‘I will lead my people in the fight against the oil companies’
Fascinating new book just published by indigenous campaigner Nemonte Nenquimo and US activist Mitch Anderson
I’ve long thought that this famous quote from the now-deceased South African archbishop Desmond Tutu - apparently a tweak on something of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta’s - was asking to be riffed on: “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible, and they had the land.” Given what has happened in South America since the 1950s, perhaps something like: “When the missionaries came to the Amazon, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and the oil companies had the land.”
I was reminded of this reading the just-published We will not be saved: A memoir of hope and resistance in the Amazon rainforest by Ecuadorian indigenous campaigner Nemonte Nenquimo and US activist and writer Mitch Anderson. It’s an extraordinary book: the story of a young Waorani girl growing up in one of the remotest parts of the Amazon and her education - or rather “mis-education” - by missionaries, which included being re-named (“Inés”), raped and beaten. Following that came years of confusion and dislocation, her seminal encounter with Anderson, and then her emergence as a grassroots activist whom in 2020 the United Nations crowned a “Champion of the Earth” and Time magazine called one of the 100 “Most Influential People in the World.”
“I realised that our fight to protect our forests and our way of life was really a fight to protect the whole world,” writes Nenquimo towards the end of the book, which she and Anderson were promoting in London last night. “Many others around the world understood this too - that we were all connected, and that to protect the Amazon was to protect the one home that we all share: Mother Earth.”
For all the beautiful evocation of the rainforest and the Waorani’s deep knowledge of it, or the sometimes comic nature of her childhood attempts to understand the “whites”, or her first encounters with buildings, lipstick, money, radio, caged animals etc, or even the tender descriptions of her and Anderson as they fall in love and raise their first child, it’s Nenquimo’s path to activism that I found most fascinating. This included searching conversations with her brother Opi, random encounters with already-well-known indigenous Ecuadorians fighting for their rights, her first demonstration, her concern for the last “uncontacted” Waorani, her dramatic meeting with two of their kidnapped children following a massacre, her introduction to Anderson’s work installing rainwater catchment systems, her ever-increasing sense of outrage at what the oil companies have been doing to Ecuador’s Amazon, and one night drinking ayahuasca with the Siekopai when she realised what she needed to do.
“I looked into the future. And the jaguar showed me what I must do,” she told Anderson. “I will lead my people in the fight against the oil companies. I will be a leader in the fight. The fight against your world.”
Out of all that came the vision to found an alliance between the Waorani, A’i Kofan, Siekopai and Siona, which came to be called the Alianza Ceibo, as well as an organisation to support them, later named Amazon Frontlines. Early initiatives included making their own maps of Waorani territory - given that government versions ignored them - and the decision to file a lawsuit against the government for trying to auction off their land to oil companies, which was won and catapulted Nenquimo to a degree of global fame.
“The words didn’t matter anymore,” she remembers in the book. “The judge continued to read the verdict but we had already heard what we wanted to hear: The government had lied! The oil auction was illegal! The documents were invalid! Our territory couldn’t be sold. Our people had the right to decide what happened on our lands.”
I can’t recommend We will not be saved highly enough. If this year there is just one book to read about the Amazon, or about indigenous people’s connection to the forest, or about the grotesquery of certain missionaries, or about the devastating impacts of the oil industry on indigenous communities, or about the discovery by one truly inspiring woman of her activist path , together with her equally inspiring co-author and partner, then this is surely it.