The explorers came in and we are looking for oil everywhere, but they discovered oil here.

In 1953 Chiefsunday in Anguita was 19 years old when oil prospectors first came to his

village of Aloybury. Aloybury was then a small fishing and agricultural community which sat in

the Niger Delta, a vast network of forests, creeks and waterways where the Niger river

meets the sea on Nigeria, south-eastern coast. Many years ago I met Chiefsunday in Anguita

in his village where he still lived in a small one-story house. He sat on his porch and recalled

the moment decades earlier which would change Nigerian history. Back in 1953 the foreign men who

arrived in his village were from a company then called Shell Darcy, a joint venture between Royal

Dutch Shell and Anglo-Iranian oil later BP. Since the 1930s they had been scouring Nigeria in search

of crude oil. The expatriate explorers there were black men but those who led were all whites.

I was very friendly with them. We had markets so they were frequent individuals. I knew quite

a number of them. There were Germans, there were Dutchmen, Englishmen. Sunday in Anguita was young,

educated and interested in what the foreigners were doing. He befriended them and would be

entertained on their houseboats, the floating homes in the creeks for the oil company workers.

We were very friendly. Most of the weekend they took care of me to the house, both go to

parties with them, I used to play football with them, long ten years. And I was very, very inquisitive

driver. So you know why they are all here going into the forest, into the swamps. They said they were

looking for oil. The search for oil in Nigeria had begun in the early 1900s as Nigeria became a

British colony. They found bitumen deposits but they did not find a sufficient quantity or quality

of crude oil to make a commercially viable industry. At the time Nigerians had virtually no say in

the activities of the oil companies. The oil companies had the backing of the British colonial

regime and Nigerians knew that meant any interference with their work could lead to fines or even

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