For more than three decades, Nigeria has remained in the global media, not because of her oil

wealth, or her meteoric rise at the level of human and infrastructural development, but because of the Niger Delta Question.

Rethinking Militancy and Environmental Justice: The Politics of Oil and Violence in Nigerian Popular Music Ogaga Okuyade

The Niger Delta question is not just the most controversial issue in postcolonial Nigeria: it has launched Nigeria into global news circuits. The delta itself, the most marginalized geopolitical zone in Nigeria, gives vibrant expression to the paradox of wealth and poverty tied to a single space. With the establishment of the amnesty policy, most mainstream media seem to have forgotten that the cardinal aim of the policy is to create a platform to ease infrastructural development in the Niger Delta and thereby to articulate the importance of ecological and human justice. What fascinates the media is the idea of militancy itself, not the postamnesty assurance of a new world for the doubly marginalized delta people. This essay examines how popular music has become the new site for political activism, especially in engaging the society and government on pressing postcolonial issues in Nigeria, specifically the Niger Delta question and the functionality of the amnesty package. The essay examines how these popular artists articulate the predicament of the delta in their songs, considering that popular music is hardly discussed among cultural art forms that give expression to the Niger Delta question. Popular music offers the Nigerian public an alternative to the hegemonic position.

Introduction: Nigeria and the Niger Delta Question

In 2009, the Nigerian government offered the Niger Delta militants what is now popularly described as an amnesty package to create a platform for meaningful dialogue among stakeholderswhich would in turn create a peaceful environment for redressing the Niger Delta Question. The Niger Delta Question gives expression to numerous conflicts that have arisen from the federal governments control of oil resources and the distribution of

their revenue among the constituent states of the federation. It foregrounds how communities from where crude oil is being extracted lay claims to the resources because of governments failure to distribute the oil wealth equitably, considering the damage brought upon the Niger Delta people and their environment as a result of oil exploration and exploitation. Although agitations between the Niger Delta and the Nigerian government over oil wealth and resource control are not nascent, the 1990s witnessed violent resistance to the gross marginalization of the Niger Delta people, with the emergence of insurgent groups that insisted on total control of oil wealth (Ejobowa 2000; Osaghae 1995). However, the Nigerian government continues to deploy military capacity to silence these dissenting voices. Its response to the agitations of the Niger Delta people has involved the sacking of numerous communities in the delta, destruction of lives and properties, and sexual abuse, and most of those who survive these military onslaughts are now permanently displaced. These conflicts have transformed the delta into a war zone and a new site of global terrorism, considering the kind of weapons the militants use for their engagements with the government. The YarAdua and Jonathan administration in 2009 came up with the amnesty policy, geared toward a radical transformation of the Niger Delta. The transformation was supposed to consist of three parts: disarmament, rapid infrastructural development of the Niger Delta, and the rehabilitation and reintegration of the lost souls (militants) into an already depressed society. Interestingly therefore, considering the activities and the response of insurgent groups like MEND and NDPVF,1 the amnesty deal was apparently not meant to be the solution, but to persuade the people to give peace a chance and allow the continuous flow of oil. Consequently, the mainstream media, which were supposed to initiate the agenda for public discourse, got carried away by the sophistication of the weapons and and other fetish insignia the militants surrendered to the Nigerian government during the disarmament exercise. They lost sight of other important issues that needed urgent attention. A key issue is oil exploration and exploitation, which have wrought despoliation and impoverishment on the regions landscape and people, who looked to the amnesty package as a welcome solution to the problem of oil politics in Nigeria. These grim realities have been translated into cultural art forms that articulate the crises in the area and demonstrate that the delta has been taken hostage and there are no willing establishments ready to ransom this geography and people. Popular music on the Niger Delta question continues to draw attention to the insensitivity of government to the plight of the people of the delta and the tactics it deploys to quell insurgent groups. In recreating the local predicament, popular music seems to have reconstructed a new discursive space, different from that of the dominant public sphere, creating a gap between the civil society and the state society and rupturing the idea of a global public sphere as marshaled by public or mainstream media. This essay examines popular music as an alternative discourse to come to terms with the fact that what the Niger Delta needs is not amnesty, but

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human and ecological justice. It foregrounds how popular music continues to sustain the spirit of resistance in the delta, regardless of the fact that the Nigerian armed forces have outgunned the militants. Invariably, popular music becomes the medium that influences public discourse in the public sphere and determines or influences public opinion on national issues.

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Popular Culture and Society

This essay appraises the musical texts of Timaya and Lover Boys, popularmusic artists from the Niger Delta. Timaya appears to be the more popular and prolific, considering the national outlook of his music and appearance on local television stations and the air time accorded his music on the local radio stations. Since 2006, when he debuted with True Story, he has continued to inspire Nigerian youths with his brand of music, which is ethnic because he fuses local idiom with Nigerian Pidgin to narrativize the conditions in which Nigerians negotiate their existence as a people. A close evaluation of his four albums will demonstrate that most of his songs are what I designate as autobiomusic,2 a mode through which he makes himself the subject of his music. As he sings himself, he sings the nation: he becomes the microcosmic representation of the Nigerian masses. He is from the Niger Delta and is an Izon (or Ijaw) from Bayelsa Stateone of the major ethnic groups in the Niger Delta that has taken agitation for resource control to a monumental dimension. Lover Boys, a group of two, is not so popular, considering the reception of their debut, Yawalele. However, Yawalele (meaning crisis), which is gyratic in temper, with its sonic intensity appears to be the most often aired song on the delta question for delta youths. It is regularly aired in public transport (cabs and buses) and in the nightclubs and hotels where militants are lodged for the rehabilitation and reintegration exercise.3 Although the music of the two artists analyzed in this essay may not address all the issues on the delta crisis, they remain the most representative, and the artists are from the delta. Popular culture as a cultural artistic form and a broad-based cultural phenomenon has continued to defy a straightjacket definition. My purpose in this essay is not to engage in the debate on what constitutes the basis for labeling a cultural form as popular. I intend to discuss a subform within the broad spectrum of popular culture, specifically popular music in Nigeria. This reading strategy will foreground how the artists whose songs form the basis for analysis frame the politics of marginality and construct the idea of otherness within Nigeria. Popular culture is a broad term, especially if the meaning of culture is understood as referring to whatever is distinctive about the way of life of a people, community, nation or social group (Hall 1997:2). Whereas academic disciplines condone the dissection of artistic endeavour (Rosenberg 2008:101), my purpose here is to attempt a reading of hip-hop music in Nigeria to come to terms with its relevance in

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understanding the relationship between the victim and the oppressor in the Niger Delta, and not with the processes of categorization. A growing body of scholarly work emphasizes that popular culture is understood as a site of struggle, a place for the negotiation of race, gender, nation, and other identities and for the play of power (Dolby 2006:33). Recent publications (such as Dolby 2006) build upon the perspectives put forth by Barber in her 1987 essay, Popular Arts in Africa:
The most obvious reason for giving serious attention to the popular arts is their sheer undeniable assertive presence as social facts. They loudly proclaim their own importance in the lives of large numbers of African people. They are everywhere. They flourish without encouragement or recognition from official cultural bodies, and sometimes in defiance of them. People too poor to contemplate spending money on luxuries do spend it on popular arts, sustaining them and constantly infusing them with new life. (1987:1)

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Barber strives to construct a systematic understanding of the nature of the popular and how it relates to African artistic creativity. Her insights into what she calls the apparently infinite elasticity (Barber 1987:5) of African popular art succeeds in dissolving the shaky foundation of divisions between the folk and the popular and, ultimately, even the forms of cultural expression that can be labeled elite or high arts (1987:9). African popular arts are indeed elastic, considering their sameness, which sometimes makes them taxonomically supple. If there is any cultural production in Nigeria today that constantly expresses the ineffectuality of government and the peoples disenchantment with independence and self-governance, it is, without doubt, hip-hop music. As Barber (1997) points out, music is the first form of popular culture in Africa that has been noticed and studied outside the African continent. Hip-hop culture in Nigeria has become a pie chart where socioeconomic and political conditions are captured. As the number of hip-hop artists continues to soar with the passage of time, these artists have taken advantage of the public space music offers marginalized groups to engage their societies dialectically on pressing postcolonial issues and help celebrate the hope signified in the attainment of independence in 1960. Nigerians have recently witnessed new and vibrant forms of musical, civic, and political activities. These forms of politics include different genres of music, including hip-hop, reggae, Afro-jazz, and Afro-pop. Of all these forms, Afro-hip-hop seems to be the most popular, because it not only provides entertainment for a teeming enthusiastic public, but is becoming a formidable vehicle for political education and mobilization. This group of new artists, initially isolated from the public sphere, have sung themselves into prominence, providing political balm to millions of disenfranchised Nigerians. Sometimes, government employs its services to help reinforce

its agenda. Afro-hip-hop is currently enjoying an unprecedented artistic outburst, and has completely invaded the Nigerian airwaves. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the late bohemian Afro-beat musician, was the precursor of present-day Nigerian music. This music is public oriented, especially at the level of language. Nigerian Pidgin is the medium of expression, a language whose syntax is wholly African, while most of its vocabulary is premised on lexical borrowing from English and indigenous languages. Nigeria is a multiethnic society, and Nigerian Pidgin has become the linguistic bridge for the entire nation; however, it especially captures the voice of the underclass, the common people. Since these artists are engaging their society on pressing postcolonial concerns, the only language that can adequately message their intention must be adaptive and flexible. Flexibility here means a communicative medium that virtually everybody can employ with ease: the rich, the poor, the educated, the illiterate, and city and rural dwellers. Nigerian Pidgin arose from the urgent communication needs of contact between the visiting Europeans and their multilingual Nigerian hosts. Invariably, a pidgin as a communication system developed among people who are multiethnic yet trapped within the same geography or nation-space. Throughout Nigeria, music is now considered a legitimate and potent medium to pass messages across to people, especially sociopolitical messages, on occasions when government tries to shield the realities of situations from the ruled. Music therefore becomes a counternarrative to official cultural politics. The number of artists that continues to engage themselves publicly to defend their rights and address concerns with sociopolitical stakes has increased over time. Monga establishes the incisive power of music and its potentials to articulate social change in any society:
If political scientists and sociologists wish to understand the way African societies function, they need to go beyond statistics and macro-economics in order to decipher the sounds and the music of Africa. The rates of inflation and unemployment may allow for calculation of a fictive gross domestic product, but only music can help us measure the per capita anxiety rate and gross domestic happinessfundamental underpinnings of culture. (1996:105)

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Recent Nigerian popular music is now viewed as subversive because of its antipathetic tone against the activities of government. The most fascinating feature of this music is its radical correspondence with popular issues plaguing the society. It is in touch with the problems of daily life, in tune with the present democratic chaos of victory, annulments, nullifications, reruns or runoffs, and the general atmosphere of disorder. The music is often syncretic, but it contributes positively to the development of a new social order. It is often repetitive and sometimes seems fixated and enjoyed more when it is aired loudly, especially in commercial buses, the most popular site of its consumption. It continues to play the essential role of popular art:

it records the frenzied chronicle of the meanderings, ambitions, pains, joys, and dreams of the masses. Tejumola Olaniyan captures the components of recent Nigerian popular music, depicting alternative truths against the official monolithic version, when he lists
tyrannical leadership, political instability, flagrant disregard for rules and entrenched nepotism as currency of official transactions, economic malformation, epochal inequalities between the few and the many, impossible cities, recurrent devastating interethnic wars, anti-state rebellions, and attendant heart-breaking dispersal of populations. (2001:77)

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This music form is associated with youth, and as de Boeck and Honwana (2005:1) have noted, creative and innovative forms of popular culture are often the exclusive domain of the younger generation. Youths are at the forefront of incorporating global influences into their cultural products, which are often viewed as part of youth culture.4 The emergence and/or liberalization of media such as TV and the Internet have eased the production of cultural expressions by young people, making them become increasingly global, but this has not led to a homogenization of the form. Instead, expressions take different forms in different locations as processes of domestication re-contextualize and reshape them to address local concerns (de Boeck and Honwana 2005:12; Frederiksen 2000:29).5 However, although youths play an important role in the processes of production and consumption of popular culture, it is too narrow to conceive of popular culture/music as a domain of the young. By singing the pains of the Nigerian underclass, they acquire a new kind of power, which articulates their commitment to an ideology of social equality, which has in turn bequeathed them with an identity as people with the propensity to interrogate issues bordering on national development and quality of life. This identity, acquired through hip-hop culture, is not peculiar to Nigeria: youth tend everywhere to occupy the innovative, uncharted borderlands along which the global meets the local (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000:308). Recent hip-hop Nigerian artists vibrantly demonstrate how a disempowered and excluded class can negotiate its identity through arts and popular culture. Their newfound identity represents ways that class and political identities are shaped among youths in urban and rural communities.

Popular Culture and the Niger Delta Question

Scholarship on Niger Delta discourse tends to exclude music from what is gradually becoming a canon. Literature remains the dominant cultural art form, which continues to attract the attention of scholars and critics when appraising the Niger Delta question; however, music is one of the most widely communicated forms of verbal expression on the continent. Popular

songs are dynamic and widespread, and they permeate the lives of people throughout Nigeria. This neglect raises numerous questions. Are songs merely superficial entertainment for their immediate audiences? Or do they operate on deeper aesthetic and intellectual levels for the songwriters and audience members in their respective communities? Do they transmit information that may provide clues to understanding the people who produce these lyrical traditions? And what informs their production? Can they offer insights into relationships among host communities, multinational oil firms operating in the Niger Delta, and the Nigerian government? Or can they adjust our perception about the violence and the heavy military presence in the area? One may be easily convinced that the late President YarAduas amnesty project has become the most enduring solution to the Niger Delta crisis; however, the twin bomb blasts of 1 October 2010 (with MEND claiming responsibility), the sacking of Ayakoromo by the Joint Task Force, and the declaration that John Togo was the most-wanted person in the country are clear indications that we are yet to hear the last of the crises wreaking an already ravaged Niger Delta. Therefore, I argue that popular music in Nigeria allows us to revisit the deeds, the sites, and the participants of what I designate as the triangular raid: the Ogoni raid, the Odi massacre, and the blanketing6 of Gbaramatu. This medium offers access to the historical events of the recent crises in the Niger Delta and signifies the psychology and behavior of victims and oppressors. With its lyrical power, popular music stands as a cultural and sociopolitical witness to the values of the period which the songs depict. It can celebrate the agenda of dominant groups for the purpose of manipulation and propaganda. An apt example was during the Abacha regime, when some artists converged at Abuja, the federal capital territory of Nigeria, to express their desire for Abacha to become a civilian president, in an attempt to sustain the propaganda of an association without visible membership, Association of Better Nigeria, whose agenda geared toward subversive ends. Today, we see the power of music to move, educate, and provoke critical thinking. When educators and other professionals use these songs, there is the possibility of understanding the importance of the image these songs configures in the memory, as well as the significance of the historical, political, and social contexts from which the songs were made. Songs rearticulating the crises in the Niger Delta have often been considered incapable of capturing the tragedy of the loss of lives and the wanton destruction of properties; however, aside from the survivors experiences, communicated through oral and written media, music may be the closest the public can come to grasping these events. In Nigeria, popular culture has long been a site where serious political and social commentary and contestation have taken place. Given the strength of indigenous culture and ethnic identities in Nigeria on the one hand, and the force of British colonialism and postcolonial majority ethnic rule in upholding ethnic distinctions on the other, social relations have long been imbued with feelings and identifications of ethnicity and regionalism.

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Popular culture has been a highly charged field, in which people deemed inferior according to the dominant socioethnic hierarchy have addressed, reflected on, and shaped ethnic or regional identities and their political futures. Invariably, popular culture can be seen, not as a given view of the world but as a space or series of spaces where popular subjects, as distinct from members of ruling groups, are formed (Wilson 2000:239). The Niger Delta as a marginalized geographical space or region has been represented, elaborated, and reworked in urban popular culture, as the problems in the zone continue to defy solutions. The topical issue is, therefore, the history of the marginalized Niger Delta, as seen through the lens of hip-hop. This will in turn demonstrate how the Niger Delta artists, specifically hip-hop musicians, transform the pains of marginalization to protest and retell their story to draw attention to their plight.

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The Niger Delta, Identity, and Politics of Double Hegemony

The shift from pan-African nationalism to panethnic nationalism in popular arts has become fashionable, specifically because the different nationalities colonially collapsed into a geographical space as nations have continued to voice their discontent and disenchantment when issues bordering on political and economic power are discussed. For the Niger Delta people, the stake centers on resource control and the politics of derivation. Analysis of the changing forms in popular arts helps reveal how groups from the minority ethnic groups construct their identities as the other, with emphasis on how they are worked out and negotiated, and how these identities contest the dominant group. The use of popular culture as a means of embodying and elaborating ethnic or regional identities has been prevalent in postcolonial Nigeria, and one can expect broad similarities across space and time; however, one needs to be aware of significant regional differences if the experiences of Nigerians are going to speak more directly to each other. The chronologies and contexts of colonial history are central here. Nigeria remains a perplexing example of how foreign oil firms and the government accumulate oil wealth from the Niger Delta without easing local development. Most poor rural people there still continue to eke out a meager living from subsistence farming, but farming as a vocation is no longer a viable enterprise to them, as the activities of multinational oil firms have made the land less arable. Oil exploration began in Nigeria in the 1950s, but left the land riddled with polluted waterways and half-cleaned-up spills. No one can plant cassava any more in a large field soaked with oil from a 1972 wellhead explosion (Vogt 2007:3). Oil fires have become a common sight in the delta, caused by aged pipes, as well as theft of oil and sabotage by dishonest local youths trying to obtain lucrative contracts from oil companies for guarding the oil pipeline and cleaning up oil spills. Villagers even expect payoffs for letting oil companies come into their neighborhood to extinguish fires or clean up oil spills. Often, the result is a standoff, which

usually leaves some people dead, others homeless, and properties worth millions of naira (naira is Nigerias local currency) destroyed. Considering Nigerias $20 billion oil exports to the United States of America in just five years (20012006), one would expect Nigerians to have risen above poverty, but the average Nigerian survives on less than $2 a day. Where does all the oil money go? No one knows for sure, but Vogts investigation offers a clue from the oil-company perspective:
The oil companies say its not their job to pave roads or build schools like a surrogate government. The Nigerian government owns 55% of Shells venture in Nigeria. Shell says it cant be held responsible for corruption that keeps the money from reaching villages like Kegbara Dere, where roads are still dirt and houses are made from cement or mud cubes. (2007:3)

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One issue that remains topical when considering the Niger Delta crises, besides the two well-known agitations that have become the primary slogans for the struggle (the principle of derivation and that of resource control), is the dialectic of internal or local colonization and global capitalism. The quantity of crude oil shipped to the West from the Niger Delta adds only a little value to the growth of the nation, considering who fixes the price of the commodity and who determines the quantity that must be sold at a given time, as in the colonial era, when a large amount of wealth was extracted from Africa, often with severe forms of labor control, and little or nothing of the wealth was ploughed back to develop the land and the people. However, the money derived from the export of the commodity is hardly made available by the federal government and state governments of the Niger Delta to develop the area. Invariably, the delta is trapped between two hegemons: the multinational oil firms and their governments. The draconian and savage forms of colonialism practiced in the delta can only be compared to those of the Belgian Congo. Most times, delta discourse provokes much emotion and empathy, but if one considers the destructive politics of internal colonization and global capitalism, the delta question assaults the psyche of concerned observers. The ruination and degradation of the land on a colossal scale, of the waters, of the physical environment, and of human resources in the last century and a half inspire rage. Politics and discourses on the Niger Delta have provoked numerous debates and, most importantly, have ignited the area and left it agog. Literary productions spanning the three genres and popular culture on the Niger Delta continue to grow. For more than three decades, Nigeria has remained in the global media, not because of her oil wealth, or her meteoric rise at the level of human and infrastructural development, but because of the delta question. Events in the area are followed closely because of their significance in global oil trade. This is why most popular art forms in Nigeria no longer celebrate national shared experiences, but further ethnic or regional politics

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(Okunoye 2008). My purpose is therefore to subject the presumed integration of Nigeria into the dialectic of local colonization and global capitalism through the delta. I intend to achieve this through careful analysis of popular music. I shall attempt to contextualize the culture of violence in which the area is now implicated to ascertain whether violence is a tradition or an identity marker of the delta people.

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Oil, Violence, and Odi in Timayas Na True Story

Timaya is a popular voice in the Nigerian music scene. His music has an ethnic and regional temper, which exposes the asymmetries in the distribution of resources in Nigeriatelling the Niger Delta predicament to other Nigerians, who may refuse to examine the plight of the microminorities today in the Niger Delta. His music has become a vehicle that elaborates the pains and anguish of a people deprived access to their natural endowment, which develops the majority ethnic regions that continue to sustain what most delta people regard as a parasitic union with the delta people. Besides capturing the existential angst and anguish of being trapped in this haunted space, he reappraises the issue of notation and naming. Because of the insistence of the minority people on resisting the government over the gross destruction of their environment and humanity, they are now branded as militants7 and hostage-takers. Timayas music reverses the branding. The Nigerian government invariably becomes the hostage-takers and militants. Presently, the delta is a group of vassal states, and the administration of YarAdua and Jonathan has militarily conquered the people. The people walk with their hands up when approaching military checkpointssignification of their submission to the governments insensitivity. Timayas music engages in the act of mutual zombification of the Nigerian military (Mbembe 1996:4, emphasis mine). The Nigerian government therefore assumes the identity of hostage-takers because the environment and the people are under hostage and bombarded constantly for oil. Considering the atrocities of the Joint Task Force (the label of the military operation in the area and their designation, Operation Restore Hope), the governments activities in the area articulate the strictest etymological sense of the idea of militancy. Timayas songs reemphasize that the Nigerian government won only the oil battle, but the war has been won by the Niger Delta people, because they now see who and what is responsible for their misery. Contention and resistance remain a question mark on the legitimacy of the present democratic government. Timaya addresses global issues from a local perspective because art speaks for all of humanity but it uses a platform, a springboard, from the particular to the general (Eghagha 2004:159). Timayas music is close to Tanure Ojaides poetry because the imaginative arts have become the locus for identity politics. As artists, they owe a duty to their people to bring to the limelight the burden of being a minority person. Timayas songs are threnodic. In Dem Mama, he revisits

president Obasanjos executive pogrom in Odi, a town in Bayelsa State, one of the oil-producing states in the delta:
Lyrics Formal English Translation I say dem don come I say they have come Iyo, Iyo Iyo Iyo Iyo Iyo Iyo Iyo Iyo Iyo nothing we de dem yo yo yo yo We have done nothing wrong yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo Nigeria na my country Nigeria is my country Bayelsa na my state oh! Bayelsa is my state Dis na reality This is reality We im bin happen for Bayelsa o it happened in Bayelsa 1999 I swear I no go forget am o It was in 1999, I cant forget Wen dem kill the people o the people were killed And make dem children and children became orphans o orphans Anytime wen I think am o Whenever I remember the incident Water dey pour for my eyes o Tears drip down my eyes Somebody say make I leave Somebody asks me to forget am o about it But I say me I must talk am o But I insist, I must talk about it Chorus: I say dem don killi They have killed Dem mama yekeleee their mothers I say dem don killi they have killed Dem papa eh their fathers I say dem don killi I say they have killed Dem mama, dem mama, their fathers and mothers dem papa . ... ... . ... ... Na so dem march e dey go yoo Onward they marched Ten thousand soldiers for road o Ten thousand soldiers Ask dem where dem dey go when asked of their destination Dem say dem dey go Bayelsa o Bayelsa! They responded Which place for Bayelsa o Where in Bayelsa? One village when dem call A village called Odi Odi iyo Wen dem enter our village when they landed the village Dem rape our young girls they raped our young girls and make dem homeless o and made them homeless

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Dem kill our mama Iyo They killed our mothers Dem kill our papa Iyo they killed our fathers Dem kill our brothers and they killed our brothers and kill our sisters sisters and make dem homeless oh! And made them homeless Wetin we go do Iyo what are we to do? Everybody dey cry Iyo Everybody is crying I say the government dem This government is indeed bad oh! bad

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The song reveals the outlandish criminality of the Nigerian government and demonstrates how the microminority people of the delta are displaced from their primordial base, making them suffer the burden of permanent migrancy because the delta habitat has become uncomfortable or uninhabitable. The song does not just capture the violence in the area: it conceptualizes it. Youth resistance in the area is gradually waning because it has metamorphosed into an enterprise, and the militants have been outgunned by the firing might of the Nigerian military. Timayas music reverberates with uncompromising resistance, reiterating that the Nigerian government only won the battle, but lost the war. The delta agitations represent just a fragment of the pervading atmosphere of social unrest engendered by ethnonational politics in the Nigerian federation.

The Niger Delta Question and Lover Boys

Lover Boys is another group that has deployed the resources of music to reappraise the Niger Delta question. Their No More Crisis remains fascinating because of their sense of history and remembrance. The title of the album is paradoxical, because it suggests the need to end the violence. The song is a renewed call to continue to resist the gross destruction of lives and properties. The album becomes a witness to the regular raid of the delta states. The intention is to narrativize the sacking of Gbaramatu kingdom in Delta State, but they artistically deploy history to remember the bloody confrontations the British colonialists had with the city-states of the Oil Rivers Protectorate. In No More Crisis, Lover Boys compares the strategies and weapons used by the colonialists with those the federal government of Nigeria uses to gag the delta people. Recently, mention of the delta became synonymous with crisis, hostage-takings, and violence. This in turn may seem as if violence and crisis are identity markers for this people. However, Lover Boys begins the track by asking a fundamental question bordering on the issue of violence as a culture: Abi crisis na our culture Is crisis part of our culture?. It is this question the track responds to so as to make explicit that though Nigeria has become a tinderbox and the delta permanently remains the flash point, violence is not in any way enchanting to the delta people. The track shows

that the most vibrant way to respond to the devaluation of ones humanity is resistance. Lover Boys uses music to interrogate sociopolitical problems in Nigeria. They have a wonderful knack for imagery; the historical aspect of their debut album is indeed compelling, and its ability to sustain the topicality of the subject all through is profound. Historical art hardly creates room for suspense because the tale is familiar, but Lover Boys breaks the chain of history and dims its lines, inserting materials forged from imagination. These artists are not concerned with the specificity or exactitude of history. Their major concern is with the extent of damage done to lives and properties occasioned by the military reprisal, but the track makes lucid what is narrativized and indeed happened. Significantly, Lover Boys attempts to draw attention to the plight of the people more than they want to entertain them:
Lyrics Formal English Translation Yes oh! Yes indeed This na true story This is a true story of wetin happen for Niger Delta of what happened in the Niger Delta for Gbaramatu Kingdom in Gbaramatu kingdom

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In another track, Yawalele, Lover Boys emphasizes the volatility of the crisis and the need for the world to listen to the gory tale of the destruction of a kingdom and the violent excitement with which this act of destruction was accomplished:
Lyrics Formal English Translation Yawalele (le le le le ) Yawalele Ha ha ha yawa le le Yawalele Niger Delta una dey hear Niger Delta I hope you are am oh hearing me Yawalele Yawalele Kasa la don burst eyo crisis has erupted Yawalele Yawalele My people una dey hear My people I hope you are am oh hearing me Yawalele Yawalele Make una listen to my tori Listen to my story Eyawalele Yawalele May fourteen oh May 14, 2009 Two Thousand and Nine Eyawalele Yawalele

The text becomes an exploration and a rewriting of the predicaments of the Niger Delta people from the eighteenth century to the present. The track makes emphatic moral statements on the relevance of history: to be

liberated from the past, that past has to be revisited and understood. Thus, the track brings to the fore the relationship between history and memory. History exists in the past because it has been lived, while memory remains in the present because it is much needed for appraising the past. Since memory is the product of what people remember, history plays the function of messaging to memory because without history the power of memory may not be relevant to the present. We do not remember to forget, but to order the present with the map of memory. History can therefore help a people adjust an ugly past, and it is memory that launches the platform for this adjustment. My analysis of No More Crisis demonstrates how contemporary oil exploration and exploitation resemble that of its colonial predecessor. Multinational oil firms have replaced the colonial Royal Niger Company, and the activities of the Nigerian government could be described as the return of the gunboat. In fact, the amnesty package is close to gunboat diplomacy, considering that it prioritizes the importance of allowing oil flow at the expense of developing the Niger Delta people and their environment. Economically, the delta city-states were ruined by the abolition of the slave trade; they were socioculturally stranded (especially the caste-based relationship between freeborn and slaves were disrupted) by the emergence of the new men, and their political structures began to wane because of British intervention in their internal affairs. Like the present delta states, the delta city-states had collapsed by the end of the nineteenth century. The dominant mood of this doubly marginalized people is depression and their sociopolitical and economic conditions are poverty and political impotence. The importance of historical themes in African arts remains monumental because the representation of history becomes an attractive and effective means of deregulating history and subjecting it to the present in order to bring it closer to the people. This will in turn help them understand the journey of nationalism and focus on it, regardless of the bruises and scars this journey may have engendered. There are statements, for example, that are attributed to certain historical figures which are in actual fact fictitious. For the African artist, historical themes are partly taken up as a response to the negative stereotypes created and perpetuated by historians, writers, and other artists. As with successive Nigerian governments, the history written by colonial writers portrays the precolonial Niger Delta people as unruly savages who needed Christian order, imperial etiquette, and mercantile direction to invest their surplus profita negative image designed to justify the invasion and ultimate destruction of the delta city-states, despite the tremendous efforts the delta city-states made to avoid war with the British. The delta people have made their agitations clear: the need for massive infrastructural development; however, the government in its diplomatic wisdom gives them amnesty packages instead. No More Crisis offers a cinematographic account of the destruction of the Gbaramatu kingdom and explains how the Niger Delta people are othered through different strategies, especially legislatively sanctioned violence. Invariably, they become victims of national greed. Lover Boys enumerates

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the names of the communities that make up the destroyed kingdom to make glaring the extent of damage done:
Lyrics Formal English Translation Na Ekenrekoko I dey somebody It was in my presence at Ekenrekoko Knocking kpo kpo kpo a close friend of mine was murdered Open my door omo na gun As I opened my door, I shut eyeeh heard gun shot Make I run away military As I made to run, I saw hold me military men who For my waist held me around the waist Na watin dey happen omo and I discovered trouble na crisis brewing Eyeeh! Eyeeh!

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Lover Boys gives expression to the brutal tactics the Nigerian military employ in their ferocious reprisals. For the delta people, their activities are only an attempt at resisting the greedy entrepreneurial market strategies of multinational oil firms and bureaucratic maneuvers of the Nigerian government at legitimating the destruction of the Niger Delta; however, the Joint Task Force is at war with the people, since it has a standing order to utilize brutal tactics if resistance from the people is geared toward reducing the flow of oil:
Lyric Formal English Translation Na for my presence A close friend of mine Na so dey killi my paddy was murdered in my presence Kill innocent people Innocent people were also killed Throwe their body and their corpses When come de float for water were thrown into the river What of hustlers What of those workers Wen dem kill for Agala murdered at Agala say na wetin dey happen What is the problem Omo na crises, eyeee! It is crisis eyeee! Dem kill people papa Fathers were murdered Na so dem kill people mama so were mothers Burn people house houses were burnt Dem kill innocent soul eyeeeh! They murdered innocent people Take their Gun Boat they used their gunboat go block our creek to barricade our creeks

Na wetin dey happen Omo na crises, eyeeeh!

What is happening It is crisis, eyeeeh!

Besides describing the casualties and the damage done to the Gbaramatu kingdom, the song offers an eyewitness account of the crisis. The brutal murder of innocent people and the destruction of properties are metonymic of the innumerable unrecorded atrocities perpetrated during military reprisals, and they foreground the governments failure to address the Niger Delta question constructively. In singing the delta predicament, Lover Boys discloses how the Nigerian history of conflict and suffering has wrought havoc in the delta peoples psyche. No More Crisis seeks to articulate a provisionally redemptive vision of Niger Delta history that undermines the narrow vision of national historicism, but Yawalele reveals a dystopian vision of suffering and war in the Niger Delta, a vision that challenges the Nigerian official discourse of sincerity and commitment to the plight of the delta. In both songs, the dynamics of retelling and constructive resistance disrupt the silencing mechanisms of dominant monologic discourses to provide a discursive space for the brutalized and marginalized speaking in the text. The strategies successive Nigerian governments employ to silence the delta people differ little from those the colonialists employed to silence the delta city-states during the palm-oil trade. Lover Boys mention of a gunboat8 makes this point valid. The utility and operations of oppression in Nigeria are particularly complex and do not allow for any straightforward opposition to its laws, systems, and ideologies. While the tripartite raid (Ogoni, Odi, and Gbaramatu) remains a direct product of dominant power imposition, the logic of impunity which enabled its emergence was inherited from colonial forms of government. Achille Mbembe argues that the forms of governance which African regimes adopt are not the innovations of its new leaders, but are partly a product of the colonial rationality (1996:25), which validated the authority of their European predecessors. Instituted and authenticated by violence, colonial governance did not require external justification, but was a self-validating system, which asserted its authority through the use of indiscriminate and brutal force:
This violence was of a very particular sort, immediately tangible, and it gave the natives a clear notion of themselves in proportion to the power that they had lost. ... It eliminated all distinction between ends and means; depending on circumstances, this sovereign violence was its own end. ... Anything that did not recognise this violence as authority, that contested its protocols, was savage and outlaw. (Mbembe 1996:26)

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Colonial sovereignty was thus both arbitrary and unconditional (Mbembe 1996:26), able to function with impunity, despite its rejection, illegitimacy, and unpopularity. Mbembe argues that postcolonial states have inherited this unconditionality in their forms of governance, appropriating

the colonial rationalization of violence as a necessary means, while remaining unaccountable for its end. Thus, while Africans continue to romanticize the beauty of self-rule, their leaders continue to consolidate their positions by furthering a colonial bureaucratic legacy safely moored on brutal force. Ironically, the activities of the Nigerian government in the delta manifest the relations of subjection that validate colonial domination. It is therefore difficult to speak of oppression in the decolonized state as a practice distinct from colonial subjugation. The utility of oppression in the Niger Delta must be understood, not as a homogeneous or unitary practice deriving from a single tyrannical source, but as a web of interpenetrating systems, produced and appropriated at different historical moments. The laws, theories, and ideologies that constitute these systems ratify state domination: they are not merely a set of notions imposed on society, but systems of meanings and values, which saturate society to such an extent that they constitute a sense of reality for its subjects (Williams 1980:36). Moreover, these systems are by no means static, but have continually to be renewed, recreated and defended (Williams 1980:38) to maintain their dominance and reduce the Niger Delta to an arid space under absolute despotism. Lover Boys makes one point clear in Yawalele: the need for equitable distribution of oil wealth. This has been the cardinal aim of the debate from the brief revolution of Adaka Boro in 1966 to the present, militant phase of the resistance.
Lyrics Formal English Translation Oil money na chop and Oil money is supposed to demo eh give pleasure to all Eyawa le le Eyawalele But our time na chop and But it gives us death die oh Eyawa lele Eyawalele Oil money na chop I Oil money is for everybody chop eyooh Eyawa le le Eyawalele But our time na chop and But for us it is death die eyooh Eyawa lele Eyawalele Somebody say na him Somebody says it is his get am oh own Eyawa le le Eyawalele Oil money oh na for Oil money is for everybody every body oh

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Every study of the delta experience usually proceeds from establishing the paradox of its location within Nigeria and the economic condition of the inhabitants of the area. This is what I describe as the paradox of wealth and poverty of a nation. While the region is oil-rich, it is the most marginalized

and the least developed.9 Thus it provides the mainstay of the wealth or economy of the nation, so it has the largest share of poverty. Lover Boys therefore insists, unequivocally, that the oil belongs to the delta people. Nigeria extracts about 93.1 million metric tons of oil annually from its soil to account for 2.9% of world production. The Niger Delta and the sea gulf off its shores, which host over a dozen oil companies, produce what accounts for 80% of Nigerias annual revenue (Ejobowah 2000:33). Rather than protect and work out modalities to replenish the Niger deltascape and the plundering of its peoples wealth, successive Nigerian governments have been repressing the lawful aspirations and claims of the delta people. Yawalele ends unrepentantly, in an unambiguous insistence on the need for the sustenance of the agitations, regardless of the governments tactics:
Lyrics Formal English Translation Soldier go soldier come Soldiers will go and they will come Eyawa le le! Eyawalele! Militants go, militants come Militants will quit, militants will come Eyawa le le! Eyawalele! . ... ... . ... ... Niger Delta people we dey Niger Deltans are angry vex eyo Eyawa le le! Eyawa le le! Port Harcourt people we dey Port Harcourt people are vex eyooh angry Eyawa le le! Eyawa lele! Bayelsa people we dey Bayelsa people are angry vex eyooh Eyawa le le! Eyawalele! Delta people we dey vex eyoh Delta people are angry Eyawa le le! Eyawalele! Niger Delta una dey Niger Delta hope you hear hearram oh my song Eyawa le le! Eyawalele! E kasala don burst eyo Crisis has erupted Eyawalele Eyawalele

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The song implies that the delta people are not a violent group, but struggle only to resist any attempt by any establishment to deprive them access to their natural endowment. Thus, the repertoire of the resistance continues to change, depending on the exploiters strategies. The song demonstrates that not until the government sincerely comes up with pragmatic policies that will positively affect the delta people will the crisis cease: as the soldiers continue to invade the delta and kill militants, so will others rise

from among the people to pursue the cause. The murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa by the Abacha regime was geared toward permanently silencing the Ogoni people and the delta at large, but the agitations and resistance have grown, with some groups taking the struggle into a criminal dimension. If the government continues to fail in working out pragmatic solutions to rescue the region from its present ruins, the delta will remain a symbol of a vanishing Eden and a theater of war.

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Conclusion
Just as the Niger Delta remains a paradox of the yoking of wealth and poverty in a single space, so is popular music on the delta discourse laden with irony. Analysis of the music of Timaya and Lover Boys shows that there is militancy and actual militancy. The militants are the youths in different resistance movements who contest the government through blackmail, hostage taking, and other subversive strategies, but artists appear to be the actual militants, if one considers the number of persons their songs speak to at any given time. Furthermore, their songs are actually catalytic: they are geared toward entrenching the delta question, sustaining its topicality, and helping sustain the boys in the struggle. For example, in Yawalele, Lover Boys enumerates the names of militants who have been engaging in the struggle; the song is a panegyric, because it celebrates the essence of the struggle. The songs attempt to rally Nigerians at large and delta people in particular to a national and ethnic preservationist cause. A continuous attack on the landscape for oil and brutalizing the people will strip Nigeria of the greenest aspect of her existence, symbolized in the national flag. The green signifies the facility of resources and the abundance of naturethe evergreen rainforest of the delta. Moreover, the deltascape remains an identity marker for the delta person because the environment determines the vocation or occupation of its inhabitants; hence, they are predominantly fishermen, farmers, hunters; their religious choices are equally predicated on the immediate environment. If the environment disappears, they will lose the most important aspect of their sociocultural identity. Popular music on the Niger Delta becomes a strategic mode for sustaining the spirit of resistance because it draws attention to the peoples debility and the dangers of exploiting resources without providing room for their replenishment. These singers foreground the importance of making music function beyond entertainment: it can equally function as a site where national history can be appraised. Therefore, environmental justice initiatives specifically attempt to redress the disproportionate incidence of environmental contamination in communities of the poor and/or marginalized communities, to secure for those affected the right to live unthreatened by the risks posed by environmental degradation and contamination, and to afford equal access to natural resources that sustain life and culture. These artists, as members of marginalized communities, have mobilized around

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issues of environmental degradation affecting their families, communities, and worksites; they have illuminated the crucial intersections between ecological and social-justice concerns. What role can artists play in reclaiming such censored histories and retelling the stories the dominant group may have altered to demonize the other? The artists whose songs offer this study textual analysis have demonstrated unequivocally that artists are obligated to redress historically silenced narratives. As artists, they have refused to suppress history. Through their songs, they have liberated stories by giving voice to the other side. Singing becomes an act of resistance because it banishes silence. Art as a medium of resistance is even more potent and lethal than the idea of confrontational militancy. This is so because arts on the Niger Delta and popular music in particular are a direct call for action. The songs are aired in the creeks, the base of isolated militants, and these songs inspire them. The mobilizing power of these songs goes beyond a form that summons dancers to their feet, but it is a tonic that rearticulates the struggle for resource control and the insistence on the principle of derivation as a noble cause. Little wonder artists were not asked to lay down their drums, guitars, voices, and pens during the disarmament exercise of the amnesty package! Analysis of these songs shows that art must bear witness to the suppressed histories of brutalized subjects within an oppressive system. Art becomes a privileged site, from which transgressive interventions can, and must, be articulated.

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Notes
1. The New Niger Delta Peoples Volunteer Force (NDPVF) and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). These adopt the guerrilla tactics of negotiations, which include kidnapping of expatriates of multinational oil firms, bunkering of oil pipelines, seizing oil rigs and installations, armed confrontation with the state security forces, and general militarized operations. See Ojukorotu 2008 and Osaghae 2003. 2. This is the musical variation of literary autobiography: the many different accounts that authors make of their experiences (Berryman 1999). 3. For fear that the militants would go back to their homes in the creeks after the disarmament exercise, the Nigerian government lodged them in hotels across the nation. Returning to their homes would reinforce the need to return to the struggle because the creeks remain the major signpost of their debilitation, poverty, and hopelessness. They are placed on monthly salary as the rehabilitation process goes on without specific terminal date. 4. As popular culture, youth culture can be defined in different ways: ranging from cultural expressions in a more narrow sense which are actively being created by young people, to a broader concept which encompasses cultural forms such as behavior that is being created and upheld by the young (Wulff 1995:10). Definitions of the term youth are equally complex, but in the social sciences youth is commonly understood as a social category that is constructed in discourse and does not adhere to strict biological age limits (Bourdieu 1993; compare Bayart 1993).

5. Youth are not only often in the forefront of cultural production: they form the largest group of consumers of popular music. 6. A military register that explains an attempt to annihilate any living creature in a military raid. The Gbaramatu raid was close to a pogrom because air raids were sanctioned by the government. 7. Militancy is supposed to be a positive force to agitate for social or political change. During the anticolonial struggles, youth movements like the Nigerian Youth Movement and the West African Students Union were militant groups that agitated for self-rule. The broad historical record of the sacrifices made by vanguard youths in the liquidation of colonial rule is clear, even though many of them were marginalized as spectators the day after independence. Presently, militancy takes a negative marker because the dominant group has criminalized the concept to justify the rape of the people and the landscape. In the Niger Delta, the government has made militancy seem demonic; it is only the ugly side that is foregrounded. People continue to miss the fact that it is the failure of the government to address the oil crisis from its most fundamental, structural, systemic bases so that the world can experience what Barnes (2005:14) designates global flow of peace that is responsible for the increase in the number of militant groups in the region. The idea of militancy for the Niger Delta people is constructive agitation and systemic resistance to the dominant attempt at reducing the people of the zone under absolute despotism. 8. Gunboat diplomacy can be described generally as any aggressive diplomatic activity carried out with the implicit or explicit use of military (usually naval) power; however, the term is most often associated with the activities of the Great Powers in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. During this period, the construction of heavily armed steel-hulled vessels of relatively shallow draft (gunboats) provided new opportunities for projecting power on the part of rival imperial powers. I use the term here to demonstrate that the oil crises of the nineteenth century continue to recur. It is only the temper of the merchandise that differs: the structure of the trade remains the same. During the colonial period, the item of trade or conflict was palm oil; today, it is crude oil. George Dashwood Taubman Goldie signed treaties with thirty-seven local chiefs, and organized and maintained a fleet of twenty gunboats to punish local traders who challenged the company or its interest. Just as Goldie positioned gunboats to overwhelm any attempt by Africans to contest his terms of trade, so has the Nigerian government militarized the Niger Delta with armed military men labeled as the Joint Task Force. Their assignment is specific: to quell any attempt by host communities to truncate the activities of multinational oil firms in the Niger Delta. These firms include Shell, Mobil, Chevron, Elf, Agip, and Texaco. Sometimes, the Joint Task Force employs brutal forcewhich has resulted in numerous deaths and the destruction of properties, the Ogoni killings of the 1980s and 1990s, the Odi raid of 1999, the Gbaramatu massacre of 2009, and recent destruction of Gbaramatu with the pretext of searching for John Togo. 9. Official acknowledgement of the deplorable state or a near absence of social infrastructure in the Niger Delta and the neglect of the people took the form of establishing agencies that are to ease development in the region. The first was the Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission, established with Decree 23 of 1992. The Obasanjo administration replaced this with the Niger Delta Development Commission, and the Yadua and Jonathan administration went a step further by establishing a ministry for the region.

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Vogt, Heidi. 2007. Oil Fire Symbolizes Woes in Nigerias Destitute Villages. Los Angeles Times, 16 September. Williams, Raymond. 1980. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso. Wilson, Fiona. 2000. Indians and Mestizos: Identity and Urban Popular Culture in Andean Peru. Journal of Southern African Studies 26(2):239253. Wulff, Helena. 1995. Introducing Youth Culture in Its Own Right. The State of Art and New Possibilities. In Youth Cultures: A Cross Cultural Perspective, edited by Vere Amit-Talai and Helena Wulff. London: Routledge.

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OGAGA OKUYADE received his Ph.D. from the University of Ibadan. He is currently head of the English Department at the College of Education Warri, Delta State, Nigeria. His scholarly interests include postcolonial studies, politics of identity constructions, politics in postcolonial texts, and other popular art forms. He is presently guest editing a special issue for IMBIZO: International Journal of African Literary and Comparative Studies on the writings of Wole Soyinka twenty-five years after the Nobel. He may be contacted by e-mail at gagokus@yahoo.com.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.