Walls and White Elephants: Oil, Infrastructure, and the Materiality of Citizenship in Urban Equatorial Guinea

Abstract

Hurricane Ike struck Houston and much of eastern Texas in September 2008. At the time, I was living in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, doing fieldwork in the burgeoning oil and gas industry. Many of my informants were Texans, living as expatriate oil industry managers in the tiny Central African country. Days after Hurricane Ike hit, I stood in a security checkpoint building with a few other American women—wives of male expatriate management—going through the rituals of security clearance for admission to a private oil compound. As we waited, the women began to talk about home. They had family and friends in Texas, who, in the wake of the hurricane, had been living without electricity or running water for several days. One woman worried out loud about her 24-year-old daughter in Houston who had told her that there was no more gasoline, ice was sold out at local stores as were ice chests. “How will she eat?” she asked. However, in the next breath, she noted the incongruity, the strangeness, that here in Equatorial Guinea people live without electricity and running water every day. “Study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies,” Susan Leigh Star wrote, “and you miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power” (1999: 379).

A version of this essay originally appeared in Ethnography (2012, 13:4). It has been revised here to reflect the themes of the volume. Thanks to Sage Publications for permission to use the article here and to the editors of this volume for including the article here.