Camcorders, cassava and crude

For years, farming and fishing communities in the Niger Delta have objected to frequent oil spills and gas flaring that pollutes their lands and waters. Crackdowns on community protests, insufficient mitigating measures by the oil companies, theft of oil from pipelines, the influx of weapons and weak governance have pushed society in the delta to the edge. Now the communities are battling the polluters with an innovative combination of participatory video, mobile-to-web messaging and online video sharing.

The Niger Delta, the eighth biggest oil producing region in the world, is a maze of waterways and mangrove swamps. Thousands of kilometers of pipelines crisscross this land that provides a living for 20 million farmers and fishers. Since the arrival of the oil companies 50 years ago, the delta has become the fifth most polluted area in the world, according to an October 2006 report from the World Wildlife Fund. This is the result of some 4000 spills that have spread crude oil throughout the swamps and over huge tracts of agricultural land, as well as illegal gas flaring that produces a cocktail of toxic gases which in turn cause acid rains that destroy crops.

Just over a year ago, Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), contacted our organisation, Maweni Farms, based in Tanzania. We have more than a decade of experience in a participatory approach to making videos for development programmes. FoEI asked us to work with Environment Rights Action (ERA), its Nigerian partner organization, in producing a TV documentary about the situation in the Niger Delta for international distribution. At the same time, we were to use the production of the documentary as a training opportunity for assisting in setting up a participatory video project with communities in the Niger Delta. These two separate projects quickly merged in an interesting way, as we decided to make the participatory video team the main characters in the TV documentary.

One objective of this project is to set up a website that villagers in the delta can use to explain how their environment is being affected by the oil industry, and to take part directly in the national and international discourse about the Niger Delta oil. Another objective is to set up a ‘communications loop’ between grassroots people in the delta and oil industry stakeholders throughout the world. The project would train volunteers to help community members record their own video testimonies on the impact of the oil industry on their livelihoods. One important reason for establishing such a network of volunteers was to enable journalists or others from the outside world to contact communities across the delta directly via the web or by mobile phone.

Over the last twelve months, we have visited the Niger Delta on three occasions for three weeks at a time. In brief, we train the local people in participatory video (PV) techniques, help them to make film clips documenting the impact of the oil industry on their lives, edit the footage under their supervision and help them to publish the clips on the web.

Filming testimonies

Environmental Rights Action has contacts with many village communities in the delta. In the event of a new spill or fresh negotiations with an oil company that may affect their livelihoods, villagers call ERA and ask for their testimonies to be recorded on video.

The team uses digital video cameras to record these testimonies. People from the communities work out who is to make statements and chose locations that are as close as possible to the core of the story being told. This could mean a cassava field, fish pond, or a dugout on the creek. In one clip, as a farmer tells her story about an oil spill, she pulls out cassava tubers, cuts them into pieces and shows how they are rotting from the inside, toxic and unfit for consumption. In another, a military officer protecting an oil installation is interviewed by a young woman in front of a roaring gas flare. Testimonies are placed in their direct context for maximal visual impact

Film-makers always shoot much more footage than they use in the end. So far, we have collected more than 50 hours’ worth of DV and HDV tapes, and there is no way we can show this material unedited. Using a portable computer and a petrol generator, we have sometimes been able to pre-edit sequences directly in the villages, but mostly we do this work in temporary offices in towns near the location of where we have been filming. We play back these rough cuts to the villagers and ask them ‘does this video clip tell your story? and ‘will it have the effect they intended on your audience?’ We record any necessary explanations, or improvised voice-over narrations, on such occasions. At least one community member is present throughout the editing process to make sure that the video clip becomes the testimony they wish to publish. In this way, the villagers become co-producers of their video clip.

Who holds the camera?

We often encounter the assumption that participatory video is about local people shooting their own material. But good shooting requires talent and lots of practice, and since we want these stories to reach as many people as possible, we do most of the shooting ourselves. This does not make the process any less participatory. Authorship of a video clip does not lie with who holds the camera or sits at the keyboard, but with who directs the shooting and editing process. In this ERA project, we try to work very closely with community representatives throughout the process. The community rather than the film crew is the director. Many development practitioners who experiment with participatory video do it the other way round. They give people the camera and instruct them what to shoot and how. In the end, they become the authors of the video, not the people.

YouTube

When ERA has recorded a sufficient number of testimonies, the next step will be to post them on the web. In the delta very few people, if any, can watch web video because connections are very slow. Nevertheless, villagers understand immediately the power of publishing their stories on the web. With such wide distribution, they feel the oil companies and the federal government will have no choice but to respond.

Uploading video remains problematic on slow internet connections, but the problem with hosting and buying bandwidth for distribution has in a way been solved by free video hosting websites such as YouTube.com. A technology known as RSS feeds enables other websites, or any group or organization, to subscribe to these videos and combine them into programmed ‘podcasts’. We are planning to license these videos in such a way that anyone can distribute them for free.

SMS gateways

In Nigeria, internet access is still very limited, but mobile phones are ubiquitous. With this in mind, ERA plans to integrate an SMS gateway to the internet to its website. The community representatives, producers and spokespersons of the testimonies can then continue to report on their story by sending an SMS text message to a specific phone number, for automatic and instantaneous posting to a particular ’thread’ on the website. They will also be able to attach their phone numbers to the video clip so that journalists and others – and maybe even oil company shareholders? – can phone or send text messages directly to the communities to follow up on cases. In this way, ERA is not just building a static web resource of video clips, but is also creating a network of grassroots ‘reporters’ across these communities that can keep the wider world informed about the situation.

Communications loop impact

Friends of the Earth Netherlands (Milieudefensie) invited one of the ERA volunteers to attend the Shell AGM in The Hague in spring 2006. Bringing questions from the video clips, she tried to get answers from Shell executives. She spoke with the managing director of Shell Nigeria for six minutes while we videotaped the conversation. He made some remarkable statements which we have since played back to many different people in the delta. We recorded their responses, sometimes addressed directly to the general manager.

Later, we showed samples of this footage to the environment minister in Bayelsa State. He watched the villagers’ material and the footage from the Shell meeting, and needed no further convincing. He is now trying to arrange meetings between Shell and the communities to resolve the specific problems documented in these cases. But the initiative could lead much further. Villagers complain that until now, dialogue between oil companies and communities has always been on the companies’ terms, taking the companies’ problems as the point of departure. The video testimonies, and the fact that they will be made publicly available, can perhaps change that, and set a new precedent for communities to establish dialogue on their own terms. There is an optimistic feeling that the companies will have to take them seriously, that they cannot ignore and ‘greenwash’ these documented, well argued complaints that anyone can follow up with the communities directly.

The minister intends to set up an environmental monitoring facility at the state level that could take an inventory of the damage from oil spills and map this information, employing the same PV methodology as the project. The state government has also financed and will host a media centre where the volunteers will have access to both video production facilities and decent internet bandwidth.

Then there is the other project, the TV documentary. While teaching the volunteers how to use these technologies to further the farmers’ and fisherfolk’s causes, we have followed them with ‘our’ camera. In this ‘film-about-a-film’, or ’meta-narrative’, the main characters are the local volunteers who are learning to record digital testimonies.

Meanwhile, another producer has used the materials of the project to produce a short documentary for MTV, as part of a series on young human rights and environmental activists in different countries. We understand that this film will be distributed over several continents, including Africa. Such re-using, re-packaging and re-distribution of stories is encouraged. The video testimonies are offered for free, and in an increasingly commercial media environment there is something refreshing about being able to say that, and having the means to distribute them worldwide, thanks to the vast areas of the internet that are still free.

ERA is undertaking an innovative experiment combining participatory video in combination with video-sharing over the web and an SMS gateway. We hope this will provide an effective ‘communication loop’ that grassroots communities in developing countries can use to make their voices heard in the rest of the world.

Lars Johansson is a director of Maweni Farms, based in Tanzania. Weblinks and footage about the project will soon be available at www.maweni.com.