Paradise Lost: George Osodi’s ‘Oil Rich Niger Delta’

By Tia Merotto

Shell Glass Flare, 2006: A young girl protects her infant sister from the intense heat of a nearby gas flare as their mother dries tapioca.

George Osodi’s Shell Gas Flare is one of the many eye-catching images from his Oil Rich Niger Delta series, throughout which the self-taught Nigerian photographer documents the uncompromising realities of the oil crisis which has enveloped large areas of his native country. In it, a young girl is shown protecting her infant sister from the heat of a gas flare, the fabric behind her aglow in a way that it is hard to tell where flare ends and girl begins. At once beautiful and deeply disturbing, the image is emblematic of the powerful juxtapositions and saturated tones which characterise Ososdi’s body of work. The bright backlighting of the flare renders the girl a featureless silhouette, her anonymity unwittingly echoing the silenced voices of the Niger Delta region. 

Nigeria’s Niger River, one of the largest sites for crude oil production in the world, is said to have suffered the equivalent of Alaska’s Exxon Valdez spill every year for the last 50 years since the beginning of oil exploration in the region. The sheer scale of this destruction is difficult to fathom, but its effects are felt and seen through its impact on the surrounding wetland ecosystem. Once associated with rich biodiversity, oil slicks have polluted waterways and made the surrounding land inhospitable.

The devastation of the Delta’s natural environment is paralleled only by that of its residing communities. Local populations endure contaminated drinking water supplies, heavy metal toxicity, and harmful gas flare emissions as facts of everyday life. The Delta region has, additionally, been plagued by cycles of conflict since drillings began. Caught between the violent clashes of the national army and heavily armed militant groups who demand a stake of the country’s oil profits, and silenced by the executions of leading activists (Ken Saro Wiwa, for instance)**, the area has become a site of extreme volatility and hostility, with civilians often bearing the brunt of the struggle.

A woman dries tapioca using the heat of a Shell Oil company gas flare. Tapioca drying, which can take many days under the sun, can be completed in a matter of hours with the flare’s heat- but the women and children in the vicinity of the flares unknowingly expose themselves to deadly fumes in the process.

Despite the monetary value that oil so often implies, the wealth which is pumped from under the waterways of the Delta region contrasts starkly with the poverty on the surface, where local populations do not reap the benefits of extractions taking place in their own backyards. ‘These oil wells should have been a blessing,’ Osodi himself explains, ‘but they have become a curse.’

In 2011, the United Nations Environment Programme published a report which documented the extent of oil-related environmental degradation in the Delta’s Ogoniland district, proposing a set of ‘emergency measures’ to address the severity of pollution in the area, as well as its impact on human rights. Some 10 years later, new investigations have suggested these measures still have not been sufficiently implemented. Clean-up efforts have begun on only 11% of the contaminated sites, leaving many communities exposed to toxic fumes and without access to drinking water. What’s more, politicians and mainstream news outlets on the global stage have hardly addressed the disaster. 

The issue of how to make the world see is one which Osodi approaches with skilled sensitivity in his Oil Rich Niger Delta series. His images are an emotive study of the communities who have become enmeshed within the political, humanitarian and ecological scandal of over 50 years of negligence and exploitation. A former freelance press photographer, Osodi employs his expertise in photojournalistic storytelling to represent the multifaceted complexity of the Niger Delta region and the crisis. 

Ogoni Boy, 2007: A boy looks up at the billowing black smoke of a Shell pipeline which has been burning for weeks in Kegbara Dere, Nigeria, blanketing the village with smoke and ash.

Osodi does not victimize his subjects, nor does he indulge in shocking imagery. Instead, he employs certain visual techniques- boldly saturated hues, dramatic contrasts and striking compositions- to captivate the viewer, drawing their attention in such a way that they are forced to confront the complexity of a scene. There is an almost tangible dissonance between subject and surrounding environment in many of his photographs, as well as between their awful beauty and the harrowing reality they capture. The resulting images unfailingly grip their audience, narrating a story of human resilience with a lens of respect, and not of pity.

‘I had a lot of challenges on how to represent these images. Some images were so graphic, so gory, that would drive people away from the image. I realised that people love things that are beautiful- it’s easier to attract someone’s attention to something that’s beautiful […] I tried to take images that are very beautiful, and by doing so you get someone’s attention. When it comes closer, you see there is something behind the image, there’s a reason why this image was shot […] But this time it’s too late, you can’t run away from the image, because you’ve been dragged into it.’

Oil Reflection, 2007: Locals stand over a bucket of oil collected from a polluted stream in Oshie, Nigeria. 

The enduring relevance and urgency of Osodi’s Niger River Delta series, almost 15 years after its completion, speaks to the gravity of Nigeria’s unresolved tragedy. While the destructive presence of major oil companies like Shell in the Niger Delta has received less attention in recent years than at the height of the Delta crisis in 2000s, life has yet to improve for the people who reside there. Osodi continues to document the Delta with his camera to this day, and his images continue to tell the reverberating stories of lives caught in the region’s crossfire.

**Ken Saro-Wiwa was an activist, author and member of the Ogoni people. He led a nonviolent campaign against the Nigerian government and oil companies like Shell for the rights of local Ogoniland civilians, and was executed in 1995. 

Bibliography:

‘Oil boom, Delta burns: Photographs by George Osodi’, National Museums Liverpool, www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pM0BunuSik 

‘No clean up, no justice: Shell’s oil pollution in the Niger Delta’, Amnesty International, 27 February 2021, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/no-clean-up-no-justice-shell-oil-pollution-in-the-niger-delta/

Milbourne, Karen E., ‘African Photographers and the Look of (Un)Sustainability in the African Landscape’ in Africa Today, Vol. 61, No. 1. Indiana University Press: 2004, pp. 114-140.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/africatoday.61.1.115 

‘Oil boom, Delta burns: Photographs by George Osodi’, National Museums Liverpool, 1 March 2021

https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/oil-boom-delta-burns-photographs-george-osodi 

Jeanne Park, ‘Cleaning up Nigeria’s Oily Mess’, 1 March 2021

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/the-daily-need/cleaning-up-nigerias-oily-mess/10914/ 

Images:

https://library.panos.co.uk/features/stories/the-rape-of-paradise.html#0_00148864 

https://georgeosodi.photoshelter.com/portfolio/G0000ns8MS37FfZU