Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes

Foreword

v Foreword Tanure Ojaide, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte Vœ‡VÀˆÌˆV>ÊˆÌiÀ>ÌÕÀi\Ê,i}Àii˜ˆ˜}Ê
vÀˆV>˜Ê>˜`ÃV>«ià is perhaps the first major book project to date on eco-criticism written or edited by an African literary scholar. I congratulate the intellectually indefatigable Dr. Ogaga Okuyade for his foresight, intellectual acumen, industry, and determination to pioneer this field of study in contemporary African literature and other fields in a purposeful way. While there are articles here and there on the relationship between African literature and environment, one hardly finds a book-length project dealing with different authors covering all the genres of literature and other cultural art forms. (Under)Graduate students in Africa and elsewhere working on different authors and books with eco-critical topics will find this book fascinating because it brings together eco-critical approaches to the entire African literature in one volume. A coordinated approach to African literature focusing on the environment has been long overdue. In this work, the editor and contributors take African literature and criticism to their functional role of addressing important issues of the society to draw attention to them so as to generate ideas and actions toward the solution of problems. This book thus carries African scholarship further than mere analyses of themes and style to ethical and activist roles of literature having an impact on readers and the public. It is a scholarship geared toward rectifying ecological imbalance that is prevalent in many parts of the continent that form the setting, context, and thematic discourse of the works or authors studied in this book. This work hopes to sensitize the African readership to the need for the restoration of harmony between man and the environment. What is eco-criticism? It has to do with ecologically sensitive creative writing and criticism, which, according to Michael Branch, is meant to promote “ecological literacy” (viii). As I wrote elsewhere: vi FOREWORD It is meant to make readers not only aware of the global environmental crisis but also for literature to “suggest[s] means by which we might read literary texts with a new appreciation for what they reveal about the complex of relationships that mediate interactions between humans and their environments” (xiii). It is a call for a change in culture towards a more “biocentric worldview, an extension of ethics, a broadening of human conception of global community to include nonhuman life forms and the physical environment” (xiii). With awareness of ecocriticism, what Cheryll Burgess Glotfelty calls “the relationship between human culture and the environment,” literature will lead towards “an ecologically sustainable human society” (qtd. in Branch 29). The environment has always played a significant role in African life and society. As Ali Mazrui says in the first part of his series of documentaries “The Africans,” there existed in traditional society a partnership between humans and nature. Some animals were domesticated while others roamed the wild. Humans relied on animals and plants for sustenance— food in crops and fruits, fish and animals, firewood for cooking, timber for building, and more. Man held aspects of nature sacred—mountains, rocks, rivers, trees. The forest was the home of ancestors. In the religions of Africans, nature became an integral aspect of their spirituality in the form of groves, thus giving the environment a spiritual dimension. But with the coming of Christianity and Islam to Africa, the natural world became a servant of man rather than a partner because of an aloof God, leaving man to control and exploit nature. The result of the Western and Islamic intrusion into Africa and the superstitious and other practices of Africans led to the massive environmental degradation of the continent. A specific case in point that has attracted creative writing and criticism is the Niger Delta area of Nigeria where multinational oil corporations have done massive environmental damage through oil spills, blowouts, gas flares, and other forms of ecological despoliation. While oil exploration and exploitation are meant to bring wealth to the region, this has not happened in the Niger Delta, which remains not just one of the poorest parts of Nigeria but also of the entire world. As the multinational oil companies have done in other parts of the world (as in Ecuador), little of the oil wealth filters to the local communities whose traditional occupations of farming and fishing are destroyed. The health hazards are enormous and go unchecked, such as the methane and other chemicals that poison the people from the air...