Volume III, Issue I Available for Order Now
DOONU KUNKEE IS THE WORD FOR THE TRADITION IN OGONI, AND IT ALSO MEANS HONORING THE LAND.
Before the first oil derrick broke the Ogoni land, and the gas flares turned the skies of the Niger Delta a soot-filled amber, before the ‘resource’ was used on the place where the ancestors of my people had a covenant with the earth, there was this land and its rivers. There was the sweet yam, cassava, garden egg, the palm kernel that was cracked for its nuts, and there was a people who lived communally and knew themselves completely.
The Ogonis fight for justice through their spiritual relationships with land and food. Oil extraction disrupts the ecology of Ogoniland and alters cultural practices—from farming and fishing to preparing ancestral meals. Despite these changes, survival and self-determination persist. Resistance runs through generations, from Ken Saro-Wiwa’s political struggle to Zina Saro-Wiwa’s artistic practice, which reimagines eating as a way to reclaim place.
I come from a people once known as the food basket of the Niger Delta. The Ogoni nation, occupying about one thousand square kilometers in Rivers State in southern Nigeria, took pride in feeding themselves and neighbouring communities. Their land was generous, sitting on fertile plateau soils that joined the creeks and rivers of the Delta. Yams were planted with ceremony; the growing season was regarded as more than agriculture, but spiritual duty. This land belonged to Bari, the supreme deity through whom the Ogoni cosmos was created, who lived, and still lives, in the soil, rivers, and waterways that dot the land.
When Shell arrived in Ogoni land in 1958, what followed was what Ken Saro-Wiwa, the slain Ogoni writer and activist, would later call an ecological war.[1] Oil spills glazed the rivers black, while gas flares burned endlessly and poisoned the rain. Fish vanished from rivers that had fed families for generations. Even staple foods such as cassava and yam failed in soil made toxic by petrochemical discharge.[2] Yet the Ogoni people, who never benefitted from the oil extracted beneath their feet and still lacked potable water, electricity, and schools for their children, found themselves dispossessed. The only wealth that had always been theirs was turned into something of a curse.
In Ogoni spiritual life, the land and rivers cannot be reduced to resources for profit; they are respected as life forms and as part of Bari. The planting of yams was a sacred occasion, just as streams and rivers were regarded as places of communion with the divine. Not unexpectedly, when Shell began its operations, it brought toxic waters and the destruction of local livelihoods, along with the erosion of the Ogoni cosmology itself. In the deepest sense, the colonization of Ogoniland by oil can rightly be understood as a spiritual dispossession.
Ken Saro-Wiwa was born in Bori, Ogoniland, in 1941, during British colonial rule in Nigeria. Before anything else, he was a playwright, television producer, novelist, and environmental activist. When the destruction of his homeland became an undeniable reality, Saro-Wiwa took up the baton of resistance. He became a founding voice of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) and played an instrumental role in drafting the Ogoni Bill of Rights in 1990, a document that sought political autonomy for the Ogoni people, a reasonable share of oil revenues extracted from Ogoni, and the clean-up of environmental destruction caused by Shell.[3]
In January 1993, MOSOP led peaceful demonstrations involving about 300,000 Ogoni people, more than half of the entire Ogoni population, to draw attention to the crisis. The movement was not tolerated. Shell reached out to the Nigerian government for assistance, and the military responded by burning Ogoni villages, killing many people in the process. By 1993, Shell had withdrawn its American employees and machinery from Ogoniland, marking an impressive, though temporary, victory for the people.[4]
General Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s military dictator at the time, refused to let that victory stand. In May 1994, four Ogoni chiefs were murdered, and Saro-Wiwa was later accused of responsibility for their deaths. He was arrested and tried before a military tribunal condemned internationally as a sham. Two witnesses later admitted that they had been bribed by the government and promised jobs at Shell in exchange for false testimony. On November 10, 1995, Saro-Wiwa and eight other MOSOP leaders, known as the Ogoni Nine, were hanged at Port Harcourt Prison. But before the noose took him, Saro-Wiwa said: “Lord, take my soul, but the struggle continues.”[5]
The state knows that his memory continues to command significance in the ongoing struggle for the Ogonis. In June 2025, the President of Nigeria, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, granted a posthumous pardon to Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni nine, about thirty years after the state hanged them.[6] His daughter Zina Saro-Wiwa received the gesture responded by saying in an interview with BBC in 2025 by saying “It’s really important that we move toward an exoneration because a pardon doesn’t cut it—my father was innocent.” The people are not asking for forgiveness but to have the truth restored, exonerated, and their name cleared.[7]
Zina, impacted by her father’s death, says it’s what made her an artist today. After getting an education in Britain, she returned to the Niger Delta in 2013, and made a home there as a culture worker.[5] She opened a gallery in her father’s former office building in Port Harcourt, and there she began to make art that refused the dominant story of the region.[8] Zina was looking for other truths.
Her popular series of work, Table Manners, was started in 2014 to portray Ogoni men and women sitting before the camera and eating the staple foods garri and egusi soup, roasted cocoyam with palm oil, and garden egg with groundnut butter.[9] Each video and image she created was titled after the person’s name and their meal, and the specific place where it was filmed.
“A lot of my work is trying to connect the personal with the political because I think blatantly political work doesn’t really reach people. That’s why I talk about things like emotional landscape,” Zina told the Guardian in a 2018 interview. She said the reconnection with food spiritually is a form of defiance, that restores her people to a place that truly belongs to them, even with the persistent and disastrous interventions from outsiders. Ogoni people love to grow their own food, as the meals become a way of cultural persistence, and a mediation on power and place.[9]
For Zina, food is one of the languages of return to her land. There, she founded the Mangrove Arts Foundation to attend to the realities of the Niger Delta, working with local artists, farmers, cooks, and historians to regenerate a land that was made sick by oil extraction.[10] Through her Illicit Gin Institute, she turns to the palm wine spirit widely called ogogoro, and often dismissed as illicit, contraband, or something treated as inconsequential, to protect what the oil economy has always tried to erase. It’s this Indigenous ingenuity and deep ecological knowledge that the Ogonis have been distilling meaning from their land long before any pipeline arrived.[11] It is the insistence that what existed in Ogoniland before the arrival of oil extraction remains present and continues to deserve recognition and honor. From her interview with Frieze, Zina reflects, “I think regions are strong when they maintain strong cultural ties to their past and thus a powerful sense of self. Cultural power leads to other forms of power.”[12]
Zina, like her father, is a culture worker. The Ogoni people have long understood what many revolutionary traditions know: the struggle for land is inseparable from the struggle to preserve culture, food, and identity.
Till today, the Ogoni nation survives, and so does MOSOP. People of the Niger Delta continue planting cassava in polluted soil because what other choice is there when the land is their mother, and the mother is in danger? Resistance to destructive oil extraction lives through farming, fishing, culinary practices, and spiritual ceremonies. The Ogoni resistance is also the act of eating from the land with your hands and looking the world in the eye.[13]
Though assassinated for defending the land, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s legacy lives on through his daughter. She continues his fight by advocating for his exoneration and advancing the causes he championed. Through the Mangrove Arts Foundation—a nonprofit she founded—and the Illicit Gin Institute, a radical think-tank, she explores how earth-based wisdom subverts political power and sparks creativity.
While she carries out her fight for struggles in a different way than her father, they both lean on Ogoni wisdom. And through the collective fight, somewhere in Ogoniland, someone is cracking a palm kernel and honouring the earth in the same way their great-grandparents once did, in the language of Doonu Kuneke.
Peer Reviewed by: Shivon Pearl Love
