Anger, grief, regret and shame are some of the myriad ways that people narrate a decade of life along the Chad‐Cameroon Oil Pipeline. These stories reveal a perceptive and collective socio‐political awareness situated within multifaceted emotional geographies of resistance. In spite of resistance narratives, explicit and collective resistance practices remain uncommon. As people struggle and live within composite landscapes of structural violence along the pipeline, particular processes and mechanisms of uneven power influence the tendency for resistance struggles to be slow, impromptu or labour based. In this comparative ethnographic analysis, I consider the political environment that shapes socio‐political emotional ties in Nanga, particularly its socio‐political positioning as ‘the village of the First Lady’. In this case, people in proximate positions vis‐à‐vis the ruling family experience heightened oppression(s) and dispossession(s), at the same time that they report feeling little political recourse. In Kribi, on the other hand, responses to the pipeline can be described as defiant withdrawals, demonstrated through a series of unconnected refusals. Although resistance practices along the pipeline have not been visible or successful in an established sense, emotional geographies of resistance elucidate long‐term struggles to survive (i.e., slow dissent), including the accumulation of a collective emotional consciousness grounded in an awareness of historical patterns of injustice.