Introduction

Abstract

“Nigerian Women Threaten Naked Protest at Oil Plant,” trumpeted the headline of a Denver Post story on July 15, 2002. “Unarmed village women holding 700 ChevronTexaco workers inside a southeast Nigeria oil terminal,” the story below read, “let 200 of the men go Sunday but threatened a traditional and powerful shaming gesture if the others try to leave—removing their own clothes.” The article reported on the taking of an oil facility in Escavros (Ugborodo) in the Niger Delta by local women seeking to use their “weapon of nakedness” to force ChevronTexaco (CT) to accede to their demands for a number of reforms: greater employment opportunities for local men; infrastructural resources like electricity, running water, and schools to better living conditions in their villages; the creation of fish farms to replace the fishing destroyed by the company’s polluting of rivers and streams; and improvement of the environment degraded by oil spills and gas flares, which the women understood to be harming their children. Faced with the possibility that other groups of protesting women would conduct their own occupations of oil facilities across the Delta, CT eventually gave in to many of the women’s demands, promising to hire a number of local men and committing to build roads, a school, and electricity and water systems.¹