I talk to Williams on the phone about once a month, seventeen years after we first met in Nembe Creek, a remote fishing village and militant headquarters in the oil-rich Niger Delta of Nigeria. On a Sunday afternoon in September 2022, during an uncharacteristic fall rainstorm in Oakland, I take his call.
“Now wow o! Oga my oga!” I say.
“Dan Dan, how body now?” he asks.
“Body dey inside cloth,” I respond. “No wa, everyday we hustle, but no wa.”
We greet in pidgin English, joking and laughing. And then catch up. “Oil business is slow,” he tells me. “(Nigerian President) Buhari done jaga jaga (mess up) the whole economy.”
Williams is a middleman in Nigeria’s thriving black market oil trade. It is an improbable journey from the frustrated militant I met in 2005 while living in Nigeria for a year as a Fulbright Scholar. Back then, he was 23 years old, and felt trapped. He dreamed of going to University and leaving his fraught occupation as a sharp-shooting militant in the Niger Delta. But he had to provide for his four-year-old son. Williams didn’t see a way out. When I left Nigeria in February 2006, he said, “I don’t think I will be around too much longer. The creeks are a dangerous place. But if you come back, and my son doesn’t have to be a killer, you can be happy for me.”
That son is now twenty years old, and Williams has two younger children. His youngest son is seven, about the same age as my oldest child. “I told my son I have a brother in California,” Williams tells me over the phone. “My son said, ‘you have a brother in California? How can you have a white man as a brother? Your Mom had a Black baby and then a white baby. How is that possible?’ I said, ‘ok, ok, too many questions, I don’t know how to explain it. He is a friend. But he is my brother.’ Maybe next time I call you can explain it to him.”
We are well-aware of the tropes of white savior, harmful do-gooder, and clueless interloper. But in Nigeria, and in almost twenty years of doing this work, I’ve found there is another way of doing cross-cultural research that can be mutually beneficial, enriching, and eye-opening for everyone involved.
The story of William’s rise from militant to oil businessman is also the story of a friendship that began through my work researching a play, and endures eighteen years after we first met. I am an actor and playwright who creates journalistic theater. When people see the shows, they get a glimpse into the process, of the trust built with the people I profile. But they don’t realize that the relationships made in the creation of a show often last long after I stop performing, and sometimes have surprising second acts.
I had arrived in Port Harcourt for a year long stay as a Fulbright scholar researching my theater piece on Nigeria’s oil politics in March 2005. I was shocked at first by the everyday corruption, the multiple power dynamics of every interaction, how people could offer real emotional comfort and try to get over on someone at the same time. I was viewing the world through the lens of a middle class American liberal, seeking the clarity of moral absolutes in a world that is far too messy.
I was told again and again by Nigerians that to truly understand what was happening in the Niger Delta, and Nigeria, I had to abandon this world view, jettison squeamishness, and try to see and experience the world the way Niger Deltans did. Of course I could never fully close the gap, but that became my goal. I learned pidgin English, I rode local buses, I played soccer with my neighbors in their backyard in the evenings, and jisted and joked after while sharing a beer. I haggled aggressively over prices. I learned to laugh off attempts at intimidation and defuse conflict by saying I was only small boy and not a Big Man. And I traveled all over the Niger Delta, alone, with a small school backpack. Weeks would go by in which I wouldn’t see another foreigner.
When I first met Williams, he was called Okosi mostly. I had been dropped off by public transport (a speedboat that could pack up to 20 people at a time), in his remote and notoriously volatile village of Nembe Creek. The driver shouted the name of Professor Alagoa to the closest adult at the jetty, explanation and bonafides for this lone, scrappy white guy.
I was taken into a shack and addressed by a half dozen youth leaders of the village, who were also clearly the leaders of the militant group in that area. One man named Captain, tall and sinewy, with close cropped hair and more limited English, led the effort to present themselves as ruthless and fearless freedom fighters. They gave me their rehearsed list of talking points, scowling performatively.
When I told them I was writing a play and wanted to stay in their village for several days, the scowls turned into smiles and jokes between them. They realized they could not keep up this performance for several days. Some of them, I would later find out, were wanting to kidnap me for ransom payments. But they argued against that, and shifted towards figuring out where I would sleep. I showed them my lame REI mosquito net and they howled with laughter. It was far smaller and thinner than their UN-issued nets.
I was told I would stay with Okosi, because he was younger than me. His place was a cramped wooden shack he had constructed, with a narrow bed in the corner. He had a getaway bag packed in case of attack by a rival militant group or a Nigerian military raid. At night, he thrashed around in bed, haunted by PTSD nightmares from his work as a sniper and fighter with the militants.
We would travel around the village and to neighboring villages, talking to fisherman, women cooking meals, Nigerian oil workers, other militants, and small shop keepers. And slowly Williams’ story came out, of him being pressed into militancy when he was fifteen years old. He had joined because he had no prospects for a better life. He was wracked with guilt from the violent raids they made on other militant groups.
Williams was indispensable during my time in Nembe Creek, patiently and diligently introducing me to everyone he knew, providing subtext and background power dynamics to every interaction. I visited Nembe Creek and stayed with him for several stays of three to five days at a time. But I didn’t know that while I was learning how people lived and thought in the Niger Delta, he was studying how I did my work.
Eventually he summoned the courage to leave militancy. He threw his guns into the creeks. At the time, he explained the decision as one of guilt and remorse for being a part of violence. Later though he revealed there was a complex backstory to this shift. As he tells it, he’d never met anyone like me that got to ask questions and tell stories as a job. It was exposure to a completely different set of opportunities. He was able to imagine a life for himself not predicated on being an intimidator with a rifle, but on being a businessman with a gift of gab.
When I left Nigeria, things were very unsure for him. It was unclear if he would resist the pull of militancy, and if he could make ends meet. We kept in touch and I sent money via Western Union occasionally.
And then I got the phonecall from the State Department. A woman with a Swedish accent informed me the U.S. State Department would like to produce a tour of my show back in Nigeria. To five different cities over two weeks. What a dream come true. I could take the show back to the people who had inspired it.
In October, 2009, I performed the show in Calabar, Lagos, Jos, and Bauchi to warm and boisterous audiences of Nigerians. Multiple times I had to pause performances for clapping while audience members shouted “Now true o!” in affirmation.
We weren’t able to travel to the Niger Delta due to security concerns. I was worried I wouldn’t get to see Williams. So I bought him a flight to come see the show in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. Williams boarded the first plane of his life with only the clothes on his back. He arrived at the swanky hotel in Abuja in a state of head-spinning shock.
As I detailed in a previous piece for Mother Jones, leaving militancy had continued to be fraught and challenging. He’d been beaten and pressured to rejoin the gang, showing off a long scar on his forehead. He escaped captivity, and had been living in Yenagoa, the capital of Bayelsa State, doing day labor work.
The State Department had lined up a television interview in Abuja to promote the show, so I brought him on with me, and he told his story to a Nigerian national TV audience. He caught the eye of Jonathan Mack, a State Senator from the Niger Delta, who was working to create an amnesty program for Niger Delta militants. The idea was to coax militants to trade in their guns and renounce violence in exchange for skills training, monthly payments, and the chance to study at University abroad.
I assisted Williams as best I could from back home in San Francisco, gathering documents and giving testimony to various program coordinators of his skills, talents, and trustworthiness. For a while I talked on the phone regularly with a Nigerian ex-pat in Regina, Canada who was working to make Regina University the home of the Nigerian ex-militant study abroad program.
Eventually Williams and several dozen militants received acceptance and funding to study in Accra, Ghana. He called me one of his first nights there. I could hear his fellow ex-militants whooping it up in the background.
But within weeks, Williams and the ex-militants decided it was not for them. They were men in their ‘30s and ‘40s who’d spent most of their lives in Nigerian villages. They were all home-sick, and overwhelmed. Williams returned to Nigeria after three months, along with most of the other ex-militants.
It looked bleak for Williams. He wasn’t sure what his next move was. After years of build up to study abroad, the reality was deflating.
But the sheen of being an internationally educated college student paid big dividends in Nigeria. And while he was in Ghana, Nigeria changed a law that had previously only allowed Nigerian military to secure oil infrastructure. (Nigerian troops, underpaid and poorly trained, were notorious for heavy handed tactics that resulted in serial human rights abuses and killings.) Now, civilians could provide security for oil businesses. For years, militant groups had been fighting over “ghost contracts” to provide security (and not commit attacks of their own) for oil companies in a nebulous and conflict-prone arrangement. With the new law, they could go into business legally.
So Williams used his contacts in the Niger Delta plus his connections with Nigerian politicians from the television interview to become an owner-operator in the semi-legal supply side of Nigeria’s oil industry. Having spent his youth fighting over payouts to stay peaceful from the oil companies, he joined the oil business himself. Now every time he called he would detail how his business had grown, how new contracts were in the offing. He built a two story house for himself in Yenagoa, and bought an old Mercedes Benz.
As an ex-combatant enrolled in the amnesty program, he still gets a monthly payment from the Nigerian government. He says there are 30,000 ex-militants who get this payment. On top of his oil business contract work, he has some financial security.
It’s a long way from when I stayed with him in Nembe Creek in 2005. One night then, we sat in plastic deck chairs around an upturned flashlight, smoking cigarettes, drinking khai khai, and singing songs with several other militants. Captain at one point led a traditional war song. I sang it back to Williams over the phone from Oakland. He sang along too. I watched a balmy rain fall on my backyard in Oakland, singing an Ijaw war song with Williams, seventeen years after we first sang it together.
I looked at the rain lashing the trees, and marveled at how both our lives had been changed by our meeting in Nembe Creek, and the friendship that followed. And that though our circumstances are so different, we had both become owner-operators, him lining up oil shipments, me telling stories. That year in Nigeria formed so much of how I view the world, and I think about Nigeria everyday. Williams wants to come to California, but he is in no rush. “You know everybody here in Naija they say ‘you have a friend in California, you need to go there!’ But I know money does not grow on trees there. I am an African. I love my place. I don’t want to go to California to be star struck. I only want to go to add to my life experiences.”
Great piece, Dan, and the pictures add so much to the story. As I read this is the small town in S. Texas where I grew up, I totally understand how hard it is for people to leave home, even when such huge opportunities present themselves. The goal in creating a just society is providing folks with a chance to support themselves and their families and to live a life in peace, wherever they may be.