ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 focuses on neocolonial exploitation, local government corruption and the effects on local communities and environments in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water. The novel frames its narrative as a detective story, thus suggesting that the scenes of grotesque devastation with which it opens are going to be uncovered with the revelation of a final truth. The chapter shows how narratives of poverty are used to justify neocolonial exploitation in ways that end up perpetuating that poverty. In this way, the representation of place and its relations in Habila’s novel exposes the ‘structural violence’ of oil extraction, whereby a ‘phantasmagoria of petro-commodification’ produces the problems that the mining of natural resources is claimed to solve. The extraordinary complexity of corruption and deceit that is shown to be explicated by the novel requires an approach to the structural violence of oil extraction in places such as the Niger Delta in ways that, the novel suggests, never claim any final or absolute truth. In this way, Oil on Water begins to gesture towards the need to respect differences in our approaches to environmental destruction in the twenty-first century.
