In this review of Adam Hanieh’s recent book, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market, Amina Adebisi Odofin draws out its connections to the Niger Delta, Palestine, and the global system of exploitation. The violence of extraction, Odofin argues, is not limited to oil fields or ecological degradation. The violence of extraction extends to the erasure of entire futures, including the future of life itself.
By Amina Adebisi Odofin
Adam Hanieh’s latest book, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market, offers a critical exploration of the intersections between resource extraction and global capitalism, exposing the forces of dispossession and exploitation that sustain corporate empires and the modern world system. By dissecting how fossil fuels and other resources are embedded within the logic of capital and empire-building, Hanieh illuminates the profound costs of this system. While his primary focus is on the Gulf countries and the Middle East, his framework can also be applied to Africa, particularly the Niger Delta, where oil extraction has long exemplified these dynamics.
Understanding the Niger Delta’s significance within the global oil market provides essential insights into the broader implications of resource extraction. As Africa’s leading oil exporter, Nigeria ranks between 9th and 15th globally, depending on the type of report we look at. The Niger Delta, located in southeastern Nigeria, is the richest oil region in Africa, yet its wealth starkly contrasts with the dire living conditions of its inhabitants. Life expectancy in the Delta hovers around 41 years, and it has some of the world’s highest rates of cancer, poverty, unemployment, and violence. Education and infrastructure lag far behind other regions, reflecting the region’s systemic neglect.
Colonial Roots of Oil Exploitation in Nigeria
The discovery of oil’s commercial potential in the Niger Delta dates back to 1956, just before Nigeria’s independence in 1960. Under British colonial rule, the British corporation Shell (back then Shell BP) was granted a monopoly over oil extraction. Archival records from the British National Archives reveal the exploration licenses granted to Shell were valid for 30 years, ensuring continued control of Nigeria’s oil by its colonial rulers even after independence.
This arrangement exemplifies what Ghanaian scholar and first Prime Minister of independent Ghana Kwame Nkrumah termed “neocolonialism,” where political independence masks continued economic domination. Although Shell’s monopoly ended with Nigeria’s independence, American oil companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron swiftly moved in, mirroring their expansion into Gulf countries during the same period, as well explained in Hanieh’s Crude Capitalism.
In Crude Capitalism, Hanieh discusses how oil is invisible, but so is its pollution. Oil’s destructiveness isn’t always obvious. It’s not just oil spills sitting on the surface of land or sea; the harm can be invisible, like polluted air or toxic rain. I remember interviewing an ecofeminist activist in her front yard in the Niger Delta. It started raining, and I thought nothing of it in the 40-degree heat. But she rushed inside, warning me that the rain, polluted by gas flaring, could burn my skin. It’s these quiet devastations that reveal the deeper scars of oil extraction, slowly eroding health and ecosystems while remaining unnoticed by the wider world.
Connecting Nigeria and Palestine
If you didn’t know about Nigeria’s ecological catastrophe triggered by oil, it may be because antiblackness is a global phenomenon, shaping what is considered worthy of attention. Even environmental discourses, which claim to prioritize life and sustainability, often reproduce these hierarchies of value. The invisibilisation of Black and Indigenous suffering and environmental destruction in places like the Niger Delta reflects the deep entanglement of antiblackness with ecological thought.
Some ecologies are deemed worthy of preservation and care, while Black and Indigenous environments, such as the Niger Delta or Palestine, are treated as disposable, sacrificial zones existing solely to serve Western consumerism or white supremacist structures. The largest and wealthiest environmental organizations have remained silent on the ecocide that is been taking place in Gaza for well over a year. The ecological resistance is also invisibilized: the movement against oil capitalists in the Niger Delta started way before the arrival of Western-led international environmental organizations—think of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Nine.
The oil infrastructures that dominate the landscapes of the Niger Delta, particularly those operated by corporations like Shell, have destroyed ecosystems, poisoned communities and ingrained structural violence. These dynamics are not isolated and spill beyond the borders of the Niger Delta. They connect to other geographies of extraction and dispossession, such as Palestine. For 466 days now, Palestinians have been live-streaming their genocide to the world, after resisting and continuing to resist settler colonialism for over 76 years. The Zionist entity, Israel, has been sustained through global networks of capital, political power and resource flows, including oil, as demonstrated by Hanieh in his book.
The same crude extracted from the Niger Delta fuels partially the machinery of Israeli occupation, linking the dispossession of Palestinian lives and land to the exploitation of Nigerian resources. About 37% of the oil used by Israel comes from three African countries: Gabon is responsible for 22%, Nigeria for 9% and the Republic of Congo for 6%This same crude, produced amid the suffering of Niger Delta communities, powers the occupation of Palestinian land.
Both Nigeria and Palestine share a history of British colonial rule, which laid the groundwork for their current struggles. In Nigeria, British colonial policies ensured that the wealth from oil extraction remained under external control, as evidenced by Shell’s 30-year agreements secured before independence. Similarly, in Palestine, British colonialism facilitated the establishment of Zionist structures, which have since evolved into a system of ongoing dispossession and occupation.
The Legacy of the Biafra War
Unlike the six-day war in the Middle East, which was fought between different nations, the Biafra War is also known as the Nigerian Civil War. The conflict lasted from July 6, 1967, to January 15, 1970, following the southeastern area’s proclamation of independence as the Republic of Biafra. This region encompasses the majority of the Niger Delta territory. The underlying causes of this internal conflict were multifaceted, encompassing ethnic divisions, governmental instability, and most significantly, the struggle for control over oil resources.
The people from the Niger Delta felt the oil revenues were mostly concentrated in cities like Lagos and Abuja, while they were being pushed into poverty, despite living on top of these oil fields. The war saw devastating fighting between the Nigerian government, backed by European powers, and Biafran forces. A Nigerian blockade caused mass starvation, leading to one to three million deaths, who were mostly civilians. Biafra surrendered in 1970, and Nigeria adopted a “no victor, no vanquished” policy, but the war left lasting scars on the nation’s ethnic and political landscape and the control of oil.
Despite the brutality of the civil war, oil giants like Eni (a global Italian gas and oil company) and Shell unapologetically maintained their operations, showing no signs of halting their activities. We see similar behavior happening today in Palestine where Shell and Eni are granted licenses of exploration a few weeks into the genocide in Gaza. Searching for oil and gas amid genocide somewhat exposes the moral and ethnic compasses of these fossil corporations and how much they value fossils over human lives.
This connection exposes a broader truth, that violence of extraction is not limited to oil fields or ecological degradation – although this is what mainstream environmentalists will push forward, as an attempt to depoliticize climate catastrophes. The violence of extraction extends to the erasure of entire futures: the futures of students, of knowledge and of life itself.
Israel’s destruction of all the universities in Gaza has eliminated spaces that fostered resistance, creativity, and hope. This is what a Black ecology reveals when we take a closer look at oil: that the logic of racial capitalism and colonialism are not confined to one place or time. They operate across borders, binding Nigeria, Palestine, and other sites of struggle into a shared history of extraction, violence, and resistance.
Amina Adebisi Odofin is a Nigerian Moroccan PhD candidate at the Conflict Research Group at the University of Ghent. She researches the enduring colonial legacy of petro-politics in the Niger Delta, examining its intersection with gender and its spatial manifestations across the region’s landscapes.
Featured Photograph: A miniature of the spillages of the Niger Delta, found at the lobby of a civil society organisation (author copyright).
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