Two Oils, Same Phenomena: Historicizing Exclusion, Poverty and Contemporary Violence in the Niger Delta

From a subsistence economy, remote from the mainstreams of trade, the Niger Delta communities moved to a position in the forefront of the trans- Atlantic trade and became vital to European economic interests in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These communities were offered, and they seized, new opportunities for acquiring wealth, power and prominence, heralding their rise from isolation and obscurity. During the era of the slave trade they made wealth from the trade acting as middlemen between the hinterland slave producers and coast-based European traders. They also accumulated wealth from the palm oil trade following the abolition of the slave trade. However, these communities whose elites enjoyed profound prosperity, power and prominence subsequently declined in grandeur. This paper locates the roots of contemporary poverty and violence in the Niger Delta communities in the vortex of European imperialism, which suppressed the growth of a viable class of indigenous accumulators and entrepreneurs in the palm oil economy. It demonstrated that contemporary trends and phenomena only heightened when the crude oil economy penetrated and reconfigured Niger Delta communities.