Polluted land: in the oil zone of Nigeria's Ogoniland

John Vidal
The Guardian, Wednesday 27 May 2009

To reach the oil spill near the village of Otuegwe 1, we had to swim through swamp forest after a ­five-mile tramp through cassava plantations. We smelt it first – the stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation. Hundreds of hectares of forest were dead, and pools of crude oil spilled out in every direction.
Chief Promise, who swam with us, angrily rejected Shell's allegation that the spill had occurred because of ­sabotage. "People died, hundreds of people were ill," he said. "Nets, fishing pots, huts were lost. This is where we fish and farm. We have lost our forest."
This was Ogoniland nearly 10 years ago. Shell cleaned that spill up and gave the community cash and a water purification unit, but millions of cubic metres of gas are still burned off every year here, and tens of thousands of gallons of oil are spilled into the environment. Night in the delta for many communities is a lurid red from the ­flaring. The creeks are polluted, there are fewer fish and the land is degraded.
This is the backdrop to the case coming to court . Between 1960 and 1993 Shell extracted more than 900m barrels of oil from beneath the small, fertile 400-square-mile area called Ogoniland, in the Niger delta. But the 500,000 people who survived there, farming and fishing, were ­living in abject poverty, poor health and deteriorating conditions.
Decades of oil exploration and production brought not wealth, as people in the delta had been promised, but an ecological wasteland with devastated schools and non-existent healthcare.
As Saro-Wiwa himself put it: "Streams and creek are totally and continually polluted, the atmosphere has been poisoned, acid rain, oil spillages, gas flaring and blowouts have devastated Ogoni territory."