Oil on Water is a 2010 novel by Helon Habila, who originally worked as a journalist and poet in Nigeria before becoming a professor of creative writing at George Mason. His writing has earned many accolades, including the Music Society of Nigeria national poetry award, the 2001 Caine Prize, the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize, the 2008 Emily Balch Prize, and the 2015 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. Oil on Water is his third novel and foregrounds Habila’s unique ability to weave journalistic endeavors into prose that elicits strong responses from the reader. Habila uses his main characters, Rufus and Zaq to illustrate how the global oil economy wreaks environmental and social havoc on the Niger Delta.

Content Warning: Both the novel and this guide reference alcohol and substance addiction, sexual assault, suicide, imperialism, and wartime violence.

Plot Summary

A young journalist, Rufus, travels into the Niger Delta along with his hero, a famous reporter named Zaq. They are searching for a kidnapped white woman, Isabel Floode, who finds herself made a bargaining chip in the war between the government of Nigeria and its people. This war is being fought over oil, a resource in high demand. On the side of the oil industry, the government and its military defend the profits and the machines of production against the militant forces who wish to liberate their people from the tyranny of the industrial complex. Those militants wish to stop the environmental pollution and destruction that result from the oil company and its interests; however, they bring their own brand of terror to the region through their violent acts.

As they venture deeper into the waters of the Niger Delta, Rufus, and Zaq meet a number of powerful people on both sides of the conflict but focus on the poor people caught in the middle of the battle, whose villages and lives are in constant danger. During all of this, Zaq is also struggling with alcohol addiction and an infection that is shutting down his internal organs one by one; it is hard to say which might kill him first. Meanwhile, Rufus is motivated to keep moving forward despite the danger because he cares for and pays the rent of his sister, who still bears the scars of an accident involving a terrible oil fire.

Rufus ultimately travels ahead of Zaq and finds that Isabel and her driver, Salomon, have concocted the kidnapping as a revenge plot against Isabel’s husband, James, who impregnated Salomon’s fiancée, Koko. The kidnapping quickly got out of hand, which led to Isabel being shuffled back and forth between militant groups and caused chaos for the people on the island of Irikefe, which is caught in the center of the conflict. When Rufus returns to Irikefe, he finds that Zaq has died. However, Rufus’s sister has joined a community of local worshippers bent on restoring the region’s environmental integrity, and Rufus can now share the story of his experiences with his readership.