Ecology and Decoloniality: Reading the Natural World in Twentieth-Century African Literature

Abstract

In this article, I argue that pioneer African writing (in the frame of the empire writing back) hinges its anti-colonial aesthetics and politics on what I see as the African natural world—a space of nonhuman–human entanglement ruled by the natural order of things. In confronting colonial discourse, the writers, in most cases, resort to deploying the natures (I prefer the plural form) and the nonhuman elements of their traditional societies, which constitute what many scholars see as the cultural context of their writing in postcolonial reading practice. By way of shifting the paradigm, I propose an ecocentric reading practice that unbundles the notion of cultural context to reveal its heavy reliance on the African natural world. The recourse to natures, I argue, is a decolonial strategy, in that the writers deploy the natural world to counter the Western civilisation imposed on their epistemological order. In the end, the natural world remains the forte of the African writer in presenting a civilisation that claims to be more all-embracing (of humans and their nonhuman others) than the Western one with emphasis on human exceptionalism. I then read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino as illustrations of how African writers of the colonial moment anchor their counter-discourse on the African natural world. It is hoped that this reading practice will inspire a revisionist reading of African literature that places indigenous ecology at the centre of decolonial philosophy and practice.

Keywords:

• 20th century African literature
• colonialism
• ecology
• Chinua Achebe
• Okot p’Bitek