Life After Oil

jeremyweate
3 min readOct 29, 2015

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The culture of oil that has shaped the production of images in and of Nigeria since the late 1950s is now drawing to a close. The world is turning to energy independence, to gas and to renewable energy. No one has any essential need for the sweet crude of the Niger Delta anymore. The political class, drunk on its proceeds, has yet to tell. We’re in that cartoon moment, when Bullwinkle stands frozen beyond the cliff top and is yet to plummet. Government (no matter the replaceable names) keeps signifying according to it a grand sense of self: in the size of overseas delegations, in magnificent plans for shining Lagos enclaves, in dreams of a Dubai planted on a Sahelian soil. No one has a strategy for a future beyond oil, or for a climate baked too hot because of it.

We are witnessing a decades long dilution of the moment of intensity that was the Festival of Arts and Culture — FESTAC, in 1973. In Andrew Apter’s magisterial analysis, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria, the festival was a chimerical allegory of the oil boom. Underneath its homecoming celebration of African culture, through his analysis, FESTAC reveals itself to have been a simulacra of development and modernity. Anchored by an emerging concrete infrastructure and an excess of signs, FESTAC showed Lagos to be in a state of petro-induced semiosis. Images were produced which had no substance behind them: the fetish was commodified. It was a time of the “problem of Nigeria” being of “too much money” (in General Gowon’s famous words), of owanbes without number and of limitless lace.

It will take some time for the braggadocio signifiers of petrofest Nigeria to fade from expectation, at home or abroad. The image of President Obasanjo, in his finest, most starched agbada, standing proud next to Jimmy Carter, burns brightly from the 1970s. But it seems that little will remain for future Nigerians to remember this period, apart from images and sounds stored digitally in archives elsewhere. True, FESTAC lives on as the name for a run-down suburb on the western edge of the city and in the grandchild of FESTAC — the annual Lagos Festival of Black Arts. But how many today associate FESTAC with… FESTAC? And Nigeria can no longer hope to be a centre for black diasporic pride; the destination for intimately held dreams of return.

In the absence of monuments, all monuments default to the form of a forgetting, or an erasure. It is as it ever was. Earlier periods in Nigerian history are not stored through space either. By an accident of geography (coastal marshes), there is no slave castle as a fulcrum for traumatic memory, and yet millions of Africans in the New World came from Nigeria, traded in Lagos or the creeks of the Niger Delta. What commemoration that exists is pathetic; one might visit a museum in Badagry and hold up a rusting chain. As for the longer-lasting Trans-Saharan trade, its memory is no more architectural than sand in the desert, far north of Kano.

The autochthonous and collective urge for a nation to remember is generated in part by a unifying narrative — shaped by shared victories, or through shared suffering. In Nigeria there is little of that, not even in its regions. Nigeria’s most famous twentieth century son has no public memorial in his home city. There were just too many women, too much herb, too much pidgin, too many bowties rejecting the culture.

In Nigeria, historical opinions are set apart from each other like tectonic plates; every now and again there is an earthquake: fissures over roles in the civil war, corruption in the post-Independence years, who did what to the military. There is nothing to be built on land that is constantly shifting.

The oil that remains is piped away, or is stolen, or leaks into the already blackened soil. Yet still, government lives beyond its means, producing nothing. What culture and what memory will be left of oil, after oil? Will there (at last) be new ruins, half in the sea, beyond Bar Beach? What will the beautiful Nigerians not yet born make of this time that is passing and of this substance which confused everyone?

This article originally appeared in the Chimurenga Chronic in March 2015

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jeremyweate
jeremyweate

Written by jeremyweate

Natural resource governance, climate change, plant healing

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