We Are Pipeline People: Nnedi Okorafor’s Ecocritical Speculations

Petroleum extraction, transportation, and consumption follow global routes familiar to the historiography of the African diaspora. Pipelines in the Niger Delta transport crude oil to tankers owned by US-based multinational oil corporations such as Shell, Chevron, and ExxonMobil, delivering this global commodity across trans-Atlantic routes to North American entry points, routes familiar to the history of the slave trade. Whereas European and American projects of empire extracted the lives and bodies of African people in the centuries preceding oil, since the discovery of crude oil in the Niger Delta in the 1950s a different form of extraction has been occurring,