56 pages • 1 hour read
Rob NixonSlow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Pipedreams: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Environmental Justice, and Micro-minority Rights”
In this chapter, Nixon continues to grapple with the growing inequity of oil exploitation between “subnational minorities and transnationals” (119). He turns to Nigerian writer-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995), who wrote about his people, the Ogoni, an ethnic micro-minority group living in the Niger Delta, and about the human rights violations inflicted on them by Shell and the Nigerian government (the Abacha regime). The Nigerian government executed Saro-Wiwa for his writings and advocacy.
As with the Bedouins, the discovery of oil in the Niger Delta should have transformed the economic livelihood of the Ogoni people. Instead, it poisoned their future. Most of the Ogoni people live on less than a dollar a day, despite transnational oil companies and the Nigerian government extracting $30 billion worth of oil from beneath their homeland. The oil extraction poisoned their land and water, so they are unable to supplement this “daily dollar with untainted crops and fish” (106).
The Ogoni people represent less than 0.5 percent of the population of Nigeria. They lack the political power and protection to claim the wealth that transnational oil companies and the Nigerian government have extracted from their land. At the time of Saro-Wiwa’s death, the Nigerian government was responsible for the deaths of several thousand Ogoni people “through direct murder and the burning of villages” (107).
Saro-Wiwa developed the term Indigenous imperialism to describe the Nigerian government’s domination of the Ogoni people. To Saro-Wiwa, this domination was similar to the British colonial rule of the country. This theoretical creation makes him stand out among other African writers. Also, he did not focus only on the Ogoni people but addressed the inequities faced by vulnerable communities in general due to transnational corporations and their collaborative local elites and military.
Saro-Wiwa’s posthumously published detention diary, A Month and a Day, connects the injustices committed against his people to vulnerable communities around the world. Human rights and environmental groups initially ignored the Ogoni people’s plight in part because they were dying from slow violence. Saro-Wiwa remained undeterred. He traveled throughout the US, where “a visit to Colorado gave him access to an environmental group that had successfully salvaged a wilderness from corporate and governmental assaults” (111). This reaffirmed to Saro-Wiwa the importance of connecting the rights of vulnerable communities to environmental rights. His work eventually paid off, and his campaign received international support.
In contrast to Britain, France, and South Africa, American media and government officials largely ignored the Abacha regime’s execution of Saro-Wiwa. Nixon believes this is due to the long history in the US of racism and oppression of marginalized groups. Marginalized groups in the US found it difficult to raise awareness of the Ogoni people’s campaign when they too were invisible and lacked political clout in their own country.
Throughout his life, Saro-Wiwa called for international sanctions against the Abacha regime. The international community, including other African nations, largely ignored these calls. As one example, President Nelson Mandela voiced his opposition to sanctions, “advocating quiet negotiations instead” (115), at an international meeting of the Commonwealth nations. Shortly after he made this statement, the Abacha regime killed Saro-Wiwa. Nixon argues that Mandela’s misreading of Saro-Wiwa’s situation was due to his own nostalgia for Nigeria, where many of his compatriots found refuge during apartheid. When South Africa was suffering under colonialism and apartheid, Nigeria was democratizing. By the time Mandela was president of South Africa, however, his country was far more democratic than Nigeria. Saro-Wiwa’s killing brought focus to both the vulnerability of ethnic micro-minority groups and the democratization shifts within the African continent.
Nixon ends by noting that Saro-Wiwa’s son, Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr., became the lead lawyer in a 14-year-long trial against Shell for the organization’s complicity in his father’s death and its paying of Nigerian government and military officials who committed injustices against the Ogoni people. Shell eventually settled out of court, but they refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor”
Nixon focuses on the connections between gender, poverty, and environmental justice movements in Chapter 4. In particular, he examines Kenya’s Green Belt Movement (GBM). Professor Wangari Maathai cofounded this movement in 1977. Maathai’s movement memoir, Unbowed, shows how GBM created a national security narrative focused on exposing soil erosion and deforestation and advancing environmental recovery and protections. Central to this movement is tree planting.
Maathai argues that soil erosion and deforestation represent national security risks. She was one of the first writers to expand threats to national security beyond war to include environmental assaults. Initially, Kenya’s authoritarian regime ignored the environmental degradation, partly because it lacked spectacular violence and because women were the ones being impacted. Yet soil erosion, which Nixon notes is a form of resource bottleneck, “can fuel conflicts for decades, directly and indirectly costing untold lives” (131). Thus, soil erosion can truly be a national security risk.
One key challenge Maathai grappled with “was how to dramatize the gendered dynamics of Kenyan land politics” without resorting to nostalgia for the past or typical colonial and postcolonial literary tropes. She overcame this challenge through three strategies, each involving “the theatre of the tree” (132). The first was to use the activity of tree planting as both a practical response to environmental degradation and a powerful symbol that would catch media and global attention. As Nixon notes, “in an era of widening social inequity and unshared growth, the replenished forest can offer an egalitarian, participatory image of growth—growth as sustainable over the long haul” (134). Maathai also connected the loss of land to the history of territorial theft in Kenya—by British colonists and the Kenyan authoritarian regime as well as transnationally. The final strategy was to align GBM with environmental, civil rights, political rights, and women’s rights coalitions.
Maathai took an “intersectional approach to environmental justice” (138). As one example, she leveraged women’s rights groups in addition to environment groups. British colonialists changed traditional land ownership practices, in which land belonged to the family, to a system of male landownership. Rural women suffered massively from this land theft. By leveraging women’s rights coalitions, Maathai mobilized women who had been treated as invisible for decades. The Kenyan authoritarian regime understood the threat posed by women’s rights groups and environmental rights groups working together. They tried to end their engagement with one another, a tactic that failed. Maathai turned her intersectional approach focused on slow violence into a movement that demanded political accountability. Nixon credits the GBM with leading to democratic elections in Kenya in the early 2000s.
Nixon reiterates the urgency of recasting the modern understanding of violence to include slow violence. Environmental violence impacts far more people than war or terrorism. Slow violence is more insidious than spectacle violence because it “can ignite tension, creating flashpoints of desperation and explosive rage” (149).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
As in the first few chapters, Nixon presents different literary forms that writer-activists use to shed light on the impacts of slow violence on vulnerable communities. In this section, Nixon focuses on writers who helped launch environmental movements. Nixon begins with Saro-Wiwa, who:
saw himself as part of that testimonial tradition, a witness to what he called the ‘recolonization’ of Ogoniland by the joint forces of the oil companies and the Abacha regime. Together the corporations and the regime had transformed the Niger Delta into a Bermuda triangle for human rights (105).
Saro-Wiwa believed firmly in the power of writing and activism as tools for change. Nixon notes that “like many African authors before him, he recognized that in a society with frail democratic forces and a thin intellectual elite, interventionist writing required versatility and cunning” (108). He produced over 20 books in different genres, including children’s books, diaries, and newspaper columns, to ensure that his writings and messages reached different audiences.
The brutality of the Nigerian regime unintentionally helped amplify the environmental causes of Saro-Wiwa. Nixon notes that “they took a very moral and internationally obscure activist, gave him a stage trial, and turned him through execution into a martyr” (121). Abacha and his cronies did not understand that language is uncontrollable. Saro-Wiwa’s martyrdom provoked outrage from journalists around the world who, by their profession, care deeply about freedom of speech. By turning attention to Saro-Wiwa’s death, they also focused on the human injustices done to the Ogoni people.
In Chapter 4, Nixon turns to Maathai’s Green Belt Movement. This example highlights the impact slow violence has on rural Kenyan women. These women faced the impacts of soil erosion, which is a form of both global and local slow violence. Soil erosion is global in nature because it partly stems from the human-driven climate crisis. Local factors, such as deforestation by the Kenyan authoritarian regime and the ensuing stripping of vegetation from the land, also contribute to soil erosion. Women represent the majority of Kenya’s subsistence farmers. Thus, they are immediately impacted by environmental degradation, even though they “contribute little and can do very little to avert it” (131). Maathai built coalitions centered on “authoritarianism’s discounted casualties, especially marginalized women” (133).
The writings and activism of both Saro-Wiwa and Maathai helped reimagine what environmental activism could look like. These two writer-activists and their environmental campaigns demonstrated to the global community that environmental activists were not just “white, young, middle-class Europeans or Americans who can afford to hug trees because they have been spared more desperate battles” (112). Instead, they showed the importance of vulnerable communities themselves in the fight for human and environmental rights.
