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ECOLITERATURE AND LEADERSHIP DISCOURSE IN 

NIGERIA: A STUDY OF TANURE OJAIDE’S THE 

ACTIVIST AND HELON HABILA’S OIL ON WATER 

 

Abigail Onowosemenmen Oaikhena 

Department of English Language and Literature 

Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka 

Email: abaigailabby1@gmail.com 

 

Dr. Mbanefo S. Ogene 

Department of English Language and Literature 

Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka 

 

 

Abstract 

In Nigeria the effects of the destruction of the natural 

environment, resulting from the destructive extraction of 

resources have been seriously felt. This reality has been 

worsened by the compradoria stance of the national leadership 

class. The poor leadership of the country has influenced every 

strata of the society, particularly literary creativity. Adopting this 

reflectionist paradigm, this study examines the role of 

(mis)leadership in Nigeria, which has culminated in the 

seemingly intractable Niger Delta question in the creative works 

of select Nigerian authors. The paper argues that the leadership 

failures of the Nigerian state has  not only been given attention, 

especially with regards to the Niger Delta question by eco-

literary writers but also, have proffered some (neglected) 

suggestions on how these challenges could be resolved. This 

study examines the literary texts  of  Helon Habila's Oil on 

Water and Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist as exemplars of eco-

literary creativities that speak to our understanding of both the 

Niger Delta discourse as well as the leadership lacuna which 



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often, at the behest of multinational oil corporations work 

against the collective aspiration of the people. These writers, in 

their texts, uncover the socioeconomic relations, leadership 

failure and degraded environment/ecology that endangered the 

lives of the people in Niger Delta refereed through (global) 

capitalism. 

 

Keywords: Militancy, Leadership, Environment, Capitalism and 

Neglect  

 

INTRODUCTION  

The interplay of literature and the environment became a new 

area of interest and an intellectual linking bridge that centers 

principally on the relationship between literature and the 

environment. It addresses and foregrounds ecocritical issues as 

they unfold from the general abuse of the natural environment 

captured by literary writers who are mindful of and passionate 

about a hazard-free ecosystem. The symbiotic relationship that 

exists between literature and the environment has long been 

established and well articulated even before the formal 

inauguration of a critical approach to study the environmental 

side of literature-ecocriticism.  

 

Jelica Tosic establishes the interconnectedness of literature and 

the environment, in her statement that ecocriticism is an 

interdisciplinary study of literature and environment. She asserts 

that, 

 

The word ecocriticism is a semineologism. Eco is 

short of ecology, which is concerned with the 

relationships between living organisms in their 

natural environment as well as their relationships 

with that environment. By analogy, ecocriticism 



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is concerned with the relationships between 

literature and environment or how man’s 

relationships with his physical environment are 

reflected in literature. These are obviously 

interdisciplinary studies, unusual as a 

combination of a natural science and a humanistic 

discipline. That unusual (interdisciplinary) 

combination of the physical and the spiritual can 

be seen in some of the terms used in ecology and 

ecocriticism, which both have the same aim: to 

contribute to the preservation and survival of man 

(43). 

 

Eco Literature explores the plunder of the natural environment; 

this manifests in various ways through the interaction of man 

with the environment. From Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring to 

Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and from Lawrence Buell’s Writing 

for an Endangered World to The End of Nature by Bill 

McKibben, the debate has been on the consequences of the 

interface between nature and people’s activities on the planet. 

Nature in this respect is a victim of the human cultural agent. 

The cultural agent referred to here is global capitalism. The shift 

from the preservation of nature to capitalism in the wake of 

frontier global capitalism is fundamentally ensconced in the 

different modes of humanity’s relation to the earth.  

 

In Africa, the effects of the savage rape of the environment have 

been seriously felt resulting from the destructive extraction of 

resources. Nigerian writers particularly have used literature to 

interrogate the goings-on in the Nigerian environment that poses 

a threat to the environment, nature and society at large. An 

essential facet of this interrogation is eco-literary writings. 

Tanure Ojaide notes that what informed eco-writings in Nigeria 



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is what he describes as ‘‘senseless destruction of our original 

neighbours, the trees and animals’’ (Poetic Imagination in Black 

Africa. 16). Also Niyi Osundare’s crying revelation in the 

preface to The Eye of the Earth strengthens his desire for biotic 

wholesomeness as well as socio-economic wellbeing of the 

masses.According to him, 

 

Waters are dying, forests are falling. A desert 

epidemic stalks a world where the rich and 

ruthless squander earth’s wealth on the invention 

of increasingly accomplished weapons of death, 

while millions of people perish daily from 

avoidable hunger. ( xvi) 

 

However, these Nigerian environmental writers who include 

Tanure Ojaide, Helon Habila, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Odia Ofeimun,  

Niyi Osundare and Kaine Agary among others have articulated a 

way of re-imagining the (Nigerian) environment that melds 

socio–economic existence with environmentalism. According to 

Emmanuel Nwagbara, “they have called for a prioritisation of 

green discourse for better leadership and socio-economic 

relations, as well as environmental sustainability” (qtd in African 

Study Monographs,17). In order to give face to the invisible but 

palpable presence of capitalism on the Nigerian environment, 

these writers have turned to eco –literary writing. They have 

declared themselves chroniclers of the changing environmental 

times, an artistic engagement to save the environment from the 

shackles of global capitalism. Ernst Fisher highlights the 

malignant nature of capitalism, thus; 

 

Capitalism turned everything into a commodity. 

With a hitherto unimaginable increase in 

production and productivity, extending the new 



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order dynamically to all parts of the globe and all 

areas of human existence, capitalism dissolved 

the old world into a cloud of whirling molecules, 

destroyed all direct relationships between 

producer and consumer and flung all products 

onto an anonymous market to be bought or sold. 

(50) 

 

The reality of this practice finds resonance in an ever more 

globalised state of oppression and dominance which is 

characterised by the movement of resources from the periphery 

to the centre, as well as the destruction of the natural world of 

the periphery nations. Victor Ojarokotu asserts that, 

This is the case in Nigeria, particularly the Niger 

Delta, where the multinationals in cahoots with 

the political class have wreaked havoc on the 

ecology, biodiversity, hydrocarbons, marine life 

and environment of the people all in the name of 

international business, oil exploration and global 

capitalism. (99) 

  

The effect of global capitalism which is seen as oil politics, 

perpetuated by the multinational corporations in partnership with 

corrupt leadership system in Nigeria have greatly affected the 

people and the society negatively as they are constantly faced 

with poverty and hunger. 

 

However, this study is predicated on a binary concept: Marxism 

and ecocriticism. They both work hand in hand in the study of 

Eco Literature in Nigeria. In separating them one may run the 

risk of mangling the dynamics of this study, or losing its import. 

This is why this discourse is forged in this fashion – to bring to 

the fore the essentials of concerned writers. This concept is the 



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ideological and socio-economic education or engagement 

needed to sensitize as well as galvanise the masses and readers 

about the nature and the effect of capitalism and bad leadership 

in their environment. Ann Dobie asserts that: 

 

The good Marxist critic is careful to avoid 

the kind of approach that concerns itself 

with form and craft at the expense of 

examining social realities. Instead, the 

Marxist critic will search out the depiction 

of inequities in social classes, an 

imbalance of goods and power among 

people, or manipulation of the worker by 

the bourgeoisie and will then point out the 

injustice of that society (93).  

 

The thrust of Marxism in Eco Literature is to challenge the 

continuing imperialist modes of socio-economic and 

environmental dominance disguised in the name of 

development. In other words, the theory sets out to dispute as 

well as reject the do-gooder mentality of the West by 

discrediting the kind of development brought up in the name of 

modernization. As argued by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, 

ecocriticism sets out to debunk the western ideologies of 

development and redirect the focus of development away from 

the self-serving interest of the West. They claim that, 

 

One of the central tasks of ecocriticism as an 

emergent field has been to contest – also to 

provide viable alternatives to – western 

ideologies of development. These contestations 

have mostly been in alignment with radical 

Third-World critiques that tend to see 



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development as little more than a disguised form 

of neocolonialism, a vast technocratic apparatus 

designed primarily to serve the economic and 

political interests of the West (27) 

 

Development, in this regard, can be viewed as a destructive 

weapon used by the elitist First World countries to continue to 

re-establish and expand the rift between them and the Third 

World countries (especially Africa), so that the former can 

continue to maintain its political power and economic hegemony 

over the latter. In this connection, Oswaldo De Rivero believes 

that “development in western ideology is a means of relegating 

the Third-World countries to the perpetual state of social, 

political and economic standstill under the guise of assisted 

modernization” (The Myth of Development, 110). Huggan and 

Tiffin, state that sustainable development is practically designed 

by the West as a regulating mechanism used to determine 

people’s everyday lives. They further assert that “The term 

‘environment’ itself implies the marketability of nature 

providing an implicit rationalization for the control and 

management of natural resources by the global urban-industrial 

system and its primary political ally, the nation-state” (32)  

 

From this, it is obvious that Marxism and ecocriticism have 

joined forces to collectively challenge human inequalities and 

environmental abuses. By the common grounds that Marxism 

and ecocriticism share in terms of advocacy for social-equality 

and environmental justice (however, undoubtedly polemical to a 

certain extent), most literary works that form the body of the 

Niger Delta literature have profoundly re-established and 

reinforced the ‘mutuality’ between Marxism and ecocriticism. 

By this, one would say, Marxist ecocriticism has become more 



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sophisticated in terms of drawing attention to the socio-political 

usefulness of literary texts without losing its aesthetic values. 

 

Addressing the Niger Delta problem as a case of exploitation 

disguised in the name of development by leaders, some works 

testify to it as a colonial genesis that eventually graduates into 

continuing human inequality and environmental abuses. Of 

course, one has to admit that development as harmful as it is in 

itself, is not what Marxist ecocriticism is contending with, but 

the contention over the blatant social and environmental abuses 

perpetrated in its name. And this same development is a 

camouflage under which the Europe hides to sustain its political 

power and economic hegemony over the developing countries. 

 

In practical terms, what Europe claims to sustain, is not 

development at all but market domination. After all, gaining 

economic power is synonymous with gaining absolute political 

power. 

 

In the same vein, as already argued in this study, the first world 

countries which the oil companies stand for can divert the 

attention of the developing countries from making judicious use 

of the wealth that lies within their environment by controlling 

the leaders. These two bodies then work together for their own 

selfish aims at the detriment of the poor masses. This inhuman 

attitude of these two allies is what most writers of Niger Delta 

Literature in connection with Marxism stand against. 

 

 Leadership Negligence in Helon Habila’s  Oil on Water. 

This novel was evidently written in the aftermath of the 

November 1995 execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa (the Ogoniland 

activist) by the Nigerian dictator, Sani Abacha, its implicit 

political accusations implicate not only the obvious targets 



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(international oil companies’ neo-colonial predation; Nigerian 

leaders and businessmen who allow this by accepting the spoils 

of bribery; the lawless gun-toting warlords and their henchmen 

on all sides, whether army or police, or the militants with whom 

they play their nasty, bloody war games in the waters and on the 

islands of the Niger Delta), but also the local and international 

media who provide the stages on which the antagonists strut and 

rant.  

 

The novel tells the story of a daring adventure of two journalists, 

Zaq and Rufus, commissioned by Mr. James Floode to go in 

search of his wife, Mrs. Isabel Floode was kidnapped by a group 

of Niger Delta militants on Irikefe Island. In the course of the 

journey, the journalists become crestfallen to experience, first-

hand, the depth of environmental degradation and its lingering 

effects on the people. They see “the polluted waters, the 

forsaken villages, the gas flares, the stumps of pipes from 

exhausted wells with their heads capped and left jutting out of 

the oil-scorched earth, and the ever-present pipelines 

crisscrossing the landscape, sometimes like tree roots surfacing 

far away from the parent tree…”(Oil on Water, 182). 

 

Though the experiences described tend to be bleak, with the 

atmosphere that is evoked of a predominantly brooding, 

menacing, frightening kind, Rufus’s mostly matter-of-fact 

recording of his impressions and memories does at times allow a 

poetic lyricism. An alleviating tenderness to creep into his voice 

– like the occasional shafts of sunlight piercing the swirling 

mists over the Delta waters or the patches of clear water in 

between the murky, ill-smelling channels or shores full of oil-

covered garbage or rotting creatures and remnants. Here is one 

example of the Niger Delta river scape and its shores as 

recounted by Rufus: 



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The next village was almost a replica of the last: 

the same empty squat dwellings, the same ripe 

and flagrant stench, the barrenness, the oil slick, 

and the same indefinable sadness in the air, as if a 

community of ghosts were suspended above the 

punctured zinc roofs, unwilling to depart, yet 

powerless to return. In the village centre we 

found the communal well. Eager for a drink, I 

bent under the wet, mossy pivotal beam and 

peered into the well’s blackness, but a rank smell 

wafted from its hot depths and slapped my face; I 

reeled away, my head aching from the encounter. 

Something organic, perhaps human, lay dead and 

decomposing down there, its stench mixed with 

that unmistakable smell of oil. At the other end of 

the village a little river trickled towards the big 

river where we had left our boat. The patch of 

grass growing by the water was suffocated by a 

film of oil, each blade covered with blotches like 

the liver spots on a smoker’s hands. (9) 

 

The neglect of the region by the government has led to 

environmental degradation, pollution, loss of traditional 

occupations, rise in social vices like gun-running, kidnapping, 

militancy, oil theft as well as health hazards, to mention a few.  

 

Oil on Water explores the issue of poverty, lack of social 

amenities as well as insensitivity of the Federal government and 

multinationals in the Niger Delta region these are the major 

causes of youth restiveness in Nigeria. Militancy is indeed not 

new in the region. It  started in Isaac Boro, who out of “fear that 

the Ijaw would not have a fair deal in the military dispensation 



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declared the Niger Delta republic in 1966” (Darah, 10). The 

militant in the region are seen as defenders of the system. The 

youth have turned militants because they want to draw attention 

to their bastardised environment. This militancy can be likened 

to guerilla fighters. In Oil on Water, the narrator, Rufus, recalls a 

certain island they encountered with some reporters from Lagos 

as they search for the militant group that abducts Isabel Floode 

to interview them and also to confirm if she is still alive 

 

In Oil on Water, a lot of concerned members of the communities 

have at one time or the other called the attention of their leaders 

(the government) and the oil companies to the deteriorating 

situation in the region, but nothing reasonable has been done. 

Instead, they feign deaf and dumb to the people’s excruciating 

experience and their continuous ululations. The extent of the 

injustice and insensitivity is incredible and alarming. One 

wonders if the leaders were hired from other countries, say, 

Sudan or Iraq, because they do not feel the pains of the people. 

They treat them as refugees or illegal immigrants. They trade 

their land for oil, degrade their environment and displace the 

people, cutting them off from their natural home and only means 

of sustenance. Yet there are no human feelings, no compassion 

whatsoever to lessen their burdens, allay their fears and douse 

their tensions. Their situation just keeps on degenerating. 

 

Leadership and Revolutionary Discourse in Tanure Ojaide’s 
The Activist. 

Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist is seen by many scholars as a work 

in which the author did not employ his radical voice against 

oppression. Although the text could not be discussed from the 

angle of ecocritism but in it Ojaide reveals the goal of Marxism. 

Revolutionary aesthetics which serves as a corrective measures 

against bad leadership in the novel, is seen from the fall of the 



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bourgeoisie and rise of the proletariats which Marx considered 

as the perfect state of a nation’s economic system, writers, 

especially the African writers, have written on the ills and vices 

in their different distinctive societies as a result of oppression 

and at the same time provide some steps needed for possible 

solutions. 

 

Ojaide explores the economic and socio-political problems 

caused by oil in the Niger Delta in his novel, The Activist. Some 

of these problems are exploitation and the hijacking of people’s 

natural resources to the detriment of the original owners, the 

cause of militancy and prostitution. The exploiters’ actions 

generate a lot of protests both nationally and internationally as 

portrayed by Ojaide. The main character in the novel, the 

Activist “had flown to Europe several times on chartered flights 

to carry placards against Bell Oil International and Group of 

Seven over debt relief for third world countries. He saw World 

Bank and the International Monetary Fund as exploiters of 

developing countries.” (The Activist, 16) 

 

All Ojaide’s major characters in the novel are essentially 

revolutionary characters. They include: the Activist, Pere, Chief 

Ishaka, Ebi and Omagbemi. They are all crafted to give credence 

to Ojaide’s artistic vision, which culminates in populist 

governance. By doing this, the readers could gain palpable 

insights into how intellectualised activism could radicalise 

people’s thoughts and ideals and thereby affect societal 

development.  

 

In the novel, The Activist, Ojaide clearly depicts the goal of 

every Marxist struggle which is victory of the proletariats over 

the bourgeoisie in order to have a balanced economic system in 

the society. Through this he shows that the substructure can help 



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in overthrowing the base. A situation whereby with the aid of 

literature, the economic power of production will be in the hands 

of the lower class. 

 

Conclusion  

From the analysis of the novels selected for this study, it is 

discovered that the socio-economic marginalization and 

environmental damage have a multiplier effect on the 

environment and the society: displacement, moral bankruptcy, 

violence, killing and kidnapping, proliferation of deadly 

weapons, debauchery and overall disruption of the social and 

ecological system. Therefore, a mutual relationship and benefit 

exist between Marxist discourse and environmental discourse 

and this helps to depict the role of our leaders in Nigeria with 

regards to literatures about the Niger Delta.. These writers have 

written accomplished novels that transcend their authorial 

thematic preoccupation and literary values, speaking to all 

mankind with such great practical belief and universal coverage 

that they are capable of making an irrepressible impact on 

society regardless of time and place. Indeed, they perfectly 

justify the assertion that an author is a product of experience and 

reality and literature can also change the system of things in a 

society for the better.  

 

Works Cited 

Dobie, Ann. Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary 

Criticism. Wadsworth: Centage Learning. Third Edition. 

2012. Print.  

De Rivero, Oswaldo. The Myth of Development. Zed Books, 

London: 2001 

Fischer, Ernst. The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach. 

Northampton: Peregrine Books. 1984. Print. 

 



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Habila, Helon. Oil on Water. London: HarrishHamilton , 2010.  

 Print 

Huggan, Graham and Tiffin, Helen. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: 

Literature, Animals, Environment. New York: 

Routledge. 2010. Print. 

Nwagbara, Uzoechi. ‘‘Poetics of Resistance: Ecocritical Reading 

of Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues & Home Songs and 

Daydream of Ants and Other Poems ’’. African Study 

Monographs, 31.1(2010):17-30  

Ojaide, Tanure. The Activist. Lagos: Farafina. 2006. Print. 

Ojaide, Tanure. Poetic Imagination in Black Africa: Essays in 

African Poetry. North Carolina: Carolina Academic 

Press, 1996. Print. 

Ojakorotu, Victor. 2008. ‘‘The Internationalisation of Oil 

Violence in the Niger Delta of Nigeria’’. Alternatives: 

Turkish Journal of Int’l Relations. Benin City: Ethiope 

Publishing Corporation.2008. Print. 

Osundare, Niyi. Style and Literary Communication in African 

Prose Fiction in English. Ibadan: Hope Publication Ltd. 

2008. Print. 

Tosic, Jelica. “Ecocriticism – Interdisciplinary Study of 

Literature and Environment.”Walking and Living 

Environmental Protection. London: Oxford University 

Press. 2006.  

 


