Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  Paulo, who is dusky and Portuguese, kept getting mistaken for the Zambian Minister of Agriculture, and was thus excused from dancing. We were both relieved when lunch was announced. In the dining car, everyone we met told us they were off to Tanzania to buy spare car parts.

  Having resolved to be late, the train fell further behind schedule. By the second day the water ran out, so we were not only drinking Mosi, but brushing our teeth in it. The stream of visitors to our compartment continued.

  On the third and last day, as the train crossed into Tanzania, and the beer switched from Mosi to Safari, we hogged the window seats, pointing at the Masai with their cattle and hoping to see wild animals.

  ‘How is the bush in Portugal?’ asked Chola John. ‘Do you have giraffes?’ Before we could answer, the radio, which had been mercifully silent, started blaring again.

  ‘Time for dancing!’ shouted Moses.

  Delta blues: Nigeria’s poor prepare to fight for the oil riches of their country

  Sunday Telegraph, 21 February 1999

  CHIEF OGIBO OTODJARERI is holding court in a wattle-and-daub hut decorated with goat skulls on strings and faded black-and-white photographs of his ancestors. He still remembers when oil was first struck in West Africa in 1956. ‘We thought we would be rich,’ he smiled sadly, recalling the excitement that spread through the tangled jungles of the Niger Delta where it was discovered.

  Instead, like most of the region, his village of 5,000 people still has no electricity or running water, no clinic, no school. The bandy-legged children who gather to see the oyibo, or strange white woman, have the swollen bellies of the malnourished.

  Pointing out the nearby oil pipeline which runs right outside the huts, Otodjareri says: ‘We can’t understand why our area is producing all this wealth yet when you come to my house I cannot even offer you a cup of porridge.’

  The Niger Delta is the world’s sixth-largest oil producer, pumping out 2 billion barrels a day, yet most of Nigeria’s 108 million people are growing poorer. In Arab countries which produce this much oil, people have living standards beyond most Nigerians’ wildest dreams. But in Africa’s largest country, billions of pounds in oil wealth are siphoned off by a small clique of politicians and generals like the late General Sani Abacha*, while the average income has plummeted to £160 a year. So skewed is the system that motorists must queue for two days to get petrol.

  In the Delta region where more than 90 per cent of the oil comes from, people live in some of the worst poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and they are losing patience. Much of the Delta is in a state of near insurrection, with groups of militant youths turning off oil valves, occupying flow stations and kidnapping foreign oil workers. Yesterday a Chevron boat was attacked and one person killed. The next step, says Oronto Douglas, one of the groups’ leaders, is to bring the entire oil industry to a halt.

  The government has responded with violence, sending in security forces and turning one of the world’s largest wetlands into a battleground.

  Few believe the current elections – yesterday for parliament, and next Saturday for the presidency – will change anything, despite ending fifteen years of military rule. The candidate expected to win is General Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military dictator, although the only one ever to hand over power to civilians.

  ‘The real problem is the mineral resources are in minority areas, while the government is always run by a majority tribe who don’t find it worthwhile to divert funds to develop those areas,’ said Robert Azibaola, the president of the Niger Delta Human and Environmental Resources Organisation.

  The plight of the Delta first came to world attention in 1993 when the playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa led the Ogoni tribe against General Abacha’s military regime to try to force the British-Dutch oil giant Shell out of its region. Thousands of Ogonis were beaten or detained and there was an international outcry when Saro-Wiwa and eight colleagues were hanged in November 1995, particularly after it emerged that Shell had been paying ‘field allowances’ to the Nigerian troops.

  After Abacha’s Viagra-fuelled death in the arms of prostitutes last June, the new President, General Abdulsalam Abubakar, reduced repression, freeing political prisoners. Many tribes have been emboldened to follow the Ogonis’ example.

  A British employee of Shell and his 2-year-old son were kidnapped last week, although they were released within days, and oil workers travel in convoys with armed guards.

  A new report by Human Rights Watch catalogues numerous cases of people being ‘brutalised’ by Nigerian security forces for attempting to raise grievances with the oil companies. The largest is Shell, responsible for almost half the country’s oil production, followed by the American companies Chevron and Mobil, Elf of France, and the Italian state-owned Agip.

  Most of the protesters are Ijaws, the largest tribe in the Delta with more than 6 million people, presenting a far more serious threat to the regime than the Ogonis, who number fewer than 500,000. Armed mystical cults of the Ijaw god of war, Egbesu, have sprung up, hiding in the mangrove swamps which cover a third of the Delta.

  Last month there was a series of killings in the riverside village of Kaiama after troops moved in to end a demonstration calling for foreign oil companies to leave. A week-long gun battle raged, leaving more than thirty people dead. Owonaro Kesiegha, the 26-year-old youth president, gave a warning: ‘We are not afraid. We are angry.’

  Travelling in the Delta last week, in a car driven by a man named Good News who fancied himself Michael Schumacher*, I hid in the back as foreigners are not allowed. Every couple of miles we screeched to a halt at checkpoints manned by soldiers brandishing machine guns, looking for youths whose backs bear the tattoos of the Egbesu cults. Soldiers have spread terror by looting houses and demanding money to let people pass.

  The Ijaw have threatened to bring the oil industry to a halt. This month, leaders of all the Delta tribes gathered for the first time and issued a declaration demanding autonomy and a share of oil royalties.

  With disruptions flaring up every week, Shell’s production has been cut from 450,000 to 250,000 barrels a day. ‘Many of our operations have been closed down and our staff are exposed,’ said a senior executive. The foreign oil companies feel unfairly targeted. Since the Ogoni crisis, Shell has conducted a major review and is building hospitals and schools, paying for more than a hundred teachers in the Delta. It says the real blame lies with the state, which receives the royalties and is supposed to distribute a percentage to local people.

  The anger of the Ijaw people hangs heavy in the already humid air of the Delta. At the village of Otuegwe, which is only accessible by boat, a strange gloom hangs over the community.

  Ijaw youths led the way through the forest, where spiders are the size of rats and everything seems to grow to ten times the normal size. Suddenly the birds stopped singing. As we emerged from a swamp, the damp odour of the jungle was replaced by an overpowering nausea-inducing smell of hydrocarbons, and we entered a place that looked like Armageddon.

  A pipeline had burst, spreading black oil over the vegetation and casting a thick film over the pools of water. When it rains, as it does every day, this runs into the creek and pollutes the water used by the villagers, in addition to killing the mudfish which they eat. Many of the palms on which they depend to produce palm oil and alcohol lay brown and dying.

  This happened four months ago, yet nobody from Shell has visited the village to clean up or apologise, let alone offer compensation. Scooping up some crude to take home for fuel, Igonibo Ido said: ‘We want the world to know our plight.’

  The oil companies admit that many pipelines are older than the fifteen-year safe lifespan, but blame the government (which has a 55 per cent stake in Shell’s operations and 60 per cent in the others’) for not putting up its share of investment. Hundreds of pipeline leaks occur each year, although Shell claims that many result from sabotage.

  Last October, word went around the community of Jesse that a pipeline had
burst. Thousands of villagers rushed to the leak to collect oil. Among them was Eunice Akamugbe, a 30-year-old mother of two. ‘We were all filling buckets when suddenly there was a huge explosion.’

  When Eunice regained consciousness, she was covered in horrific burns. She was one of the lucky ones. More than a thousand people died in the blaze. In November, General Abubakar said there would be no compensation, as sabotage was suspected.

  The current low price of oil, and the rash of demands which democracy is likely to bring, will make it hard for a new government to meet the needs of the Delta region. Oil earnings, which make up 80 per cent of government revenue, are projected at £4.8 billion for this year, far short of 1997’s £9.3 billion.

  Some campaigners fear that the Delta people’s fight will provide an excuse for the military to retake power. But Fawehinmi Gani, a leading campaigner for democracy, warned: ‘You can send in 50 million troops but you cannot cow the people. They have been cheated for so long that they are fighting the battle of their lives.’

  Eat, eat, eat if you want to be loved… In Africa, big is beautiful

  Sunday Telegraph, 25 March 2001

  Calabar

  ARIT ASUQUO IBOK is large. Her thighs wobble like blancmange as she walks, her bottom is as round and squashy as two over-ripe pumpkins, and at least seven chins quiver when she swallows. For the past two months, she has woken at 5 a.m. for a pint of millet in water and a plate piled high with fried plantain, followed by a special body-rounding massage. Then she has spent the day in whale-like recline,

  stirring only to stuff herself with glutinous bowls of yam and crayfish, or for the occasional game of ludo.

  Worried that, at 35, she is still not married, Arit’s family has paid to send her on a three-month programme to make her more desirable to men. Whereas in the West this might mean going to a health farm or gym to lose weight, in the steamy jungle port of Calabar in southern Nigeria, it means going to so-called fattening rooms, where women do nothing but eat.

  ‘I must eat so I’ll be fat and people don’t laugh at my figure,’ explained Arit, as she measured her thickening waist with one of the strings of special beads that she wears in the fattening room. ‘It shows that my family has money and can afford to feed me properly and I will make a good bride.’

  The fattening room in which she is staying is run by Madam Eke Eden and Madam Elizabeth Eyo, two middle-aged women, both on the corpulent side. They operate out of 42 Iboku Street, a peeling sky-blue and yellow bungalow, under a large mango tree in a dusty suburb of Calabar.

  The terrace functions as a beauty salon, with two young girls busily plaiting and crimping hair. Behind the screen door, the two madams hold court in an expansive room with turquoise satin ruched curtains, a ceiling fan that occasionally stirs the thick air at the whim of the Nigerian electricity company, and framed photographs of large women – graduates of the fattening room.

  ‘We can make any woman obese,’ boasts Madam Eyo, looking critically at my size-10 figure. ‘You might find the odd man who thinks that kind of shape is modern but, sorry to say, you look underfed,’ she said. ‘If a man were to choose you as his bride, people would feel sorry for him. If you stayed here some months, we could help you.’

  Though intrigued by the idea that the way to a man’s heart might be through my stomach rather than his, I decided not to take up her offer, which might have been more attractive had it involved bingeing on Belgian chocolates and cream buns rather than pounded yam and millet water. Instead, I ask to know her secrets. It is rare for an outsider to be admitted to a fattening room, because clients are supposed to be kept in seclusion until ready to emerge newly rounded.

  The main component of the fattening room experience seems to be total inactivity, combined with as much yam, plantain, millet, and pepper soup as can be stuffed into one person in a day. A special red powder, ground from the bark of a tree, is taken to thin the blood to stop it coagulating with all the fat, and the women are painted with a native chalk that cools the skin, enabling them to eat more. They are also given special massages in which their bodies are kneaded to direct the fat to certain places, specifically the bottom.

  ‘It is a bit tiring eating all the time,’ admitted Arit, as she tucked into another large pan of yam and crayfish. ‘But I know that when I come out I will be attractive, healthy and beautiful.’

  Being fat is a beauty ideal for much of Africa and, in some countries, such as Nigeria, there are beauty contests to be the heaviest, with women eating animal feed and steroids to pile on the pounds. But fattening rooms are peculiar to southern Nigeria and the people of the Efik tribe.

  In the Old Residency, a prefabricated house transported from England in 1884 to house the then British Governor and now the Calabar Museum, there is a series of black-and-white photographs of fattened Efik women with enormous, pendulous breasts and large pot bellies.

  ‘Efik men liked their women fat and juicy,’ explained Prince E. E. Eyamba, the son of the late Obong of Calabar, the traditional ruler. ‘My mother spent seven years in a fattening room, as did most women whose families could afford it, from the age of 12.’

  However, tastes are changing. ‘Personally, now I like slick waists, but big breasts and bottoms,’ said the Prince, tracing a swollen hourglass figure with his hands. ‘In the past, we said big hips are good for child-bearing, but we have learnt that sometimes overblown hips are hiding a narrow pelvis, so now we check out the families to see if they have a history of difficult births.’

  In fact, fattening rooms have become increasingly controversial since a recent study that links the intensive fattening to diabetes. Although the practice is still common, many have moved underground.

  A campaign to stop fattening has been launched by Girl Power Initiative (GPI), a Calabar-based women’s rights organisation founded in 1994, long before the Spice Girls adopted the phrase. Ofon Ekpoudeom, a facilitator for GPI, explained: ‘We go to schools and villages telling girls to be happy with their bodies and teaching them to be more assertive, so they can reason with parents not to send them to fattening rooms.’

  One of the objections of GPI to the fattening rooms is that time between eating is used to give lessons in how to be a good wife, in other words being obedient. Arit recounted: ‘I have learnt that, if my husband is annoyed with me, then, even if it is his fault, I am not to react, but to stay quiet and let his temper calm, maybe cook him coconut rice or melon-seed soup.’

  In a town with a history as one of the world’s biggest slave-trading centres, where down by the riverside thousands of lives would be bartered for gin or gunpowder, the GPI members see such lessons as imparting a slave mentality to women. ‘What they are being told is how to be slaves in the homes of their husbands,’ said Ms Ekpoudeom.

  Fattening rooms, however, have an even more sinister side. Apart from helping brides reach their enormous potential, they are also used to prepare young girls for circumcision, or genital mutilation as it is more commonly referred to in the West.

  Sharing a room with Arit is 15-year-old Glory Ita Asuquo, a highschool student, naked apart from a short sarong around her waist, her skin painted with chalk designs. She is preparing to undergo female circumcision.

  ‘They will cut off part of my genitalia with a razor blade,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘It’s painful, but it’s part of our tradition. I feel comfortable about it.’

  Asked about cases of local girls who have bled to death or later experienced gynaecological problems, she said: ‘It will be done in a hygienic way and they will put a mixture of gin and special herbs on the wound to stop the bleeding. My friends say the pain goes away after two days.’

  Glory, a slim, beautiful girl whose ambition is to go to university and become a lawyer, hopes to return to the fattening room when she is older to prepare to be a bride. ‘I want to be fat like her,’ she said, pointing at Arit admiringly.

  Despite the GPI campaign and the changing taste of some Nigerian men in favour of sleek
er women, a visit to the town’s sprawling Watt Market shows that the desire to be large remains common. Beyond the tables piled high with cassava, yams and snails is an area with stall upon stall offering fattening accoutrements.

  Apart from blood-thinning bark and massage chalk, they sell special fattening peppers for pepper soup, as well as stomach-turning substances such as dead chameleons to soak in water. When drunk, this supposedly cures bloating and allows the women to keep on eating.

  Along the road, one of the many Pentecostal churches is called the Church of Divine Enlargement to attract ladies who long to be fatter. Local pharmacies do a thriving trade in a product called Wate-on, bought by women whose families cannot afford the 5,000 naira (£30) a month, plus the food cost, of the fattening room – a substantial amount in a country where the average wage is £200 a year.

  Some younger girls are resisting the pressure to be fat. Mary Adi, a plump, lively 31-year-old who runs a beauty salon where many local girls hang out, said: ‘I think fattening rooms are a dreadful idea. I try to dissuade the girls who come here.’

  Talking as she painted crimson varnish on the toenails of an enormous woman in royal blue, she added: ‘You have to laugh that you in the West, with all your money, are obsessed with losing weight, whereas us poor Africans, with no money for anything, are trying to be fat.’

  While the practice may be on the wane in town, families in local villages struggle to send their daughters to fattening rooms in the hope of their winning the most eligible bachelors.

  Creek Town, twenty minutes’ boat ride along the muddy Calabar River, used to be a European trading post and is today an eerie place full of abandoned, prefabricated two-storey wood chalets with stained-glass windows criss-crossed with thick cobwebs. On the step of a small concrete shack, across from one of these ghostly relics, three sisters sit sorting periwinkles. Each spent two years in fattening rooms and proudly brings out photographs of her fattened self.