Why read Where Vultures Feast?

Book cover of Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil in the Niger Delta

Book description

On 22 February 1895, a naval force laid siege to Brass, the chief city of the Ijo people of Nembe in Nigeria's Niger Delta. After severe fighting, the city was razed. More than two thousand people perished in the attack. A hundred years later, the world was shocked by the…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Where Vultures Feast as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Simon Pirani

Author

In 2003 I went to Nigeria to write a report on oil companies’ “corporate social responsibility” in the Niger Delta. There was, and is, no such responsibility. The companies finance corrupt officials, wreck communities, and allow oil spills to poison millions of people’s drinking water. Under the Abacha dictatorship in the 1990s, they colluded with violent suppression of protest against their activities, culminating in the judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the “Ogoni Nine”. This book showed me how Shell’s naked exploitation of people and their land worked, the systems of power that supported it, and how these evolved over…

From Simon's list on The best books about the oil industry.