Narratives of Life aNd vioLeNce aLoNg the chadcamerooN oiL PiPeLiNe Amber Murrey Abstract his article further develops a critical geographical theory of structural violence. It does so by considering the ways people in Nanga-Eboko and Kribi, two communities in Cameroon, report feeling and experiencing structural violence along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. For people living within spaces (re)produced through structurally violent processes, projects, and extractions, a triad of intersecting experiences emerge: structural violence is felt as (i) tangible through the body (senses of loss, the belly, the body, and nourishment), or described through gendered narratives of hunger, illness, and the experiences of land dispossession; (ii) historically compounded, or characterized by a rootedness in the colonial and racist structures of the past alongside expectations that present-day structural violence threatens future generations; and (iii) spatially compounded, or experienced through a concurrent spatial overlapping (or compounding) as multiple forms of structural violence converge within the same landscapes and lifescapes, efecting displacement in-place. Each of these, felt simultaneously, has the efect of rendering structural violence acutely visible, tangible as it is in the restructurings of landscapes and lifescapes, despite discursive attempts to cloak, bury, and eface by powerful actors. Looking toward the narratives that people use to critique and engage with such violence provides conceptual tools for wider resistance practices against structural violence. Geography and the Environment University of Oxford, UK Keywords: displacement in-place; hunger; oil pipeline; politics of visibility; structural violence Narrativas de Violencia y Vida a lo largo del Oleoducto Chad-Camerún Resumen Este artículo contribuye al desarrollo de una teoría geográica crítica de la violencia estructural, considerando las formas en que los pueblos en Nanga-Eboko y Kribi (dos comunidades camerunesas) dicen sentir y experimentar la violencia estructural a lo largo del oleoducto Chad-Camerún. Para los pueblos que viven dentro de espacios (re)producidos mediante procesos, proyectos y extracciones estructuralmente violentos surge una tríada de experiencias interrelacionadas; la violencia estructural se siente: a) tangible en el cuerpo (el estómago, el cuerpo y las náuseas), o descrita a través de narrativas de género sobre hambre, enfermedad y experiencias de saqueo de sus tierras; b) compuesta históricamente, o caracterizada por la importancia de las estructuras coloniales y racistas del pasado junto a la idea de que la violencia estructural actual amenaza a las generaciones futuras; y c) compuesta espacialmente, o experimentada a través de un solapamiento (o compuesto) espacial cuando se da la convergencia de múltiples formas de violencia estructural dentro de los mismos paisajes y escenarios de vida, constituyendo verdaderos desplazamiento in situ. Cada uno de estos 15 NARRATIVES ALONG THE CHAD-CAMEROON OIL PIPELINE sentimientos, que se sienten de manera simultánea, tiene el efecto de volver claramente visible la violencia estructural , que se hace tangible tal cual es en la restructuración de los paisajes y escenarios de vida a pesar de los intentos discursivos de ocultarlos, enterrarlos y eliminarlos de los poderosos. Analizar las narrativas que utiliza la gente para criticar y enfrentarse a esa violencia provee herramientas conceptuales para analizar prácticas de resistencia contra la violencia estructural. Palabras clave: Desplazamiento in situ, Hambre, Oleoducto, Estrategias de Visibilidad, Violencia Estructural. Introduction Figure 1. Abandoned building, former pipeline work camp, outside Nanga (Amber Murrey) Outside the rural town of NangaEboko (hereinafter Nanga, as it is called by the people who live here) in central Cameroon, I saw the irst physical evidence of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline: a semi-destroyed worker’s base camp. he camp was used temporarily during the pipeline’s construction between 2000 and 2003 to house and feed migrant laborers, as well as to store the project’s heavy equipment. With the air fresh and moist at the height of rainy season, I was visiting with two brothers, Daniel and Simon, who live in the homes nearest the remains of the base camp. Walking along the muddy path towards Figure 2. Another abandoned building, former pipeline work camp, the brothers’ groundwater source, we outside Nanga (Amber Murrey) looked down the hill to the area where bits of linoleum were cast haphazardly on the ground. the work camp once stood, now a vast expanse of Anything of value that might have been left had long exposed red earth, with a few scattered buildings since been picked over. Consortium documents assert (Figures 1 and 2). After the construction phase ended that, “after construction…the site of the construction in the area, the roofs of the concrete buildings were camp would be returned to its natural contours and torn of and the insides of the buildings were gutted, grade and topsoil returned to those areas where it was exposing the concrete foundations to the elements. removed” (3.2.1.2 Esso Chad/Cameroon 1997: 3-6); he remaining concrete walls were heavily cracked this area had not been returned to its natural contours. and thick with underbrush. Glass shards and torn 16 Human Geography AMBER MURREY he brothers, Simon Akono and Daniel Nkouma, spoke at once, “You wouldn’t know it ever existed, but the work camp was like a town. It was bigger than the town, even—it moved.”1 he abandoned buildings— once the oices, sleeping quarters, ablution units, laundry units and recreation hall—were all that remained above ground. Later, in Nanga, I was told that the heavy equipment used during the construction phase was demounted and buried there. To the people who believe this story, the place is a burial ground. We by-passed the camp on our way to the men’s post-pipeline water source, walking along the large road, which was wide enough for two vehicles to pass easily despite the almost complete lack of vehicles in Nanga (where bensikiners2 or motorcycle taxis predominate). he road was built to facilitate the work along the pipeline, but is now used by local foot and motorcycle traic, as well as logging rigs. We left the main road as it split of to a footpath, leading down to a small ravine. My rain-boots slipped several times on the muddy rocks and I wondered at the technique and skill that one would need to carry a bucket of water on the way back up. Before the pipeline, the family used a communal well near the work camp. hat well had been destroyed 1 Some names have remained unchanged while others have been altered to preserve anonymity (each relects the personal preference of the person). In a project concerned with recovering, uncovering, and creating space for people’s voices, lives, ontologies and epistemologies, I felt that a discursive violence would be efected by efacing the names of those who speciically requested that I not do so. Many of the people whom I spoke with were adamant that their stories be heard, powerfully asserting their right to be known—not as a number, a euphemism, or a pseudonym, but as themselves. he literature on power and politics in ethnographic research almost uniformly espouses the need for anonymity, emphasizing the researcher’s position of power and privileging the researcher’s ability to consider the dangers of revealing people’s identities. In this case, dismissing people’s demands to have their names recorded would be a discursive injustice. here is no indication of which names have been changed for anonymity and which have not. 2 Following de-colonial critiques of linguistic Anglocentrism, non-English words are not italicized, not placed in quotations, and not visually set apart from English here. he visual practices of italicizing or isolating non-English words contribute (even inadvertently) to colonizing projects, labeling non-English languages as aberrant, exotic, or Other. during the pipeline’s construction and COTCO (the Cameroon Oil Transportation Company), the private company in charge of overseeing pipeline operations in Cameroon, resolved to provide them with a replacement. We arrived at the end of the trail; the brothers showed me the replacement well. It was faulty, now nothing more than a solid concrete form, slick with mud and un-use. heir family gathers rainwater when they can, the brothers said, otherwise they collect water from where it seeps from the forest loor, just footsteps from the faulty well. In Cameroon, water-related illnesses, and the parasitic diseases that thrive in standing water, are everyday threats. Onchocerciasis, a parasite transmitted through the bite of what are locally called les moutmouts (a black ly of the genus Simulium), can cause blindness. Months later, I was told by people living in the villages around Kribi, approximately 450 kilometers from Nanga, that the wind tunnel created by the pipeline right-of-way facilitated the spread of les moutmouts to the Kribi area, where they had never before been a problem. here are reports that a number of illegal cost-savings practices were used during the pipeline’s construction, including the illing of pipeline trenches with “cement bags mixed with cement and topsoil” instead of the more environmentally safe gabion bags (wire baskets) illed with stones to protect the pipe (Keenan 2005: 402).3 Filling the pipeline trench with cement and topsoil causes cement leeching and washout, polluting water sources along the right-of-way with calcium hydroxide (Keenan 2005). he older brother, Daniel, smiles as he shakes his head. For three years he has struggled with the local administration and COTCO to resolve the problem of access to clean drinking water. Daniel is unemployed and, like many Cameroonians, is adept 3 hese reports are further substantiated through the testimony of Alan M. Dransield, a former ExxonMobil Engineer who was terminated from the project in 2002 for objecting to what he calls the pipeline’s “myriad of H&S (Health and Safety) violations,” including failure to install Emergency Shut Down Valves at all major river crossings, insuicient pipeline coating, testing failures, trench backill violations, welding violations, and an improperly designed and installed iber optic cable (interview with Alan M. Dransield, by Djamil Ahmat 2014). Volume 8, Number 1 2015 17 NARRATIVES ALONG THE CHAD-CAMEROON OIL PIPELINE in se débrouillage (managing lifetime-unemployment with temporary jobs in a variety of sectors). During the construction period, he was hired temporarily as a “room boy” to clean the worksite dining hall, wash latrines, and dispose of garbage. During the “moment of the pipeline” (the brothers’ term for the period of pipeline construction), people jokingly and optimistically called themselves “Americans” because, it was believed, “dollars” would “pour” into the town from oil wealth. he construction period brought a brief but unprecedented inlux of cash into Nanga, as subsistence farmers and small-scale commercial farmers were compensated for the destruction of crops, hundreds of migrant laborers consumed local goods, and local men (those employed during construction were almost exclusively male) were employed in temporary labor positions. he younger brother, Simon, worked “in the ground” laying pipe. As he spoke, he was visibly agitated, waving towards his clothes, dusty and worn, with sizable holes in both trouser knees. Having just returned from the forest, where he taps matango (palm wine), he had his machete in hand. He used it to point at his body, waving the machete from his toes to his head. “Regarde-moi,” he said, “On se retrouve dans la vieille époque, avec toute l’ancienne misère” (look at me—we ind ourselves in the olden days, with all of the ancient miseries). He used his body and his clothing as an indication of the pipeline’s cost to the landscape and to people’s bodies, inscribing his body with the history of the pipeline. As Simon and I spoke, Daniel walked along the edges of the road to avoid sinking into the thick red mud in his blue plastic lip-lops. He stopped to reiterate what his brother said about the miseries of “ancient times,” showing me his pufy right eye. His sclera, or the white of his eye, was a vivid red. He wiped at it periodically with the back of his hand, blinking quickly. As we walked back up the hill towards their homes, we grew quiet, and I didn’t ask any more questions. We reached the top of the hill, where a group of neighborhood children were playing. hey stopped to hug arms and laugh at me, the sunburned ntangan. hey ran towards us, giggling and jumping 18 on the roadside. he air was heavy with the coming rain as we said our goodbyes. Outline of arguments Daniel and Simon’s account reveals some intersections of the palpable forms of violence brought about through the construction, implementation, and everyday operations of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline as well as how these are compounded by additional ecological and structural violence(s) (Figure 3).4 People’s narratives along the pipeline merge the experiences of deforestation, land dispossession, pollution and contamination of groundwater, the spread of the moutmout ly, and so on—experiences which have been mostly analyzed in isolation in academic scholarship on the pipeline. A focus on how these forms of violence overlap is meaningful in terms of understanding the experiences of the continuities of structural violence. By focusing the conceptual lens narrowly on one form of violence, we overlook mutually constituting forms that simultaneously conigure landscapes and lifescapes. In this framework, instead of conlating discrete forms of violence within one rubric, we might speak to the experiences of structural violence in Nanga and Kribi as one of an expansive matrix of land dispossession, displacement in-place, and ecological destruction. he concept of structural violence dates back to Johan Galtung’s (1969) work on social position theory, as he developed an holistic lens for the study of social inequality. Inluenced by Latin American liberation theologians, Galtung broadened the conceptual lens of violence by arguing that the dominant focus on direct violence—i.e. those violence(s) with precise beginnings and ends as well as clearly identiiable agents—is a restricted focus that omits the structures that frame physical violence as well as the ways in which institutions and institutional actors inlict violence. Drawing inspiration from Antonio Gramsci’s (1982) analysis of how ordinary people (or “organic intellectuals”) look at and describe political power, combined with critical geography’s focus on 4 Oicially titled the Chad–Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project, the name has been shortened here to relect its more common nomenclature. Human Geography AMBER MURREY the cognitive and embodied experiences of land dispossession and “displacement in-place” (Magaramombe 2008; Nixon 2011; Mollett 2014).5 Along the pipeline, structural violence is experienced as “displacement in-place,” as access to safe drinking water and agriculturally fertile land is severely restricted, leading to illness, and aggravating hunger. Displacement in-place is a form of displacement-through-abandonment, as large-scale ecological damage destroys people’s homes, landscapes, and livelihoods without displacing them far from it (physical displacement did happen in some places along the pipeline, at short distances; most land dispossession occurred as plantations were destroyed and familial/communal land was appropriated). Instead of displacing people from their land, the pipeline transformed the landscape, leaving them displaced-athome with contaminated water sources, soil erosion, deforestation, and oil spill pollution, as revealed through narratives of hunger (from soil erosion and decreased crop yields), illness (from polluted, contaminated, and destroyed water sources), and environmental uncertainty (Figure 4). At the same time that the landscape is dramatically changing and people are Figure 3. Map of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline (Amber Murrey) psychologically attending to potential disaster, mobility is constrained by local police, the gendarmerie, and COTCO security guards. material, lived, and embodied experiences (Castree et al. 2010)—including the emphasis on the “historical 5 I have been unable to determine the precise roots of the geography of material practice[s]” (Harvey 1996: concept “displacement in-place” (also displacement-in-place 183)—I outline a re-articulation of the theory of or displacement in situ); it emerged in the early 2000s in the structural violence by focusing on people’s interpretaliterature on development displacement as a means to expand theories of displacement to include non-physical forms. he tions and experiences along the Chad-Cameroon Oil earliest piece I located is from a paper presentation given by Pipeline. One experiential marker of structural violence is the embodied struggles and physical pain(s) resulting from structural forms of violence. hese are expressed along the pipeline through gendered narratives of hunger and illness, overlapping and arising out of Magaramombe in 2008. Nixon (2011) and Mollett (2014) articulate variations of the concept. Godfrey Magaramombe (2010: 364) articulates displacement in situ as the “material and socio-economic losses without enforced movement to diferent places” or the “social dimensions of displacement beyond physical uprooting.” Building on similar ideas, Sharlene Mollett (2014: 4) explains, “Much displacement does not involve physical movement but takes the form of constraints on livelihoods and cultural practices.” Volume 8, Number 1 2015 19 NARRATIVES ALONG THE CHAD-CAMEROON OIL PIPELINE is illustrated in the compounding accounts of pain across time and spatial scales, evidenced in people’s powerful connections between the present and the past, drawing from social memories and consciousness of colonialism, slavery, and past exploitations as a means to characterize the lived experiences of life along the pipeline, described as “encore une autre déception” (yet another deception) or using a language of witchcraft to characterize COTCO personnel and the unseen decision-makers behind the pipeline’s implementation (Murrey 2015). Moreover, women and men are impacted unevenly by structural violence. Along the pipeline, for example, the oil conFigure 4. Wind tunnel along the pipeline right-of-way, near Kribi (Amber sortium’s reimbursement mechanisms Murrey) failed to recognize the agricultural and medicinal contributions of women’s crops (e.g., cassava, yams, groundnuts, medicinal plants), A second experiential marker of structural violence instead reimbursing people and families for the loss is its historical persistence. As structural theorists illusof crops deemed to be of market value (women’s crops trate, socio-spatial relationships are historically rooted are traditionally consumed by the family or locally). and stretched over time (Giddens 1984). As such, he destruction of nearby wells and boreholes during theorists of structural violence, including Galtung the pipeline construction increased the daily walking (1969), Paul Farmer (2004a, 2004b), Rob Nixon distance for women and children to collect water for (2011), and Akhil Gupta (2012), agree that this household activities. An inlux of temporary workers violence is a constant rather than episodic. Nixon’s created new and increased demand for sex work and (2011) notion of slow violence emphasizes the broad an attendant exposure to sexually transmitted diseases; temporal and spatial operations of structural violence at the same time, the consortium almost exclusively in the present and towards the future, employing the employed men, exacerbating income inequality term as a means of highlighting the “slow moving between men and women. mutations” of ecological damage and disaster that accompany large scale projects, such as Shell Oil’s A third experiential marker of structural violence extraction in the Niger Delta. Nixon explains that, “time becomes an actor” in the operations of is its spatial compoundedness, or the coalescence of simultaneous ecological, environmental, social, slow violence. While Nixon emphasizes the slowly gendered, dispossessing violence(s) in the same place. unfolding nature of structural violence into the future, Farmer (2004a, 2004b) emphasizes the historical roothe re-articulation of structural violence ofered here involves an expansion of our understanding of its edness of this violence in the past, remarking that the violence of slavery, the plantation system, colonialism, experiential efects as spatially compounded: in this sense, the pipeline participates in and aggravates prepatriarchy, and Eurocentrism set the stage for contemporary webs of structural violence by providing existing structures of violence, as well as perpetuating new forms. the ideological legitimacy, the racial, economic, and gendered hierarchies, as well as the property regimes through which structural violence unfolds. Along the his triad of structural violence indicates the ways pipeline, the historical duration of structural violence in which structural forms of violence are often hyper- 20 Human Geography AMBER MURREY visible, in spite of their (apparent) normalization or banalization, because they are widespread. People’s narratives reveal, contrary to much of the scholarship on structural forms of violence, which describes such violence as invisible, silent, or unseen, that structural violence is often acutely visible for people living within structurally violent nexuses. An awareness of this hyper-visibility has signiicant implications for intellectual projects of social justice that critique, and seek to combat, structural forms of violence: instead of focusing on the invisibility of structural violence, as has been the academic trend, we might consider the ways in which structural violence is acutely visible and the languages used by people to critique, understand, and engage with such violence. Furthermore, by rooting my analysis in a speciic temporal and spatial context, I hope to demonstrate that structural violence is a coherent and useful conceptual framework for illustrating the intersections among discrete patterns of violence, including the ways in which diferent violence(s) are compounded as they are experienced in everyday life. As a broad but coherent force, I argue, structural violence is capable of engaging with various discrete forms of violence simultaneously; as such, it is a holistic framework capable of understanding how multiple interacting forces are felt simultaneously. Analyzing these in isolation fails to engage with the immensity of the scope of the violence and performs a de-contextualization that can be politically disempowering. At the same time, this analysis engages with a principal criticism of the theory of structural violence: the argument that structural violence is vague and capacious, to the point of rendering violence “ubiquitous” or everywhere (Wacquant 2004). However, all structural social phenomena are by deinition widespread: structural phenomena are built into the very fabric or foundation of social networks, interactions, and exchanges. his is not to assert that all forms of structural violence are uniform or that structural violence entraps people and landscapes uniformly. Rather, focusing assiduously on “one” violence dismisses the systemic (by this I mean the complex and often contradictory, shifting power hierarchies between and within local, national, and transnational spatial scales) institutional realities (always permanently changing form, method, property, and process) which precede and supersede the oil pipeline. So, structural violence is not a theoretical articulation which fails to diferentiate or distinguish “important” diferences between various forms of violence. Instead, it is a theoretical articulation which actively refuses to be complicit in the historical and geographical de-contextualization and artiicial separation between forms of violence that are united in their enactments at a distance from those harmed, through multiscalar transactions that remain out-of-sight, which are implemented to ensure enormous inancial and economic proit fro transnational capital. he use of narrative is of central importance here; much of the scholarship on the pipeline has been conducted at the policy-level, through an analysis of the interactions between the World Bank, the oil consortium, the national governments of Chad and Cameroon, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Notable exceptions have been the long-term and ongoing survey-based research among 120 households in three sites in southern Chad, with a focus on health impacts by Siba Grovogui and Lori Leonard. Joyce Endeley and Fondo Sikod’s (2007) surveybased research illustrates the depth and complexity of struggles among the state, the community, and the individual over land ownership and resource control in Cameroon, arguing that the pipeline has exacerbated poverty in towns along the pipeline right-of-way. Endeley (2010) highlights the intersections among land dispossession, land tenure, and gender, arguing that because of the male dominated character of the oil industry, women are super-marginalized through the pipeline project: as non-beneiciaries (without access to employment or training opportunities) as well as by gendered land dispossessions and heightened exposure to environmental damage. his scholarship importantly highlights the failures of project management and implementation. However, the relections and narratives of people along the pipeline have remained at the periphery of academic discussions. My approach merges feminist, decolonial and critical geographical standpoints Volume 8, Number 1 2015 21 NARRATIVES ALONG THE CHAD-CAMEROON OIL PIPELINE conscious of the geopolitics of knowledge creation and critical of a monolithic, single-voice, and positivist voice; instead, I approach narrative as a mode of knowing and narration as a mode of communication within social science (Cesera 1982; Arguedas 1985; Bruner 1986, 1990; Polkinghorne 1988; Reck 1993). his project was undertaken with a geographical development methodology (Raghuram and Madge 2006) that receives guidance from the concerns and experiences of the people involved in the research, and uses ilm, and the subsequent screening of ilm, within the ethnographic context as a means of extending and facilitating people’s participation, so that the feedback of community members on the project’s conclusions feature signiicantly. I lived in Kribi and Nanga between July 2011 and March 2012, during which time I interviewed city mayors and pipeline employees, spoke at length with community members, and accompanied people to social gatherings, agricultural ields, and other places of work.6 I conducted an extensive review of newspapers and periodicals (including oil-funded marketing prior to the pipeline’s construction and local commentary on potential outcomes of the project) and pipeline documents (from ExxonMobil, COTCO, and the World Bank), as well as nonproit reports written on behalf of people along the pipeline (such as the Forest Peoples Programme and the Centre Pour l’Environnement et le Développement in Yaoundé). I work from a consciousness of my place in the longue durée of colonial violence, with an attention to people’s narratives alongside an acknowledgement of my incomplete access to them. My intent is to elucidate some of the ways that structural violence is experienced, navigated, and spoken about by those who live in Nanga and Kribi, with an acknowledgement of my presence within the setting where the 6 As this is a decolonial project—or a project that seeks to join the ongoing collaborative efort to decolonize knowledge and further challenge the mechanisms of knowing á la scientism—I distance myself from terms like “the ield,” “the interview,” “the informant,” and “the research subject.” hese historically- and spatially-charged categories artiicially de-privilege non-academic spaces and people as “knowable” or “researchable” for an empowered researcher, while limiting people’s contribution to “knowledge” according to what is perceived to be important according to, and therefore pursued by, “the researcher.” 22 narratives emerged. his humble consciousness of my place is relected in the moments where I highlight the knowledge that I don’t have, and when I trace the moments in which my friends in Cameroon reveal how they might see themselves or me. his is part of working against the established tendency to erase the researcher in ethnographic writing—a convention that seeks validation for “what is known” by erasing the author (and therefore hiding the author’s position in the research); Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez (2007) calls this dominant convention of academic writing the “hubris of the zero point.” At the same time, I do not focus centrally on my identity, as the point is not to perform another Eurocentrism by re-centering myself in the narrative. Emphasizing the ways of knowing relected in people’s narratives illustrates the brokenness or non-totality of structural violence, while also stressing the ways that people discuss, name, experience, and are conscious of forms of violence. Background: Displacement in-place along the pipeline he Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline is the largest private construction project ever undertaken in Africa (Grovogui and Leonard 2007). he pipeline pumps approximately 78,000 to 105,000 barrels of crude oil each day from the Doba Basin in southern Chad along 1,070 kilometers of carbon steel pipe, cutting across the landscape of Cameroon from northeast to southwest. he pipeline’s marine terminal is located near Kribi, where an oloading vessel is situated 12 kilometers from the shoreline; from here, the crude is loaded onto tankers and exported for reining and, ultimately, traded on the global market. With the construction of the pipeline between 2000 and 2003, forests, vegetation, farmlands, ancestral lands, and homes were destroyed along a 30 to 50 meter-wide corridor. A material land space the size of the Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) was expropriated—surveyed, staked, cleared, and graded—in Cameroon and southwestern Chad for the anticipated 30-year lifespan of the project. housands of families were dispossessed of land. Displacement in-place calls attention to the Human Geography AMBER MURREY violent reorganization of space through interrelated and intersecting social and ecological processes, as people are not physically displaced from the land, but the land is transformed around them. People in Nanga and Kribi have been displaced-at-home with contaminated water sources, soil, and coastal erosion, deforestation, and oil spill pollution. Ecological destruction of land, loss of access to land, displacement in-place, and land dispossession are all kinds of violent spatial transformations brought about by the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. he oil consortium, led by the World Bank, promoted the project as a “development” project that would ensure the use of oil proits for projects for local wellbeing on the Chadian side of the project. he Bank implemented a number of spending mechanisms for oil revenues in Chad; these were violated almost immediately. No such spending limitations were imposed on Cameroon. he oil-for-development discourse failed in both Chad, where President Idriss Déby spent $3 million USD of the project’s signing bonus on arms to ight militias in Northern Chad in the name of “state security” (Grovogui and Leonard 2007), as well as Cameroon, where the uses of project proits have never been explicitly named. he development discourse inds few echoes in people’s narratives of the pipeline in Nanga and Kribi. People living in rural and peri-rural areas, like those in the villages around Nanga and Kribi, are exposed to what Ngouo Ngali called “an enforced waiting for death” (“nous sommes obligés d’attendre la mort”). Ngali, the chief of Mpango, the village nearest the pump reduction station outside of Kribi, described the risk of illness that accompanied the spread of the moutmout ly to the area. She said, Now we are obliged to wait for death. here was one case that I know of, a man temporarily lost his vision and still has a white scar on his eye because the illet rose to his eyes and caused cataracts. I expect this more and more. I know it happens in diferent locations… the point is that we are progressively losing life. he risk [of losing life] is there all the time. he engineers of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline sought to avoid densely populated urban spaces so as to reduce the number of people incorporated; this also meant, however, that Cameroon’s poorest and most politically disenfranchised people would be the most endangered. Eighty-nine percent of Cameroon’s poor live in rural areas (ECAM hree 2007). his has meant that the rural poor, already politically and economically marginalized within Cameroon, have been disproportionately incorporated into the project. On the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, the population of the community of Kribi is 70,565, 90 percent of whom are under the age of 50 (information provided by the Mission d’Etude Pour l’Amenagement de l’Ocean in Kribi, 2012). With picturesque beaches, waterfalls, and historical monuments, Kribi is a foremost tourist destination in Cameroon. he principal economic activities are artisanal ishing, tourism, logging, and hunting. Nanga-Eboko, with a population of 35,330, is the capital of the HauteSanaga (Upper Sanaga) department within the Centre Province of Cameroon. he Sanaga River, the longest river in Cameroon, splits the community from North to South. he community of Nanga includes 103 villages, each of which has a local chief who is consulted or informed of developments within the communities, including information about the implementation of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. he villages are grouped into separate second-degree chiefdoms, supervised by a préfet, who is overseen by a governor (information provided by Kribi’s Préfet in 2011, Magloire Abath Zangbwala). he chieftaincies were structured as local proxies during the colonial period to sub-divide power and ensure administrative duties were carried out according to the German and later French colonizers (Owona 1973; Guyer 1987; Quinn 2006). he system of chieftaincies remains in place today; this colonial inheritance was integral for the pipeline’s land appropriation, as local chiefs played integral roles as go-betweens, calming and reassuring people that the pipeline would be beneicial. his created post-construction tensions, as chiefs now feel betrayed by COTCO representatives, at the same time that people are suspicious of their chief ’s involvement in the project. Likewise, the colonial land tenure system—which established land as property for men Volume 8, Number 1 2015 23 NARRATIVES ALONG THE CHAD-CAMEROON OIL PIPELINE and deemed all non-deeded land, even if historically occupied, as state owned—remains at the heart of current land policy in Cameroon and continues to facilitate land dispossession in the name of the state. Tangible violence in-place While accompanying Rosa into Nanga town one afternoon in early September 2012, she explained that her day starts at 6 in the morning. While her mother and sister-in-law generally manage the family’s small plot, Rosa ventures to the market to purchase meat—mostly bush meat, such as porcupine, from the other side of the Sanaga River—to cook for migrant laborers. She goes with several women to prepare food for the men who work at the Chinese-owned gravel pit nearby. She doesn’t sell to the Chinese bosses, she explains, as they have their own cooks. She takes her ive-month-old son, wrapped in pagne on her back. Rosa has three children, her two eldest live in Douala with her sister and brother in-law. Her 16-year old daughter is inishing high school next year; she hopes to be a nurse. With her red umbrella in hand to shade her baby boy from the bright midmorning sunshine, Rosa was a striking igure. As we walked through her neighborhood, she greeted most of the people walking, including the children in light blue school uniforms. “Is that you, already grown up like that?” she teased a young girl. “Is it the hour of prayer already?” She asked a man. She laughed softly to me, “hey’ll all run home and tell their friends that they said hello to a white person—and that the white person said hello back.” When Rosa was 20 years old, the pipeline construction crews arrived in Nanga and she, like many of her family members and friends, believed that her life had changed forever. She was approached by a local man and ofered monetary reimbursement to sleep with a “Colombian boss” from the ExxonMobil construction crew (a number of Colombian men were employed as welders along the pipeline route). At the time she was making money as a bayam-sellam or a revendeuse (a small-scale entrepreneur, usually a woman, who independently buys and re-sells goods). She would purchase accessories in Douala and selling them locally for a small proit. In the late 1990s and 24 early 2000s, she could buy a pair of sandals in Douala for 1,000 CFA (approximately $2 USD) and turn them for a proit in Nanga, selling them for 2,000 to 2,500 CFA ($5 USD). he looding of the market with cheap goods, mostly imported from China and increasingly from Dubai, lowered the value and raised the availability of such items; consequently, Rosa stopped selling things about 8 years ago. Around the same time, she was diagnosed with human immunodeiciency virus (HIV). After the pipeline’s passage, the rate of HIV and acquired immune deiciency syndrome (AIDS) increased exponentially in the community, where the virus had not previously been a problem (Silverstein 2003; Endeley and Sikod 2007). he risk of increased rates of HIV and AIDS in villages along the pipeline route was a form of “collateral damage” for pipeline engineers, who anticipated the temporary increase in sex work with the inlux of male migrant laborers (large-scale infrastructural projects nearly always trigger increasing rates of sexually transmitted diseases). According to Madame Lizette, a nurse specializing in the virus, who was recruited for the local hospital, measures to mitigate the problem were only taken after the passage of the pipeline in Nanga. Now, Rosa fatigues easily and she has regular hospital visits to contend with. Rosa is also responsible for her younger brother, who was forced to quit school after a sudden and unexplained itching in his foot led to the gradual loss of all feeling and eventually developed into ilariasis and elephantiasis of his entire left leg. His illness could be a result of a number of neglected tropical diseases (so named because they are acutely understudied, lack vaccines, and afect only people in tropical zones, where pharmaceutical companies do not earn large proits), including podoconiosis (an abnormal inlammatory reaction to mineral particles in red clay soils) or wuchereria bancrofti (a parasitic roundworm spread by mosquitoes). Our conversations often revolved around hunger, as Rosa worried about having food for herself and her family. She laughed about “les white stars” on TV (although francophone, she said “white stars”) who, she said, would surely be jealous of her thin frame. On another occasion, her brother sat eating a plate Human Geography AMBER MURREY of boiled plantains and an avocado; she said, “le tchop des hommes célibataires” (single man’s food). For Lizette, Tené, Jean, Simon, Daniel, and many others, hunger was described as a constant, nagging companion. According to Essimi Menye, Cameroon’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, chronic hunger afects one out of every two people in Cameroon (press conference 16 Oct. 2013). Child hunger is particularly pernicious, with Cameroon home to 44 percent of the chronically malnourished children in the 11-member Economic Community of Central Africa States (ECCAS). Twenty percent of Cameroonian children are underweight and more than one in four sufers from stunting resulting from nutrition deiciencies (UNICEF 2013). For people living in the Equatorial rainforests near Nanga and Kribi, small-scale, rain-fed shifting agriculture is a mainstay of life. Small farming plots are arduously cleared from the thick rainforest growth and are cultivated in a two-ield system of gender complementarity that dates back to the pre-colonial period (Quinn 2006: 15-18). In Nanga, men cultivate the esep (dry season ield), producing plantains, cacao, mangoes, citrus fruit, avocadoes, and sugar cane. Women using a shorter hoe on afub owondo (smaller ield) produce beans, groundnuts, maize, cassava, yams, potatoes, and other vegetables (Quinn 2006: 17). hese small family-run plots are invaluable, contributing an estimated 90 percent of food consumed in Cameroon (World Food Programme 2012). Although only 13 percent of the land in Cameroon is arable, agriculture (including large industrial plantations) and forestry account for 62 percent of the workforce and 20 and 40 percent of the GDP respectively (World Food Programme 2012). Cameroon was nutritionally self-suicient until the early twenty-irst century. However, after two decades of the neoliberal policy preferred by the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the government of Cameroon, and the development of export crops, food farmers have been under-supported or pushed of their land (DeLancey et al. 2010: 25). At the same time, changing weather patterns, land dispossession, soil erosion, deforestation, rural-to-urban migration, and industrial pollution come together to make farming more diicult than ever. In February 2008, popular discontent at the rising price of petroleum and food (primarily rice and bread but also tomatoes and meat), alongside a constitutional amendment by President Biya to eliminate presidential term limits, gave rise to a series of transportation strikes by taxi drivers and storeowners, efectively shutting down major cities, including Douala and Yaoundé for a week.7 If, as Jean told me in Nanga, “le terrain lá, c’est le ventre” (the land is the belly), cassava uniies the land with the belly in central Cameroon. Indeed, cassava is a symbol for the community in some contexts (Richards 1986). “If you take away the land, you have taken from us our food,” Jean told me in Nginda, outside of Kribi. “We cannot ever forget that. So, everyday we think—forever—of that pipe.” People’s narratives connected soil erosion, soil warming, and soil disturbances to chronic hunger, particularly in regards to the tubers consumed for immediate dietary needs. Following the decline in the global price of cocoa and cofee in the 1980s, Cameroonians diversiied agricultural production (which had continued the colonially-enforced system of monocropping, where farmers cultivate cacao, cofee, sugar, and other exportoriented crops exclusively), turning increasingly to cassava (manioc), a tuber and starchy carbohydrate, as a centerpiece in daily diets. As the mainstay of rural household subsistence, cassava is eaten in several diferent forms, including les batôns de manioc or miondo (cassava soaked in water, pounded into a paste, wrapped inside banana leaves, and steamed), le manioc simple (cassava sliced and boiled), and couscous de manioc or foufou/fufu (cassava laked/ graded, dried in the sun, ground into a powder, and then turned quickly as it is added to boiling water). 7 he government responded by sending heavily armed gendarmes into the cities and setting up roadblocks to divide the major quarters. After mass arrests and the killing of an estimated 137 civilians (Amnesty International 2009), the protests were suppressed. he government conceded to continue petroleum subsidies (ensuring taxi fares remained low) but pushed forward with the elimination of term limits, allowing Biya to run for a sixth term in the presidential elections in October 2011. Volume 8, Number 1 2015 25 NARRATIVES ALONG THE CHAD-CAMEROON OIL PIPELINE he leaves of the plant are consumed in sauces such as kpwem, a dish that is culturally important for the people of central Cameroon. he transformation of raw cassava into les baton de manioc (for sale at local markets and for transport to the markets of Yaoundé) is a principal source of revenue for women in Nanga. his money helps pay for daily expenses like transport, school, and other material needs. In Nanga, cassava is consumed daily, alongside avocados, and groundnuts. Meat is consumed rarely, with bifaka or poisson séché (smoked ish) being a more accessible source of protein, particularly in the non-electriied villages around Nanga and Kribi. he overhunting of wild animals for bush meat— according to people in Nanga and Kribi, overhunting has been aggravated by the Figure 5. Sign at Nanga train station, indicating the area’s endangered migrant laborers who come into town species (Amber Murrey) for large-scale construction projects as the topsoil would be “removed, stockpiled and evenwell as loggers (both legal and illegal, see below)—has tually re-spread over the graded area” (3.2.1.2. Esso depleted the forests on the Nanga side of the Sanaga Chad/Cameroon 1997: 3-4), I was unable to locate River. he government has responded with a number photographic evidence that this was the case, and oral of anti-poaching eforts, including random stop-andhistories and cultivation diiculties in Nanga and searches of buses travelling from Nanga to Yaoundé Kribi refute the oil consortium’s account. Testimony (Figure 5). In this nutritional context, the importance from ExxonMobil whistleblower, and former engineer of cassava cannot be overstated. of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline, Alan M. Dransield, substantiates the communities’ experiences of Cassava is vulnerable to even slight changes in improper soil redistribution. Numerous accounts soil temperature; this was emphasized repeatedly from construction employees in Nanga reiterate the in discussions with farmers along the pipeline, who seeming disregard for topsoil disturbances. reported that, in the warm and abnormally moist soil along the pipeline, cassava rots in the ground before it In Nanga, Maman Medgongo explained to me reaches maturity. his means that cassava crops must that, because she is afraid of an explosion or a ire along be harvested early when planted along the pipeline the pipeline, she abandoned her pre-pipeline farming right-of-way. Soil disturbances during the construcplot. Although informed by COTCO representatives tion period (as forests were cleared and leveled) that she could continue to farm cassava and peanuts included the mixing of rock, concrete, and debris above the pipeline, she decided to leave the plot as with nutrient rich topsoil. Root systems derive most she feared an ecological disaster. he once-fertile soil of their nutritious components from the vital topsoil is now barren, she said, mixed with rock and concrete and, according to people’s accounts, the topsoil was during construction. We were seated on wooden destroyed after the subterranean installation of the benches outside her home, in a compound shared pipeline. Although the oil consortium reports that 26 Human Geography AMBER MURREY with her son and his wife. A hen clucked nearby as Maman Medgongo periodically slapped at biting lies with a hand-broom made from the dried stems of palm leaves, tied together with a bamboo string. She explained to me that her new plot is farther from her home and that the distance increases her daily walk to work by 30 minutes. Cassava cultivation is labor intensive, with women often beginning their workdays before 6am and carrying heavy loads of irewood and produce. At nearly 70 years old, she cannot farm “les terrains pas touchés” (uncultivated forest land that has not been cleared). he section of land she now farms had been left to fallow by a younger farmer and as a result, she explained, her plot is over-cultivated and the soil has been stripped of valuable nutrients. Since the pipeline has passed, the cassava is rotten…. we have famine since the pipeline. In Nanga, COTCO representatives told people that they could continue to plant above the pipeline area but only growing crops with short root systems, such as groundnuts and cassava; this was not the case in Kribi, where COTCO apparently altered planting regulations after construction was completed (this is one indication of non-uniied policies along the pipeline, where one community is told one policy and another is told something diferent). Ndgila André, in Mpango, a village outside of Kribi, explained the paradox of cultivation along the pipeline, At irst, they [COTCO personnel and community liaisons] told us that we could cultivate atop the passage [of the pipeline], but only those plants that were quick to mature. hen shortly after the construction [was complete], they told us that it is strictly illegal to cultivate along the passage. We know that they just made promises [of continued farming prior to the construction] to pacify people. Figure 6. Pierre stands atop the pipeline right-of-way, the location of his destroyed plantation, near Kribi (Amber Murrey) For these reasons, people emphasized greater hunger and declines in production following the pipeline’s construction. As we stood atop the pipeline, in the location of his former plantation, long destroyed by the pipeline (Figure 6), Pierre told me, he pipe is hot, it burns women’s plantations. Since the pipeline has been installed, nothing grows well. We have no proof, but we know that is how it is. It hurts inside. It honestly, seriously hurts. But who will listen to me? Agriculture is how I live. It is how I feed my children and my grandchildren... For the loss of our food, I cannot call it reimbursement—I call it mockery. hey mocked us. At 20 meters, the cassava is still disturbed by the heat of the pipe. Both Jean and Tené described hunger as the “irst thought in the morning” and “the last thought at People in the villages near Kribi and Nanga reported changes in growth patterns of cassava above the pipeline. In instances where women tried to continue cultivation after the pipeline’s construction, I was told, Volume 8, Number 1 2015 27 NARRATIVES ALONG THE CHAD-CAMEROON OIL PIPELINE night.” Hunger was less spoken about in Kribi, which has a healthy tourist economy and greater access to animal protein in the form of ish, although the ishing sector has likewise sufered after a large section of coral reef (important habitat for marine life) was dynamited during the construction of the pipeline. he impact on Kribi’s artisanal isheries is incalculable because oil consortium environmental baseline studies did not comprehensively gather ishing data (Schwartz and Nodem 2009). In Ebomé, outside Kribi, the chief told me, parasites, amoebasis, and dysentery—to the contamination of water sources. Shallow, stagnant groundwater is susceptible to bacteriological pollution, which has an immediate and marked impact on health. In a discussion with seven women in the village of Bilolo outside Kribi, one woman emphasized, You know, here on the coast, we ish to feed our children [but COTCO] broke our rocks that [used to] hide the ish. hey said they would build an artiicial rock habitat but that never worked. hen, the petroleum that leaks in the ocean has already ran of many, many ish. he destruction and contamination of groundwater abstraction points (also called wells, bore holes, or water sources) during the construction of the pipeline was one of the most frequently noted embodied struggles arising from the structural violence of the pipeline (Figure 7 and Figure 8). Seven families, three in Nanga and four in Kribi, showed me contaminated, destroyed, or unsafe water sources caused by the pipeline (Figure 9 and Figure 10). During construction, groundwater sources or boreholes were destroyed alongside the right-of-way on a large scale; these sources were then either inadequately replaced or were not replaced at all. he destruction and contamination of pre-existing water sources was compounded by an almost unanimously reported inefective wellreplacement procedure, as wells did not comply with technical standards. As such, all of the replacement wells that I was shown are today abandoned. People traced material vulnerabilities—intestinal 28 Figure 7. Non-functioning well that was built by COTCO as reimbursement when a borehole was destroyed during pipeline construction, Mpango (Amber Murrey) Figure 8. Looking down into a non-functioning well that was built by COTCO as reimbursement when a borehole was destroyed during pipeline construction, Mpango (Amber Murrey) Human Geography AMBER MURREY he woman’s words echoed the story told by Simon and Daniel several months before, 450 kilometers away near Nanga. As she spoke, her friends nodded their agreement that “the problem with the pipeline is [irst and foremost] the problem of [clean] water.” Figure 9. Water source that was once moving is now stagnant after the pipeline’s construction, Mpango (Amber Murrey) In a study of the socioeconomic consequences of the pipeline in Cameroon’s central province, Bertrand Ndjessa Bessala (2002), notes a marked increase in water- borne illnesses treated in medical centers along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline corridor, from around 50 in 1998 to over 300 in 2006 and 2007. ExxonMobil whistleblower, Alan M. Dransield, provides insight into the technical aspects of water pollution and contamination caused by the pipeline. He explained, he [Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline] has not been designed in accordance with International Standards, i.e. Front End Engineering Design (FEED). ExxonMobil designed the project ad hoc as they went. he [pipeline] crosses between 25/26 major rivers and dozens of smaller streams which are the lifeline to local communities and indigenous people. he correct procedure to install pipeline across such rivers and streams is via pipe jacking/tunneling procedures but ExxonMobil took the Figure 10. Water sources that were once moving are now stagnant after the cheaper alternative [and conducted] open dig [at] all the river crossings, pipeline’s construction, Bikolo (Amber Murrey) which allowed the unnecessary poisoning of drinking waters. Moreover, he irst problem is water. It is better to go the Hydro testing water equaling millions and see where our people bathe and where we of gallons of contaminated test water was drink [rather than sit here and talk]… Before pumped back into the Ecosystem as opposed the pipeline, our water [the small stream near to [conducting] the correct disposal of conthe village] circulated very well. We had no taminated waste via evaporation pits. he problems with skin infections and other sickopen dig methods also deployed thousands nesses, [now] even where we wash our bodies, of tons of cement mixed with backill used as the water is so dirty. Volume 8, Number 1 2015 29 NARRATIVES ALONG THE CHAD-CAMEROON OIL PIPELINE erosion control. (Alan M. Dransield, from an interview with Djamil Ahmat, August 2014) Ils ont ini par nous sellam Nos enfants sont tous les buyams Inadequate access to safe drinking water in Cameroon is not a relection of geomorphology, hydrology, or luvial geomorphology (Mafany et al. 2006). Indeed, Cameroon has the second highest volume of available water in Africa after the Democratic Republic of Congo, with an estimated at 233 billion cubic meters (m3). Of this, groundwater constitutes 21.5 percent (57 billion m3) and is used for domestic, industrial, and agricultural activities (Mafany et al. 2006: 47). As aquifers and lowing streams are destroyed and polluted, people are increasingly exposed to waterborne illnesses and “the progressive loss of life.” In Mpango, Ndgila André told me, Nos enfants n’ont plus du get-em Notre espoire c’est Zion We di cry Mama cry In the end, they sold us Our children are all consumers Our children have no more money (get-’em) As soon as they constructed [the replacement wells] they were abandoned—the water is so dirty people only use it to wash clothes… hey [COTCO] descend into our villages only when they decide and for reasons they deem necessary. hey never respond directly to our complaints. hey never respond directly to us at all. Our two streams [from] before the pipeline were very stocked with ish but because they re-routed the streams, the water became stagnant and now it is wetlands… there are no ish and it is swampy habitat for snakes. here are six water-bottling plants in the country, extracting groundwater predominately in the volcanic region of western Cameroon (Mafany et al. 2006: 47). However, the cost of bottled water is beyond the quotidian purchasing power of most Cameroonians. Inadequate access to safe drinking water is a form of structural violence, as the prioritization of corporate and state proit result in the destruction and pollution of groundwater, with no recourse. Experiences of structural violence as historically compounded In their song, La Fleur (the lower), the Cameroonian musical group, Sumanja, recount, 30 Our hope is in Zion [slang for marijuana, Zion also references transnational dispossession and resistance by drawing upon Rastafarianism] We cry Mama, cry he parole of the song illustrates some of the grief felt by what people perceive to be the wholesaling of people and resources that describes contemporary Cameroon. In Kribi and Nanga, people told me, “ils nous ont vendu” (they sold us) and “nous sommes toujours les esclaves” (we are still slaves), to explain the “selling out” of national and regional oicials to the interests of the pipeline consortium at the expense of people. In this sense, Cameroon has been “bought” and “sold” and children are now bustled into the marketplace, where they are forced to sell everything but have little means (or, little get-em) for survival. his contemporary setting is historically compounded. “Discovered” by Portuguese explorers in 1472, the social and economic fabric of Cameroon was devastated by the theft of several million people over 430 years, as diverse societies were forcibly incorporated into the transatlantic slave trade by way of the Bight of Biafra. he geography of what is today Cameroon—the country’s name is adapted from the Human Geography AMBER MURREY label given by Portuguese explorers as Rio dos Camerões, or the river of shrimp in reference to the large prawns of the Wouri estuary—was annexed by Germany in 1884 at the Berlin Conference, a series of meetings between Western European powers to carve up most of the continent for formal colonization in what is known as the “Scramble for Africa.” During the colonial period, from 1884 to 1960, the diverse peoples and places of Cameroon underwent—often by force—interrelated and simultaneous spatial, religious, linguistic, agricultural, political, and economic transformations. he capture of people for the slave trade Figure 11. Statue of Chief Nanga Eboko in Nanga town’s central Carrefour was abolished in 1902 although forced (Amber Murrey) labor continued throughout the colonial period under the auspices of corvée, or consigned labor. Colonial domination was enforced Portuguese to describe the Baka, Bagyeli, and Bakola “locally” through the implementation of hierarchiforest people of the region’s coastal rainforests. In 1914, cal cheferies (or chieftancies that subdivided places the Batanga people rose up against German colonizand people), which facilitated labor exploitation by ers, who responded by massacring hundreds of people incentivizing indigenous leaders, handpicked by the and exiling the remainder of the Batanga to South colonizers, to provide laborers and to suppress all antiWest Cameroon, several hundred kilometers away, colonial movements (Guyer 1987: 119). his spatial near Mount Cameroon. After the German defeat in and political partitioning involved the imposition of WWI, a bloody two-year war was fought among the male chiefs to oversee diverse communities, many Germans, British, and French in Cameroon and the of which were previously nonhierarchical and which German colonizers were forced to retreat to the island engaged in systems of gender complementarity (as of Fernando Pó in 1916.8 he Batanga community opposed to European patriarchy); as was the case for returned to Kribi in two voyages after Germany’s the headmen in the communities around what is now withdrawal and the return is celebrated annually by Nanga, so named for a pre-colonial political outcast community-wide celebrations. of the area, Nanga Eboko of the Yekaba, who agreed to work with the German lieutenant Dominik to Cameroon’s formal independence in 1960 was not violently suppress the anti-colonial uprisings by the tantamount to autonomous independence—as was the Maka farther east (Owona 1973; Monteillet 2001; case for most post-colonial African states (Mamdani Figure 11).. 1996)—in that full political and economic sovereignty was not achieved. Indeed, at independence, the Cameroonian colonial state altered little. Claude Ake In Kribi, the colonial period was marked with (1996: 6) explains that in the African post-colony, the passage of Portuguese and Dutch slave traders “state power remained essentially the same [that is to (1470-1880s), German colonizers (1884-1914), and say] immense, arbitrary, often violent, always threatFrench colonizers (1914-1960) and, like Nanga, the city’s name reveals the discursive dominance assumed 8 Again, the reverberations of colonialism’s discursive vioby European explorers: “Kikiribi” (a fantastical or lence: Fernando Pó was named after the Portuguese explorer, mystical person) is thought to have been used by the Fernāo do Pó; the island was later renamed Bioko. Volume 8, Number 1 2015 31 NARRATIVES ALONG THE CHAD-CAMEROON OIL PIPELINE ening.” Former colonies continued as the economic “pré carré” (backyard) or the “chasse gardée” (private hunting preserve) of corporate France as Frenchinstalled post-colonial leaders—such as Cameroon’s irst president, Ahmadou Ahidjo (1924 - 1989), and irst prime minister, Paul Biya (1975 – 1982), both selected by departing French colonists—collaborated with French corporations and businessmen-politicians for “the ultimate purpose of exploiting Africans and African wealth” (Le Vine 2004: 4). Cameroon is one of a few countries in the world where the current head of state has a direct lineage to the former colonial powers.9 Today, structural violence is engaged on the ground through a popular imaginary rooted in the historical experiences of racism, slavery, and colonization, so that the dispossessions of this pipeline are characterized as “exactement comme” (just like) earlier dispossessions. Monsieur Tené, whose agricultural ield sits atop the pipeline, and whose home is less than one minute’s walk from the right-of-way, told me that the pipe “vibrates” and sometimes “makes a loud grumbling noise during the night.” So much so that it disrupted their sleep at irst. In the beginning, he and his family were frightened and thought something might happen. He sought out COTCO representatives with his worry and was told that the crude must be heated or else it will not low easily down the pipe. Dissatisied with the answer, he felt he had little choice and “progressively” they adjusted to the noises, although he spoke of the risk of living along the pipeline. He described the danger of something happening, particularly the pipe burning or bursting (the most commonly heard fear among people in both towns) and his sense that his children would sufer most from such a catastrophe. his imaginary is founded on shared historic memories of injustice, where these previous experiences provide the foundations for an articulation against the pipeline’s particular dispossessions. People spoke about discrete and intersecting forms of violence—including racism (“it’s because we’re black”), ethnocentrism (“it’s because we’re Baka”), enslavement (“they treat us like animals”), and colonialism (“we’re still not free—who are we to say no?”)—unifying past moments with present moments and concurrent projects of dispossession across multiple scales. hese characterizations indicate that people have nuanced perceptions of their position within a historical ontological order; speciically the ontological ordering that was the rationalization for slavery and colonialism. hrough these narratives, people ofer self-aware and historically sensitive orderings of themselves, their neighbors, and their communities at the bottom of what was widely described by people in the villages around Nanga and Kribi as an unfair system. Women in the villages around Kribi likewise reported that they joined together to discuss and decided collectively not to risk death, injury, or malchance by planting along the pipeline; instead, they have abandoned their pre-pipeline plots and negotiated land elsewhere, often bearing physical and economic burdens for the choice (including increased walking distance to the plot and the cost of clearing unfarmed forest). In the village of Bisiong, near Kribi, for example, a respected village elder, Mikoum told me, “We women have decided that we no longer grow next to the pipe.” Mikoum had closely cropped white hair, her feet were bare and I noticed scarlet red nail polish on her toenails. As we sat outside her home, Mikoum’s elder sister laughed occasionally at her bold statements. Mikoum continued, At the same time, several conversations revealed expectations of future environmental disaster. 9 President Ahidjo was hand-selected at independence as a leader who would be malleable to the interests of the French business class; he selected as his Prime Minister, Paul Biya, who succeeded him upon his withdrawal from power in 1989. Biya remained president at the time this paper was written in 2014. 32 ...and we are afraid that when we burn the ields after harvest that it can create dangerous problems above the pipeline... Women do not even cultivate next to it—we think the ire will spread to the pipe and they will say that the old woman with white hair did it and they will put me in prison! Mikoum’s sister laughed loudly as her sister continued the story, Human Geography AMBER MURREY We have no [good] memories [of the pipeline]... only this breakable material [she indicated the broken plastic chair upon which I was precariously seated, which had been reattached in several spots by rusting wire]. Ils nous ont escroqué [hey scammed us]. Mikoum’s sister was entertained by Mikoum’s enthusiastic retelling, but despite her humor and narrative talent, people emphasized fear of environmental disaster along the pipeline. Due to the decline in production along the right-of-way and the fear of a pipe explosion, I was only able to locate one woman, Monsieur Tené’s wife in Mbong-Sol near Nanga, who continues to plant near the pipeline easement. She continues to farm here because their home is so near the pipeline easement (recall they can hear the oil pumping from their beds at night) that, in the event of a pipeline explosion, the more immediate concern is the location of their home. Monsieur Tené and his family lack the inancial means to relocate their family compound (which consists of three separate one-room buildings, an outdoor cooking area, and a roofed stall for sitting outside) farther from the pipeline, despite their consciousness of the risks of life alongside it. A focus on people’s experiences of structural violence illustrates the larger nexus of coloniality (Escobar 2004; Mignolo 2000, 2011) within which the particular violence(s) of the pipeline occur, including how they are compounded and exacerbated over time. hese pervasive projects efect dispossessions that harken back to the colonial period, creating elaborate international structures of violence that inluence social organization, gender relations, and everyday life. People’s accounts reveal that popular imaginations connect contemporary dispossessions of structural violence to earlier forms, as is illustrated in Simon’s assertion, “We ind ourselves in the olden days, with all the ancient miseries.” Contemporary manifestations of structural violence are bound up within neoliberal globalization and its attendant institutions, norms of power, socio-politics, and ideologies, each of which guide labor relations, production, resource distribution, and the processes of accumulation. his perspective highlights the ways in which the violence during the colonial period has been revised—and even augmented—by the violence of the post-colonial present. Spatially compounded: Mutually constituting and embedded structural violence(s) he people I spoke with in Nanga and Kribi struggled to focus exclusively, or even primarily, on the pipeline, as concurrent infrastructural projects impact families and communities. In Kribi, for example, a group of people urged me to research the Kribi Deep Sea Port Project, which, they explained as they drew connections between the port and the pipeline, also failed to provide long-term or skilled employment for local people. In Nanga, people told me about instances of foreigners trekking through hard-to-access rainforests with “strange machines,” reappearing days later to ofer exchanges of dried ish and rice for the land’s timber; they speculated that the coveted resource lay under the timber. Two men criticized the industrial sugarcane plantations of SOSUCAM (Societe Sucriere du Cameroun, a subsidiary of the French food giant, SOMDIAA) for pumping waste and pesticides into streams near Nkoteng. hey urged me to document the pollution of surface water. A Nanga woman, whose crops were destroyed by the pipeline, later had portions of her land appropriated for the construction of the Yaoundé-Bertoua Autoroute, contracted to the China Water and Electricity Corporation (CWE). During our conversation, she showed me her preciously guarded oicial documents from both projects. Elie, in Mpango near Kribi, said, “Today it is not a problem of COTCO or the pipeline. he problem is bigger than COTCO and we must speak between ourselves as villagers to ind solutions because we will ind none at their door.” hese narratives indicate that the pipeline is one violent project within a complicated matrix of structurally violent capitalist projects that afect everyday life in and around Nanga and Kribi as a multitude of corporate and political interests convene and intervene in “local” spaces, centering on the economic impetus for raw materials. One consequence of the convergence of multiple deforestation and landscape transforming infrastructural projects is a change in weather patterns, particularly in the last decade. Coastal erosion, pesticide pollution, indus- Volume 8, Number 1 2015 33 NARRATIVES ALONG THE CHAD-CAMEROON OIL PIPELINE trial waste oil spills, deforestation, and desertiication threaten Cameroon’s mega-biodiversity and contribute to the unpredictable weather patterns identiied by Maman Medgongo. Like several of her neighbors, Maman Medgongo attributed the unusual climate patterns over the past ten years to the presence of the oil pipeline and the deforestation that accompanied it. She characterized farming as “playing chess” with the rain and the sun: “I mostly lose,” she said. People in both Nanga and Kribi emphasized the disruption of the seasonal calendar by climate change. Cameroon’s rainy season, which usually starts in June, arrives earlier and earlier, sometimes as early as February. he deforestation brought about by the pipeline occurred within a larger context of deforestation in Cameroon. his was made apparent during my conversation with Jacques, the chief of Nginda (near Nanga). He was burning big brush piles when I arrived, adeptly positioning his cigarette at the corner of his mouth while he spoke and shook my hand simultaneously. He asked if I knew where the pipeline passed nearby and I admitted to him that I couldn’t see it although I knew I had to be standing practically on top of it. Jacques explained that the brush and vegetation is cut periodically along the pipeline right-of-way, approximately every three months (although there is never any indication when it will happen). During my time in Nanga, it had been over six months since the foliage had been cleared and, as a result, it was diicult to ascertain the pipe’s exact location. For the people who lived along it, of course, there was no diiculty. “We don’t know why they’ve let it go so long,” Jacques told me as we walked from his home to the road to where he could show me the pipe. Jacques was an energetic and lithe man in his late forties. On that day he was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and white tennis shoes. As we walked up the road in front of his house, I had to almost jog to keep up with him. He spoke quickly and conidently without prompts, recalling exact dates, places, and names. He stopped me near a section of the road, indicating a moist section of ground where the pipeline passed underfoot. As we spoke, a logging straight truck barreled down on us 34 and we raced to the side of the road. Trucks carrying the massive logs of old-growth rain forest pass through Nanga every day, en route to the industrial sawmills of Douala, where the logs are prepared for export. Chief Jacques scofs at “les gens dans le bois” (the people “in” wood), calling them the “Maia” of Cameroon. In a systematic exploitation of wood in the eastern part of Cameroon, the chief says, “everyone is complicit.” Rosa, likewise, late told me a story of a man who came to their familial plot to cut down some wood; meanwhile, he stole several bushels of plantains, which he hid in his truck. I heard many similar stories. he leaves of the trees along the roadside were red-tinted, covered with dust from the nearly constant truck traic, transporting this raw lumber— mahogany, ebony, and teak—from the dense equatorial rainforest of the Congo Basin to Douala’s port. With 24 million hectares of rainforest, Cameroon is the fourth most ecologically diverse African country. Cameroon’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) identiies 805 ish species, 8,000 tree species, 409 mammal species, 183 reptile species, and 849 bird species. he exploitation of this biodiversity its into the long history of structural violence in Cameroon, a history which people on the ground are acutely aware of. Commercial logging began during the colonial period in the 1880s and expanded in the 1920s (Topa et al. 2009: 13). Cameroon remains one of Africa’s largest producers of timber and from the 1980s to mid-1990s; it was the world’s fourth largest timber exporting country (Ichikawa 2006; Ngalame 2013). Since the 1980s, timber has accounted for approximately 25 percent of Cameroon’s foreign exchange, second only to petroleum and far exceeding any other agricultural commodity (Topa et al. 2009: 13). Cameroon’s forests are disappearing at an annual rate of close to one percent. Between 1990 and 2010, 4.5 million hectares (approximately 45,000 square kilometers) of forest cover was destroyed (UN Food and Agriculture Organisation). In 1994, the government introduced a number of forest policy reforms, placing 30 percent of the surface area under production. However, Global Witness recently released a report exposing a system of “shadow Human Geography AMBER MURREY permits,” highlighting the allocation permits for small business and artisans to industrial logging companies (Mwanamilongo 2013). Greenpeace International has likewise documented instances in which illegal timber was labeled as legal and exported with false documentation, including a report of illegal logging near the site of the Memvé’élé Dam project, construction for which is contracted to the Chinese company, Sinohydro. Greenpeace recently reported on illegal logging by Uniprovince—a subsidiary of SGSO Cameroon Holding Ltd., which is registered in the Cayman Islands—where 2,500 hectares of land were razed, to make way for the American-owned Herakles Farm palm oil plantation. he report, titled “License to Launder,” indicates that Cameroon’s Minister of Forests was aware of the allocation of the unlawful logging permit that allowed the clear-cutting to occur (Greenpeace International 2014). he convoluted power nexus that creates the groundwork for structural violence in Cameroon is tangible in such moments. Deforestation, oil spills, soil erosion, and groundwater contamination are forms of structural violence afected by the pipeline. If we evaluate each of these violence(s) in turn or in isolation, we lose sight of their overlapping and intersecting conigurations in lifescapes and landscapes; we also perform a decontexualization that is complicit with the perpetuation of structural violence. Final thoughts What Chief Ngali described as the progressive loss of life its into the body of critical scholarship on how particular populations are made “redundant,” “superluous,” or “disposable” by the patterns of uneven development entrenched in the practices of modernity (Agamben 1998; Mbembe 2003; Bauman 2013). Some of these theoretical projects implicitly overlook the role of human agency. Even as patterns of global political economic exchange force people to the margins, peripheries, and dead-lands, people struggle, laugh, mourn, feel, resist, acquiesce, and act in complex ways. Moreover, there is often—as relected in Ngali’s commentary on the “enforced waiting for death”—an astute consciousness of self, place, and community within this nexus of structural violence, defying any easy characterization of people as “disposable.” In Kribi, a group of men explained the risks of living alongside the oil pipeline in transnational ways. hey referenced the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and ecological destruction in the oil exploitation of Ogoniland in the Niger Delta. Describing groups of people as “superluous,” “wasted,” and/or “redundant”—even in a deeply critical analysis of the processes that convene to make this so—risks solidifying and inalizing abandonment/disposability as such. Turning to a framework of structural violence that centers on people’s narratives, opens up other possibilities—most particularly an engagement with agency and people’s understandings of their placement in a longue durée of structural violence. A body of scholarship on structural violence posits it as invisible and, therefore, any project to combat it begins with the unveiling of such violence. his begs the question: Structural violence is invisible to whom? For the people who live amidst structurally violent forces, this violence is hyper-visible, despite discursive attempts to cloak, bury, and eface by those in power. Dignity, shame, pain, and pride inform resistance and response to structural violence as much as—or more than—the visibility or invisibility of “the perpetrators.” In a context of increasingly porous power structures and as violence is embedded within racialized hierarchies, multilayered, and multispacialized global transactions, the actors and actions of structural violence do not need to be made “visible” to those who live within structurally violent nexuses. Recognizing this fundamentally alters the scholaractivist project of deining and working against forces of structural violence. he search for greater visibility and even greater visibility—including those of transparency initiatives, full disclosure, and liberal principals that are now embedded within a transnational corporate responsibility discourse—is a cognitive snare, restricting the realm of possible solutions to corporate volunteerism and excluding narratives of loss outside a quantiiable, calculable ordering of the world according to the dogma of scientism (recall, for example, Pierre’s nuanced awareness of the laws of “proof,” which Volume 8, Number 1 2015 35 NARRATIVES ALONG THE CHAD-CAMEROON OIL PIPELINE limit the power of his testimony without a scientiic examination of changes in soil temperature along the pipeline route). To “see” something is to encounter it in a particular ield of visibility, but ields of vision are created through political, cultural, and scientiic processes and these processes determine what subjects and objects are understandable, important, and valid—and therefore visible. Euro-American audiences are spatially disciplined to not “see” the sufering caused by the particular spatial privileges of living in Euro-American regions (what can be described as willful blindness). his spatial conditioning is fundamental to the perpetuation of a globalized inancial-political-policy regime (Peet 2003: 14-23) that perpetuates historically rooted, spatial practices of structural violence. Cultivating spaces of peace—not just the absence of direct war as in the dominant Western liberal concept of peace, but a nonviolent peace founded upon local notions and practices of wellbeing (Daley 2014: 66-7)—entails long-term collaborative work to dismantle structures of exclusion by doing intellectual and creative work that emphasizes the vocabularies and languages that dispossessed people use to stake claims in structurally violent contexts. he theory of structural violence has its origins in peace studies and as such there is an active component imbedded within the theoretical work on structural violence: it is an incitement against the complex sociopolitical processes and colonial discourses that produce historically rooted, spatially compounded, and acutely visible violence of displacement in-place experienced through hunger, thirst, and the “death of the earth” (Lefebvre 1976; Blaikie 1985). By asserting and foregrounding the violence(s) of these processes, we demystify the colonial monopoly on the discourse of violence, which would cast entire populations as either perpetual threats to or superluous in the colonial global order. Work on structural violence has almost unanimously involved the foregrounding of the need to build resolve against and work towards the unbinding of ourselves from such systems. An immediate step in this direction would entail the decommissioning of the ChadCameroon Oil Pipeline alongside a sustained debt relief program, which would, critically, open up space for an unprecedented level of self-determination, as 36 opposed to the current system where regulations and policies are determined by external bodies through debt restructuring schemes. Acknowledgments: his research was funded through a Clarendon Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Travel to Cameroon was partially supported by the Bowers Fund Award, the Ann Ward Fund, and the Charles Green Award through Jesus College, Oxford. I had fruitful and insightful conversations with colleagues on my approach to structural violence, including Dali Islam, Patricia Daley, and members of the Transformations Cluster at SoGE, Oxford. Audience members at the 8th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference at the Centre of Applied Philosophy Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton, UK provided critical feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ahmat, Djamil. 2014. Interview with Alan M. Dransield. Al Wihada. Available at: http://www.alwihdainfo.com/Chad-Cameroon-Pipeline-operating-in-aLegal-Void_a12429.html (accessed 15 Oct. 2014) Ake, Claude. 1996. Development and democracy in Africa. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Amnesty International. 2009. Cameroon: Impunity underpins persistent abuse. London: Amnesty International Publications. Available at: http://www.univie.ac.at/bimtor/dateien/cameroon_ ai_2009_persistent_abuse.pdf (accessed 13 Oct. 2014) Arguedas, J. M. 1985. Yawar iesta. Barraclough, F. H. (trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2013. Wasted lives: modernity and its outcasts. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity. Bruner, J.S. 1990. Acts of meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Human Geography AMBER MURREY Castree, Noel and Paul Chatterton, Nik Heynen, Wendy Larner and Melissa W. Wright (eds.). 2010. he point is to change it: geographies of hope and survival in an age of crisis. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. essochad.com/Chad-English/PA/Newsroom/TD_ Documentation_Supporting_3.aspx (accessed 13 Oct. 2014) Castro-Gómez, Santiago. 2007. he missing chapter of empire: Postmodern reorganization of coloniality and post-fordist capitalism. Cultural Studies 21(2-3), 428-448. Farmer, Paul. 2004a. On sufering and structural violence: A view from below. In Scheper-Hughes N, Bourgois PI (eds) Violence in war and peace: An anthology, 281-289. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Cesera, M. 1982. Relections of a woman anthropologist: No hiding place. New York: Academic Press. Farmer, Paul. 2004b. An Anthropology of structural violence. Current Anthropology 45(3), 305-325. Daley, Patricia. 2014. Unearthing the local: hegemony and peace discourses in Central Africa. In McConnell, Fiona, Megoran, Nick and Williams, Philippa (eds) Geographies of peace, 66-86. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Galtung, Johan. 1969. Violence, peace and peace research. Journal of Peace Research 6(3). DeLancey, Mark Dike, Rebecca Neh Mbuh and Mark W. DeLancey. 2010. Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon. Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, Inc. ECAM 3. 2007. Cameroon’s third household survey, National Institute of Statistics. Endeley, Joyce and Sikod, Fondo. 2007. he social impact of the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline: How industrial development afects gender relations, land tenure, and local culture. Lewiston, New York: he Edwin Mellen Press. Endeley, Joyce B. M. 2010. he politics of gender, land and compensation in communities traversed by the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline Project in Cameroon. Tsikata D, Golah P (eds) Land tenure, gender and globalisation: Research and analysis from Africa, Asia and Latin America, 145-179. New Delhi: Zubaan. Escobar, Arturo. 2004. Beyond the third world: Imperial globality, global coloniality, and anti-globalisation social movements. hird World Quarterly 25 (1), 207-230. Esso Chad/Cameroon (1997) Supporting Documents – Volume 3. Available at: http://www. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. he constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gramsci, Anthony. 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks of Anthony Gramsci. Hoare, Quentin and Geofrey Nowell Smith (trans). New York: International Publishers. Grovogui, Siba N. and Leonard, Lori. 2007. Oiling tyranny? Neoliberalism and global governance in Chad. Studies in Political Economy 79, 35-59. Greenpeace International. 2014. License to launder: How Herakles Farms’ illegal timber trade threatens Cameroon’s forests and VPA. JN 467, Amsterdam: he Netherlands. Available at: http:// www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/forests/2014/Licence-to-Launder. pdf (accessed 15 Oct. 2014) Gupta, Akhil. 2012. Red tape: bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Guyer, Jane I. 1987. Feeding Yaoundé, capital of Cameroon. In Guyer, Jane I. (ed), Feeding African cities, 112-153. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Volume 8, Number 1 2015 37 NARRATIVES ALONG THE CHAD-CAMEROON OIL PIPELINE Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, nature and the geography of diference. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges and border thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ichikawa, M. 2006. Problems in the conservation of rainforest in Cameroon. African Study Monographs 33, 3-20. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2011. he darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Keenan, Jeremy. 2005. Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline: World Bank and ExxonMobil in ‘last chance saloon.’ Review of African Political Economy 104(5), 395-477. Mollett, Sharlene. 2014. A lost paradise: Garifuna land, labour, and displacement-in-place. Latin American Perspectives 20(30), 1-19. Lefebvre, Henri. 1976. L’état dans le monde moderne. Vol. 1 of De l’état. Paris: UGE. Le Vine, Victor. 2004. Politics in francophone Africa. Bolder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Magaramombe, Godfrey. 2008. Agrarian displacements, replacements and resettlement. ‘Displaced in place’: Farm workers in Mazowe District. Paper presented at conference on ‘Political economies of displacement in post-2000 Zimbabwe,’ Nordic Africa Institute and Forced Migration Studies Programme, University of the Witwatersrand. Mafany, G T, Fantong W Y, and Nkeng G.E. 2006. Groundwater quality in Cameroon and its vulnerability to pollution. Yongxin X, Usher B (eds), 47-55. Groundwater pollution in Africa. London, Leiden, New York, Philadelphia, Singapore: Taylor and Francis. Magaramombe, Godfrey. 2010. ‘Displaced in place’: Agrarian displacements, replacements and resettlement among farm workers in Mazowe District. Journal of Southern African Studies 36(2), 361-375. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mbembe, A. 2003. Necropolitics. Meintjes, L. (trans) Public Culture 15(1), 11-40. 38 Monteillet, Nicolas. 2001. Tradition orale, utilisation des généalogies et nouvelles entités politiques, Nanga Eboko, Cameroun. Journal des Africanistes 71(2), 95-112. Murrey, Amber. Forthcoming 2015. Lifescapes of a pipedream: a decolonial mixed-tape of structural violence and resistance along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. PhD dissertation, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. Mwanamilongo, Saleh. 2013. Logging permits are being abused in Africa. Associated Press. http:// www.omaha.com/news/logging-permits-are-beingabused-in-africa/article_9ba614d1-2e46-56be-abe40519f5ef58a0.html?TNNoMobile (accessed 19 Jun 2014) Ndjessa Bessala, Bertrand J. 2002. Impacts socioeconomiques du projet de pipeline Tchad-Cameroun le long du corridor dans la province du centre (Cameroun). PhD dissertation, Economie et inance, Université de Dschang, Ingénieur agro-socio-economiste. http:// www.memoireonline.com/12/09/2991/m_Impactssocioeconomiques-du-projet-de-pipeline-TchadCameroun-le-long-du-corridor-dans-la-province-d0. html (accessed 4 Apr 2014). Ngalame Elias. 2013. Cameroon hopes EU timber labelling can protect forests. homas Reuters Foundation. http://www.trust.org/item/201305141251071spkt/ (accessed 14 May 2013) Human Geography AMBER MURREY Nixon, Robert. 2011. Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press. Owona, Adalbert. 1973. La naissance du Cameroun (1884-1914). Cahiers d’études africaines 13(49), 16-36. Pankhurst, Alula and Piguet, Francois. 2009. Moving people in Ethiopia: Development, displacement, and the state. Oxford: James Currey. Peet, Richard. 2003. Unholy trinity: he IMF, World Bank and WTO. London and NY: Zed Books Ltd. Polkinghorne, D. 1988. Narrative knowing and human sciences. Albany: SUNY Press. Quinn, Frederick. 2006. In search of salt: Changes in Beti (Cameroon) society, 1880-1960. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Raghuram, P. and Madge, C. 2006. Towards a method for postcolonial development geography: possibilities and challenges. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 27(3), 270- 288. Reck, Gregory G. 1993. Narrative and social science: Reclaiming the existential. Issues in Integrative Studies 11, 63-74. Schwartz, Brendan and Valery Nodem. 2009. Humanitarian disaster in the making along the ChadCameroon Oil Pipeline—who’s watching? AlterNet. Available at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144303/a_ humanitarian_disaster_in_the_making_along_the_ chad-cameroon_oil_pipeline_--_who’s_watching (accessed 13 Oct. 2014) Silverstein, Ken. 18 June 2003. AIDS could follow African pipeline. Los Angeles Times, A1-A12. Sumanja, featuring Miguel. 2012. “La leur.” Music video available at: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Y70lddTa6bw (accessed 15 Oct. 2014) Topa, Giuseppe and Karsenty, Alain, Megevand, Carole, and Debroux, Laurent. 2009. he rainforests of Cameroon: Experience and evidence from a decade of reform. Washington, D.C.: he International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/he World Bank. UNICEF. 2013. Country Statistics—Cameroon. Available at: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/ cameroon_statistics.html (accessed 15 Oct. 2014) Wacquant, Loïc. 2004. Response to Paul Farmer, “An anthropology of structural violence.” Current Anthropology 45(3), 322. World Food Programme. 2012. Country Programme Cameroon 200330 (2013-2017). Executive Board, Second Regular Session. Available at: http://one.wfp.org/operations/current_operations/ project_docs/200330.pdf (accessed 13 Oct. 2014) (All igures have been produced by the author.) Volume 8, Number 1 2015 39