Nigerian village curses the day the oil men came...

When foreign oil explorers first arrived in his remote Nigerian village, Sunday Inengite Ikpesu welcomed them with open arms thinking they were here to expand the community's palm oil trade.

More than 50 years later, the frail 75-year-old chief of Oloibiri still regrets his naivety.

"They told the elders they were looking for oil. We were excited because we thought it was palm oil," Ikpesu said sitting on his porch in his simple one-storey home close to where Shell D'Arcy, the predecessor to today's Shell Nigeria, drilled the country's first oil well in 1956.

"Our happiness later turned into sorrow when we saw the oil spills." More...

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