Sebastian Junger visited the MEND militants of the Niger Delta who overran a Shell oil facility there and seized four Western oil workers:
An American photographer named Mike Kamber and I had come to this village to meet MEND, but things had already acquired that unmistakable feeling of not going according to plan. One of the young men had a bottle of Chelsea gin with him, and he shook a splash onto the ground as a blessing and then poured himself a shot. The bottle proceeded like that around the little group. After the gin was finished they told us to follow them, and we were led back into the center of the village and told to sit in some white plastic chairs that had been set out for us. A joint was passed around. More Chelsea gin was brought out. Eventually the village chief took a seat at a small table under a mango tree and asked what we were doing in his village. It wasn’t an unfriendly question, but neither was it an invitation to feel right at home. Young men with guns started to drift into the area and position themselves around the group. I stood up and explained that Mike and I were journalists and that we wanted to document the impact of oil drilling in the area, and that a MEND contact had directed us to this village for a meeting.
The truth was a little more complicated. The official MEND spokesman is a mysterious online entity known as Jomo Gbomo, who trades sharply articulate e-mails with foreign journalists who arrive in the delta to cover the oil wars. No one seems to know Jomo’s real name or even where he lives; according to The Wall Street Journal, his Yahoo account carries an electronic code that may indicate his e-mails are sent from a computer in South Africa. Jomo is the person whom visiting journalists turn to for permission to go into the creeks, and he has refused every single request. A few days after getting the bad news from Jomo, though, Mike and I met with an Ijaw priest named President Owei, who also has contacts with MEND. Owei said that he could arrange a meeting for us if we wanted; all we had to do was hire a boat. By noon the next day we were gripping the mahogany thwarts of a 25-foot open speedboat, slamming southward at full throttle.
Throughout most of the delta there is a weak cell-phone signal, and MEND has run its entire military campaign using a flicker of reception and $3 phones. We were later told that, as word of our arrival spread, Ijaws in South Africa began calling to warn that we might be spies, and others, in the United States, were looking us up online to figure out who we were. The first sign of trouble was when one of the village boys got in our boat and drove it away into the creeks so that we couldn’t leave. Another hour went by, and dusk started to creep in through the mangrove. Finally we heard the sound of a powerful outboard motor, and then a boatload of gunmen roared past the village, plowed a couple of angry circles into the narrow creek, and came into the landing at what looked like full throttle. The women in the village fled. MEND had arrived.
They climbed out of the boat with their weapons propped upright on their hips and their faces immobile and expressionless. They didn’t bother to look at us and we hardly dared look at them. They carried heavy belt-fed Czech machine guns with the ammunition draped across their bare chests like deadly-looking snakes, and some wore plaid skirts called “Georges,” and others wore shorts or cast-off camouflage. One was naked except for his ammunition and a pair of dirty white briefs. They had painted their faces with white chalk to signify purity, and they had tied amulets around their arms and necks and foreheads for protection from bullets. Some had stuck leaves in their clothing so the enemy would see trees rather than men. One of them had painted the Star of David on his stomach to signify the lost tribe of Israel. They were a collection of walking nightmares, everything that is terrifying to the human psyche, and when confronted with them, Nigerian soldiers have been known to just drop their weapons and run.
Their leader was a slender boy wrapped in a red turban and white robe who was helped out of the boat almost like a child. Leaders are often chosen by the Ijaw god of war, Egbesu, and leadership can change daily. Egbesu sometimes communicates his desires by appearing in the dreams or visions of one of his followers and instructing him to be leader for that day. If the man tells the truth about Egbesu, others follow him without question; if he lies about it, Egbesu might kill him. The followers of Egbesu refrain from sex during time of war, and fast to increase their powers. Those powers, I was told, include the ability to drink battery acid without harm. “The spirit enters them when they go into battle,” one anthropologist who had lived in Nigeria for years told me. “They don’t have the same fears as you and I.”
Mike and I were told to rise and we stood there like penitent schoolboys while the young leader approached. He handed his rifle to one of the other militants without bothering to look at us and said, “Which one of you is Sebastian?”
“I am,” I said. The boy handed me a cell phone and walked away.
It was Jomo. “I told you that you couldn’t go out into the creeks,” Jomo said. I started to try to explain, but he cut me off. “What is the spelling of your last name?” he asked. I told him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right.” I handed the phone to the leader and walked back to where Mike stood. A few minutes later, one of the militants strode up to me and pointed his finger at my face. He was short but extremely strong and was covered in white war paint.
“You,” he said matter-of-factly. “I am going to kill you.”
Half an hour later, Jomo told the MEND leader to release us, and we were in our speedboat headed back to town.