We can already anticipate the blame-the-victim chorus that will be raised by the oil companies, Nigeria's rulers and the global media. But when resource hyper-exploitation co-exists with dire poverty, such incidents are absolutely inevitable. From the Lagos Vanguard, May 13, via AllAfrica:

The April 30 march in Washington, organized by the Save Darfur Coalition, brought out some heroes of the left, like George Clooney, but also some that the hard left loves to hate, like Elie Wiesel and Samantha Power. While policy-makers equivocate, trying to sound tough against the genocide while actually doing not a thing to stop it, the radical left remains largely silent on Darfur: the atrocities there are not being carried out by US imperialism or its proxies, and the solutions most often proposed involve some degree of US military intervention. There is indeed a strong case that another Western military adventure would be a very problematic "solution" at best—but the anti-war left, afraid of losing popularity, doesn't even bother to make that case. As usual, it is being just as dishonest as the government it claims such moral superiority to.

With Darfur in the headlines, if not the minds of our policymakers, it is generally forgotten that armed attacks, forced deportations and even slavery continue against Black African peoples throughout the Sahel. On Tuesday, May 9, at 7:30 PM, the Libertarian Book Club's Anarchist Forum will present a discussion in New York's Greenwhich Village on "Ethnic Cleansing and Slavery in Contemporary Africa," with an emphasis on Mauritania, Sudan and Darfur. The featured speaker will be Abdarahmane Wone of the African Liberation Forces of Mauritania (FLAM), which has been attempting to resist and expose the system of slavery in that country for a generation.

We wonder how he feels to be briefly on the Reuters wire April 30?

Eritrea's last native Jew tends graves, remembers
58-year-old Sami Cohen has fond memories of friends, parents and families in the Horn of Africa. Now there's little left, apart from an empty synagogue
Tending graves knee-deep in dry grass and purple flowers, Eritrea's last native Jew clutches memories of a forgotten community.

From Newsday, April 23:

LAGOS - A militant group that has been attacking Nigeria's oil pipelines and helping to drive up world oil prices added a new tactic last week by detonating a car bomb in a major oil city to publicize its standing threat to shut down the country's entire crude output.

Still hailing the cartoon protests as heroic anti-imperialism? From AP, Feb. 21:

Christian and Muslim mobs rampaged through two Nigerian cities Tuesday, killing at least 24 people in violence that followed deadly protests against caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed during the weekend.

The Niger Delta, in Nigeria's south, has long been beset by ethnic struggles over distribution of the region's oil wealth. Now the north, where Muslim-Christian tensions have long simmered, is boiling over—ostensibly over the cartoon controversy, but one wonders what local Nigerian Christians have to do with Danish cartoonists.

A new adittion to the alphabet soup of armed rebel groups in Africa's most oil-rich region: the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). From the BBC, Feb. 17:

A Nigerian militant commander in the oil-rich southern Niger Delta has told the BBC his group is declaring "total war" on all foreign oil interests.