Colonialism Continues From Oil To Cancer In Kenya / Nelly Madegwa

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4.9 • 937 Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2026

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

Nelly Madegwa is co-author of The Intercept story supported by the Pulitzer Center, "Where There Is Salt: An American Company Drilled for Oil in Kenya — and Left Behind Soaring Cancer Rates," which she co-wrote with Georgia Gee.  Nelly is an award-winning journalist from Kenya whose reporting covers climate change, sustainable development, health, and human rights across Africa. She writes frequently from a gender perspective on issues ranging from public health to sexual violence  Her work has appeared in The Elephant, Minority Africa, taz, and Africa Uncensored. Her storytelling blends investigative and data-driven reporting with human-interest narratives. Nelly is a Pulitzer Center Persephone Miel Fellow. https://theintercept.com/2026/04/06/amoco-bp-oil-kargi-kenya-cancer/ She was first runner-up in the 2021 African Journalist Gender Equality Awards. She also holds a certificate in explanatory journalism from the Knight Center. We will have new installments of Rotten History and Hangover Cure. We will also be sharing your answers to this week's Question from Hell! from Patreon. Help keep This Is Hell! completely listener supported and access bonus episodes by subscribing to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thisishell

Transcript

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0:00.0	The water is with the water with the power.
0:16.0	Take it back in time. Take it down. This is hell.
0:44.2	Capitalism times geography equals colonialism.
0:51.2	And this is hell. What if we knew the origin of all our resources what if we had a
0:59.7	better understanding of how those resources are extracted and refined and their impact on the
1:04.8	local communities who live near those extraction sites and refineries What if we had a clear comprehension of how those
1:13.5	resources contribute to the goods we consume and how that stuff gets to us from wherever they
1:19.1	come from and all the impact on all the workers and their working conditions along the way,
1:24.8	much of which is purposely made invisible to us.
1:29.8	What if we knew exactly how much energy we consume by using those goods,
1:33.9	and then, when we are done with them, the energy needed to dispose of them,
1:38.3	wherever all that waste ends up going?
1:42.0	What if we knew all that so we could consider all that whenever we made
1:47.0	any purchase of anything? Not simply a country of origin label, which is sadly referred to by
1:54.0	its acronym, Cool, C-O-O-L. While it might be a cool marketing gimmick, it's far from enough to understand the global marketplace
2:04.6	in which we live and interact every moment of our lives.
2:09.6	We've asked this question to a few guests, Pankaj Mishra and Lala Kalili, come to mind.
2:15.6	How knowing the before, during, and after of the way we interact
2:19.9	with the market might affect the way we live and view in this world.
2:24.8	And they agreed, if we did understand exactly how all this works, the world would be a very
2:31.9	different place. In 1934, Upton Sinclair ran for Governor of California.
2:38.0	Must not have been, must not have gone well because he wrote a book about it that year called
	...

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