Presentation short abstract

This paper traces women-led resistance in the Niger Delta from the 1929 Women’s War to anti-oil protests today, showing how Afro-feminist, embodied, and spiritual practices reclaim land and body as demonic grounds of anti-colonial and ecological resistance.

Presentation long abstract

This article examines the continuity of women-led resistance in the Niger Delta, tracing a lineage from the Women’s War of 1929 against British colonial rule to contemporary protests against Shell and the oil industry. Across these struggles, Niger Delta women have reclaimed both land and body through acts of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. Drawing on Afro-feminism and Feminist Political Ecology (FPE), the article explores how women disrupt continuous cycles of dispossession by transforming the landscape into a site of embodied, spiritual, and ecological insurgency.

Through oral histories, archival traces, and counter-cartographic methods, I analyze practices such as naked protests, ritual occupations, and mangrove replanting as expressions of demonic grounds (McKittrick, 2006): spaces where Black women’s bodies and spiritual power reconfigure colonial mappings of territory, gender, and life itself. By foregrounding nakedness as an epistemic and spiritual strategy rather than a sign of vulnerability, this paper repositions environmental justice as an Afro-feminist praxis rooted in refusal, memory, and care. It argues that these embodied forms of resistance expose the enduring entanglements of empire, patriarchy, and oil, while gesturing toward alternative, decolonial geographies of justice and survival in the Niger Delta.