In Curse of the Black Gold, a pictorial book, Ed Kashi parades moving photographs that capture the variegated agony that
fifty years of crude oil exploration has inflicted on the people of the Niger Delta in South-South,
Nigeria. This has resulted in the militancy that is troubling the nation today.
Edited by Berkeley-based scholar, Michael Watts, the avalanche of photographs most strategically taken and splashed on most of the pages of this book tell the Niger Delta story in graphic and soul-stirring details.
This book also incorporates incisive esays by a crop of human development experts, rights activists and writers from within and outside Nigeria. Indeed, it is a book in which a unity of genres is classically established as it also contains poems that speak the same language as the essays and photos: the language that fifty years of oil exploration in the Niger Delta
region of Nigeria has ironically broughtbthe people more doom than boom.
The book "Curse of the Black Gold" is Ed Kashi's golden jubilee gift to the Niger Delta, and to a thoughtful world, is from other pictorial books .Some three photos that serve as the prologue of this book are ushered in by a concern expressed by the United Nations : " The Niger Delta produces the oil wealth that accounts for the bulk of Nigeria's earnings. Paradoxically, however, these vast revenues from an international industry have barely touched the Niger Delta's own pervasive poverty. For most people, progress and hope, much less prosperity, remain out of reach."
The editor, with this quote, seems to have affirmed that the problem of the region has become a global concern.
The second photograph in the prologue is that of two innocent children playfully walking across an array of open and live oil pipelines. While this is followed by that of a disgruntled worker trying to board an oil rig, the third picture, which is that of two militants wielding guns that seems to be ready for action, appear to have summarised the tragic progress that Nigeria has made during the fifty years of oil exploration- at least outside the glitters of a city like Abuja ( the seat of power) and the over-bloated pockets of the nation's many political leaders.
Generally speaking, whatdo these photos show about the Niger Delta? Many of them show Niger Delta children in different precarious situations- having to romance pipelines carelessly handled by oil companies; several of the kids in hungry postures; and many either out of school or in classes that are a mockery of what a learning environment should be.
Many of the photos also expose an environment with lacerated wounds, as inflicted om it by inhumane activities of oil merchants: polluted rivers, poisoned earth and terribly devalued forests. In the album of sorrow, Kashi also shows men and women in various dire situations, battling with poverty and despair that sharply contradict the amount of resources that Nigeria and its accomplice oil companies have milked out of the region. Where people have to struggle to make ends meet, they do so but in competition with ubiquitous oil tankers and unbridled spillage. Where women have to dry cassava, they do so on the same terrain where gas is being flared with impunity.
But watch the editor, Watts. He ensures that
Curse of Black Gold has a progresive plot. With the book unfolding like a film, Kashi's camera is made to roll to the faces of some of the region's traditional rulers whose bright postures sharply contradict those of the people. The aura of affluence that sorrounds them, and the link established in some of the captions, indicate that the typical oil merchant will rather strike nocturnal deals with the royal fathers and royal mothers than do what is right to the polity most times. Trailing these is another set of symbolic images: those of pastors who, in the Nigerian style, are seemingly beckoning the polity to God since reason, science, education and oil have failed.
Now as the 50 years of oil winds down, desperation had bred a creed of youths who would rather confront the injustice in the region with absolute violence. It is, therefore, not suprising that the book closes with photos of MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) fighters- the militant group purortedly fighting the injustice in the region- in various predictable circumstances.
An account given by Kashi in his introductory note titled "Shadows and Light in the Niger Delta" sheds light on how intriguing and demanding the task of photographing the Delta is. In the course of his unusual paparazzi in the troubled region, he was once arrested and detained by the Nigerian military (page 27).
At the end of the tunnel, however, it is noteworthy that Kashi has come up with an authoritative and impeccable account of the fate that oil has brought the Niger Deltans as contained in the book.
He says on what prompted him to embark on shedding light on the Niger Delta's world of shadows, "with Michael's guidance, on my first trip to Nigeria in July 2004, my eyes and heart were opened and my anger and disgust were ignited. To tell this difficult, but profoundly important geographical story in a visual way became an obsession."
In the end,The Curse of The Black Gold appeals to the conscience of all and sundry.