The center-periphery environmental map itself blocked Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoni campaign from being heard

Evidence

What is required is more than simply diversifying the canon: we need to reimagine the prevailing paradigms. That much is evident from the enormous difficulty Saro-Wiwa had in gaining an audience in the United States and Europe. When he first appealed to Greenpeace representatives they said they didn’t work in Africa, that it was off their environmental map. Wherever he went, Saro-Wiwa was treated as an unfathomable anomaly. An African writer claiming to be an environmentalist? And claiming, moreover, that his people’s human rights were being violated by environmental ethnocide? Part of Saro-Wiwa’s problem in gaining a hearing for the Ogoni was not just economic and political—it was imaginative as well. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 790

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the eco-justice thread on who counts as a witness making slow violence legible, connecting to complaints-about-narratives-of-invisibility in the polyad.