In Pursuit of Disobedient Women

In Pursuit of Disobedient Women

Prologue
 
The hotel looked like all the other big hotels around here. It was trying hard to be five-star but was no match for the elements. One too many rainy seasons had dulled and dented its mirrored exterior. The heat seeped in from outside, overwhelming the air- conditioning. The lobby’s mahogany-looking floors were actually cheap linoleum that had buckled in the humidity. Mold crept along the edges of the walls.
 
It was early 2016, but the music blaring out of the speakers was a mix of Elton John and Billy Joel and Sting, an easy-listening soundtrack apparently meant to soothe the harsh realities behind the lobby’s glass doors.
 
I had been living in the region for only a few weeks when I shipped out for one of my first assignments as West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times.
 
Fifteen hours of airplane and car rides later, I arrived in the muggy southern tip of Nigeria, deep in the country’s oil-rich Niger Delta, tucked right in the geographic middle of the continent’s armpit.
 
My plan was to talk to residents about the damage a group of militants had done as they blew up oil pipelines in a country that relied on oil proceeds to pay for almost everything in its budget.
 
I was waiting to see Peter, a local journalist who was my “fixer”— the savvy, street smart, on-the-ground operator who arranges interviews and guides international reporters through and, importantly, out of unfamiliar areas.
 
In his prime Peter had led other reporters across some of Nigeria’s roughest spots. Now he was almost 60 and nearing the end of his journalism career. He wore striped golf shirts that didn’t quite cover his potbelly. His thick, black-rimmed glasses magnified his eyes. The first time I worked with him, he had to be roused from his bed half drunk and nearly missed an assignment. New to the job, I didn’t know anyone else more qualified. I hired him to take me to the Delta.
 
The Niger Delta is a dangerous corner of the world in a dangerous corner of the world, where militants were making a sport of taking foreigners for ransom. I didn’t want to be one of those people who worried about getting kidnapped just because they wandered into new places without understanding them. But around here, that fear seemed legitimate. The local papers were reporting new kidnappings every month.
 
Peter might have caved to the occasional bender but he knew the region well. I was pretty certain he wasn’t going to get me kidnapped—at least not intentionally.
 
In the city of Warri at the hotel check-in desk, foreign refinery workers from Chevron, Shell and other big oil companies were checking out. Their lives were calculated to be at risk and their corporate overlords were bringing them home.
 
The people blowing up the oil pipelines were the newest generation of militants who in the past decade had been prowling the Delta’s web of mangrove-lined creeks armed with dynamite. The government for years had honored a deal that paid them to stop, but a new president was threatening to cut o the payments. Attacks were ramping up.
 
Before I could even set down my bags in my hotel room, Peter called my cell.
 
“There’s someone here to meet us,” he said. “Come to the lobby.”
 
I didn’t realize we had a “meeting” scheduled. I grabbed my notebook and rushed to the lobby, where a Celine Dion song was blaring from the speakers now. I spotted Peter and another round-bellied man wearing a beret, who motioned for me to sit down in a corner near the bar. Peter introduced us.
 
The man, Victor, was from a place called Ugborodo, one of the communities deep in the Delta’s miles of skinny, vein-like water- ways that curl around specks of islands before spilling into the Atlantic. Ugborodo was across the water from a giant, gleaming Chevron natural gas terminal—a miles-long space station monstrosity that was itself a modern city, complete with its own air-conditioned apartments and airstrip.
 
Victor began telling me of his village’s misery. Their biggest concern wasn’t the terrorists. Years of careless oil company drilling and transport had time and again spilled ExxonValdez–sized amounts of oil into the water. No one properly cleaned it up. People were so poor they were forced to dine on the fish they pulled from polluted swamps. Most everyone in his community was unemployed, yet the oil and gas companies imported workers from abroad. Those corporations were earning billions at the expense of Victor’s people. They lived in tin shacks with no electricity and shared a single, shabby outhouse propped up in the middle of a murky lagoon.
 
This is going to be an important story, I thought. Maybe Peter wasn’t so bad after all.
 
The lobby music was overpowering the conversation. I leaned closer to catch each of Victor’s eloquent, pained words, trying to ignore the Sting song now blaring in my ear.
 
“The president can’t turn his back on the Niger Delta. This region lays the golden egg for the rest of the country.”
 
You could say I lost my faith in the people on TV, Sting sang.
 
“Our land is polluted. Agriculture no longer thrives,” Victor said.
 
You could say I’d lost my belief in our politicians, they all seemed like game show hosts to me, Sting wailed.
 
I turned around to look for a bartender to lower the volume of the stupid music.
 
“Dionne!” Peter shouted. Probably for the third time.
 
I snapped my head toward him. A dozen men in grubby jeans and tight T-shirts were standing in front of me.
 
The man closest to me was dressed in all black, tall and bald with mirrored sunglasses dangling from his collar. His biceps bulged out of his T-shirt. He wasn’t smiling.
 
My mind raced. Peter had sold me out. These were the kidnappers I had been hearing about.
 
But before I could really worry, my phone beeped with a calendar alert I had set for myself a few weeks back. Out of instinct, I looked down.
 
“Kids need to wear green to school today for Earth Day celebration.”
 
I swiped away the alert, along with the notion that my husband would ever remember to dress the kids in green to save the planet—let alone remember, while I was being held for the next few months in a damp, dark kidnappers’ hideout, which of our kids hates watermelon-flavored anything, which one likes to go to bed with the hallway light on and which one needs her stuffed tiger to fall asleep.
 
I looked up at Peter. He looked at me. I did the only thing I could think to do. I stood and introduced myself. And one by one, the men all shook my hand.
 
They were Victor’s friends. And they were here to talk, not kid- nap me.
 
But they were, in fact, terrorists. Or at least they used to be until a couple years ago when they struck an amnesty deal with the government to lay down their explosives in exchange for cash. Their own pipeline-busting days were behind them, they assured me.
 
I spent the next few hours talking with them about explosives, best practices for backyard oil refining and the topic they were most interested in, the bombastic and unlikely candidate for American president back then, Donald Trump.
 
The men laid out the case for how jilted their region had been, not just by the oil companies but by their own government. Leaders for years had skimmed oil revenues to buy armored Hummers and opulent mega-mansions in the capital city while everyone in the Delta lived in sweltering, small metal shacks on islands where oil flares glared on the horizon, as though they were blowing a fiery raspberry at their misery.
 
To tell their story, I knew I had to see the community they were describing.
 
“Can you take me there tomorrow morning?” I asked.
 
“Yes,” answered an enthusiastic Victor. “But it’s a three-hour ride through the creeks in a small speedboat.”
 
That’s a long time to spend out in the remote, oil-soaked man- groves with a group of ex-militants when other not-so-ex militants are roaming around. Especially for an American journalist who might as well have dollar bills stapled to her forehead.
 
Victor must have read my mind. “We know the area. It will be safe,” he assured me. I believed him.
 
But Mike, the guy in the sunglasses, was agitated, waving his arms and mumbling something to the others, who were getting just as squirmy.
 
“It’s OK,” I said, reassuring him that I wasn’t worried about my safety. “I believe Victor, and I trust you guys. It’ll be fine.” Did they think I was chicken? I knew this job required more guts than shouting questions at a press conference.
 
“It’s not you we’re worried about,” Mike said.
 
They were afraid that if the military spotted them out in the middle of nowhere with a foreigner, let alone a foreign woman, soldiers would assume I was a hostage. They’d be arrested, accused of kidnapping me, and were quite certain no one would believe anything to the contrary.
 
So I spent the next half hour convincing this band of retired terrorists that I was safe to hang with.