Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes

Introduction: African Cultural Art Forms, Eco-activism, and (Eco)-logical Consciousness

ix Introduction: African Cultural Art Forms, Eco-activism, and (Eco)-logical Consciousness "}>}>Ê"ŽÕÞ>`i]Ê ˆ}iÀÊ iÌ>Ê1˜ˆÛiÀÈÌÞ]Ê7ˆLiÀvœÀViÊÏ>˜`]Ê >ÞiÃ>Ê-Ì>Ìi One of the most problematic issues the world continues to contend with even beyond the close of the twentieth century is the unimaginable disappearance of the nonhuman world. Mankind continues to make concerted efforts to ensure that the other worlds are kept alive since the human world solely depends on them for sustenance and existence. Interestingly therefore, the nonhuman world appears to be more important than the human since it provides the material support base for the latter. Summits of different kinds with the environment forming the basis for such ensembles are organized across the world in order to draw man’s attention to his inordinate exploitation of natural resources, which in turn continues to make human existence precarious. However, as world leaders continue to advocate the need for an eco-friendly universe, there appears to be a basic problem with fashioning pragmatic policies that will ensure the preservation and sustenance of the environment. This may be viewed as a moot point, but the absence of a pragmatic and proactive eco-policy and its strict implementation essentialize the need to protect these worlds that cannot fight for themselves, but can only draw attention to the debilitating and devastating blows (un)consciously and constantly thrown at them by man’s sense of capitalist industrialism and consumerism through their visible disappearance. Africa appears to be the only continent that hardly participates in any form of mercantile-based revolution that powers the economy of the world. Africa was visibly absent during the industrial revolution, even if it actually oiled the process. The technological and scientific revolution which most Western countries launched in the twentieth century seems to be too complex for the African peoples, and as such, they appear to be mere observers and consumers of whatever projects or products emanating from this ever present and evolving revolution. If there is any one thing Africa has in abundance, it is, without doubt, natural resources. Invariably, nature-cum-environment becomes the base of the new revolution. As x INTRODUCTION noted above, Africa is heavily endowed with natural resources, but the inability to translate these natural endowments into socioeconomic bliss for the empowerment of the African peoples, which will in turn power their economy, lamentably positions Africa once again at the margins of this revolution. This inability to purposively utilize natural endowments to empower the African people is usually attributed to the governmental misrule and bureaucratic inefficiency of Africa’s political systems, which are usually predicated on the dialectic of belly and the individualization of the commonwealth. Thus, it has become commonplace to remark that the “disruption of the landscape is tied to political corruption” (Slaymaker, “Natural Connections” 131). However, the environmental crisis in Africa today spans beyond the moral depravity of government and the bureaucratic inefficiency with which the business of governance is run or conducted . The crisis is complex, if we consider Rob Nixon’s idea of “slow violence” (2), the kind which encompasses all brands of chaos that occur steadily and out of sight. A kind of violence that is monumental but its consequences are strategically delayed. For example, one will wonder how a gas flare or incessant oil spill can deprive a child from attending school three years after the flare or spill, when the school is many kilometers away from the site of the flare and spill. Nixon’s idea of slow violence expresses violence without blood. This kind of violence is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but “incremental and accretive” (2). Eco-criticism as a theoretical approach to the study of cultural art forms offers an appropriate middle ground, thereby making emphatic a vibrant relationship between the humanities and other disciplines. As an interdisciplinary field it enables us to reassess African writings in different frameworks within a single forum. The most fundamental feature of ecocriticism is basically to theorize the unending environmental crisis mankind continues to create and invoke different strategies (which are usually interdisciplinary) as means of bridging the frightening gap between humans and the environment. Hence Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells remark that the dominant tradition of eco-criticism is to “evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to the environmental crisis” (5). Cheryll Glotfelty’s formulation of cardinal aspects of eco-criticism has become perhaps the most quoted definition in the field. Her de...