Introduction: Ferguson’s enduring influence

James Ferguson occupies a distinctive position in Africanist scholarship. For decades, his work has shaped the intellectual imagination of colleagues and students alike, establishing a foundation for the anthropology of development while influencing debates across multiple disciplines. From The Anti-Politics Machine to Global Shadows and “Seeing Like an Oil Company,” Ferguson has shown how development projects, global capital, and extractive industries generate new forms of political and social life (Reference Ferguson1994). His influence on the theory and ethnography of Africa has remained an epistemological foundation in the interdisciplinary study of the continent. His ethnographic richness was what first drew me to his work in graduate school, and his insights continue to ground my own research.

This essay reflects on Ferguson’s influence by returning to these three iconic works (The Anti-Politics Machine, Global Shadows, and “Seeing Like an Oil Company”) and considering their relevance for contemporary questions of resource extraction. I take as my point of departure my recent ethnographic fieldwork in the Niger Delta, where abandoned oil infrastructures have become both material ruins and symbolic sites of everyday life. Linking Ferguson’s concepts of incorporation, abandonment, and shadow economies with Yorùbá notions of Òjìji (shadow) and Ibojì (grave), I ask: what happens to oil infrastructures and the communities around them as we enter a post-carbon era? What forms of social and political life emerge in the spaces left behind by extraction? By situating these questions alongside Ferguson’s scholarship, I aim to show how his work continues to illuminate the precarity and creativity of African communities navigating the ruins of development.

Òjìji and Ibojì: Yoruba cosmologies of presence and ephemerality

It is with these concerns in mind that I turn to a moment from my recent fieldwork. One afternoon in February 2025, as I sat in front of my interlocutor’s house in a Niger Delta community, I watched three children (ages six to ten) run toward an abandoned oil installation in their village. It was playtime, and the children were thrilled that the sun was out and the heat and humidity less oppressive. As they ran towards the abandoned oil infrastructure, they laughed and exchanged banter, their eyes fixed not only on their destination but also on their own shadows. With long stick in hand, they pretended to chase those shadows—sometimes fleeing from them, sometimes embracing them—before finally climbing atop the rusting infrastructure. The abandoned oil installation soon transformed into an impromptu playground. For nearly half an hour, they played there, tapping the metal with their sticks and gazing at their shadows.

What struck me most in this moment was their constant attention to their shadows, a gesture that resonates with Yorùbá ideas of Òjìji (shadow). In Yorùbá cosmology, Òjìji is interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, it is the emanation of the soul, the visible sign of life and presence. On the other, its absence or distortion signals illness, spiritual attack or death—hence the saying, “ Eni tí Òjìji ò tẹ̀ lé, kò sí l’áyé ” (the one whose shadow does not follow is no longer alive). Òjìji also figures prominently in Yorùbá orature—in òríkì, proverbs, and Ifá verses—where it conveys loyalty, dependence, or inseparability: just as a shadow never leaves the body, a person cannot be separated from kin or community. At the same time, it reminds us of life’s ephemerality, for human existence—like a shadow—is fleeting.

This sense of temporality is demonstrated in another Yorùbá idiom: your shadow departs only at death when the body is laid in Ibojì (grave), the final destination of every human body once the soul has departed. Shadows, then, are powerful metaphors of presence, absence, and conscience—the ever-attendant witness to human life. My invocation of Òjìji (shadow) and Ibojì (grave) provides a framework for thinking through the precariousness of communities rendered “usable” and then “unusable” in Ferguson’s telling.

The children’s shadow play points us toward a broader reflection on how life and death, presence and absence, are entangled with infrastructures of extraction. Placing Òjìji (shadow) and Ibojì (grave) side by side as notions of ephemerality highlights two interconnected dynamics. First, the “shadows of the state” appear as oil infrastructures—monuments of incorporation into global circuits of capital—but then disappear as the wealth they generate is siphoned away through extractivism. Second, these state shadows reveal their temporality when they become sites of contestation: communities chase them, resist them, and endure their menacing afterlives (Adunbi Reference Adunbi2015, Reference Adunbi2022; Ferguson Reference Ferguson2005).

Oloibiri: From usable to unusable

A vivid illustration of this ephemerality is Oloibiri, transformed from a once “usable” site of oil extraction to an “unusable” ruin by the Nigerian state and its corporate allies. Located a few miles away from Yenagoa, capital of Bayelsa State and Port Harcourt, capital of Rivers State, Oloibiri shares a local government with the hometown of Nigeria’s former president, Goodluck Jonathan. Yet its greater historical significance lies in being widely cited as the birthplace of the country’s oil industry. During its two decades of production (1958–1978), Oloibiri’s oil wells yielded approximately twenty million barrels of oil, generating immense revenue for the Nigerian government (Adunbi Reference Adunbi2015; Hibou Reference Hibou2004).

Today, however, Oloibiri is desolate, a shadow of its former vitality. Its abandoned oil infrastructures—now serving as playgrounds for children—are both Òjìji, shadows of state presence, and Ibojì, monuments of decay. What remains is not prosperity but water pollution, soil erosion, and derelict facilities. While the state and international oil companies have long since moved on, ordinary people continue to bear the costs: environmental degradation, deeply entrenched poverty, impassable roads, and the absence of education and quality health services.

The shadow-chasing children gesture towards two connected insights that echo Ferguson’s elucidation in Global Shadows (2006) and Expectations of Modernity (1999). As Ferguson reminds us, “Africa is not outside the world system, nor is it simply ‘marginalized.’ It is rather selectively incorporated into global structures, often through shadowy, opaque, and unequal forms of connection” (2006, 14). The children’s play dramatizes this condition: their pursuit of shadows mirrors how capitalism itself hovers over local life. The abandoned oil infrastructure they climb upon embodies Ibojì—a grave of once-productive spaces now transitioned into an unusable ruin. In this way, the Niger Delta exemplifies Ferguson’s observation that Africa is never absent from global processes, but present in highly uneven and precarious ways.

Global shadows and corporate enclaves

The fate of Oloibiri emphasizes this point. During its two decades of production, it was fully incorporated into Nigeria’s political economy and global energy markets, fueling the state’s revenue and elite accumulation. But once the wells ran dry, it was swiftly abandoned. The Òjìji (shadow) that was once the revenue generating monuments of the state suddenly turns to Ibojì (a grave) that is now left as a site of precarity that stands as a desolate infrastructure that children now repurpose for play. Here we see how the wealth of the Delta has been extraverted through what Bayart calls the “politics of the belly”: the capacity of elites to draw resources from outside and redistribute them internally, transforming dependence itself into domination (Bayart Reference Bayart2009, 21). The infrastructures that once anchored Oloibiri to the global economy have become markers of its disposability, demonstrating what Ferguson calls the temporality and ephemerality of incorporation. Ferguson also offers tools for understanding the complicity of global capital in producing such precarious enclaves. In “Seeing Like an Oil Company” (2005), he shows how multinational corporations make local realities legible in ways that maximize extraction but disrupt social and ecological life. He challenges the notion that the dynamics of standardization integral to “seeing like a state” (Scott Reference Scott1998) automatically apply to contemporary global capitalism. He observes, “I address the almost tossed-off claim in the introduction to Seeing Like a State that the dynamic of standardization, homogenization, and grid making … applies equally well to our contemporary world of downsized states and unconstrained global corporations” (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2005, 378). Instead, corporations carve out enclaves: isolated zones of extraction, policed by private security and governed largely outside of national authority (2005, 378–80).

This resonates with my own ethnographic research on oil extraction in the Niger Delta, where oil companies similarly bypass state structures to impose their own regimes of governance, even as local communities resist, adapt, and negotiate on their own terms (Adunbi Reference Adunbi2015, Reference Adunbi2022). While corporations wield considerable power, they do not fully determine outcomes; residents exercise agency through activism, litigation, and everyday forms of refusal. Here, Ferguson’s insights into corporate legibility meet my own attention to community practices of resistance, together revealing that extraction is never simply technical or economic but always political. By reading Ferguson alongside my fieldwork and theoretical insight on extractivism, we gain a fuller picture of how oil economies are structured by both global and local forces: by the standardized frameworks of multinational corporations and the creative, often resistant responses of those who inhabit extraction zones. Oloibiri, in this light, is not only a graveyard of infrastructures but also a living reminder of the selective, temporary, and unequal ways Africa is incorporated into global capitalism.