Ogoni Women’s Peace, Nonviolence and Feminist Resistance

The discovery of oil in Ogoni in the mid-twentieth century led to it becoming a heavily militarized area. This militarization escalated in the early 1990s when the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta waged a nonviolent struggle through the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) against Shell Oil Company and the Nigerian government to seek improvement to their political, social, economic and environmental conditions and an end to violence in their land. The Federation of Ogoni Women’s Association (FOWA), the women’s wing of MOSOP, has been at the forefront of this struggle since its inception and views one of its primary goals as existing to establish peace in Ogoni. By providing informal education for women, FOWA teaches, among other things, how to use peace to improve their community and view themselves as the peacekeepers in Ogoni. Based on findings from individual interviews with 10 FOWA leaders in Nigeria and numerous sessions of participant observations and focus group interviews, this chapter seeks to understand how Ogoni women conceptualize peace and use nonviolence to work toward establishing peace in Ogoniland through the FOWA organization.