Jacqueline’s portrait of Niger Delta where oil is thicker than blood

BY OSA AMADI

The Niger Delta, the network of shallow creeks flowing into the Gulf of Guinea, is the hub of Africa’s biggest oil and gas industry and yet, it has been reduced to miserable state with nothing to show for the wealth it spews from its depths.  This authorial comment laid the groundwork for Jacqueline Agweh’s activist book, A Pelican of the Wilderness, a book that belongs to a group of literary works whose living words have broken the guns of dictators and grounded the tanks of armies of occupation.

The scene is water, life on water, but unfortunately, on polluted waters of the Niger Delta, and the protagonist is Tonpre, son of a high court judge and member of the Signet Brotherhood, a militant group. The signet Brotherhood understood the arms equation of the struggle in Niger Delta – fire for fire. The Niger Delta militants are made up of natives who did not deceive themselves into the illusion that the other armed men who had laid claim on their oil and made trillions of dollars from it over the years would relinquish it by mere negotiation.

The reader is appalled by Jacqueline’s expose of crass environmental pollution made by oil exploration in Niger Delta until you read pages 86 – 90 and 114 – 118 at Omadi Waterside where the Joint Military force and oil companies’ security operatives slaughtered unarmed, defenseless villagers and fishermen, and then your heart breaks into pieces!

On page 120, Tonpre the Pelican angrily calls the people cowards for not fighting back, bringing to the fore the argument over whether an oppressed people should fight back or remain docile and complacent in renunciation of violence. For Wole Soyinka and many of us, the man died (that is, the manliness in a man died) if he cannot not stand up to fight when he is oppressed. Reporting Tonpre’s thought, the author writes: “…one thing Tonpre knew was that the militancy in the Niger Delta would never stop, not as long as the kind of mistreatment meted out on the people continued while the powers-that-be remained in their secure strongholds pretending that all was well in the waterside villages.”

Perhaps one of the men in whom the men in them died is Justice Tonpre Wilson-Kogbara, the Pelican’s father. From page 149-150, Tari, the Justice’s daughter, accuses her father of being complacent to the struggle: “Stark illiterates,” the Justice had muttered and pushed his plate away. He was referring to Niger Delta villagers protesting on TV.

But Tari would not hear of that. “We, the elite,” she tells her father, “should be part of that struggle, but we all live in our cosy worlds, in the lap-of-oil-money comfort. Dad, the fact is, we will never know, or understand how they feel. I mean, who in his right mind would put his life on the line like they are doing? I would say only men driven to the limit.”

The storyline of A Pelican of the Wilderness is linear – straight forward – until in chapter 18 (page 135) where we see suspense for the first time.

Besides water, blood also flowed freely in the Niger Delta – mostly blood of natives, the blood of villagers to who oil wealth has brought curses. For the implicated Nigerian Federal Government, the Nigerian army, and a few militants like Mr. Spotless who are in the struggle to enrich themselves, oil is thicker than blood. Jacqueline Agweh has made available to us, the aspect of murder and injustice in Niger Delta unknown to us – murder by government and oil companies.

A Pelican of the Wilderness, published by Kachifo, is truthful, engaging, and a veritable eye opener to the environmental and murderous atrocities going on in Niger Delta. It draws attention to cabals who use the instrument of federal government power and military to rob the people of their natural endowments. The book is a must-read. It is well produced, printed and bound in India, which denied the Nigerian bookmaking industry and her economy from benefiting from it.

Apart from some typographical errors on pages 65, 67, 69, 90, 99,100, 205, 266, and 269, A Pelican of the Wilderness is a resource book for understanding the problems of Niger Delta and the oil beneath her soil that has torn it apart.

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