enforcement remains weak, penalties are negligible, and communities are still being poisoned. The gap between what is written and what is lived falls almost entirely on women. They have responded not with despair, but with tireless creativity, cooperative farming, peaceful demonstrations, and international advocacy. They have built a movement not because they were waiting for someone to lead it, but because no one else was going to. As Ebi put it: “To encourage women’s participation, we need to include them in local, national, and international decision-making processes.” That is not a radical demand. It is the most basic one, and in the Niger Delta, women have been making it loudly, persistently, against considerable odds for a very long time.
—Tari Azebi graduated in June with a master’s degree in global studies. She received a 2025 CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant.
References:
Aghalino, S. O. 2004. “Oil Mineral Exploitation, Environmental Deterioration and Public Policy in Nigeria.” Calabar Journal of Politics and Administration 2 (122): 39–50.
Ikelegbe, Augustine. 2005. “The Economy of Conflict in the Oil Rich Niger Delta Region of Nigeria.” Nordic Journal of African Studies 14 (2): 208–234.
Okon, Emem. 2002. Cited in Environmental Defenders Network (EDEN) field documentation.
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2006. Niger Delta Human Development Report. Abuja: UNDP.
UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme). 2011. Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland. Nairobi: UNEP.