“Here We Are”: Ogoni Women’s Nonviolent Resistance

Abstract:This study examines the activism of the Ogoni women of southern Nigeria who have organized with their community since the early 1990s to speak against the state and multinational oil companies’ exploitation of their people and resources between 1993 and 2017. The article intends to shed light on the women’s practices of resistance in their movement for self-determination. Through the example of Ogoni women’s activism I provide an illustration of nonviolent resistance as an appropriate mode of resistance to the coloniality of gender because it works to fight the invisibility of Black women. I reveal the operations of the coloniality of gender in the experiences of Ogoni women and their participation in the Ogoni movement. Then I identify ways the Nigerian colonial and neocolonial state denies the women’s existence, and I discuss how they act to insist upon their humanity. In turn, I respond to María Lugones’s call to shed light on the various modes operating in the “oppressing/resisting process at the fractured locus of the colonial difference.”