Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature PDF

The problem of environmental degradation on the African continent is a severe one. In this book, Cajetan Iheka analyses how African literary texts have engaged with pressing ecological problems in Africa, including the Niger Delta oil pollution in Nigeria, ecologies of war in Somalia, and animal abuses. Analysing narratives by important African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Bessie Head, and Ben Okri, Iheka challenges the tendency to focus primarily on humans in the conceptualization of environmental problems, and instead focuses on how African literature demonstrates the interconnection and 'proximity' of human and nonhuman beings. Through this, Iheka ultimately proposes a revision of the idea of agency based on human intentionality in African literary studies and postcolonialism: that texts yoke the exploitation of Africans to the despoliation of the environment, and they recommend responsibility toward human and nonhuman beings as crucial for ecological sustainability and addressing climate change.

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“Naturalizing Africa is an essential addition to environmental studies in Africa. Iheka has an impressive command of the interface between human communities and non-human ecologies and the way literature can illuminate some of the most vital environmental challenges of our time.” Rob Nixon, Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in the Humanities and the Environment, Princeton University

“Through its focus on non-human agency and what Cajetan Iheka calls ‘the proximity’ of human and non-human actors, Naturalizing Africa offers an innovative approach to the role African literary studies can play in addressing environmental degradation and injustice in Africa. It represents an insightful and signiﬁcant contribution to literary, postcolonial, and environmental studies.” Byron Santangelo, Professor of English, University of Kansas

“Cajetan Iheka delivers a beautifully researched referendum on the Eurocentric limitations of both Enlightenment and postcolonial thought, seeking to relocate African ecocriticism and environmental activism in a primarily indigenous African understanding of the relations of humans with non-humans. His delineation of an ‘aesthetics of proximity’ as a means of representing multispecies relationships adds yet another dimension to the most progressive scholarship in animal studies, ecocriticism, and the new materialism.” Stephanie LeMenager, Moore Endowed Professor, Department of English, University of Oregon

“Brilliantly countering the anthropocentrism of much ecocritical scholarship on African literatures, Cajetan Iheka’s Naturalizing Africa offers important new interventions into African, postcolonial, and environmental studies. Through its skillful, expert analyses of literary representations of ecological crises from across the African continent, this book also contributes signiﬁcantly to envisioning alternative, sustainable ecosystems.” Karen L. Thornber, Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

“Cajetan Iheka’s Naturalizing Africa is an eloquent, theoretically sophisticated contribution to the growing body of ecocritical work engaged with the Global South. This book vividly illuminates the cultural causes of and responses to Africa’s environmental crises, using carefully chosen examples from various sub-Saharan regions.” Scott Slovic, Professor of English, University of Idaho and coeditor of Ecocritical Aesthetics: Language, Beauty, and the Environment and Ecocriticism of the Global South

“Iheka’s Naturalizing Africa is a book that is uncanny in its prescience. Synthesizing a range of debates in environmental, animal, and African literary studies, it not only elaborates the grounds of current debates in these ﬁelds but also illuminates a pathway for what is to come. This is going to be of tremendous inﬂuence for a very long time.” Ato Quayson, Professor and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

Naturalizing Africa

The problem of environmental degradation on the African continent is a severe one. In this book, Cajetan Iheka analyzes how African literary texts have engaged with pressing ecological problems in Africa, including the Niger Delta oil pollution in Nigeria, ecologies of war in Somalia, and animal abuses across the continent. Analyzing narratives by important African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Bessie Head, and Ben Okri, Iheka challenges the tendency to focus primarily on humans in the conceptualization of environmental problems and instead focuses on how African literature demonstrates the interconnection and “proximity” of human and nonhuman beings. Iheka proposes a revision of the idea of agency based on human intentionality in African literary criticism and postcolonial studies. He argues that the narratives yoke the exploitation of Africans to the despoliation of the environment and recommend responsibility toward human and nonhuman beings as crucial for ecological sustainability and addressing climate change. Cajetan Iheka is an assistant professor of English, specializing in African and Postcolonial Literatures, at the University of Alabama. He is an editor for African Studies Review, the journal of the African Studies Association.

Naturalizing Africa Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature Cajetan Iheka University of Alabama

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107199170 DOI: 10.1017/9781108183123 © Cajetan Iheka 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Iheka, Cajetan Nwabueze, author. Title: Naturalizing Africa : ecological violence, agency and postcolonial resistance in African literature / Cajetan Nwabueze Iheka. Description: New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiﬁers: LCCN 2017030487| ISBN 9781107199170 (alk. paper) | ISBN 1107199174 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Ecocriticism. | Ecocriticism in literature. | Postcolonialism in literature. | Human-animal relationships – Africa. | Human-plant relationships – Africa. | Human beings – Effect of environment on – Africa. | Nature – Effect of human beings on – Africa. | Human ecology – Africa. | Human ecology in literature. | Violence – Environmental aspects – Africa. | War – Environmental aspects – Africa. Classiﬁcation: LCC PN98.E36 I37 2017 | DDC 809.933553–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030487 ISBN 978-1-107-19917-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Keji, Kamsi, and the unborn My Loves, ndi o ga diri mma

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

page x 1

1

African Literature and the Aesthetics of Proximity

21

2

Beyond Human Agency: Nuruddin Farah and Somalia’s Ecologies of War

57

Rethinking Postcolonial Resistance: The Niger Delta Example

85

3 4

Resistance from the Ground: Agriculture, Gender, and Manual Labor

126

Epilogue: Rehabilitating the Human

158

Notes Works Cited Index

167 193 207

ix

Acknowledgments

My name is emblazoned on the cover of this book as author but the labors that resulted in the ﬁnal product can be traced to a network of mentors, friends, family, and Others. My trusted advisor, Kenneth Harrow, read and commented on numerous drafts of the chapters. Ken’s tough but loving criticism as well as encouragement and his example of dedication to students and junior colleagues are attributes I strive to emulate in my dealings as a scholar-teacher. I am also appreciative of the guidance of other mentors in East Lansing, including Justus Nieland, Salah Hassan, Nwando Achebe, Folu Ogundimu, Jyotsna Singh, Steve Rachman, and Kiki Edozie. Chris Onyema introduced me to the eco in literature during my undergraduate days at the Imo State University, Nigeria. I thank him for his unwavering support ever since. Isidore Diala ignited the intellectual spark with his extraordinary intellect and rigorous teaching during my undergraduate years. I am grateful for his continuous inspiration. Chima Korieh saw the potential in an undergraduate student and encouraged me to undertake graduate education in the United States. I thank him for his consistent support. I am grateful to Maureen Eke for everything she has done for me. This book has also beneﬁted from my friendship with Evan Mwangi. His insistence on focusing on what is important guided my thinking on this project. I will remain in Niyi Afolabi’s debt for his assistance in clarifying my ideas and strategies for navigating the contours of academia. Rob Nixon deserves special mention for the thorough feedback that was crucial for streamlining this book; I am in awe that I can continue to depend on his wise counsel. Byron Santangelo’s scholarship in African ecocriticism inspires mine and so is his generosity. For these, I can never thank him enough. This book received ﬁnancial support in the form of an Andrew Mellon Research Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. I thank the center for their support and the intellectual productivity they make possible. For providing the appropriate resources to complete this book, I must thank my department chair, Joel Brouwer; x

Acknowledgments

xi

Associate Deans Tricia McElroy and Roger Sidje; and Dean Robert Olin. I equally thank my colleagues and friends at the University of Alabama (UA) for their support and encouragement. Duncan Yoon, Cassie Smith, and Trudier Harris read aspects of this book and offered useful feedback. Nicholas Kerr, Lamar Wilson, and Utz McKnight have been remarkable interlocutors. I appreciate their friendship and efforts at community-building. UA’s Research Grants Committee also provided research funding for this book. Jennifer Jones welcomed me into her social world at UA and introduced me to the Cultural Diversity Working Group. She has since become a wonderful friend. Portions of this book beneﬁted from the careful reading of members of this group, including Stefanie Fishel, Hilary Green, Mairin Odle, Lamar Wilson, Marie-Eve Monette, and Lauren Cardon. It has been a pleasure to work with such generous scholars. Lauren Cardon and Thomas Altman have a special place in my heart for their friendship and introducing me to their networks in Tuscaloosa. Lauren was the perfect guide on a visit to New Orleans during a much-needed break from writing this book, while Laura Murphy was gracious enough to let us stay in her beautiful home. Thank you, Laura. My research assistants, Josh Dugat and Reilly Cox, proofread the manuscript and assisted with the bibliography. Special thanks to the generous colleagues, friends, and mentors scattered across the world, who have supported my work in many ways, including Scott Slovic, Tejumola Olaniyan, Tsitsi Jaji, Carli Coetzee, Apollos Nwauwa, Olabode Ibironke, Joeken Nzerem, Madhu Krishnan, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Brady Smith, Carmela Garritano, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Akin Adesokan, Olabode Ibironke, Tade Aina, Karen Thornber, Matt Brown, MaryEllen Higgins, and Pius Adesanmi. I count myself lucky to have beneﬁted from the brilliance and kindness of Ato Quayson and Adeleke Adeeko; I will always remember. I must also mention Amatoritsero Ede, Chielozona Eze, and Paul Ugor here for their intellectual and emotional support while writing this book. At Cambridge University Press, I had the honor of working with Maria Marsh, the best editor one could imagine. Maria’s quick turnaround of reader reports and immediate response to my many queries remain astonishing. I appreciate the efforts of other members of the Cambridge team in facilitating the publication of this book. Reports from two anonymous reviewers helped in the completion and revision of this book; I appreciate their useful counsel. An early version of Chapter 3 appeared in The Postcolonial World (Routledge, 2016, pp. 425–438), edited by Jyotsna Singh and David Kim. I thank Taylor and Francis Group for the permission to reproduce this material.

xii

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Connor Ryan, Jack Taylor, Anna Feuerstein, Abdulhamit Arvas, Hanan Aly, Delali Kumavie, Yesomi Umolu, Celina de Sa, Jennifer Royston, Noble Onyema Ikeh, Emmanuel Akanwa, Kenneth and Dammy Agbonwaneten, Paige, Mark McCormick, Bala Saho, and Leonald Mbah for their friendship and support. Connor and Jack also read and commented on portions of the book, while Delali invited me to Northwestern University where I tested some ideas. Rev. Fr. Mike Etekpo, beloved priest, big brother, and friend, has been there right from the beginning. I appreciate his material and spiritual sustenance. My parents and siblings have supported me with their prayers and love. I will remain in their debt for everything they have done to bring me this far. I am also grateful to the Famutimis for welcoming me into their family. Oh, my beloved Eve! Evelyn Moromokeji’s love and her appreciation of intellectual labor saw me through the writing of this book. Her greatest gift, however, is Kamsiyonna, whose arrival transformed our world and made the need for a more sustainable planet more urgent. My dedication of this work to mother and child is a small step toward acknowledging the many ways they enrich my environment.

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

This book was conceived in the wake of an ecological disaster that occurred, remarkably, not in Africa but in the United States. This was the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. When this event occurred, I had been in the United States for a few months, having arrived from Nigeria in the fall of 2009 for graduate school. The BP spill was my introduction to the world of sensational, image-driven coverage by the American media, but it was also a lesson in geopolitics, history, and narrative positioning–all subjects that fascinated me. More importantly, I was amazed at the reporting on the spill, the Obama administration’s relatively swift response to it, and the fact that BP’s then CEO ﬂew to the United States to take charge of the company’s mitigation of the aftermath of the disaster. All these were captivating because I had just arrived from a country where oil spills are a regular occurrence: the communities of the Niger Delta sit in a region despoiled by continuous environmental devastation since 1956, when oil was discovered in commercial quantities. As I followed the disaster in America, the contrast with the Nigerian scenario where oil companies and government at different levels ignore damage caused by frequent oil spills, gas ﬂaring, and other forms of environmental degradation became more glaring and disturbing.1 The contrast between the handling of similar incidents in Nigeria and the United States prompted my interest in literary representations of Africa’s environmental crises, beginning of course with the Niger Delta oil exploration that is so close to home. I favor literary narratives here for their important role in elucidating and informing “our ideas about catastrophic and long-term environmental challenges.”2 But the more I looked, the more I grappled with the paucity of scholarship on the subject. Moreover, the few studies that existed focused primarily on the effects of environmental tragedies on humans in the affected areas, often leaving out the nonhuman world or merely glossing over its relevance for the human population. Nonhumans, in this context, encompass the other life forms in the environment, including plants, animals, and forests but also the abiotic components of the ecosystem including soil and water. 1

2

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

The rubric of environmental justice, under which most African ecocritical studies are conducted, tends to deemphasize the nonhuman implications of environmental tragedies, the very sort that was highlighted in the discussion of harm to sea life caused by the BP spill. The emphasis on human life in the growing corpus of environmental scholarship in African literary criticism does not take sufﬁcient cognizance of the interlinking of human and nonhuman lives in African societies represented in literary works. Furthermore, such humancenteredness leaves untapped the full potential of those literary texts that stage relations across species and propose visions of sustainability for various aspects of the ecosystem. In other words, placing a premium on human lives to the detriment of Others carries the risk of reifying the anthropocentricism that leads to ecological disasters in the ﬁrst place. Of course, I do not seek to privilege the nonhuman over human lives; rather, my aim is to underscore the different ways these other life forms are linked to humans in the narratives, or what I have chosen to call their “proximity” in Chapter 1. I argue in this book that the relationship between humans and other life forms in African literature has signiﬁcant implications for rethinking questions of agency and resistance in African studies as well as in postcolonial studies. The scope of the study extends to African literary representations of ecological crises such as oil pollution in the Niger Delta, war devastation in Somalia and South Africa, and deforestation in Kenya as well as the ecological implications of agricultural development in Botswana. In many ways, this book responds to Neil Lazarus’s call in The Postcolonial Unconscious for a kind of postcolonial studies attuned to contemporary issues including questions of the land and environment.3 But why do all these matter? What is to be gained by evoking a complex view of Africa’s environments bordering on the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman lives? And why is Africa an important site for understanding the proximity of humans and nonhumans alongside the environmental devastation underscored in this book? The book makes four interventions: (1) it extends the domain of African literary studies from one primarily focused on humans to one that explores the complexities of human-nonhuman relations in the different sites under consideration; (2) it rethinks the dominant notion of agency based on intentionality and proposes ways of conceiving distributed agency or varieties of agency functioning between human beings and other environmental actors; (3) it broadens our perspective on violent resistance and its complicity in ecological degradation, thus reopening the question of violence that earlier marked the struggle for liberation by such

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

3

ﬁgures as Frantz Fanon; and (4) it contributes to the larger project of envisioning alternative, sustainable ecosystems. While one category of African environmental criticism is particularly interested in highlighting human sufferings and subjectivities, another subset propounds the necessity of attending to animal rights and critiques the exploitation of animals.4 My project complicates this dichotomy by considering the intersections of humans with their environment in those instances of oppression, resistance, and agency. I move the focus away from the dominant tendency to read nonhuman ﬁgures (such as animals) as symbols for oppressed humans in African literary criticism. The book orients readers to a critical practice attentive to interspecies relations and extends the interpretive possibilities of African literature with innovative readings of writings published between 1952 and 2012. One area of African and postcolonial literary inquiry dominated by human concerns is that of agency. Yet when we consider the question of agency within the context of human-nonhuman relations explored in this book, an account of exclusive human agency gives way to a sense of a distributed network of agency between human beings and other components of the ecosystem. Agency here is based not exclusively on intentionality but on the actions or effects produced by both humans and nonhumans. The processes of decolonization have been invested from the beginning with practices of subjectivities rooted in purposive human actions. As Olakunle George puts it in Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters, analyses of agency have been primarily concerned with the “human capacity, or the extent of it, to understand itself–and perhaps based on the rigor and lucidity of that understanding–to change its circumstances for the better.”5 George concedes the insufﬁciency of the human subject and shows how some instances of agency in his book are produced outside human intentionality. For George, the ultimate effect of an agentic act often exceeds the purpose or intention of the doer.6 Although nonhuman agency is outside the scope of George’s work, his analysis reveals several instances of nonhuman actions. One instance is his reading of D. O. Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons where the hero Akara Ogun is captured as he embarks on a journey to retrieve an object with the capacity to enrich his community from the king of a distant forest. Both the predatory creature and the object–with its capacity to bless and enrich–are external to the human.7 In short, Fagunwa’s text is calibrated to show how humans are intertwined with nonhuman forces, but accounts of agency in the text, as in African and postcolonial studies more broadly, are yet to seriously take notice of the nonhuman protagonists in the environment, often implicated in their renditions of agency.

4

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

Inspired by studies in indigenous cosmologies and materialist-oriented scholarship, my proposal for distributed agency–the idea that humans possess and share agency with the landscape and animals, among others– challenges the dominant anthropocentric version by recognizing varieties of actions, human and nonhuman, intentional and accidental, that permeate African and postcolonial environmental narratives. I urge readers to consider nonhumans as “actant,” as Bruno Latour terms it, and recognize their participation and effects even in those instances of intentional human agency. Rather than foreground intent or purposive action, distributed or diffuse agency is concerned with the actions or the effects produced in the environment by a network of actors, human and nonhuman.8 Sites of agency in African and postcolonial studies have equally been stages for performing resistance.9 African literature, in particular, has been involved in the larger project of resisting various forms of exploitation, although the forms that such resistance practices take in these literary texts vary. For instance, Frantz Fanon’s injunction that colonialism is a violent phenomenon that should be resisted with equal violent force has inspired scholars of African and postcolonial literature to endorse the liberatory potential of violent forms of resistance depicted in literature. In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, for example, the exploitation of the environment has been challenged by oil bunkering, which involves scooping crude oil from vandalized or corroded pipelines, and bombing oil installations, among other forms of violent resistance activities. Critics tend to view these acts positively when they appear in literary narratives.10 While recognizing the value of such violent resistance for human causes, I underline the contradictions involved when the act of resistance becomes complicit in the same environmental degradation it seeks to subvert. To be sure, some could argue that not all forms of resistance in the Delta are meant to challenge environmental degradation and that some oppositional practices in the region are solely concerned with subverting the ﬂow of capital and the activities of the oil companies. Yet to justify environmental destruction in the guise of subverting capitalist endeavors is to continue to operate within the human-centered script being interrogated here. I showcase the contradictions that may plague violent resistance against environmental degradation, highlight alternative strategies of resistance inscribed in African literary texts, and show how the environment has always been at play in resistance in Africa, including in the activities of revolutionary movements such as the Mau Mau in Kenya, which used the forests for guerrilla warfare against the British colonizers.

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

5

Finally, this book redeﬁnes the political projects of African literary criticism and postcolonial studies. Whereas the project of decolonization proceeded primarily along human lines, I emphasize that the challenge to neoliberalism or late capitalism must include a recognition of nonhumans as companions in a precarious world. This recognition will take cognizance of their proximity to humans (discussed in Chapter 1) in terms of spatial nearness and shared biological characteristics and vulnerabilities such as suffering and death as well as a shared victimhood in the neoliberal machine’s instrumentalization of bodies. The ethical import of this book consists of undermining those discourses that legitimate environmental violence in the name of human exceptionalism. Another way to state this is that narrow anthropocentric conceptualizations of the environment are now insufﬁcient. If one primary characteristic of African literature, what Tejumola Olaniyan would call the “ﬁeld commonsense of belonging and identity,” is its investment in the human condition, one implication of the global ecological crisis for the ﬁeld is the urgency of a recalibration attuned to a network of humannonhuman ensemble.11 In short, the complexities of ecosystems, Africa’s being no exception, must be properly taken into consideration to address the world’s urgent ecological crises. The foundational step toward addressing these ecological problems is inscribed in the texts under scrutiny: the recognition of the interlinkages between humans and other life forms in the environment and the embrace of what Aldo Leopold calls a “land ethic.”12 The anthropocentric position, under which ecological violence has become normalized, places humans at the center of the universe and sanctions those activities meant to “prosper” the human, even when they are detrimental to other beings; but the decentering of the category of the human counters that exceptionality. If human beings retain any exception here, it is their unique capacity to signiﬁcantly alter the ecosystem, for better or worse in the age of the Anthropocene.13 In that light, this book recommends a change of human perspective in order to see and relate with the plants and animals, lands and forests around us as constitutive of the living world and not as mere resources for indiscriminate exploitation. As African and postcolonial studies have fundamentally encouraged responsibility toward the human Other, this book extends this ethical obligation to nonhuman Others. To foreground nonhumans here is not to undermine responsibilities to fellow humans; in fact, a central preoccupation of this book is to yoke together obligations to both constituencies and position these responsibilities at the heart of what it means to be human.

6

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

Postcolonial Studies and the Late Environmental Turn If human imbrication with nonhumans has always been a feature of African societies and the literary expressions that emerge from them, why then has African literary criticism not paid much attention to the interlinkages and their ecological signiﬁcance? Why have human concerns remained at the heart of literary criticism on Africa? In his wellknown essay “Echoing the Other(s): The Call of Global Green and Black African Responses,” William Slaymaker claims that the slow response to ecocritical concerns in African literary studies is a result of the green movement being considered another imperial design. In his words, “This ecohesitation has been conditioned in part by black African suspicion of the green discourses emanating from metropolitan Western centers.”14 Extending Slaymaker’s view, Rob Nixon provides an answer that applies to a broader postcolonial context when he writes, in a 2002 essay, that “there are four main schisms between the dominant concerns of postcolonialists and ecocritics.”15 For him, while postcolonialists emphasize hybridity and cross-cultural interactions, ecocritics tend to privilege purity and wilderness preservation. The second distinction is that whereas displacement remains at the heart of postcolonial studies, environmental writing in the American scene has foregrounded place. Nixon adds that while postcolonial writers and scholars are critical of nationalism and “favor the cosmopolitan and the transnational,” ecocriticism has largely developed within the nation, especially in the United States.16 Nixon’s ﬁnal point is that unlike in postcolonial studies where attention is often devoted to “excavating or reimagining the marginalized past,” much of “environmental literature and criticism” relegates complex histories to the background in “the pursuit of timeless, solitary moments of communion with nature.”17 Nixon’s work shows the emphasis that the ﬁrst wave of ecocriticism in America placed on deep ecology. Since William Rueckert ﬁrst used the term ecocriticism in 1978, the concept has been used to articulate different shades of environmentalism. The earliest manifestation was in deep ecology, which maintains a strict distinction between nature and culture. Deep ecology implies attentiveness to nature writing and/ or wilderness preservation characteristic of the work of the American writer Henry David Thoreau. The deep ecology approach to ecocriticism was popular in American nature writing but has been critiqued for its neglect of the environment’s social dimensions. William Cronon, for instance, has connected “the movement to set aside national parks and wilderness” in the United States to the “ﬁnal Indian wars, in which the prior human inhabitants of these areas

Postcolonial Studies and the Late Environmental Turn

7

were rounded up and moved onto reservations.”18 At stake in Cronon’s submission is the need to deconstruct the idea of pristine or virgin wilderness untouched by humans. Recalling the Indian wars allows Cronon to highlight the indigenous people whose use of the land complicates the idea of “virgin wilderness” while foregrounding the violence under erasure in deep ecology. Practitioners of postcolonial ecocriticism, including Graham Huggan and Helen Tifﬁn, equally found deep ecology complicit in the project of Western imperialism because it upheld the portrayal of a wild Africa and of a tropical Edenic trope in colonialist discourse.19 However, the strict nature/culture dichotomy has become a minority position in ecocriticism, as most forms of criticism are now socially inﬂected. Social ecology foregrounds the inextricability of the human from nature and undermines a strict nature/culture dichotomy. This ecological disposition captures Lawrence Buell’s description of the environment as “‘natural’ and ‘human-built’ dimensions of the palpable world” often “indistinguishable” from one another.20 The environmental justice movement, which emerged in the United States in the 1980s to challenge the disproportionate distribution of toxic materials in communities of color and the environmental racism associated with such allocation of risk, is a ﬁne example of a social ecological perspective. A primary tenet of this movement is that environmentalism cannot be separated from issues of social justice and equity. Postcolonial ecocritics have found the environmental justice approach appealing because of the stress it puts on human concerns and its critique of inequality.21 Due to the premium it places on social justice for the humans caught in environmental disasters, postcolonial ecocriticism has not sufﬁciently addressed the entanglement of human and nonhuman lives in Africa or the value that indigenous African communities confer on other-thanhuman lives. To put it more broadly, Africa’s speciﬁcity, its singular position in the world, has not been sufﬁciently accounted for in postcolonial ecocriticism.22 For example, many African societies, despite their complexities and differences, are drawn to an ethics of the earth. In this mode of seeing, certain nonhuman forms, including animals, plants, and so on, are considered viable life forms worthy of respect. In Yoruba cosmology, the iroko tree takes on a special designation as the abode of spirits, which protects it from indiscriminate exploitation. The humans in this Yoruba traditional economy see an interconnection between their fate and that of the tree, which they protect and revere. Readers of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God will also remember Oduche, Ezeulu’s son, trapping the royal python in his box as an act defying tradition.23 The conﬂict surrounding the snake’s “arrest” takes its signiﬁcance from the

8

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

indigenous view of the snake as a relational Other. The snake, in the community’s vision, is sacred to their deity, Idemili. As such, they believe that whoever kills the sacred animal must perform an elaborate funeral or risk Idemili’s excoriation. Moreover, Wangari Maathai’s memoir, Unbowed, traces her ecological vision to the indigenous practices of her rural Kikuyu upbringing that privileges respect for the environment and the need to nurture the earth that sustains humans.24 My intention is not to make an essentialist claim that generalizes Africans as ecologists par excellence. As William Beinart, Kai Horsthemke, and Byron Caminero-Santangelo, among other scholars, have pointed out, indigenous societies also engage in indiscriminate practices that seem devoid of ecological consideration. Moreover, the non-sacred species are often left to the whim of human destructive practices.25 That said, the relational positioning of the human to nonhumans is a model attribute of the stories and social practices of indigenous communities worth considering in an era of hypercapitalism, with its commodiﬁcation of everything. As Anna L. Peterson has suggested in the context of Buddhism and Taoism, these relational beliefs and practices “can inspire and legitimize efforts to preserve the delicate web of social and natural relationships in which we all exist.”26 Therefore, the fact that members of these communities do not always adhere to tenets of their beliefs and social practices should not invalidate the importance of those values. All considered, these societies posit a relationship to the environment that differs from the commodiﬁcation of life that predominates in the hypercapitalist global economy. The environmentalism being discussed here is local and reﬂects a social ecology; it emphasizes the interplay of the human and nonhuman for ecological sustainability. Why, then, did African literary criticism not foreground this interconnectedness? There are at least two additional explanations for this ecological inattention besides the ones proffered by Slaymaker and Nixon earlier. The ﬁrst is that postcolonial studies, from which African literary criticism derives its impetus, retained the anthropocentric leaning of the Western epistemology it critiqued. While postcolonial criticism has played an important role in the assertion of the cultures and subjectivities of formerly colonized people and in the deconstruction of the uniﬁed subject of the Enlightenment, it did little to overturn the anthropocentric leaning of that subject. If the creation of the human in God’s image makes him/her superior to other life forms in Christian thought, reason became central to demarcating the human from other beings in the Enlightenment.27 Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work is useful in delineating the different strands of the human that are being explored here. In his article addressing the question of the human in a time of climate change, the Marxist historian contends:

Postcolonial Studies and the Late Environmental Turn

9

In all these moves, we are left with three images of the human: the universalistEnlightenment view of the human as potentially the same everywhere, the subject with capacity to bear and exercise rights; the postcolonial-postmodern view of the human as the same but endowed everywhere with what some scholars call “anthropological difference”–differences of class, sexuality, gender, history, and so on. This second view is what the literature on globalization underlines. And then comes the ﬁgure of the human in the age of the Anthropocene, the era when humans act as a geological force on the planet, changing its climate for millennia to come.28

The ﬁrst notion of the human is the one that postcolonialism has tried to deconstruct, and the works of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak are very inﬂuential in this regard. The result of this critique is the second view of the human in Chakrabarty’s work. While the idea of a decentered subject predicated on difference marks the deﬁning characteristic of the critique of the Enlightenment, postcolonial theory inherited the silence on nonhuman forms implied in the universal, rational, uniﬁed subject. This second view of the human considered the colonial struggle best approached from the angle of the anthropos. The quest for decolonization and national liberation trumped other considerations including questions of patriarchy and women’s rights. The environment did not merit inclusion at all. The other reason for the occlusion of the environment is the need to keep a distance from those “natural” attributes of the colonies that made them amenable to the colonial framing of their landscapes and the local inhabitants as being in a state of nature. This ideology was particularly prevalent in the description of African societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Frantz Fanon clearly shows. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon states: Sometimes this Manicheanism reaches its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the colonized subject. In plain talk, he is reduced to the state of an animal. And consequently, when the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms. Allusion is made to the slithery movements of the yellow race, the odors from the “native” quarters, to the hordes, the stink, the swarming, the seething, and the gesticulations. In his endeavors at description and ﬁnding the right word, the colonist refers constantly to the bestiary.29

In its animalization of the colonized subject, colonial discourse enabled the colonist to disavow any relation or connection to the colonized. The colonized was linked to animals positioned in a debased state.30 Fanon, for instance, shows the hierarchical arrangement of life forms in the imperial design and the way such a framework was used to denigrate Africans as bestial and therefore inferior. The debasement was not restricted to conjuring up animality, as several

10

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

colonialist writings positioned the African continent as being in a wild state and devoid of history. Anne McClintock and Mary Louise Pratt have particularly produced insightful readings of colonialist discourse’s tendency to situate Africa in the state of nature.31 McClintock shows how Africa’s colonized spaces were feminized and sexualized as well as how women and nature were conﬂated within a perverse colonial idiom. She explains that Africa’s spaces were considered virgin empty lands while highlighting the epistemic violence characterizing such categorizations. This was particularly the case in the nineteenth century. Yet as late as the 1950s, representations of Kenya and other parts of the continent, in the words of William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, “tended to write out or diminish the presence of African people who had lived so long with wild animals.”32 Soon afterward, black South Africans were banished to native homelands where they were described in animalistic terms by the Apartheid regime and its sympathizers. A shared characteristic of these colonial texts is the penchant to elide the humans in the African spaces, often depicted as wild, to be tamed and controlled. When these texts include humans in the environment they describe, it is a savage humanity with little or no rational sensibility that is portrayed. Overall, these depictions of Africans and their environment serve to justify the colonial enterprise– that is, to provide rationale for the exploitation of the human and nonhuman resources in the territories, albeit in the name of civilization and progress.33 The naturalization of the African continent in colonial discourse stands for one of three manifestations of what I am calling naturalizing Africa. The ﬁrst, described previously, can be seen in colonial writings on the continent that reduced the environment either to a wild, uncorrupted virgin landscape devoid of people or to a space peopled with human creatures still in their natural state. I locate the second dimension in the project of colonial modernity. In their bid to justify their colonial processes including the despoliation of the African environment, the colonizers sought to civilize the Africans and their environment, to “naturalize” them into a global modernity akin to the obtaining of citizenship by naturalization. In this process, the Africans would distance themselves from their “natural” state even as they became enamored by the transformation of their environment into roads, railways, and other contraptions of modern life. I argue that the distancing of the Africans from their environment was carried into the practice of African literary studies and postcolonialism with an emphasis on the portrayal of rational, modern subjectivities that are often inconsistent with those indigenous practices that connect humans to their environment. Finally, this book can be read as an extended essay on the re-naturalization

Postcolonial Studies and the Late Environmental Turn

11

of Africa in the literary texts I examine. It should be clear that my interest is not to uphold the essentialist or stereotypical view of Africa as a geography of exceptional ﬂora and fauna. Instead I demonstrate that African literary narratives stage connections between human and nonhuman lives and illuminate the necessity of these interconnections for an enriched interpretation of the narratives and Africa’s complex ecologies. Speaking of narratives, the last decade has seen a rise in the number of African environmental literary texts. Literature on the “oil curse” and its ecological aftermath, for example, has proliferated both on the continent and in the Western academy with the publication of works such as Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow,34 Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist,35 and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water.36 In terms of literary criticism, this book joins the growing body of works devoted to the environment in African and postcolonial studies. This project is inspired by, even as it expands on, Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,37 Wendy Woodward’s The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives,38 and Byron Caminero-Santangelo’s Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology.39 Nixon’s exemplary work of praxis scholarship is built around what he aptly describes as “slow violence”: “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”40 Nixon’s work addresses examples of slow violence in a reading of texts primarily from the Global South–namely, Nigeria, Kenya, Antigua, South Africa, and India. Slow violence, for him, ranges from the impacts of oil exploration in Nigeria and the Middle East and deforestation in Kenya to the environmental consequences of war in Iraq and of the tourism industry in Antigua and South Africa. I return to the theoretical possibilities of Nixon’s concept of slow violence throughout the book because of the opportunities it offers to read African literature in new ways. Yet Nixon’s angle of vision leaves open for analysis the implications of slow violence for nonhumans or what Tim Morton describes as “strange strangers” in The Ecological Thought.41 In his chapter on the Niger Delta oil crisis where he discusses the work of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his son, Ken Wiwa Jr., for instance, Nixon’s critical lens is most robust and adept when he discusses oil exploration vis-à-vis the survival of the Ogoni and other ethnic minorities. However, he leaves the reader yearning for a similar handling of the implications of his reading for the other minorities, the other beings in the Niger Delta environment. After all, the Delta is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, and a consideration of other components of the land community has much to contribute to our understanding of environmental

12

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

degradation as slow violence. My reading of Niger Delta literature in Chapter 3 builds on Nixon’s work by considering the stakes of humannonhuman entanglements for ecological justice. While Nixon’s work is dedicated to a set of mainly nonﬁctional texts drawn from across the world, Woodward’s and Caminero-Santangelo’s books focus exclusively on Africa. Woodward examines writings from Southern Africa that engage with animal subjectivities and their relationships with human beings. By so doing, her project shares my interest in interconnections across species. However, I extend her focus on animals and the restriction of her scope to Southern Africa by engaging other nonhuman life forms and abiotic components as well as by extending my primary sources to a broader range of texts drawn from across the continent. Caminero-Santangelo’s project is somewhat closer to mine because of the breadth of ecological issues he addresses and the broader geographical contexts he deals with. Informed by questions of environmental justice and thinking in political ecology, Caminero-Santangelo “examines the relationships among African literary writing, anticolonial struggles, social justice, and environmentalism in Africa.”42 He challenges the view that Africa has produced little or no environmental thought, even as he assiduously proves that African literary writings have long grappled with questions of the environment and the “tensions in global environmental justice, political ecology, and African environmentalist writing.”43 While my work shares with Caminero-Santangelo’s a recognition of the important contributions of African literary texts to ecological discourses on the continent as well as the quest for liveable, healthy environments, I develop further the interdependencies and enmeshing of human lives with those of other beings in the ecological communities I examine. Whereas Different Shades of Green places emphasis on environmental justice, this book is invested in ecological justice premised on the proximity of nonhumans to humans. Its ethical component aligns my project with the robust interdisciplinary conversations on multispecies entanglement and interspecies relations across the ﬁelds of anthropology, history, literary and cultural studies, and science and technology studies, among other disciplines. More speciﬁcally, Naturalizing Africa contributes to the scholarship being done in multispecies studies by scholars including Donna Haraway in When Species Meet,44 Eduardo Kohn in How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human,45 and Rosi Braidotti in The Posthuman.46 Whereas my project shares with the aforementioned works the need to respect and be responsive toward the Other, who may not be human, the focus on Africa in this book expands the terrain of this interdisciplinary conversation, which to date has hardly engaged the continent as a site of intellectual inquiry. The literary component of this book also expands

Strong Anthropocentrism versus Strategic Anthropomorphism

13

the angle of vision of these works, which tends to privilege the social sciences. Strong Anthropocentrism versus Strategic Anthropomorphism Of course, the African continent is indeed an important site to explore environmental degradation given its treatment as savage and brutish in the colonial imaginary and as waste or dump site in the current neoliberal order. In colonial writing on Africa, as we saw earlier, the African environment was portrayed as being in a pure state of nature. In this conﬁguration of the continent, the sociohistorical conditions of the African people and their imbrication with their environment were neglected. In more recent times, due to the impacts of globalization, the African environment has not fared much better. Lawrence Summers’s cold, rationalized, efﬁcient dumping of waste in Africa, where life is short anyhow, is instructive here.47 The neoliberal logic guiding Summers’s leaked World Bank memo is also the rule of resource extraction in Africa. The business of oil exploration, for example, has resulted in ecologically damaging practices in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Although there has been a reduction in violence in the area, its environment remains in a state of destruction due to gas ﬂaring, oil spills, and oil bunkering–all acts inimical to the biodiversity of the region. What is particularly remarkable about the practices of the oil companies and other multinational corporations operating on the continent is their continuation of the colonial disregard and contempt for the environment in the communities where they operate. By disregarding “best practices” adopted in their home countries and in other Western countries, the companies continue to treat these African environments as devoid of people or constituted by disposable people. Issues of environmental devastation and deforestation are recurring even as new economic powers such as China are now replacing former colonizers in their search for minerals and other resources in exchange for transient development. Furthermore, conﬂicts exacerbated by the quest for resources and political control have left certain parts of the continent currently embroiled in war or still reeling from the slow violence of past conﬂicts. Warfare is another fallout of colonialist ideology and the politics of resource extraction with ecological consequences for the continent. James Ferguson has noted that “the continent has been racked by a series of civil and interstate wars, with a number of countries having endured year after year of endemic instability and violence, and along with that, the killing, maiming, and masses of refugees that so often

14

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

dominate the world’s imagination of ‘Africa.’”48 The civil war in Somalia, for example, which raged from the 1990s until recently, opened the environment up for exploitation. In addition to human lives lost in the war, the absence or weak nature of existing state structures subjected nonhumans to precarity. Those that were not displaced or killed in the conﬂict ended up as resources to be exported to the Gulf States. Moreover, the country’s territorial waters were subjected to illegal ﬁshing and dumping of toxic wastes by Western vessels. Kevin Bales’s remarkable analysis of the link between conﬂict and environmental destruction applies in Somalia as it does in the Congo where he observes the decimation of forests and the larger ecosystem by armed thugs bent on mining.49 We can distinguish between a strong anthropocentrism, which would name the activities that engender the nefarious environmental challenges outlined in the preceding text, and a strategic anthropomorphism, which I interpret as a positive response to processes of environmental degradation.50 In fact, one possible critique of a work engaged in understanding nonhuman forms might be that if the Other is inscrutable and therefore unknowable, how can we understand him/her/it except through the use of human terms and language? This critique calls to mind the debate on the language of African literature at Makerere University in the 1960s. At that conference, participants like Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Obi Wali critiqued the use of English and other “foreign” languages as linguistic containers for African literature by arguing that the colonial provenance of these languages limits their potential as weapons of cultural and political liberation. But for others including Chinua Achebe, the English language is valuable for communicating across ethnic and linguistic lines in a multicultural continent, insofar as the language is ﬂexibly adapted to “carry the weight of his African experiences.”51 The language debate is evoked here to show the parallel between the successful domestication of English for literary purposes in Africa and the deployment of narrative strategies as well as the so-called “human languages” for critiquing environmental challenges and staging sustainable lifeworlds. My point is that the tool’s origin and history matter less than the strategic work being accomplished with it. Whereas any activity justifying human exploitation of the environment can be regarded as a strong form of anthropocentrism, strategic anthropomorphism occurs when the lines between humans and nonhumans are blurred to undercut notions of superiority and to bring about ecological awareness and/or restoration. Jane Bennett’s endorsement of anthropomorphic practices–the kind deployed by writers examined in this book–“to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world” would qualify as an instance of strategic anthropomorphism since it is

A Note on Method

15

concerned with positioning these humans in a nonhierarchical relationship to nonhuman forces.52 In short, strategic anthropomorphism is productive for understanding African literary narratives in new ways, for exploring connections across species, and ultimately for projecting sustainable alternative lifeworlds in Africa and beyond. A Note on Method Naturalizing Africa is primarily an excursion in African literary criticism and postcolonial studies, but the fact that it draws on different theories from across disciplines qualiﬁes its approach as an instance of Adeleke Adeeko’s “theoretical ecumenism.”53 Bearing in mind CamineroSantangelo’s point that “postcolonial ecocriticism [cannot] allow itself to become tied to overly speciﬁc theoretical positions and/or conclusions ﬂawed by the repression of geographical and social difference”54 and Scott Slovic’s discussion of the value of working with “an array of approaches to ecocriticism,”55 I weld together different theoretical tools and orientations. That said, I am not oblivious to the tensions among some of the theoretical positions underpinning this book. I acknowledge that Tim Morton’s ecological thought, with its deconstructive sensibilities and attentiveness to a dehierarchized ecological arrangement, conﬂicts with the environmental justice inclination of Rob Nixon’s slow violence. Yet Morton’s biocentric work and Nixon’s more anthropocentric ideas sit side by side throughout the book, especially in my reading of Niger Delta literature in Chapter 3.56 Morton’s deconstruction of the nature/culture binary and the idea of human superiority is critical for my understanding of the Niger Delta as a habitat for interdependent beings. Even when his analysis is less preoccupied with the nonhuman lives in the environments he accentuates, Nixon’s work foregrounds the sociopolitical implications of environmental challenges for the global poor in ways that resonate with my attentiveness to the plight of the humans in Africa’s environments. Ursula Heise anticipates my approach here when she posits the possibility of working with the tension between multispecies ethnography and environmental justice. Heise proposes multispecies justice as a framework, as “a way of exploring how their divergent theoretical commitments might become mutually productive.”57 Building on Heise’s proposal, the unity of this project lies in the emphasis on a holistic sense of ecological survival, premised on rights and obligations to human and nonhuman forms. The larger goal is the all-important need to create spaces and habitats where various species can thrive.

16

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

As I read for evidence of proximity and the interdependence of human and nonhuman lives, I unpack the textual strategies enabling the articulation of ecological issues while elaborating on the creative as well as imaginative techniques allowing the narratives to grapple with the possibility of sustainable lifeworlds. As such, my reading of evidently ecological works such as Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller shares the same commitment to ecological survival with the Niger Delta novels, which, on the surface, tend to prioritize human concerns.58 I read the Delta texts against the grain for ways that nonhumans are equally implicated in their narration of forms of environmental devastation associated with oil extraction in the region. The primary texts under scrutiny are drawn from the geographical breadth of sub-Saharan Africa; temporally the book bears witness to the literary history of modern Africa as the selected narratives ﬁt the lineaments of the different stages of the continent’s literary trajectory. One can locate the texts within the three major waves of African literature, namely literature of anticolonial resistance or revolt, which includes narratives that obviously and implicitly challenge the colonial ideology and its workings in Africa. Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard59 and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts60–the oldest texts in my archive–are examples of this literary corpus. Literature of postcolonial disillusionment–which laments the failure of the African elite, the crumbling of the nation-state, and the unfulﬁlled promise of political independence–constitutes the second wave under which texts such as Gabriel Okara’s The Voice belong.61 Contemporary African literature complicates and expands on the grand narratives of the nation, patriarchy, among others, while also bringing to fore a range of perspectives–feminist, alternative sexualities, the environment, and so on. Many of the novels discussed in the book belong here, including Nuruddin Farah’s narratives in Chapter 262 and J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K63 in Chapter 4. The principal selection criteria for the texts are their relevance for understanding the ecological issues affecting the continent and for appreciating the interrelationships of humans and nonhumans in the respective sites. Except for Maathai’s memoir, the narratives under scrutiny are all novels ranging from the social realist to the magical realist. The complexity of the magical realist narratives, including Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard, and his My Life in the Bush of Ghosts makes them appealing for inclusion here. The capacity of the magical or animist text to convey the multiple dimensions of Africa–material and supernatural–without privileging either makes the form amenable to the complex ecological interrogation

Ecologies of the Book

17

operative in this book. These texts are constituted by multispecies presences, human and nonhuman, visible and invisible, that shows the limit of the human person and his or her imbrication with various nonhuman forces. Furthermore, they rewrite reality to accommodate the equivalence of the “real” and “magical,” which Ato Quayson underscores in his work on magical realism.64 The ability of the magical realist text to stretch the possibilities of the real to include those social practices and otherworldly activities that govern life in Africa make it an appealing site for exploring human-nonhuman relations on the continent. On the topic of stretching the possibilities of the real, I concur with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s claim of multiple ways of being in the world, especially in nonWestern societies. One important achievement of Chakrabarty’s work is his “provincializing Europe” by showing how its universal values are rooted in local European practices that the Enlightenment packaged otherwise. Following Chakrabarty, my reading of texts like Tutuola’s or Okri’s recognizes the rationalities at work in them. Notice the plural rationalities, which underscores that the embrace of a singular notion of the rational is embedded within the same European parochialism that Chakrabarty critiques. In taking seriously those indigenous rationalities that complement the “realist” episodes in the narratives I analyze in the following chapters, I underscore Chakrabarty’s notion of “heterotemporality”–that is, the multiple temporalities calibrated in the narratives under review and their implications for ecological interrelationships in Africa.65 Ecologies of the Book Naturalizing Africa features four chapters followed by an epilogue, all connected by their attentiveness to various ecological issues as well as the interactions and relationships between human beings and the larger environment. Where agency is central to the ﬁrst two chapters, the last two zoom in on resistance. Chapter 1 elaborates fully the idea of an aesthetics of proximity. Proximity retains its spatial denotation here, although my usage also expands the conventional interpretation of the term to embrace those shared attributes or similarities that undermine or overwhelm clear distinctions between humans and nonhuman ecological constituents. While spatiality underwrites the ﬁrst vision of proximity in this chapter, its second manifestation gestures to those characteristics common to humans and other beings, such as shared mortality. My reading of Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts as well as Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, among other narratives in this chapter, highlights multispecies presence, interspecies

18

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

relations, distributed agency, and indistinction between humans and other life forms as the four strategies of proximity operative in African literature. If the ﬁrst chapter brieﬂy broaches the question of shared agency between humans and other beings, Chapter 2 extends that discussion in a reading of the works of Nuruddin Farah on Somalia’s war ecologies. Of course, war is a central theme in African literary texts such as Chimamanda Adichie’s acclaimed Half of a Yellow Sun66 and Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land,67 among others. This boom in war narratives in African literature has caused certain writers and critics including Helon Habila to lampoon African writers for feeding the West stereotypes of a violent and suffering Africa.68 The boom has also resulted in a rich critical harvest with articles and books devoted to the topic of war. Remembering Biafra: Narrative, History, and Memory of the Nigeria-Biafra War, for instance, is a collection of essays on the Nigeria-Biafra civil war published after the international conference on the war convened by Chima Korieh at Marquette University in 2009.69 The essays on literature in the collection track the impacts of the war on the Igbos and the complicities of the Nigerian and British governments, among other human-centered topics. We can make a similar claim for the articles in the special issue of African Literature Today on the war published in 2008. The focus on the human dimensions of the war in these essays is characteristic of the dominant mode of analyzing war literature in African literary studies.70 Farah’s novels provide a compelling archive because of their pertinence for a critique bearing on the interactions of human beings with their environment in a wartime scenario. As is evident in George’s previously mentioned work or even in Fanon’s call for individual and collective human agency in The Wretched of the Earth, agency is usually located in human beings and based on intentionality in postcolonial studies; however, I foreground an alternative form of agency that emphasizes action and/or effect rather than intentionality. To think of agency in terms of action or effect places humans alongside a network of other ecological actors. I argue that Farah’s Secrets, Links, and Crossbones enable us to rethink the dominant conception of agency by showing how the landscape, animals, and other nonhumans produce effects on humans as well as the broader ecosystem. My analysis in this chapter also demonstrates the implication of nonhuman actors even in those instances of human agency. If Fanon sanctioned violence as a manifestation of human agency and as strategy of resistance in an era where knowledge of environmental violence was sketchy, contemporary concerns over global warming and

Ecologies of the Book

19

climate change necessitate the appraisal of such oppositional strategies. Take the Niger Delta case, for example, where the dominant forms of physical resistance against oil exploitation represented in literature include bombing oil installations and oil bunkering. While critics have celebrated these forms of resistance, I suggest we rethink such veneration considering the devastation that sabotage of oil infrastructure wreaks on the ecosystem. Drawing on Tim Morton’s idea of ecological thought in my reading of Gabriel Okara’s The Voice, Isidore Okpewho’s Tides, and Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist in the third chapter, I claim that these forms of resistance also damage the larger ecological system and do not consider the rights of and obligations toward other beings in the environment. In focusing on these narratives, I intend to move away from the centrality of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s oeuvre in the consideration of Niger Delta literature and highlight other texts in this rich literary corpus. It is remarkable that Tides, published amid the Ogoni struggle in 1993, has not received considerable critical attention. Okpewho is more known for his scholarly work on oral literature and the African diaspora. My reading recuperates this novel, which is also remarkable for its epistolary form interrogated in the chapter for the alternative vision of resistance it allows. My attentiveness to the larger environment in this chapter also yields a new interpretation of Okara’s The Voice. While critics have read this novel as depicting postindependence disillusionment and have also examined the peculiarities of its Ijaw-inﬂected style, I interpret the text as a Niger Delta novel that presages the slow violence of oil pollution in the region. Nixon’s concept of slow violence allows me to consider Okara’s novel as representing the incubation phase of environmental degradation in the Delta. Further, I claim that Okpewho’s Tides and Ojaide’s The Activist manifest the intermediate and advanced phases of ecological degradation, respectively. The ﬁnal chapter explicates the notion of “resistance from the ground,” a term I use to delineate those resistance practices that involve tending the earth. The three narratives examined–Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed, Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather, and J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K–all speak to different forms of oppositional activities that are connected to the land. The chapter tracks the ways that farming, gardening, afforestation practices, and other agricultural activities challenge hegemonic, patriarchal, and other oppressive structures. For example, tree planting, which Maathai assiduously champions in Unbowed, challenges the oppressive structures of postindependence Kenya, where the leaders are keen on destroying forest resources and impoverishing the human population in the name of development. Planting trees to subvert deforestation and to enrich the ecosystem serves as a counterweight to

20

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa

the workings of the government’s agenda. Furthermore, like the aesthetics of proximity explored in Chapter 1, resistance from the ground also takes on a second connotation–namely, those acts of resistance undertaken at the grassroots level for social and ecological progress. Grounded in manual labor, this chapter extends the discussion of resistance in the preceding chapter by concentrating on oppositional practices rooted in the land and intersections with agricultural development and gender politics. In sum, Chapter 1 elaborates the dimensions of proximity and offers a model of reading attentive to entanglements in Africa’s ecologies. Chapter 2 explicates one aspect of the entanglement, that is, the way humans and other life forms participate in the production of agency in their environments. If the idea of agency shared between humans and nonhumans is the organizing logic of Chapter 2, Chapters 3 and 4 take up the related question of resistance. Chapter 3 exposes how violent resistance in the Niger Delta does not sufﬁciently consider the interests of the more-than-human in the environment, while Chapter 4 instantiates oppositional practices that are rooted in agricultural practices. While these chapters are invested in decentering human beings and placing them in relation to the more-than-human world, the concluding epilogue takes up the question of what it means to be human within the context of ecological responsibility. Although Naturalizing Africa abjures the view of human beings as the center of the world, with unfettered access to exploiting the environment, it remains sympathetic to a vision of a humanity already aware of its imbrication with the nonhuman world, a human community taking steps to respect and respond to the Other, who is not always human. In an Africa where many people barely survive amid deplorable conditions of poverty, malnutrition, and diseases, it is inconceivable to sidestep the quest of such people for progress. But developmental agendas must be consistent with sustainable practices and attentive to the interests of the ecosystem. The epilogue reiterates the vision of the book: to yoke the exploitation of African peoples to the despoliation of the African environment and to call for respect and responsibility toward all marginalized components of Africa’s ecosystems: women, men, children, animals, plants, landscapes, and so on.

1

African Literature and the Aesthetics of Proximity

In the Introduction, I showed how Enlightenment principles embedded in the project of modernity undermined, if not severed, the relationship between human and more-than-human worlds in many African societies. These African communities take seriously Marisol de la Cadena’s point that we appreciate and respect the full spectrum of “earth beings,” which she alternatively terms “Other-than-humans includ[ing] animals, plants, and the landscape.”1 The notion of earth beings speaks to the vitality of nonhuman forms and emphasizes the ways they are always implicated in human activities and actions. Although de la Cadena writes of indigenous communities in Latin America, her notion of earth beings is relevant for African extrapolation because of shared beliefs in the force of nature and the inseparability of human from nonhuman nature. Joni Adamson and Harry Garuba, in their work on the Americas and Africa, respectively, have also captured this shared value. According to Adamson, “speciﬁc indigenous movements have long formed around the notion of the earth as a sentient being” and as a site “where human and otherthan-humans coexist.”2 Garuba on his part reports on the “animist unconscious” in many parts of Africa, which primarily entails the “continual re-enchantment of the world.”3 Like de la Cadena and Adamson, Garuba illustrates that this animist sensibility is a spiritual phenomenon that is equally “embedded within the processes of material, economic activities and then reproduces itself within the sphere of culture and social life.”4 Although the spread of Christianity and capitalist objectiﬁcation of every imaginable thing has marginalized this animist sensibility, the mindset endures in the cultural practices of African societies to varying degrees. In this scheme of things, nonhumans can be considered important members of the biosphere worth human respect even when they seem nonresponsive like the mountains in Adamson’s quote. De la Cadena in fact adds that these earth beings insert themselves into politics in ways that call for the reconﬁguration of an anthropocentric sense of politics. It should be clear from the foregoing argument that the need to respect 21

22

African Literature and the Aesthetics of Proximity

nonhuman beings, both biotic and abiotic, is at the core of the interventions of thinkers like Adamson and de la Cadena. These scholars join a broader conversation on multispecies networks, a conversation interested in redeﬁning human relationships to Others with whom they share certain characteristics as well as the world. Following the works of these scholars, this chapter investigates the ways African literary expressive cultures articulate the coexistence and imbrication of human and nonhuman lives. In other words, if colonial modernity elevated the human as the avatar, the center of the universe, often to the detriment of the nonhuman worlds, both seen and unseen, how has African literature reinstated the nonhuman in relation to the human? How does the pluriverse–the agglomeration of worlds, human and nonhuman–appear in African literature? In answering these questions, I claim that alongside those African literary works that relegate the nonhuman world to mere backdrop or setting for human exploration, there exists another body of literature characterized by an aesthetics of proximity. Deﬁning Proximity Proximity has two connotations here: namely, a spatial sense of nearness as well as a form of proximity brought about by similarities and shared characteristics. To understand the ﬁrst form of proximity being charted here is to consider the narrative structures that allow the blurring of spatial distances in the texts under scrutiny. At one level, humans share their environment with plants, animals, and other material forms. Moreover, although the supernatural world is generally understood as the “great beyond,” outside the reach of humans, many of the texts in this chapter problematize this distance by bringing both material and immaterial worlds closely together. Relying on the genre of magical realism, which juxtaposes the real and the supernatural in ways that dissolve or obfuscate the barriers between them and thereby rewrites the conventions of the social realist script (often solely focused on humans), the authors I discuss in this chapter show that existing closely alongside humans in African environments are ordinary nonhuman and supernatural entities demanding recognition of their interconnectivity in our reading practices. If spatiality is critical to the ﬁrst notion of proximity, the second form of nearness is predicated on similar or shared attributes that bring humans closer to other components of the ecosystem. For most humanistic and social science disciplines, human beings have always been the primary object of inquiry because of the classiﬁcation of this species as distinct, capable of ethics, and imbued with political and creative capabilities

Deﬁning Proximity

23

unlike other life forms often relegated to the status of Agamben’s “bare life”–without rights, intellect, and other superior endowments.5 The second notion of proximity puts pressure on the ideas of human exceptionalism and absolute distinctions from other forms of life. This ethic of multispecies entanglement is particularly attentive to the ways African literary and cultural practices stage the enmeshment of human and nonhuman lives and the implications of said enmeshment for ecological justice. So rather than foreground the differences between a human and an animal–say, a man named John and a dog named Jane–the concept of proximity allows us to focus not on their peculiarities but on their common attributes, including suffering and mortality. Dwelling on these common characteristics does not eclipse the differences between the components of the ecosystem; it instantiates parallels that problematize the kind of strong anthropocentrism under critique in this book. Focusing on the vulnerabilities of death in both humans and other animals, for instance, allows for contemplating the human body in relation to other bodies easily commodiﬁed and disposable. Taken together, aesthetics of proximity refers to the processes by which African literary artifacts depict the interconnectedness of human lives with Others in the environment. The narratives here insist that we cannot separate human beings from their environments and that a complex engagement with these texts should be attentive to the closeness and similarities among the different aspects of the ecological community. This aesthetic practice insists on pondering the place of the nonhuman in African literature more seriously and on examining the possibilities for the alternative sustainable world these texts often embody. That said, I now come to the four dimensions that proximity takes in African literature. Through their genre, diction, narrative voice, and thematic preoccupation, the narratives demonstrate (1) multispecies presence, (2) interspecies relationship, (3) distributed agency, and, ultimately, (4) indistinction between human and nonhuman entities. Of these four headings under which we can understand the aesthetics of proximity, multispecies presence illuminates the spatial sense of nearness. Distributed agency as well as the strategy of indistinction, that is, blurring differences between humans and other beings, fall primarily within the ambit of the second notion of proximity, precisely the notion that there are shared characteristics between humans and nonhumans. The point is not to undermine differences but to problematize the idea that humans are the locus of existence and should occupy the center of literary and cultural analysis. Straddling both notions of proximity is the strategy of interspecies interaction that on the one hand is steeped in the spatial sense

24

African Literature and the Aesthetics of Proximity

of proximity but that also exhibits instances of shared attributes such as communicative traits. It is also important to note the overlapping tendencies of the previously mentioned dimensions of proximity and therefore understand them as conceptual categories that allow for bringing together human and nonhuman worlds rather than treat them as discrete entities. Why is this idea of proximity important? The aesthetic practice I elaborate is useful for rethinking our approach to African literature and the accents on human concerns in the critical engagement with these texts. The idea of proximity encourages us to read African literary texts in innovative ways with attention to the fact that nonhuman forms are often implicated in the concerns of the text even when they are not explicitly stated. Furthermore, the idea of aesthetics is clearly elaborated in politics. Whether it is in the texts I examine in some detail–Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard6 and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,7 Ben Okri’s The Famished Road,8 and Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller9–or the ones I explore more brieﬂy, such as Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days10 and Katie Kitamura’s Gone to the Forest,11 the emphasis is on inserting nonhuman concerns into politics and ultimately projecting alternative lifeworlds critical of human exploitation of the environment. The narratives under study are preoccupied with nonhuman otherness and are attentive to the claims and rights of and obligations to these Others even as they are invested in intimate interspecies relations with resonances for broader conversations on the state of the environment in Africa and elsewhere. Given the concerns over global warming and climate change, there is no more urgent task than to consider human imbrications with fellow travelers in the ecological sphere, especially in an African context where the matrix of elite failure and the forces of neocolonialism and globalization continue to subjugate its inhabitants–read broadly to include human beings and nonhumans alike. In elucidating the aesthetics of proximity, I complicate the dominant interpretation of representations of nonhumans in African literature. Scholars often ignore these Others to focus on the human characters; or where they do engage these other life forms, especially nonhuman animals, it is primarily to demonstrate how they function as symbols for humans–especially subordinate or oppressed ones. The problem with such a critical approach, as Laura Wright, among others, has pointed out, is that it “refuses to acknowledge the animal as deserving of the same kinds of respect human beings should grant to other humans.”12 Take the instance of Dog Days by Patrice Nganang, a narrative analyzed later in the chapter. Nganang’s novel was published in the early years of the twentyﬁrst century, an era characterized by heightened awareness of not just

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human rights but also the plight of animals and the larger environment. Moreover, its title and its mode of narration (the narrator-protagonist Mboudjak is a dog) invite a consideration of the novel’s uniqueness, its singular mode of expanding the space of the political in Cameroon to include animals like Mboudjak. Yet most readings of the novel have primarily focused on the human dimensions of the text.13 There is no problem with such readings if we remain tied to the unacknowledged anthropocentric logic that subtends most African literary criticism. But once we open the critical space to embrace an ecological angle of vision, it becomes possible to accommodate the perspective of Mboudjak in Nganang’s novel, where the dog demonstrates signs of resistance and showcases, again and again, parallels between the oppression of the human masses by the elites and the exploitation of animals by their human “masters.” My goal here is less about censuring a way of reading and more about offering an alternative to the usual treatment of animals as allegories for humans in African literary criticism. The dominant form of anthropocentric analysis raises a fundamental question: can we conceive of the dog–dogs, animals, or other life forms–as full beings in our reading and writing practices? As I will show later when I engage with Nganang’s novel and throughout this book, we can do so without reducing nonhuman presences to symbols and metaphors that merely shed light on the human world. This mode of reading is signiﬁcant because it does not obviate nonhuman beings or block what Neel Ahuja describes as the “transspecies relations underlying representation.”14 By recognizing that the human body is only one component of the ecosystem and that the nonhuman can indeed suffer, I suggest that we transcend the strong forms of anthropocentrism predominant in African literary criticism and embrace a more inclusive view of our environment. Accordingly, the rest of this chapter, divided into four sections, one for each, develops the four dimensions or strategies of proximity. The ﬁrst section, devoted to multispecies presence, discusses the ecological composition of African literature. Here African literary texts make central the presence of nonhuman life forms–material and supernatural–as important constituents of Africa’s ecosystems. My reading reinstates the nonhuman as an integral component of Africa’s ecologies and as a key player in the narrative movement of the texts. In the second section, I build on the preceding discussion by examining the relationship between humans and nonhumans in Africa’s ecologies, highlighting in the process both benign forms of interspecies interaction and the more prevalent exploitative relationships often at the expense of nonhumans. When humans interact with nonhumans around them as is clear from the second section, agency and production of effects are not restricted to

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humans even if our anthropocentric orientation limits our perception of nonhuman agency. The third section accentuates the agency shared by both humans and nonhumans in African literary texts. While the ﬁrst three sections highlight the similarities between humans and other members of the environment, the distinctions between them are very much intact. What we ﬁnd in the ﬁnal segment of the chapter are those moments when differences are obfuscated or blurred to achieve the highest point of proximity. Multispecies Presence Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts provide a ﬁne starting point for discussing multispecies presence as one dimension of the aesthetics of proximity. The Palmwine Drinkard instantiates a multispecies world, where humans share the environment with nonhumans, a world teeming with various life forms that are as important as the human. As such, Tutuola’s writing has been compared to D. O. Fagunwa’s work, especially the well-known Forest of a Thousand Daemons, whose fame outside a Yoruba readership is owed largely to Wole Soyinka’s English translation.15 Throughout The Palmwine Drinkard, Tutuola’s narrator is conscious of the different species that populate his world. As he leaves the Unreturnable Heaven, for instance, he narrates the appearance of different creatures drawn to the extraordinary musical accomplishment of Drum, Song, and Dance. In this moment and at other points in the text, we are drawn to a pluriverse of creatures, plants and animals, human and nonhuman, secular and spiritual. As Achille Mbembe describes it, Tutuola’s writing is a “spectacle of a world in motion, ever reborn, made of fold upon fold, of landscapes and topographies, ﬁgures, circles, spirals and fractures, colors, sounds, and noises.”16 In short, the narrative’s uniqueness is a result of Tutuola’s departure from the anthropocentrism that often characterizes the “rational,” realist novel. While these realist accounts insist on sociocultural human challenges and zooms in on human characters, Tutuola’s narrative shows an ecological community where the nonhuman is always present and visible with the human. Chris Dunton has noted that Tutuola’s oeuvre stages the “fragility” of the human condition and the ways supernatural forces are implicated in the affairs of humans.17 The limitations that Dunton identiﬁes in Tutuola’s account of the human condition speak to the author’s repudiation of the notion of a self-sufﬁcient human subjectivity and his insistence on human entanglement with more-than-human presences. A ﬁne illustration can be found in the major activity of the narrative: palmwine drinking. Readers familiar with the text will recall that its

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27

journey motif arises because of the Drinkard’s quest to ﬁnd his dead palmwine tapper. Palmwine, of course, is a product of the palm tree, a nonhuman life form. Therefore, the narrative is already orienting readers to the nonhuman world as early as its ﬁrst page. The text’s central problem thus arises when the tapster is unavailable to provide the ﬁne wine, and as the Drinkard embarks on the quest to ﬁnd his tapster, the reader is introduced to multiple worlds that are apart yet close to one another, to different creatures that permeate these worlds, and to the different shapes and forms these creatures take. Tutuola’s account is particularly signiﬁcant if we consider the time of its publication in Nigerian history: amid the fervent nationalist striving for independence of the 1950s. The text was published in 1952, a year before the irrepressible nationalist Anthony Enahoro ﬁrst moved the failed motion for independence. The agitation for independence was driven by the assertion of self-government abilities and of the mastery of the accoutrements of modern life. As Quayson explains it, Tutuola’s writing was enraging “for an African intelligentsia poised for self-rule and eager to express their capacity for rationalistic engagement with the problems of the real world.”18 Yet Tutuola’s narrative emerges at this moment to foreground that which is elided in the emphasis on human subjectivity– a mode of being that foregrounds human imbrication with the nonhuman. At a time when the modern subject was keen to convince the colonial authorities of his or her distance from nature, it is no wonder that the narrative generated controversy over its language and subject matter among Nigerians ashamed of its supposed exoticism. Bernth Lindfors has written about how the narrative was received as a “local embarrassment” by Nigerians despite the enthusiasm of Western critics.19 The language, as has been rightly described, introduced a tinge of local color to the nationalist question. Yet it is Tutuola’s subject that raised the greatest challenge to the modernist vision of the 1950s. Tutuola is invoking a Yoruba cosmology consisting of the worlds of the living, the dead, the unborn, and the transitional abyss.20 By taking on the vision of his Yoruba pluriverse, Tutuola challenges the human-centricity of his time. One great achievement of Tutuola’s narrative is that it reinstates an ecosystem receding in the secular imagination of the Enlightenmentinspired modernity that colonialism brought to Africa. If African traditional societies were largely attuned to a relationship between humans and nonhumans, a worldview threatened by colonialist modernity, it makes sense to argue that The Palmwine Drinkard’s anticolonial resistance resides precisely in naturalizing Africa, by yoking together the human and nonhuman worlds threatened by colonialist, rational ideology. Tutuola’s text foregrounds other rationalities by depicting a world attentive to a myriad of species.

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The narrative shows that the quest for human progress cannot be divorced from broader ecological considerations, even as it exposes the different Yoruba lifeworlds–the living (human and nonhuman), dead, unborn, and transitional. Like The Palmwine Drinkard before it, Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts exhibits different species characterized by spatial closeness. It is remarkable that very early in the text, as the narrator begins the journey into the bush of ghosts, he exposes the different creatures present in the town: So when we could not bear it [gunﬁre from the war] then we left our mother’s room for the veranda, but we met nobody there, and then we ran from there to the portico of the house, but the town was also empty except the domestic animals as sheep, pigs, goats and fowls and also some of the bush animals as monkeys, wolves, deer and lions who were driven from the bush that surrounded the town to the town by the fearful noises of the enemies’ guns.21

The narrator describes the chaos surrounding the outbreak of war and the desertion of the town by the human community. Even in this chaos, however, he is mindful of the different animals. Notice the attention to the heterogeneity of the nonhuman animals; there is an effort at taxonomical classiﬁcation as the animals are deemed as either domestic or “bush.” As we follow the speciﬁc listing across two lines, we are led to imagine a multispecies scene. Clearly it is easy to see how the narrative stages the displacement of the young boys by war; nevertheless, the passage insists the reader also pay attention to other life forms equally displaced by the conﬂict. The narrator and his brother are not privileged by this passage, which asks us to imagine a desolate town, “the domestic animals,” and “the bush animals” as among the war victims.22 The introduction of the bush in this passage foreshadows the narrator’s engagement with different living beings in the text, but it also opens the word “bush” for unpacking to reveal the different lifeworlds it encompasses. In a reading of Mahasweta Devi’s “Dhowli,” Jennifer Wenzel refers to “the forest as a thoroughly and self-consciously cultural space,” as a place that has “always been peopled by lovers, misﬁts, and fantastic creatures.”23 Wenzel’s work is relevant because her theorization of the forest space as culturally inscribed applies directly to Tutuola’s bush, where in addition to the different animals the narrator mentions, we also ﬁnd a variety of plants, shrubs, and trees. Beyond the ordinary, material components, Tutuola’s forest is also littered with extraordinary ghosts, or “fantastic creatures” as Wenzel describes them. Although My Life follows the narrator’s journeys, which makes it seem like a text focused on the human condition, the protagonist’s limitations and the complexity of the forest with which he engages reveal the extent to which

Interspecies Relationships

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the narrative is less about a personal journey and more of an exposé of ecologies, a treatise of the way that humans are co-inhabitants of the world. Tutuola’s narrative is not only a place where “memory is destabilized,” as Mbembe has argued; it is also a place where multiple worlds intersect and destabilize.24 The exciting journey the narrator embarks upon brings closer the material and spiritual planes of existence. The Yoruba cosmology from which Tutuola’s oeuvre draws signiﬁcance is particular about the transitions between the world of the living, dead, and unborn, but it is also speciﬁc about the gaps between them; that is, the separation critical to maintain a cosmic whole. It is no wonder that Chinua Achebe writes about boundaries as an important theme in Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard.25 But My Life is also about crossing boundaries to stage connections and proximities. That is why the narrator can enter the bush of ghosts forbidden to humans, relate with the ghosts, whom Quayson has aptly described as “a species of supernatural denizens of the other world,” and even marry twice therein.26 By so doing, he physicalizes even the immaterial realm that is always beyond human comprehension. As a text demonstrating a spatial form of proximity, Tutuola’s My Life, like The Palmwine Drinkard before it, brings the different planes of existence together so close that we can see the composition of Tutuola’s Yoruba ecologies. Interspecies Relationships If the previous section enlarges the angle of vision of African literary texts by adumbrating the signiﬁcant presence of nonhuman life forms and their spatial closeness to humans, it leaves unaddressed the question of the kind of relationships that ensue between them. This section explores the question of interspecies relationship that occurs when species are brought close together, such as in the Tutuola narratives discussed earlier. Different species inhabiting the African world do not exist in isolation, since they are always in relation to others. Here, I am interested in the ways that these narratives dramatize the relationship of humans with nonhumans, especially since the sites of such interactions provide a contact zone for proximity or closeness.27 Furthermore, these interactive moments provide opportunities for contrasting various forms of the human relationship to the nonhuman world. A benign relationship that is mutual and reciprocal in nature is quite rare because of the prevailing exploitative thrust of human relations with the nonhuman world; however, a non-exploitative model of behavior could exist side by side with an exploitative relationship, which is often portrayed in such a way as to call

30

African Literature and the Aesthetics of Proximity

for ethical reﬂection on the part of humans regarding their obligations to the Other(s), broadly conceived. Depictions of exploitative relationships provide avenues for critiquing the abuse of the nonhuman worlds as well as amplifying such abuse for the reading public. It is to the way these interactions play out in African literary texts that I now turn in a reading of Okri’s The Famished Road, Mda’s The Whale Caller, and Nganang’s Dog Days. Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, like Tutuola’s works, is steeped in a Yoruba cosmological vision; it parades before readers different realms of existence including the living, the dead, the unborn, and the transitional abyss. In his reading of the novel, Quayson rightly points to the fact that “the real world and that of spirits is explored . . . in not an either/or framework.”28 For Erin James, Azaro, the novel’s child protagonist, has the “ability to dissolve ontological boundaries” between the worlds of the living and of the spirits.29 I agree with these scholars on the boundless movements and possibilities in Okri’s novel but will add an additional claim: the intermingling of different realms serves an ecological function in the novel, namely to explicate the interactions of different species. In these interactions, Okri stages multispecies presence but also the interrelationship at the heart of this segment. Azaro is an Abiku child, meaning he remains connected to the spirit world, which haunts him throughout the novel. As Douglas McCabe explains it, the concept refers to “children who have secret plans to die at a certain time in their upbringing, only to be born again soon afterwards, repeating this itinerary of death and birth.”30 For the love of his mother, the Abiku child refuses to die despite the taunting of colleagues from the spirit world who constantly visit him. In other words, the novel’s disclosure of the permeability of the worlds of the living and of the spirits suggests their closeness, a kind of fractious intimacy that is always already there. As the narrator tells us early in the text, “In that land of beginnings spirits mingled with the unborn. We could assume numerous forms. Many of us were birds. We knew no boundaries . . . And we sorrowed much because there were always those amongst us who had just returned from the world of the Living.”31 The passage depicts movements and connections that transcend boundaries; it also permits proximity. One feature of the novel, as McCabe points out in an essay wherein he offers a new ageist interpretation of the novel, is “its intractable heterogeneity;”32 this multiplicity, I believe, is operative in the way spirits, humans, animals, plants, and yetto-be-formed humans are bound together in a web of connectivity and ﬂux. But more importantly, the Abiku child constitutes the nodal point of

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contact between the different realms in the novel: “We were the ones who kept coming and going, unwilling to come to terms with life.”33 The Abiku is a spirit-child, embodying the valences of meanings of both conceptual categories at once. In this privileged position, the child occupies the highest point of contact. We see the clashing of the physical and the spiritual in the struggle for Azaro’s life each time he collapses and wanders between the living and nonliving worlds. At these moments, both worlds touch and collide as the herbalist frantically calls the child back to the world of the living. As Abiku, Azaro is also privileged to observe the activities of other-than-human constellations and lifeworlds. Even when the other characters are unaware of the invisible happenings around them, Azaro is able to identify the different ontological systems at work; his subject position as “an abiku spirit-child narrator,” to quote Esther de Bruijn, allows him to focalize the closeness of the various realms, their interpermeability, and their contiguity.34 The novel presents one such moment early on when Azaro observes spirits in the market: “That was the ﬁrst time I realized it wasn’t just humans who came to the marketplaces of the world. Spirits and other beings come there too. They buy and sell, browse and investigate. They wander amongst the fruits of the earth and sea.”35 Azaro makes this observation after he sees the man with red wings and girl with ﬁsh gills in the market. The market is positioned as a contact zone for human and otherworldly interactions, not unlike the kind we saw in The Palmwine Drinkard where the later wife of the Drinkard meets the Skull disguised as a man in the market. To return to The Famished Road, we see the staging of closeness, as anyone familiar with an African market knows the crowdedness and jostling that characterize it. The African marketplace is a place where bodies touch freely and consistently. It is a conﬂuence of animals, natural produce, herbal remedies, technologies, and, for the lack of a better word, things, which one handles, inspects, ingests, or puts on in the incessant mixing and mingling that takes place in the space. The African market is also a place where buying and selling involves the art of haggling and other forms of negotiation. Quayson explains that the “predicative economic logic” that is characteristic of formal economies is circumscribed within “an essential dimension of cultural logic” in informal markets such as the one where Azaro ﬁnds himself.36 The cultural logic, for Quayson, involves the processes of “haggling with all the consequent cultural rhetorical ﬂuencies that are called into play.”37 The improvisational dimension of the informal market is pertinent for understanding how the market in Okri’s novel allows for the nearness of human beings with other creatures, seen and invisible. The negotiative character of the African market–read as haggling and informal conversation patterns–makes for

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closeness and interaction between these otherworldly creatures and their human counterparts. Okri’s The Famished Road also makes possible the entanglement of humans with earthly nonhumans. To put it differently, we can make a claim of interconnection for the novel’s articulation of the relations between humans and other living beings around them. Writing on the setting of The Famished Road, Brenda Cooper identiﬁes three primary sites in the novel: The ﬁrst is the wild forest where spirits, animals, and plant life congregate. The second site, according to Cooper, is “the road, which clears and encroaches on this bush and brings Western technology and ‘progress,’ while exposing and thereby annihilating the hiding spirits.”38 Madam Koto’s bar is the third primary site in the novel. Of importance is the physical nearness of each primary site to the others. The immediacy of the forest location to the road, to Azaro’s house, and to Madam Koto’s bar signiﬁcantly buttresses Diana Adesola Mafe’s claim (in a reading of Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl) that “although nature is integral to the bush, buildings, villages, and even cities ﬁgure within that space as well.”39 The forest or bush is often constituted as that space outside the town, with clear demarcations between them, as the “problematic ‘Other’ harbouring all sorts of supernatural forces,” as Quayson describes it;40 Okri’s novel, however, literarily brings them together. We see the ease with which Azaro, his father, and even other characters move in and out of the forest in the novel. This literal closeness is one way that the novel allows for interspecies interactions. We should add that the forest, just like the market discussed earlier, serves as a contact zone in the novel for human and nonhuman interactions. Azaro and other characters encounter spirits and otherworldly creatures in the forest; the forest also serves as the location for interacting with other earthly beings: “An owl ﬂew over my head and watched me from a branch. I heard footsteps approaching and I could have sworn that they belonged to a heavy man, but when I looked I saw an antelope. It came up to me, stopped near the pole, and stared at me. Then it came closer and licked my feet.”41 The reversion of the human gaze in this passage is noteworthy. Instead of focusing on his perceptions of the nonhuman animals, Azaro’s narration centers on the gaze the animals return. There is a looking and a look returned, a mutual seeing and responding, so to speak. While he is positioned as the object of observation, the passage’s action is concentrated on the owl and antelope that “ﬂew,” “watched,” “stared,” “came,” and “licked.” That part of the novel continues to describe the antelope scampering away and the rain water “collected at my [Azaro’s] feet.”42 A page later, the narrator states: “A millipede climbed up my leg and I did not disturb it. I saw the black cat again. It came towards

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me, slunk past, and ran off in the direction we had originally come from.”43 The narration, in addition to highlighting the different species that inhabit this forest, also shows the forest as a stage of human contact with nonhuman others. What we see is a demonstration of what Amitav Ghosh calls a “species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld” by nonhumans.44 Nonhuman animals gaze at and respond to Azaro’s presence just as the cat gazes at the self-consciously nude Derrida in “The Animal That Therefore I Am.”45 As the animals and Azaro view/ touch each other (i.e., the antelope licks his feet), there is an inkling of a form of interaction devoid of hierarchy and the ecological violence often associated with it. As The Famished Road progresses, we can contrast the benign form of interaction with the exploitative attitude toward the forest. The novel begins with the forest near Azaro’s household, allowing the reader to encounter a transformation when Azaro notes: “It took longer to get far into the forest. It seemed that the trees, feeling that they were losing the argument with human beings, had simply walked deeper into the forest. The deeper in I went, the more I noticed the difference.”46 With the cutting of trees for the construction of houses and roads, the forest has shrunk in size and seems farther than Azaro recalls. Human exploitation, in this context, widens the gap between humans and nonhumans. An argument indicates some form of interaction between the involved parties, in this case between the humans and the trees. Not surprisingly, this interaction is an exploitative one that leaves the forest on the losing side. In the end, Azaro points to the devastation wrought upon the forest: Steadily, over days and months, the paths had been widening. Bushes were being burnt, tall grasses cleared, tree stumps uprooted. The area was changing. Places that were thick with bush and low trees were now becoming open spaces of soft river-sand. In the distance I could hear the sounds of dredging, of engines, of road builders, forest clearers, and workmen chanting as they strained their muscles. Each day the area seemed different. Houses appeared where parts of the forest had been.47

There is a radical change involving the destruction of forest life forms for human “progress.” Development is at work here with engines, road builders, and other contraptions of modernity; unfortunately for the forest, development occurs at its expense. To fully understand the loss implicated here, one must decipher the storm that follows this section of the novel where the forest has lost its “argument” with the technical, rational human beings. I explore the storm in more detail later, in the section on distributed agency, but it should sufﬁce to state that as the storm ravages the neighborhood, the impact of deforestation becomes

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apparent. As deforestation severs the proximity of humans to the environment, reterritorialization caused by the displacement of the forest beings instantiates other forms of closeness. Earlier in the novel, Azaro has to be in the forest to encounter millipedes and similar creatures, but with the storm, these organisms literally move into the protagonist’s house: “Millipedes and slugs and little snails climbed up the wall.”48 As we trace the slow movement of these creatures on the wall, we are given an indication of those displaced by deforestation: the other-thanhumans left homeless by the ﬂooding rain following the decimation of the forests. That the novel restores some form of nearness even in this catastrophic moment is signiﬁcant. Azaro does not need the forests to encounter other beings anymore. The millipedes and snails join the rats and mosquitoes that already form part of his household. These creatures transform the one-room apartment into a multispecies stage. With the room’s crowdedness, with the different creatures sharing a small space, the novel forces us to visualize a micro ecosystem. The novel asks us “to imagine that we had been sharing our lives with so many rats,” in the words of Azaro’s mother after the photographer’s poison kills the many rodents that were living so intimately with them, in the oneroom space.49 The lexical choice of “sharing” is interesting because unlike the forest, which is generally understood to house different nonhuman creatures, the house is considered an abode for humans, and maybe their pets. In this conﬁguration, the rodents are normally written out of the list of residents. Even when they are included, it is usually to portray them as a nuisance. In forcing us to imagine sharing lives with rats, Okri’s novel challenges the anthropocentric conception of the inhabitants of homes; we are urged to see the so-called human spaces as sites for realizing that humans are always commingled with nonhumans. The analysis of Okri’s novel so far has focused on the role that the forest and market play in facilitating the interactivity and spatial nearness of humans with other beings in the text. Okri’s terrestrial locations are imbued with the possibility of providing a network point for the interrelated components of the novel’s complex ecosystem. If terrestrial spaces allow for interactivity in Okri’s narrative, the following reading of Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller is an exposé on interrelationship between ocean and land, between aquatic species and terrestrial ones. In Mda’s work, the beach functions as a space for showcasing the closeness of human and aquatic creatures, and for exploring the humandolphin interrelationship. Set in Hermanus, in South Africa’s Western Cape, the novel portrays the intimate relationship of the Whale Caller with a whale named Sharisha, on the one hand, and the Caller’s tortuous relationship with fellow humans, on the other. Hermanus is reputed for

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southern right whale watching, which attracts tourists to the town. The portrayal of the whale in Mda’s narrative seems consistent with Jonathan Steinwand’s position that postcolonial literature turns to whales and dolphins “for guidance in how human animals participate in postcolonial ecology” and to show “the liminal positions of both cetaceans and humans.”50 The Whale Caller is enamored by Sharisha, with whom he communicates using a horn. Sharisha in turn responds with rhythmic dance and gestures. One can say that the horn presents a means of communication between both parties. As Wendy Woodward puts it, “The man and the whale make music together.”51 The Whale Caller prefers to spend time with Sharisha and remains obsessed with the mammal even after she has migrated to better climate conditions. Mda presents at least three versions of human-nonhuman relations in the novel. The ﬁrst and most complex is typiﬁed by the Whale Caller and Sharisha, on whom he dotes. In the introduction to their collection on the writings of Zakes Mda, Ways of Writing: Critical Essays on Zakes Mda, David Bell and J. U. Jacobs disclose the “closely paired siblings or actual twinning” strategy or motif in Mda’s work.52 Their examples include the twin brothers from Mda’s most studied novel, Heart of Redness, the white man and black man whose lives are intertwined through their shared half-sister in The Madonna of Excelsior, and the two slave half-brothers in Cion. Mda’s largely understudied novel The Whale Caller is not left out as Bell and Jacobs also mention the “destructive twin children” in the text.53 While these examples typify a human-based manifestation of the motif in Mda’s writing, the Caller and the whale reﬂect an interspecies instance of pairing not included in Bell and Jacobs’s list. Bell and Jacobs see the twinning only in human pairings, but that motif is not reserved for humans alone in Mda’s work, which is known for its border crossings. The twinning motif enshrines the connection between the Caller and the whale, Sharisha, implying an intimacy like the human twinning in other texts. Throughout the novel, Sharisha serves as the impetus of the Whale Caller’s life. He is always delighted to see Sharisha and blows his horn to welcome and communicate with the whale whenever she arrives. When she arrives later than expected, the Whale Caller is troubled and wonders if the whale has been hurt by poachers or some other danger in the sea. Both beings are so in sync that the Whale Caller hears Sharisha announce her departure in a nightmare. Their love is so strong that it interferes with the Whale Caller’s relationship with his girlfriend, Saluni. Readers of the novel will recall how what would have been his ﬁrst sexual encounter with Saluni is truncated when images of Sharisha creep into the Whale Caller’s thoughts. The narrator notes, “Without further to-do he strips naked and shyly creeps into bed. She shifts against the wall to create

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more space for him on the single bed. Her body immediately charges him with electric currents. But images of whales interfere at that moment of excitement and he goes limp.”54 The Whale Caller goes limp at the thought of the whale as a cheating husband might when images of his beautiful wife ﬂash through his mind before he commences an escapade. The Whale Caller remains devoted to the whale despite Saluni’s ultimatum to choose her or the animal, their constant ﬁghts, and her threats to end the relationship. Nevertheless, Saluni’s threats do nothing to disrupt the human-whale relationship. In fact, this unnamed Homo sapiens specimen is deﬁned in relation to the whale and not by a given name. He lives to care for and worry about Sharisha even when the animal is away in the winter months. Moreover, the Caller’s affection extends to other nonhumans as well, and to the larger environment. He critiques Saluni’s purchase of a fur, bringing to fore the destroyed animal life. He refuses to litter the environment and scolds Saluni for doing so. The Whale Caller also introduces the reader to another form of interspecies relationship: as he worries over Sharisha’s lateness at the beginning of the novel, he laments the exploitation of the sea by pirates and poachers. To do this, he provides a history of whale hunting dating back to the eighteenth century, noting the “two-hundred-year-old stench from the slaughter of the southern rights by French, American and British whalers at St Helena Bay in 1785 . . . Seasons of mass killings! The smell still haunts these shores.”55 The enduring stench and haunting smell resonate with contemporary forms of exploitation despite the protection laws banning whale hunting. The Whale Caller is delighted when Sharisha eventually shows up: “Sharisha has returned. She has braved man-created dangers to be with me. She has risked ships’ propellers that slice curious whales at this time of the year. She has deﬁed ﬁshing gear entanglements and explosives from oil exploration activity to be here, Mr Yodd. To be with yours truly. She has returned, Mr Yodd, she has returned!”56 In his euphoria over Sharisha’s return, which again indicates his devotion to the whale, the Caller draws attention to the challenges faced by Sharisha and other sea creatures. Although the novel, as Gabeba Baderoon has pointed out, “reclaims a relation of bounty, reciprocity and ritual to the sea in South Africa,”57 it also dramatizes the ravages of the sea wrought by shipping operations and the rapacious activities of oil explorers offshore. The Caller’s lamentation positions the sea as, in Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s words, “a new frontier for capital,” where increasing state legislation on marine life is coterminous with increasing sea ravages by capitalist interests prospecting for oil or engaged in other endangering practices.58 The dual roles performed by Mda’s previous

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passage, of both celebrating nonhuman life and highlighting the devastation to sea life, mirror the different forms of interspecies relations that the novel documents. A relationship anchored in love like what we saw with the Caller and his beloved Sharisha versus the exploitative attitude that the oil explorers and poachers have toward nonhuman lives in the sea. Of course, there is a third kind of relationship to which the novel also alludes. It is that of the tourists who besiege Hermanus to enjoy the sighting of the whales. The choice of words to describe the tourists in the novel is signiﬁcant: invader, voyeur, and more. The Whale Caller is uncomfortable with the “gawkers” who have taken over their quiet town and increased the cost of making a living. Unlike him, they do not care about the animals’ well-being but only for their entertainment value, effectively regarding them as commodities. Although they do not hurt the animals like the poachers and pirates do, the tourists also manifest a relationship lacking consideration for the whales’ interests. We see how the tourists on the boat tours, for example, trespass the boundaries placed to protect the whales. They do this to achieve the satisfaction of having touched or being close to a whale. Yet the Caller’s benevolent relationship with Sharisha is not without its problems. According to Roman Bartosch, “As a result of the Whale Caller forcing his ideas of love and attachment onto the animal, Sharisha loses her life, Saluni her sight, and the Whale Caller his dwelling place.”59 While the novel stages exemplary moments of human-animal relations, Bartosch is right about the grotesque dimension of some instances of interspecies relations it portrays. Readers will recall the Caller’s ejaculation after one such moment of entertaining the exuberant Sharisha with his horn and the whale’s death because of being stuck on the shore as she responds to the Caller. The Caller’s relationship is knotty even if it contains positive examples of human-animal relations. For Harry Sewlall, the act of naming constitutes another problem in the human-whale relationship of Mda’s novel. Sewlall contends that the whale evokes the Biblical creation story in Genesis where Adam is empowered to name the different creatures “and establishes his dominion over them.”60 For Sewlall, the Caller “exercises authority and ownership over her [Sharisha]” through the act of naming.61 Sewlall’s point about the appropriative function of naming is astute, but such reading ignores the individuality and speciﬁcity conferred on the whale by the naming. It seems to me that the naming brings Sharisha closer to the humans, an act consistent with the goal of bridging the gap between humans and other beings. Nevertheless, the Caller’s devotion to the more-than-human world appears at the expense of his relationship to fellow humans. The novel exposes the lopsidedness of the Whale Caller’s relationships even as it

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problematizes the efforts at ﬁnding a balance between a genuine concern for fellow humans and other lives sharing the environment. Earlier I pointed to the difﬁculty the Caller faces as he tries to consummate his relationship with Saluni. Yet when the relationship is later consummated and the couple seems to be making progress, Sharisha always appears to interfere. The Caller has no human friend before Saluni forces herself into his life, and he makes no friends afterward, not even with the twin girls Saluni befriends. I want to suggest that the novel stages the Whale Caller’s attitude toward humans to critique his obsessive devotion to the whale. Human affection for whales is in order; the problem is rather that the obsessive and excessive relationship blocks or interferes with a meaningful engagement with fellow humans. Saluni captures this succinctly when she tells the Caller that “you can hear your whales a hundred miles away but cannot hear a boy only a few meters below us.”62 Saluni is referring to the boy singer Lunga Tubu who sings for a pittance from the tourists. Saluni goes on to educate him on the challenges faced by Lunga and others like him. The passage is worth quoting at length: Lunga Tubu’s presence here destabilizes the serenity of Hermanus–a sanctiﬁed playground of the rich. Lunga Tubu is disturbing the peace of the world. His tiny frame nags the delicate souls with what they would rather forget: that only a few kilometers away there is another world that is not at peace with itself–a whole festering world of the disillusioned, those who have no stake in the much talked about black economic empowerment, which is really the issue of the black middle class rather than of people like Lunga Tubu. While the town of Hermanus is raking in fortunes from tourism, the mothers and fathers of Zwelihle are unemployed. It is a world where people have lost all faith in politicians.63

Saluni foregrounds the problem of poverty still prevalent in the so-called New South Africa, the disillusionment of the masses, and the gap between the wealthy and the poor. Saluni reminds us of the link between nonhuman forms of exploitation and the challenges of the human masses living in abjection despite the promises of a more egalitarian postapartheid society. Saluni’s commentary balances the ecological work of the novel by shifting the focus from the whale to the experiences of the vulnerable human Other. Although the novel’s title is suggestive of a relationship between a whale and the Caller, Saluni introduces another ecological relationship by her presence and actions. Mda’s novel heeds Michael Lundblad’s warning about the dangers of silencing human concerns in our efforts to “speak” for nature in literature. Drawing from Achebe’s notions of malignant and beneﬁcent ﬁctions, Lundblad opines that “any environmentalist narrative that fails to take into account the human rights issues involved” is an instance of malignant ﬁction.64

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Before Saluni shifts the narrative to Lunga, the Whale Caller mainly focuses on nonhuman life forms and their sufferings. From him, we learn of the poachers and pirates as well as the oil explorers destroying the South African environment. Yet the novel’s protagonist is silent concerning the human poor, including people like Lunga, until Saluni interjects their experience. At this moment, we see Saluni’s character at its most developed form in a novel where she comes across mostly as a drunk and jealous, needy lover. The passage is also remarkable because of its seeming transformative effect on the Whale Caller. As we learn afterward, “it seems to the Whale Caller that Saluni’s inﬂuence has now made him hear the songs of humans as well. It has also made him see things that he has never noticed before, although they have been around him all the time.”65 The novel moves toward Lundblad’s classiﬁcation of a beneﬁcent ecocritical ﬁction as the Caller develops awareness of the plight of poor humans. Steinwand is therefore right that although Mda’s novel provides “guidance for thinking about nonhumans,” it is also concerned with “the lives, the knowledge, the arts, the values, and the beliefs of the people who live among these species.”66 From his singular attention to the song of the whale, the Whale Caller seems poised to hear the voice of fellow humans as well, especially those who remain socially and economically disadvantaged in postapartheid South Africa. Unfortunately for Sharisha, the Whale Caller is unable to ultimately balance the relationships. As he runs away from quarreling with Saluni, the Whale Caller goes to ﬁnd solace with Sharisha, who comes near the shore as he plays the horn. The Caller seeks to replace his girlfriend with Sharisha as he approaches the beach on this occasion. If the beach has functioned as a contact zone for interspecies relationship so far in the novel, in the end, it becomes a deathbed as Sharisha beaches on shore and cannot return to the ocean. The reader is left to ponder the implications of Sharisha’s death when all efforts to rescue her fail. At the novel’s end, Sharisha becomes the ultimate sacriﬁce or the cost of the protagonist’s failure to effectively balance the relationships he has with woman and whale. In staging these complex relationships, Mda’s novel manifests an interest in probing the basis and justiﬁcations of human relationships with others (fellow human beings, animals, the larger environment). The novel’s contention appears to be that closeness or proximity to nonhuman lives should not be achieved at the expense of maintaining relationships with fellow humans. Mda’s narrative justiﬁes the need for vigilance so that one is not sacriﬁced for the other, either intentionally or accidentally. In both Mda’s and Okri’s novels, the relationships between human and nonhuman beings are restricted to the different species brought together

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as characters in the narratives. Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle, the ﬁnal text examined in this section, introduces another form of interspecies relationship. Although it retains interspecies relationships between characters as both Mda’s and Okri’s works do, it also establishes a connection between the human reader and the nonhuman dog that is the narrator-protagonist. Whereas the foregoing analysis has pointed to interspecies relationships among characters, Nganang extends this relationship to the reader, who is interpellated by the animal narrator. A parallel is drawn between the narrator’s maltreatment and the repressive treatment of the human Cameroonians by their authoritarian rulers. By so doing, Nganang’s work provides an answer to the cogent question, “Can the nonhuman speak?” posed by S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich in their introduction to a special issue of Cultural Anthropology on multispecies ethnography.67 The act of reading therefore becomes not only an important point of interspecies communication between the narrator and the reader; the act of language shared by both parties in this instance also serves to reduce the gap between the different species and further elucidates the notion of proximity being charted in this chapter. Nganang’s novel explores life in Cameroon under President Paul Biya from the perspective of Mboudjak. Mboudjak is a pet dog of Massa Yo, a civil servant whose privileges are withdrawn when he is laid off from his job because of austere economic measures. Mboudjak is no longer well fed and does not enjoy the luxury of being walked around the neighborhood. In his new state, Mboudjak becomes a victim of Massa Yo’s frustration at his socioeconomic decline. Mboudjak’s condition is exacerbated by the fact that he is humiliated not only by Massa Yo but also by the master’s son, Soumi, who tries to kill him, as well as the schoolchildren who are customers of Massa’s wife, Mama Mado. Even the customers of Massa Yo in his new bar, opened after his layoff, humiliate and kick the dog around. The only exception is Crow, the writer, who visits the bar and silently records the activities around him. He is interested in the lives of ordinary people and has written a book titled Dog Days. He speaks lovingly to Mboudjak and congratulates the dog for speaking out against oppression when the police commissioner arrests the cigarette vendor for calling him Etienne. On that occasion, everybody except the writer drifts away without intervening. The writer asks the police commissioner if he has an arrest warrant and is detained for his effrontery. Mboudjak is outraged and attacks the police commissioner for abusing his power. The writer berates the witnesses for remaining silent in the face of oppression and refuses the free beer Massa Yo offers to compensate for his cowardice. It takes the killing of

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Takou, the young son of the engineer, for the community to mobilize itself against tyranny. Nganang’s novel underscores not only the human angle of a failed state, but the implications for nonhumans as well. While the novel has been read for its portrayal of the socioeconomic impacts of structural adjustment on Cameroonians, the place of the nonhuman animal in this highly political text has not been sufﬁciently addressed. In her review of the novel, Ngwarsungu Chiwengo writes about the novel as a political allegory that provides a counterdiscourse to the government’s ofﬁcial discourse.68 Although she admits the novel is presented from the perspective of a dog, she does not address this other voice in the novel and the possibility of such a narrative perspective for the reconﬁguration of the text’s politics. Ken Harrow’s reading of the novel as one where allegorical characters depict the human “wretched of the earth; once colonized, now the small ones in a country run by big men” also forecloses the possibility of an interpretation cognizant of the nonhuman.69 Nevertheless, Nganang’s novel seems to echo Jacques Derrida’s sentiment that animals can suffer. Derrida’s work demands that the animal be considered among the victims of such dictator-led states as Cameroon. It is signiﬁcant that Mboudjak’s problems begin immediately after Massa loses his job. The narrative could have become engrossed with the impact of the layoff on just the humans–Massa Yo, his wife, and their son–but Dog Days undermines the grand narrative of human-centeredness by not only highlighting the impact of the situation on the dog but also bringing us the narrative from his perspective. As we follow Mboudjak as he traverses the poor neighborhood of Yaoundé where his master lives, we see a clear inscription of poverty on the people, on a hungry Mboudjak, and on the stray dogs whose plight seems worse than that of our protagonist. The only well-fed dogs are those of Mini Manor, whose wealth is the subject of the community’s gossip. Her dogs reﬂect the extension of the social divide to the animals as well. In focusing attention on the plight of Mboudjak, who is hungry and whose point of view is hardly considered by Massa Yo, the novel underscores the consequences of political and economic instability in Cameroon not just for humans but also for the nonhuman population. Mboudjak, therefore, functions as a subaltern ﬁgure whose speech is ignored. The only exception is the writer who congratulates the dog for attacking the menacing police commissioner. It is remarkable that the writer is named Crow, after a bird believed to have greater than average intelligence and the capacity to respond to calls from other species. The writer’s name not only problematizes human-animal distinctions; his ability to decipher Mboudjak’s act of resistance and

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respond to the dog-narrator highlights the astuteness of his name. Unfortunately, Massa Yo does not recognize the resistance implicated in Mboudjak’s action when he challenges the police boss. According to the narrator: “One voice alone, which I recognized as my master’s, convinced me I was still alive. The voice was cruelly giving me an order I already knew by heart: ‘Mboudjak, get out.’”70 The dog’s growls for food are easily dismissed by Massa Yo, who normally asks him to “get out” on such occasions. The problem is that the humans, Massa Yo and his son among them, fail to “meet dogs as strangers, as signiﬁcant others,” as Donna Haraway advises.71 Haraway’s sense of strangers and signiﬁcant others is interesting because generally we owe both groups care. We are supposed to bear some responsibility and hospitality toward strangers, as Anthony Appiah reminds us in Cosmopolitanism, but our signiﬁcant others require love, respect, and the kind of caring response that Mboudjak does not receive.72 After Soumi’s attempt to kill him, Mboudjak tries to explain the situation to Massa, who would not listen: I howled that it was a lie; I laid out the twists and turns of my aborted assassination, but Massa Yo didn’t even listen to my overly loud version of things. I heard him say I had the nerve to come back and bark at him after disappearing “yet again” without a trace. He was hopping mad and grabbed me by the scruff of my neck. I yelled that it was all a misunderstanding, but he didn’t even listen to me. He gave my rear a rhythmic walloping. “Where were you?” he asked with every blow. I tearfully barked my explanation, but he didn’t believe me. “Where were you?” I wailed out my suffering, but to no avail. “Where were you?”73

Interestingly, while Massa did not listen, fellow animals–dogs, hens, lizards, and so on–as well as the man named Crow constitute an attentive audience. Although the animals disagree and quarrel regularly, they at least listen to one another’s perspectives, unlike the humans whose stock in trade is bullying the animals. Nganang’s novel also escapes the homogeneous categorization of animals by distinguishing them. The only times Massa Yo shows affection for the dog is whenever he wants to claim him as his possession, his property. He constantly refers to Mboudjak as “my dog” in such instances. Fortunately for Massa Yo, he does not suffer the fate of the animal catcher Fidow, who is attacked by an elephant, in Farah’s Secrets, a novel I discuss in the next chapter. This “silencing of the subaltern,” to borrow Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, engenders Mboudjak’s reﬂection on man’s inhumanity after Soumi’s attempted murder: “To tell the truth, once I had gotten over my amusement, I realized I had come back to this criminal house less to laugh at Soumi’s bumbling ﬂights than

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to learn how and why a man (or a child, what’s the difference!) could be so inhuman.”74 The novel recommends compassion toward nonhuman animals and ties such an ethical obligation to the core of what it means to be human. Mboudjak is positioned to foreground animals’ suffering as well as to demand a reconsideration of treating them as mere objects. Signiﬁcantly, it is the animal that intervenes when the humans, except for Crow, refuse to get involved in the police commissioner’s arrest of the cigarette vendor. The novel exposes the so-called human to ridicule for his inhumanity through Panther, one of the bar’s regular patrons: Didn’t I say you had nothing but beers in your head? Money’s your only friend, right? I’m sure one day we’re gonna hear you’ve sold Soumi to Famla. Here’s a guy you spend all your days with. You see the police haul him off, and you stay calm. As for the rest of you, didn’t you all turn your stories to the writer? He was arrested right in front of your eyes, and why? Because he wanted to defend one of you. You let him get hauled off and did nothing about it. Yeah, and you call yourselves men!75

Although Panther refuses to act supposedly because of his age, his testimony is a powerful indictment of Massa and the bar patrons. As Mboudjak did in a passage cited earlier, Panther, whose name also evokes an animal, challenges the humanity of Massa and others who watch the police drag Crow away. Both the dog and Panther are redeﬁning what it means to be human in their society. They both insist that the ability to care for the Other, human and nonhuman, is a basic requirement for participating in the human project. Humanity here is not a preconstituted identity but a status based on one’s attitudes toward homo sapiens and other beings. The novel insists that the dictatorship suffocating the lives of Cameroonians is coterminous with human tyranny against other vulnerable beings in the environment. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the revolutionary vision of the novel brings together the subaltern characters, both human and animal, to challenge their oppressors: “I tore myself from my seclusion and, marched along with him, ran on ahead of him. United we were, Man and me, in the spasmodic rush of our language: our barks. We marched, not only to bring somebody else’s child back to life, but above all and foremost to chase out the crazed lion. We marched, hunters in the urban jungle.”76 Both human and dog are in concert to dethrone the autocrat under whose watch they have suffered. In this march, “Man and me” form a collective. That Mboudjak does not discriminate between his barks and human language is remarkable as it

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permits the recognition of a shared communicative trait between the human and animal characters, on the one hand, and the animal-narrator and the reader, on the other. By replacing language with barks, the reader is challenged to acknowledge the dog’s communicative abilities. Nganang’s narrative recommends listening to the dogs around us and acknowledging their resistance and agency. Distributed Agency In accentuating the ways that African literature portrays multispecies ecologies and the interrelationships that characterize these complex ecosystems, I have started to hint at an important characteristic of nonhuman life forms often denied expression and consideration: their participation or contribution to what is normally considered human agency. To put it baldly, the nonhuman can act and therefore has agency. The problem, as I showed in the Introduction, is the emphasis on human agency expressed in terms of linguistic and political subjectivities all rooted in the idea of intentionality. Typically discounted in such accounts of agency are the roles that nonhumans play even in connection to human agency and the multifarious effects that they produce. Work being done on animist cosmologies, and the new materialisms has already shown the critical importance of nonhuman matter in expanding the understanding of environmental actors. I take up these works more closely in Chapter 2 where Nuruddin Farah’s war ecologies come into clear focus. For now, however, I show the ways that nonhuman actors participate in pushing narratives forward and the impacts they have on humans in the process. While intentionality is not altogether jettisoned in this conception of agency, the stress is placed on effects so that nonhuman elements can receive the credit they deserve for their roles in the production of agency. Garuba has noted that the animist narrative “devolves into a representational strategy that involves giving the abstract or metaphorical a material realization.”77 One form of this material realization entails imbuing nonhuman aspects of the environment with speciﬁc agentic capacities. Take land and trees, for example. In secular terms, both land and tree are categorized as life forms even if their actions are not properly accounted for because they lack intentionality. These nonhuman life forms are also regarded as vital life forces in various African and other non-Western cultures. Both secular and indigenous understandings of these life forms recognize their vitality and lay the foundation for exploring the actions or effects they produce in the world. The rest of this section not only dramatizes the vitality of these nonhuman forms but also shows their involvement as

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actors in narratives. By so doing, I highlight one more shared characteristic between humans and other beings in the environment, beginning with textual illustrations from Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard, which is then followed by a brief discussion of Okri’s The Famished Road and Kitamura’s Gone to the Forest. It is already clear, from the earlier section on multispecies presence, that the Drinkard shares the environment of Tutuola’s narrative with the different creatures inhabiting that space. Besides acknowledging their presence, it is equally crucial to attend to their involvement in the actions of the protagonist and narrative movement. Throughout his journeys, the Drinkard encounters different creatures, who play prominent roles in his activities. For instance, the juju provided him by his spirit friend, a nonhuman, propels his ability to escape from different forms of danger in the forest. In his encounters with the Skulls that imprison his future wife, the magic is signiﬁcant for the Drinkard’s transformation into a bird that can ﬂy away. When he needs money, his mercantile endeavor is enabled again by the spirit’s juju that allows him to turn into a canoe to ferry passengers for a fee. In his reading of the canoe incident, Steven M. Tobias suggests that the transformation of the text’s protagonist into objects parallels the objectiﬁcation and dispossession of colonized people.78 The incident can be read differently by attending to the ecological interactions missing in Tobias’s analysis. The indelible hands of nonhumans are decipherable in the canoe incident: the tree from which the paddle and canoe are made is important and so is the river that necessitates the ferry and serves as the means of transport. Man’s action is dependent on nonhumans here. Although there seems to be a manifestation of what Simon Estok has described as ecophobia–that is, an aversion toward nature in the handling of the forests and bushes by the narrator–these lively spaces also shelter and sustain the protagonist.79 Tutuola’s narrator tells us as he embarks on the journey that he “was travelling from bushes to bushes and from forests to forests and sleeping inside it for many days and months, I was sleeping on the branches of trees” to avoid spirits and other dangers.80 In the absence of roads in most instances, the forest provides the travel infrastructure that propels his movement and drives his narrative forward. In Tutuola’s narrative, the environment is not a mere background for the setting of human anxieties and desires. The relationality that the text emphasizes makes visible the agency of nonhumans. The example of the eagle brought to pluck the eyes of the Drinkard and his wife is worthy of mention. Not only does the eagle stare at the victims as if expressing compassion for them; this creature also chases away the villagers gathered

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to punish the narrator and his wife. If the townspeople plan to kill the two strangers for “trespassing,” the eagle’s actions thwart their nocturnal plan and facilitate the Drinkard’s escape. In short, Tutuola’s narrative is relevant for an ecological analysis because of its implication of both human and nonhuman actions at important points of the narrative. Therefore, it is important to qualify Quayson’s reading of heroism in Tutuola’s ﬁction. Quayson eloquently emphasizes the heroic characteristics of the Drinkard and the shift from a personal to a communal ethic toward the end of the work. However, Quayson’s celebration of the narrative’s “multivalent type of heroism,” at both the individual and communal levels, elides the role of the nonhuman in the novel’s heroic exploits: the juju from the gods, the eagle discussed earlier, the trees in the forest, and so on.81 The point is that the narrative resists a linear account of human agency. Peter Kalliney anticipates my reading when he notes that the ﬂatness of his character makes him lack the interiority expected of such a hero, not to mention the requisite “valor and tactical acumen.”82 The limitations that Kalliney identiﬁes in Tutuola’s narrator lend support to the fact that he is not designed to be a self-sufﬁcient subject. Tutuola’s text, rather, invites a reading that recognizes the place of the nonhuman– material and metaphysical–in the analysis of the text’s heroic endeavors. It is important to acknowledge the nonhuman efforts that are critical for pushing forward the Drinkard’s narrative. In the discussion of the human and nonhuman interactions in Okri’s The Famished Road in the preceding section, I hinted at certain effects produced by nonhuman life, for instance the active verbs used to depict the owl’s and antelope’s actions. There is also the dog that “led me [Azaro] through the forest” after the kidnapping from Madam Koto’s bar. Although she does not couch it in agentic terms, Arlene A. Elder gestures toward nonhuman agency in Okri’s narrative when she writes that “Okri’s landscapes threaten sojourners both physically and psychologically by emphasizing the life-giving/life-taking qualities of water with which his road is associated.”83 The threats of the landscape and the deiﬁcation of water and the road–with the power to give and take life–all point to concrete materializations of forces beyond the human. Similarly, even if he is more interested in the “realistic” aspects of the novel and believes that the nonhumans “do not shape the major situations, inﬂuence character, or determine the overall structure and meaning of events” in The Famished Road, Ben Obumselu concedes that “Okri indeed grants some power of agency to his supernaturals.”84 The supernatural and more material nonhumans in Okri’s work are imbued with signiﬁcant agency. Readers can recall the elemental vitality of the storm, which comes amid the destruction of the forest by construction workers. As Azaro

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tells us, “The freshly laid tarmac had been swept away. Bushes ﬂoated on the river. Road-workers’ tents had been blown everywhere and all those who were building the road intended to connect the highway had ﬂed for cover and were nowhere to be seen.”85 Notice again the action words in past tense used to describe the storm’s fury, including swept, ﬂoated, blown, ﬂed. In washing away the tarmac and the tents, the rain thwarts the human agenda poised for further environmental devastation. Continuing, Azaro notes: The rain and wind forced me on to the forest edge, to the pit where they dredged up sand. The white man stood there with his foot on the log. He wore a thick yellow raincoat and black boots. He was looking through a pair of binoculars at something on the other side of the pit. Suddenly the path turned into a ditch. The earth moved. Floodwaters from the forest poured underneath us. I clung to a stump. The white man shouted, his binoculars ﬂew into the air, and I saw him slide away from view. He slid down slowly into the pit, as a stream of water washed him away. The log moved. The earth gave way in clumps and covered him as he disappeared.86

This passage reveals the agentic powers of the elements for reterritorialization and control. Azaro does not say that he moved toward the forest edge, as he does many times in the text. Rather, he is submissive to the pull of the storm and in the process, witnesses the sad end of the white man who stands for the destroyers of the environment. With the storm, the role is reversed. The white engineer loses control of his binoculars, an important component of his mastery, and ultimately loses control of himself as he slides into the watery pit. The attacker has become the attacked as he is swallowed and covered up. Thus, while Kim Anderson Sasser sees Okri’s novel as one that promotes humanism, as a text that “utilizes magic to elevate the real, both the code of realism and its constitutive elements, human being and the human plane,”87 the passage shows that the text is indeed exposing the limits of an anthropocentric humanism. It is tempting to read the storm as nature’s retributive justice against those who exploit her, but it is more signiﬁcant for my purposes to observe that human design is subordinate to the agentic prowess of the elements. As the agglomeration of the rain and wind terrorize the neighborhoods and the workers, it is possible to ask whether the forest would have weathered the storm without the deforestation threat. As the storm blows, we see the vulnerability to which the forest is exposed because of the cutting of trees and dredging of sand. In the end, the storm’s larger statement may be the point made by Azaro’s dad as the novel ends: “All creatures must be treated with respect from now on.”88

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If Okri’s novel inscribes nonhuman agency in the storm, Katie Kitamura’s Gone to the Forest uses a mountain explosion and the following ash storm to reﬂect the force in other-than-human aspects of the ecology. Gone to the Forest, which explores life in an unnamed colonial society, tracks the relationship of an old settler, his son Tom, and the indigenous people who work for them. The novel examines the experiences of the settlers as their colonial world is being redrawn by anticolonial revolutionaries bent on land redistribution. When the narrative opens, we learn that the old man arrived and claimed a large expanse of land seemingly belonging to nobody. The old man does not hesitate to put the local inhabitants to work on the land, which served as a farm. But as the novel progresses, the government has begun to make land concessions to the indigenous population that has formed a rebel movement and taken to the forest to strategize and execute violent campaigns against the colonial establishment. This movement shares basic characteristics with the Kenyan Mau Mau insurrection discussed in the ﬁnal chapter and the anticolonial struggle in Zimbabwe. The novel’s ﬁctional rendition of anticolonial revolution is similar to the historical instances in Zimbabwe and Kenya where the movements incorporated oath-taking to ensure secrecy concerning their operations. Yet the most important shared characteristic is the people’s resolve to combat colonialism and the land-grab it engenders. It is these aspects of African colonial history that motivate my interpretation of the novel as depicting anticolonial struggle and agitation for land redistribution in Africa. But the revolutionary agents in the novel are not the indigenous people alone. In fact, the novel inscribes nonhuman agency with two speciﬁc incidents. The ﬁrst incident is the mountain explosion, which occurs early in the text: “Across the border there is a mountain–and one morning the mountain explodes. First there is an enormous boom. The boom is not hollow but dense with noise. The natives come out of their quarters. They are standing outside, looking and listening, when the boom repeats and then dissolves into a rumble. They are watching when the top of the mountain opens and disgorges ﬁre.”89 It would not be misleading to want to read the explosion here as a revolutionary action of the forest ﬁghters, given their activities in the novel. Such a reading would be supported by the violent activities of the rebels that we witness toward the novel’s end. The problem with such a reading, however, is that there is no human action implicated in this scene. Rather, the narrator indicates that “the mountain had been silent for a thousand years. They did not know it could explode. They had been trained to worry about other things. The ravages of colonialism. Man-made apocalypse, nuclear disaster–they have seen pictures, they have heard stories.”90

Distributed Agency

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The passage distinguishes between the things “to worry about,” all human-made problems, and things they did not know they should worry about such as the inert mountain. The human inhabitants instantiate the idea of humans as agents, those with the repository of action, while validating the notion of silent nonhuman objects. However, the mountain, a subaltern, in this instance, speaks. In exploding and disgorging ﬁre, the mountain registers its vital force, reminding the natives and the reader of its capacities. In the process, the mountain rewrites the script of a narrative that has hitherto positioned humans alone as agents. The second event in Gone to the Forest that establishes nonhuman action is the “ash storm.” The narrator tells us that ash “covers everywhere and everything” following the explosion: The ash continues to fall and the layer grows higher. It does not freeze into solid tranches. It does no melting of any kind. It only accumulates. The roads and tracks close themselves up. The car motors eat up dust and die. The bicycle wheels do not turn. They try to clear paths but the ash keeps falling. It is up to their waists, up to their necks. Two children disappear into the ash and are not found.91

As the ash comes down, we are left to imagine its provenance in death, destruction, or ruin. It is tempting to read this ash storm and even the mountain explosion that preceded it as events anticipating the human revolution at the end. After all, ash suggests death or ruin. Yet what is very striking is the way the ash “covers everywhere and everything” including the land that is the symbol of white power and wealth. The settlers, like the old man, rely on the land and the wealth it brings, but as the ash falls the old man’s power recedes. The land is beyond his reach and mastery at this point of the text. Similarly, the efforts of the men clearing the ash are in vain as it quickly reﬁlls the spaces they clear. In the ash storm, humans are subject to the whim of their environment. Two children, as the preceding passage tells us, are swallowed by the storm. The old man, too, is covered up in the “ash storm” so that it takes the intervention of his son and servant for him to be rescued. In short, the shrinking of his land anticipates his decreased landholding due to the land reform embarked on by the government. Taken together, the ash storm and the mountain explosion preceding it allow for deciphering the power of the nonhuman to overwhelm the human. The reader is oriented in this narrative to look outside the human for signs of agency. The foregoing textual examples illuminate ways that African literature foregrounds the impacts of nonhumans on Africa’s environments. If anthropocentric thinking has often placed humans as agents and the nonhuman as object, inert and passive, illuminating this shared characteristic reveals one more point of convergence between humans and

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nonhumans. Narratives make things easier to apprehend, and the ones examined here permit us to narrativize nonhuman agency as a cause/ effect, as a factor of futurity that doesn’t require linearity or intentionality. The analysis in this section accentuates the second connotation of proximity by its insistence on a shared trait between human and other nonhuman forces: agency in this case. Yet there are scenarios when the distinctions between the different life forms are radically blurred more than they are in this section where we can still easily separate the nonhuman from the human. Those radical moments of indistinction, as they appear in African literature, constitute the subject of the ﬁnal section. Indistinction between Human and Nonhuman Forms If it is possible to distinguish clearly between humans and nonhumans in the three dimensions of proximity discussed previously (multispecies presence, interspecies relationship, and distributed agency), this ﬁnal dimension, hinged on indistinction, is radically different because those clear lines of demarcations are obfuscated. All four dimensions share an opposition to anthropocentrism, yet the clarity of the distinction between humans and other forms of life characterizing the initial three stages of analyses gives way here for Homi Bhabha’s notion of sameness but not quite. The poststructural premise of Bhabha’s work allows him to show that identity is not pre-given or pre-established.92 Bhabha’s hybrid zone is a subversive space where both the colonialist authority and traditional knowledge are challenged and disﬁgured. Binary thinking that supposes the clear distinction between the colonized and the colonizer is undermined as Bhabha embarks on a psychoanalytic elucidation of split subjectivity and identity, while in the process deconstructing the Enlightenment presuppositions of ﬁxed identity. In his deconstruction of ﬁxed notion of identity, Bhabha maps a space for rethinking the wellconstructed and pervasive idea of human superiority. Although Bhabha’s work does not consider the larger ecological system beyond the humans implicated in colonial relations, his analytical insights allow for understanding the way human identity formation also proceeds in relation to other beings. As is already clear from the Introduction, the human has always deﬁned himself or herself as distinct from nonhuman nature, just as the colonizer’s identity in Bhabha’s work is constructed in relation to the colonized. It is worth mentioning that to trafﬁc in similarities and indistinctions, as I do here, is not altogether to elide difference or simply equate one species with another. Rather, the point is to work against the notion of human exceptionalism that sanctions the brutalization of other members of the biosphere, as well as to

Indistinction between Human and Nonhuman Forms

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encourage a relational disposition toward other beings, who are not always human. Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard exempliﬁes indistinction at those moments when the protagonist is in danger and needs rescue. One instance will be when the Drinkard turns into a canoe and later into a pebble to escape the mountain creatures. There are also instances where he turns into animals such as a bird or when his future wife is turned into a kitten or doll. If so far we have explored humans and nonhumans as separate entities that are yet interlinked, these examples show that, in the words of Richard Grusin, “the human is characterized precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman.”93 Take the pebble moment, for instance: the Drinkard runs the risk of being captured by the mountain creatures, but in turning into a pebble that can cross a river, a feat neither the human Drinkard nor the mountain creatures can perform, our protagonist-cum-narrator escapes his assailants. Here the pebble, a stone, conﬁrms Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s argument on the “lithic activeness” of stone, its vivacity, and its ability to shield humans.94 More speciﬁcally, as the Drinkard and the pebble engage in what, following Cohen, can be described as an “epochal embrace,” the pebble keeps the Drinkard safe from his detractors bent on capturing him.95 This example undermines the notion of human exceptionalism; more importantly, it points to the difﬁculty (if not impossibility) of extricating the human from the nonhuman. The text brings to the fore a range of ecological components while troubling any effort to clearly distinguish between them: is this pebble a nonhuman or human? If it is a pebble, what about the Drinkard? To want to resolve this conundrum satisfactorily is not to be attuned to the workings of the ecosystem–the interrelationships it engenders, its strangeness, and its chaos. Tutuola’s narrative further problematizes strict categorical differentiations with the description of various creatures such as the Red Lady who leads the Drinkard to the Red Town. Although the Red Lady’s name suggests a human identity, the Drinkard’s wife tells the reader: “She was not a human-being and she was not a spirit but what was she?”96 The unanswered question invites the reader to consider a response. But the work of the reader is made difﬁcult by the fact that the narrator has eliminated two important possibilities: being human and spirit. By projecting an indistinct ﬁgure, the passage frustrates a clear effort at dichotomizing or categorizing. The reader is confronted with neither/nor identities complicating clear distinctions and exploding conventional identitarian categories. Tutuola’s deployment of indistinction–that is, same but not quite–is useful for undermining and calling into question distinct boundaries. The intermixings that characterize Tutuola’s

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descriptions conﬁrm Robert Stam’s point that, in hybridity, “once secure boundaries become more porous due to the forms of ﬂuidity and crossing.”97 Like The Palmwine Drinkard before it, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a testament to the blurring of boundaries between humans and nonhumans, but this time with implications for critiquing animal exploitation and relating their suffering to that of humans. The narrator of My Life is transformed into different animals by the Smelling Ghost who kidnaps him early in the narrative. Readers of the text will recall two transformational instances, ﬁrst as a horse and later as a cow, when the narrator declares, “I could not eat the grasses because I am not a real cow.”98 Not a real cow and not quite human, he is subjected to exploitation by humans tending the animals. In such moments of ambiguity, the human-cow or human-horse trudges forward as a complex character imbued with both human and nonhuman features; as a creature that complicates simple, linear categorizations; the narrator invites readers to reﬂect closely on the kinship possibilities with these nonhuman Others. If it is easy to ignore the suffering of the animals caught in “enemy ﬁre” early in My Life, that is, those animals discussed as casualties of war in the earlier section on multispecies presence, the suffering of the humanturned-animal narrator corrals the reader’s focus onto animal exploitation in the text. The “terriﬁed” animals encountered in the ﬁrst chapter of the text cannot speak or be heard, but the privilege of narration offered to the human/horse, the human/monkey, or even the human/ cow allows for the dramatization of animal suffering: “In the presence of these guests, my boss was changing me to some kind of creatures. First of all he changed me to a monkey, then I began to climb fruit trees and pluck fruits down for them. After that he changed me to a lion, then to a horse, to a camel, to a cow or bull with horns on its head and at last to my former form.”99 It is striking that the narrator uses “boss” to describe the Smelling Ghost. The lexical choice indicates a superior-subordinate relationship that mirrors human superiority over nonhumans. The Ghost perceives the animal as beast of burden and transforms the narrator into animals mainly for utilitarian purposes. As a monkey, he is expected to climb trees and pluck fruits. Later, he becomes a means of transportation as a horse, ferrying his “boss” to different locations. The narrator poignantly depicts the pains involved with this arduous task: “then the attendants loosened me from the stump, so he mounted me and the two attendants were following him with whips in their hands and ﬂogging me along in the bush. As he was dressed with these leaves and mounted me mercilessly I felt as if he was half a ton weight.”100

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In addition to enduring the weight of the master, the narrator is also subject to the whipping of the attendants. He is also left “in the sun which was shining severely”101 and is exposed to cold and mosquitoes at night. Clearly the Ghost is in charge while the different animals serve at his whim. The later scene when the narrator is transformed into a cow is not very different as he is also brutalized and starved by the handlers. Why does the narrative repeatedly feature the brutalization of animals, and why does this mainly happen with the transformed animals? Laura Murphy leads in the direction of an answer when she writes that the “protagonist has not only been made a slave, but quite literally metamorphosed into a work animal.”102 Murphy’s reading of this passage is consistent with her interest in the echoes of the slave trade in the text. My sense is that the brutalization of the human/animal who doubles as the narrator does more than demonstrate human slavery; it also uniquely stages the exploitation of animals in the narrative. It is possible that the earlier scene where the animals are terriﬁed by the gunﬁre may not interpellate the reader, speciﬁcally the reader concerned with human suffering; similarly, the animals eaten or captured by the Smelling Ghost are easily dismissed, but when our narrator (albeit in a nonhuman form) is subjected to suffering–being used as a beast of burden, exposed to the elements, and “reduced to his labor alone,” as Murphy aptly captures it–the reader is likely to sympathize with the indignities.103 The text draws attention to some power dynamics here: human tendency to treat animals and other nonhuman forms as we wish. By infusing the low-valued animals with human forms, Tutuola projects an example of what Stam calls “redemption of detritus”; that is, the rendering of a negative or trashy object in positive terms.104 The process of redemption involves the revaluation of an otherwise worthless thing, “the strategic redemption of the low, the despised, the imperfect, and the ‘trashy’ as part of a social overturning.”105 Within an anthropocentric frame, the animals in Tutuola’s narrative are not granted the special status or recognition that humans enjoy. They are lower in status or value when compared to the higher beings in the human family, which explains why readers of the work readily mention the war that displaces the narrator at the beginning without recalling the animals implicated in that early scene. But when abuse is meted out to a human/cow or human/horse, the text forces us to bridge the distance between these bodies, and to imagine the impact of such punishment on our human bodies by way of appreciating the abuse often suffered by nonhuman life forms. The animal body takes on a recognizable special signiﬁcance when it commingles with the human one normatively ascribed higher value. Tutuola’s text concretizes a point that Allison

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Carruth has made in the context of J. M. Coetzee’s work, namely that “compassion for animals . . . depends on our ability not just to think about animals or just to codify their rights but also to imagine our bodies in terms of theirs.”106 As we imagine the narrator suffering in the guise of an animal, we are asked to ponder our ethical practices toward Others– especially the nonhumans often subject to human violence. If Tutuola’s My Life centers on shared suffering as it blurs the distinction between human and nonhuman animals, Mda’s The Whale Caller as well as Kitamura’s Gone to the Forest extend the indistinction to other shared biological characteristics, namely a common mammalian classiﬁcation and the vulnerability of death. While Mda’s novel, for the most part, maintains the boundaries between humans and whales as is clear from the earlier discussion of the interrelationship between the Caller and Sharisha, it does problematize the boundaries as well. One major strategy the novel uses is to insist on communication between Sharisha and the Whale Caller. If the dog-narrator Mboudjak is endowed with human language to communicate in Nganang’s novel discussed earlier, the horn serves as the technology of communication between the Whale Caller and Sharisha. As the whale responds to the Caller, she diminishes the gap existing between man and animal. Yet there is a sharper effort to blur this gap on the part of the Whale Caller when he corrects Saluni, who calls Sharisha a ﬁsh: “A whale is not a ﬁsh, Saluni. It is a mammal . . . like you and me.”107 A jealous Saluni maliciously calls Sharisha a ﬁsh due to the Caller’s devotion to the whale at the expense of their relationship. But the Caller’s response is instructive. Unlike in other instances when he differentiates between a ﬁsh and a whale, he takes a different approach, one that brings human and animal together. In grouping the animal and humans under the mammalian taxonomical class, the Whale Caller implores Saluni and the reader to focus less on differences. The Caller is underlining what Mbembe has described as “a zone of relative indistinction.”108 Indistinction, in this case, is a consequence of shared biological characteristics–mammary glands, brain capacity, largeness, similar reproductive systems, and so on–as well as shared social conditions, including being victims of the commodiﬁcation of bodies in a late-capitalist dispensation. The mammalian classiﬁcation discloses an effort to instantiate similarities to creatures like Sharisha, similarities beyond the fact that both Saluni and Sharisha are females and that both of their names start with an S. While Mda’s Whale Caller dissolves the human-nonhuman boundary with his emphasis on a shared mammalian classiﬁcation, Kitamura achieves a similar feat with another mutual biological characteristic: the vulnerability of various life forms in the face of death. If in the

Conclusion

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previous section, Kitamura’s narrative posits agency as one feature shared by both humans and nonhumans, her novel’s insistence on shared mortality seems calculated to further blur distinctions between humans and Others with whom they share the environment. As the old man declines from his position as the strong lord of the manor to a dying man in Gone to the Forest, his estranged son, Tom, is left bafﬂed at his dad’s frailty: “Once his father owned everything as far as he could see. Now it was three rooms and even those rooms would go. He gave ground–each foot, every inch, signaled what was coming. It was in this way that Tom realized the old man was dying. Animals died in the same way. Their territory taken away. Cattle retreating into their stalls. Wild dogs cowered in a corner. The look of it indistinguishable.”109 Notice the way the passage moves quickly from a realization of the patriarch’s impending death to a comparison with animals. The passage does not say animals die in a similar way; the idea of “sameness” blurs whatever boundaries we can identify between the dying man and the dying animals. Like the old man, we see that the animals lose their “territory” as they die. The last word of the passage, “indistinguishable,” signals undifferentiation. As the old man withers during the rebellion, the novel dramatizes his vulnerabilities at length. Here we see a man who cannot speak, who shits in his pants. Although the novel early on shows the old man’s mastery over his son, women, the colonized population, the land, and the animals, the distinction between him and the animals becomes less clear as we follow his son’s reﬂection on the patriarch’s fragility and gradual disintegration. If he occupies a hierarchical distance away from the animals and other beings when the novel opens, on his deathbed as the text draws to a close, he is brought closer, “indistinguishable” from the beings he lorded over in his prime. Conclusion This chapter is an attempt to understand how African literature embraces the imbrication of humans and other life forms alongside the invisible entities constituting the African pluriverse. The aesthetics of proximity challenge a human-centered literary world by positing scenarios where various beings interact. It is no surprise that humans transform into nonhumans or that nonhumans take up supposedly unique human characteristics such as language or even that they are implicated in a network of actions or distributed agency. As Jane Bennett has eloquently suggested, these convergences between humans and Others remind us to contemplate the many ways that we are similar to nonhuman forms and to downplay the exceptionalism and airs of human superiority that often

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characterize human relationships with other inhabitants of their shared ecosystem.110 I continue the exposition of proximity in the subsequent chapters of this book. In Chapter 2, I examine how the notion of proximity plays out in Nuruddin Farah’s ﬁctional representations of Somalia’s war ecologies. More speciﬁcally, the chapter addresses more fully the question of distributed agency introduced in this chapter by seeking to account for the interactions of human actors with nonhuman ones in a wartime scenario and the implications of said interdependences for undermining anthropocentric conceptions of agency in African and postcolonial studies.

2

Beyond Human Agency: Nuruddin Farah and Somalia’s Ecologies of War

I want to note here that acknowledging nonhuman agency as an active player in shaping the world does not mean backgrounding the moral accountability of the human agent. –Serpil Oppermann1

The African continent has had its fair share of conﬂicts including the Nigeria-Biafra War, the Algerian War of Independence, and the wars in Liberia and Sierra-Leone as well as the Darfur crisis. Consequently, African literature has witnessed a boom in war narratives such as Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun,2 a novel on the NigeriaBiafra War; Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier3 devoted to the war in Sierra-Leone; Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land4 on the war in Mozambique; and Chris Abani’s Song for Night,5 a novella whose hesitance to specify a geographical locale allows it to speak to any war featuring child soldiers. The child soldier phenomenon and the authors’ portrayal of the brutalities of war are thematic threads connecting the aforementioned texts. But the choice of Somalia for this chapter is not only apropos because it enables me to reﬂect on a crisis threatening the stability of East Africa. More importantly, the complex, enduring conﬂicts in Somalia–beginning with the colonial invasion through the country’s violent struggles with Ethiopia and the civil war–make the country a fertile ground for a discussion of ecologies of war relevant for a larger African extrapolation and its global resonances. In focusing on ecologies of war in this space, I wish to mediate the gap in scholarship on war narratives in African literary criticism, which has mainly focused on the human dimensions and costs of conﬂicts. By this, I mean the tendency to explore issues relevant to the men, women, and children affected by these crises.6 Such a focus is crucial but unfortunately leaves out the nonhuman world, which is elided, glossed over, or discussed only for its relevance to the human population. Nuruddin Farah’s acute attention to both the nonhuman and human world(s) in his representation of the Somali crises in Secrets,7 Links,8 and 57

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Crossbones9 makes these texts relevant for analysis.10 In this chapter, I demonstrate Farah’s attentiveness to the complex interactions between humans and nonhumans in wartime Somalia as well as their shared vulnerability. I argue that the interspecies relations in Farah’s work enable a rethink of an anthropocentric notion of agency if we consider the capacities of the land, animals, and other nonhumans to produce effects in the novels. Distributed Agency One critical insight of indigenous cosmologies in Africa is the capacity of nonhumans–water, trees, and other inhabitants of the environment–to produce effects on the human. As is clear from the Introduction and the preceding chapter, many African communities establish a relational disposition toward nonhumans, endowing them with animating powers to shape and inﬂuence humans. As I also indicate in the Introduction, one regrettable outcome of the Enlightenment was the elision of the agentic possibilities of the nonhuman world in order to uphold the Western man as superior to women, people of color, and, of course, the Others in the environment. In positioning the Western man at the apex and linking agency to intentionality, the realm of agency was foreclosed to animals and other nonhumans in the ecosystem, but even more so for nonliving matter considered inert and passive. It took recent scholarship in the new materialisms, notably the work of Bruno Latour but also Jane Bennett, for serious critical attention to be paid to the effects of nonhumans on the ecosystem and to consider their participation in instances of intentional human agency. Latour, for instance, argues for enlarging the social ﬁeld of actors in the environment. For him, what he calls an “actant” is “anything that . . . modif[ies] a state of affairs by making a difference.”11 Latour is taking a jab at the notion of intentionality that eliminates the nonhuman from conceptualizations of agency. He believes that “action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled.”12 Questioning the validity of the primacy of human consciousness in considerations of agency, Latour argues for a reconstitution of the social, one that takes the social not as pre-given but as emergent. This understanding of the social, akin to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s assemblage, is constituted by the process of becoming, premised on the interrelationship of heterogeneous human and nonhuman components. The agency that emerges from such interaction is what Jane Bennett would call “distributed agency.” According to Bennett, “humans and

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their intentions participate [in agentive events], but they are not the sole or always the most profound actant in the assemblage.”13 Like Latour, she sees agency as something “distributed along a continuum” of human and nonhuman forces.14 In her words, “there was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity.”15 All considered, Latour and Bennett call for a conceptual shift that does not oppose intentionality but displaces it as an essential marker of agency. We are oriented by these materialist scholars to focus on the ways the nonhuman acts on the human and the implications of their effects for the production of agency. Scholars invested in the subﬁeld of material ecocriticism, which is primarily concerned with “the interplay between the human and the nonhuman in a ﬁeld of distributed effectuality and of inbuilt materialdiscursive dynamics,” have also espoused the idea of attributing agency to nonhumans.16 Narrative agency, the idea that matter is storied and that it tells stories of the world, is a pertinent feature of material ecocriticism. Of particular relevance however is that material ecocriticism expands upon the anthropocentric notion of agency. As two of the subﬁeld’s major proponents, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, explain, Agency, therefore, is not to be necessarily and exclusively associated with human beings and with human intentionality, but it is a pervasive and inbuilt property of matter, as part and parcel of its generative dynamism. From this dynamism, reality emerges as an intertwined ﬂux of material and discursive forces, rather than as complex of hierarchically organized individual players.17

By placing emphasis on the ways the different components of the land community shape one another, Iovino and Oppermann, as well as Latour and Bennett before them, ask that our reading practices be attentive to the agenticity of matter, therefore displacing the human as the locus of actions. Taken together, their work undermines the dualistic thinking that structures the human/nonhuman dichotomy and encourages us to invest in their imbrications, in the networks of exchanges across living and nonliving matter, therefore exposing the inﬂuence of so-called passive objects on the ecosystem. For an Africanist, one striking fact that has accompanied the materialist turn in critical studies is the renewed interest in indigenous cosmologies and their practice of what Harry Garuba describes as “animist materialism.”18 It is interesting that the “relational epistemology” promoted by indigenous cultures, once dismissed as evidence of primitive thinking, is becoming fashionable in mainstream criticism.19 Who would have thought that “primitive minds” would have the last laugh over Edward B. Tylor who had dismissed the animist sensibility of

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indigenous cosmologies because they did not ﬁt the binary subject/object, active/passive orientation of his Western epistemology?20 It appears that we are starting to pay attention to what many African societies and other non-Western cultures believed and practiced for generations. As Anselm Franke puts it in the introduction to e-ﬂux’s special issue on animism in 2012, this belief/social practice is that “inanimate objects and things act, that they have designs on us, and that we are interpellated by them.”21 The nonhumans implicated in the actions and interpellations do produce agency, that is, “if we deﬁne agency less by the essentialist capacities apparently required to effect change than by the effecting of change itself.”22 Conceiving agency as distributed is advantageous because, as Graham Huggan and Helen Tifﬁn have pointed out, it results in “a less anthropocentric but also a less circular deﬁnition of agency.”23 There is an ethical component to the idea of distributed or shared agency that makes it compelling for my analysis of Farah’s novels, known for their postmodern critique of human superiority, their interrogation of boundaries such as the nation, and the relational possibilities between humans and nonhumans they permit. In their reﬂection on the dangers of treating nonhuman life forms and so-called inanimate things as “passive, inert, unable to convey any independent expression of meaning,” Iovino and Oppermann worry that such treatment limits “the latitude of ethics to our species,” that is, to fellow human beings.24 At stake in a materialist account of agency is a consideration of what I am calling human proximity to nonhumans and the need to rethink how we relate to these other beings. A fundamental assumption energizing this study is that a better treatment of the Others with whom we share the earth can result in a sustainable planet. This structure of feeling afﬁrms the epigraph with which I started this chapter: considering nonhumans as players or actors in the environment does not make humans less culpable in the degradation of the environment. Rather, such consideration raises the ethical stake by forcing us to reimagine them not as objects for which we are masters but as co-travelers shaping one another in an ecological network. The inspiring work of the scholars explored previously coalesces in their emphasis on relationality, the dismantling of a center, and a reconﬁgured sense of agency. Their intellectual labor is productive for an ecocritical analysis of war that focuses on humans but also on the agential capacities of the nonhuman Others in Farah’s literary representations of the Somali environment. The scholars cited here deftly show that agency must be understood in relation to the Other, be it human or nonhuman, and is not attributable to an autonomous subject. However, I dwell less on inanimate objects not because I do not believe in their

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agentic ability, or what Bennett calls “thing power.”25 The emphasis on complex relations between human and nonhuman living matter is in keeping with the scope of the book. The rest of the chapter is divided into six sections. In the ﬁrst one, I provide a brief overview of the history of Somalia to provide a context for the narratives. Following that, I attempt a brief overview of the narratives, at the risk of doing them violence given their complexities. I proceed to a reading of the novels in the third section where I show how the novels demonstrate the interactions between humans and animals in the Somali environment. The fourth section is devoted to exploring the ways humans and animals interact with the landscape in a time of crisis, alongside the expression of the agency of humans and the more-thanhuman world involved. My interest in the following section is the commodiﬁcation of bodies–humans and animals in the novels–and how the underpinning economic order does not foreclose the possibility of distributed agency. I show that even when they serve as commodities, nonhumans enact forms of agency instrumental for animating human lives and for spurring environmental thinking. In the ﬁnal section, which doubles as the conclusion, I note that studies in new materialisms have not paid much attention to the global implications of distributed agency, while demonstrating how Farah’s oeuvre stresses the inseparability of networks of exchanges from their transnational roots and routes. Ursula Heise’s work in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global inspires the transnational vision of this concluding segment. The Context of the Texts The history of modern Somalia is traceable to the nineteenth-century colonial invasion of the area by both Britain and Italy after the colonizing nations put down the resistance of the existing Islamic sultanates. Italy retained control of the northeastern and southern parts of the country until 1941 when its defeat led to the British takeover of these territories. While northern Somalia remained a British protectorate, the southern part came under the trusteeship of the United Nations in 1949.26 Both parts were reunited as the Federal Republic of Somalia at independence in 1960, the same year that Nigeria, discussed in the next chapter, attained independence from Britain. Somalia remained under civilian rule until the Siad Barre–led military coup of 1969. Barre’s regime was initially hailed as progressive due to the infrastructural projects he embarked upon, but disillusionment soon followed because of corruption and his autocratic policies. Farah was interestingly a victim of this

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dictatorship as he was unable to return to Somalia after a visit to Rome in 1976 because one of his earlier works, A Naked Needle, was considered subversive by the government. The writer was threatened with a thirtyyear jail term for this novel critical of the regime.27 In 1977, Barre’s regime attempted to annex the disputed Ogaden region, which Britain had arbitrarily conceded to Ethiopia in 1948 in return for Ethiopian support to stop French incursion.28 Somalia’s initial success was soon reversed with Russia’s support for the Ethiopians; the latter won the war, the subject of Farah’s Maps, in 1978.29 This defeat is remarkable especially because Russia initially backed Barre in the early years of his administration “when he played the Soviets against the United States and its allies,” but the emergence of Mengistu’s government in Ethiopia made Russia switch allegiance.30 In the end, Somalia was defeated, but civil unrest at home continued until 1990 when Barre’s regime ﬁnally collapsed. A clan-based opposition group chased Barre out of ofﬁce in 1991, following which the nation erupted into the civil war represented in Links. Describing the primacy of the clan and its ubiquitous role in Somali politics, Farah explains it as “an extended patrilineal network that owes its existence to a political construction whose aim was to provide the blood community with an imagined identity.”31 The collapse of Barre’s government was followed by the creation of an autonomous Somaliland state in Northern Somalia, even though the government was not recognized by the international community. In the south, two military commanders, Mohammed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi Mohamed, struggled to retain control until an international conference on Somalia in Djibouti recognized the latter as the legitimate president of Somalia. Despite the international recognition, Mohamed was unable to maintain control outside Mogadiscio. Fighting and civil strife continued despite the unsuccessful UN peacekeeping operation and the later failed US intervention (Operation Restore Hope), central to the preoccupations of Links. The absence of a central government in Somalia was reversed in 2004 when the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) was established in Kenya.32 The TFG’s hold on the nation was slippery as militants and warlords held sway in their enclaves until 2006 when the TFG was ousted by the Islamic Courts, an Islamic power bloc from which Al-Shabaab emerged. The TFG managed to regain control a few months later with the assistance of Ethiopia, African Union peacekeepers, and the United States.33 Successive governments in Somalia continue to be challenged by the kinds of Al-Shabaab attacks seen in Farah’s Crossbones. Somalia is bordered by Kenya to the southwest, Djibouti to the northwest, the Indian Ocean to the east, and Ethiopia to the west. These borders are

Secrets, Links, and Crossbones: An Overview

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its links to the outside world that have contributed to the country’s shape over time. They make possible the network of exchanges that inﬂuence events in Somalia, including those depicted in the novels to which I turn next. Secrets, Links, and Crossbones: An Overview Secrets presents to readers a nation on the verge of war. The novel features Kalaman as its main protagonist, and through his interactions with his family members–Nonno, Damac, and Yaqut–as well as his relationship with the powerful Sholongoo, we see an intricate web of relationships whose complexity matches the clannish-based allegiances of the Somali nation, where killing and maiming based on clan identity dominate. According to Francis Ngaboh-Smart, “beyond the family support still rages the horror and disorder of the political community, with its murders, its violence, and clan-cleansing from which we are forced to conclude that only one’s close family can be worthy of loyalty.”34 But the novel does more than present the national struggles and its intimate dimensions. Farah points to the relationship between humans and nonhumans in a time of crisis. We see the charred landscapes and the decimation of animals by Fidow, the animal catcher. In turn, we see the effects of nonhumans on humans as well: while Fidow is killed by an elephant, therefore ending his animal cruelty, the scorched land causes famine and hunger for the human population. In short, the novel’s inclusion here speaks to its relevance for exploring the interactions of humans and nonhumans in a time of strife. Farah’s Links is set in war-torn Mogadiscio immediately after the withdrawal of US troops and offers a complex account of that intervention and its aftermaths. In an essay exploring metonymy and the representation of the war in the novel, Ines Mzali contends that it can be read “as a counter-representation to the mainstream US media’s sensationalist, therefore, reductive, coverage of the Somali war.”35 At the novel’s beginning, its protagonist, a Somali American, has just arrived from the USA to “disorient death” and “to know the answers.” The protagonist reports his intention “to visit these heat-ﬂattened, sunburned landscapes, and see these shantytowns, witness what’s become of our city.”36 He has been away for twenty years, and this return makes him realize that the Somali crisis is more complicated than the simple narrative CNN and other international media outlets beam to the world. As he traverses the war-destroyed terrain, Jeebleh is saddened by the devastation wrought by clannish politics. For this, he spurns a plea for ﬁnancial support from his clan members to enable

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them to institute their own militia. He meets his childhood friend, Bile, who now runs a refuge and learns of the tragedy of the war in Mogadiscio and of familial betrayals. There are weapons in the hands of the young, including Dajaal’s grandson, Qassir, and the militia boys. The landscapes are also riddled with mines waiting to explode, without discriminating between combatant and civilian. As we traverse the novel’s landscape with the characters and narrator, we are confronted with destruction–dead bodies, razed buildings, and scavengers. The future is not bright for the Mogadiscio of Links. Links portrays a nuanced version of the Somali crisis that it traces to the history of occupation discussed in the preceding section. In this way, the novel departs from those accounts of the Somali crisis that reduce the war and the killing of the American peacekeepers to the propensity of Africans for barbaric violence. The novel buttresses Nicholas Hildyard’s argument that “violence that is increasingly ‘explained’ by labels such as ‘population wars’ or ‘inter-tribal conﬂict’ is generally . . . of ‘a complex web of politics, economics, history, psychology and a struggle for identity.’”37 The complex web that Hildyard claims is the root of societal violence is equally ostensible in Farah’s Crossbones, the last novel in a trilogy that includes Links and Knots. While the American invasion takes center stage in Links, Crossbones is concerned with the question of piracy alongside the impacts of the long conﬂict on the Somali environment. The novel records the instability orchestrated by Al-Shabaab, the Islamic Courts, and the TFG in conjunction with their Ethiopian backers and Western interests. Crossbones is indeed a lesson in globalization as different groups mobilize and ﬁght for their interests. Al-Shabaab is keen on destabilizing the nation and imposing an Islamic state; its members are drawn not only from Somalia but from the diaspora in the United States. Ahl’s stepson Taxiil is a ﬁne example of a youth lured from Minnesota to ﬁght for Al-Shabaab. Ahl returns to Somalia to ﬁnd him, and a signiﬁcant portion of the novel is dedicated to that quest. But as Ahl and Malik, his journalist brother, traverse the Somali landscape, they learn of the threat to the Somali sea due to the absence of a functional state. Their interlocutors inform them of foreign vessels dumping toxic waste and illegal ﬁshing in Somalia’s territorial waters. They even learn that the pirates are local movements for protecting Somalia’s aquatic territories from abuse. As in the other novels, the contending groups ﬁght over territory. These struggles are made possible by the proliferation of weapons–guns, mines, and bombs among them. As Dajaal reﬂects on a war he fought in and the decimation of humans, animals, and landscape resulting from conﬂict,

Meeting the Animal Other

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he intertwines the fate of humans and nonhumans by exposing their interactions and shared vulnerability. Many differences abound in the texts, but they are brought together in this chapter because of their attentiveness to the impacts of the crises on the larger Somali environment, the distribution of agency among humans and nonhumans in that ecosystem, and the international dimensions and implications of the crises. As Derek Wright indicates elsewhere, “Somalia–before, under and after Barre–is the subject to which he [Farah] has returned in novel after novel.”38 Despite Farah’s seeming devotion to his country of birth, he is not sentimental about it. As Garth Myers observes in his study of Farah’s work in the context of urban geography and development, “Farah does not shy away from criticisms of Somalis, nor does he prettify Mogadishu in his work.”39 In fact, Farah makes sure to challenge the construct of the nation in his novels and refuses to privilege any aspect of society or exonerate anybody. Farah, rather, stresses linkages that cross borders–linguistic, ethnic, national, regional, and even human and nonhuman ones. His novels foreground the hybridity and intermixings that make it impossible to posit a simple response to the questions they raise, including the question of humananimal relations that is addressed in the next section. Meeting the Animal Other Farah’s Secrets is indeed a ﬁne starting point for exploring the interactions of the different beings in Somalia’s ecosystem; it is particularly instructive for understanding Farah’s portrayal of agential capabilities of the animal Other. One narrative strategy of the novel that Patricia Alden and Louis Tremaine highlight is that “[a]lthough Kalaman is the principal narrator in Secrets, he cannot control, as Askar does [in Maps], the other voices in his story.”40 “These others,” according to these critics, “participate in the novel not merely as voices woven into Kalaman’s story . . . but as narrators of chapters in their right, narrators intent on sharing their secrets in their own ways.”41 Nonno, Kalaman’s grandfather, is one such character in the novel; another character who is intertwined with the others is Sholoongo, who not only activates Kalaman’s sexuality but also engages in sexual relations with his father, Yaqut, and Nonno. From Nonno’s account at the novel’s beginning, we learn that Sholoongo was abandoned in the forest by her mother because she was born a duugan child. Such children, per tradition, are meant to be buried alive. Alidou and Mazrui claim that Farah is making “allusion to preIslamic Arabia where baby girls were supposedly buried alive as a direct consequence of its jahiliya tradition.”42 But instead of devouring her, a lioness raised her and “abandoned” her at a “crossroad.”

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We can interpret the circumstances of Sholoongo’s birth and survival in at least two ways. The relationship here suggests that the animal can indeed extend sympathy to the human Other, thereby showing how Farah’s ﬁction reinstates the ethics that Levinas denies Bobby, the dog that encounters him and the other inmates in the Nazi refugee camp. For Levinas, “This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives.”43 The dog’s relation to the refugees was quite different from that of the humans who “stripped us of our human skin.”44 For the Nazis, according to Levinas, the refugees “were subhuman, a gang of apes.”45 However, Levinas could not extend ethics to the dog that reinstates their humanity. He denies the dog the “brain” crucial for a universal ethics. Matthew Calarco’s summary of Levinas’s view on the animal is worth noting: “[N]o nonhuman animal is capable of a genuine ethical response to the Other; and nonhuman animals are not the kind of beings that elicit an ethical response in human beings–which is to say, the Other is always and only the human Other.”46 Like the dog in Levinas’s writing, the lioness in Farah’s work actuates the fellow feeling that the human community fails to extend to Sholoongo in the name of tradition. For Alidou and Mazrui, Farah uses the lioness and other animals–locusts and the elephant I discuss later–to show “the animals that we are wont to describe as ‘wild’ are, in fact, endowed with a greater moral conscience than humans would like to acknowledge.”47 The lioness thus features as the “last Kantian” in Somalia, to rephrase Levinas’s characterization of Bobby as “the last Kantian in Nazi Germany.”48 An alternative reading, more consistent with the logic of this chapter, is to focus on the agentic possibilities of the lioness’s encounter with Sholoongo. This approach moves us away from the question of intentionality and the inscrutability of the nonhuman Other that the previous reading might raise. It enables us to concentrate instead on the effects and actions in that story recounted by Nonno: “I cannot vouch for its truth, but in the version I heard, a lioness adopted, and raised her together with her cubs, then abandoned her at a crossroads, where some travelers found her. These took her to the nearest settlement, which happened to be her mother’s hamlet.”49 One must add that neither Sholoongo nor any other character in the novel contradicts this version of her story. It is worth pointing out that three active verbs– adopted, raised, and abandoned–are used to describe the lioness’s relation to the baby, in moves that are similar to the active motions of the animals in Okri’s work analyzed in the previous chapter. These verbs buttress the fact that Sholoongo’s survival is made possible by the actions of the

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lioness. The acts of adopting her, raising her as an offspring, and abandoning the young Homo sapiens accentuate the lioness’s role in Sholoongo’s process of becoming. Dropping Sholoongo off at a crossroad enables her return to the human community. Consequently, human travelers ﬁnd her and take her to the nearest settlement, which happens to be where Sholoongo’s mother lives. The abandonment can thus be read, following Deleuze and Guattari, as a process of reterritorialization. Hitherto, Sholoongo’s presence among lions shows a sign of deterritorialization instituted when her mother dumped her in the bush. By “abandoning” the little girl at a crossroad near where she originated, the lioness (whether this is intentional or not does not matter!) initiates a process of returning her to where she belongs, a process completed by the travelers. Additionally, we can identify a distribution of agency in this network of movement, a network that begins with her mother dumping her and continues with Sholoongo’s survival due to the lioness’s actions and efforts of the travelers who rescue her. Lioness, human travelers, and the land interact to ﬁnd a home for Sholoongo. Agency here, if divorced from an anthropocentric frame, is attributable to the humans who picked her up, the lioness that raised her, and the intersection that attracts the trafﬁc that makes it possible for Sholoongo to be seen. Jacqueline Bardolph, writing in “Brothers and Sisters in Nuruddin Farah’s Two Trilogies,” has pointed to the incestuous relationship between Sholoongo and her brother, Timir, in Secrets. For Bardolph, the “violence and the satiric gusto of the narrative in the depiction of the brother-sister couple express the rejection of a system that puts family and blood lineage on the father’s side–that is, clan–before all other allegiances.”50 Bardolph’s reading is consistent with the concerns of the novel, and the disorder she identiﬁes echoes the chaos in the larger social context of the text. Nevertheless, the “abnormal” sexual relationships in the novel invite another interpretation. While the reader may cringe at these acts, the incestuous relationship between Sholoongo and her brother as well as their father’s (Madoobe’s) copulation with a heifer can be read as deconstructing the notion of the autonomous human subject driven by reason. Raw/wild instinct is normally considered an animal characteristic as Alidou and Mazrui rightly pointed out, whereas humans are located in culture that forbids incest and miscegenation. Therefore, the destabilization of distinct categories in the novel not only undermines blood kinship; it equally undoes the stability of the human/ animal dualism in the text. The reversal of the animal-human, natureculture dichotomies by making the lioness able to care, while Sholoongo and her family exhibit instinctual behavior expected of the animal,

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exempliﬁes the novel’s attentiveness to dismantling anthropocentric assumptions. What is remarkable is the blurring of boundaries between the human and animal. The incestuous sexual relationship in the text undercuts human exceptionalism even as Madoobe’s penetration of the heifer, while indicative of animal exploitation, undermines the strict lines that are often used to demarcate humans from nonhumans. The interaction and distributed agency characterizing Sholoongo’s encounter with the lioness also manifest in the encounter between Jeebleh and the dog being hurt by a young boy in Links. That the wartime scenario promotes violence even among the young is clear from a reading of all three novels. Arriving at the scene, Jeebleh chases the boy away and ultimately assists the pregnant dog in delivering her offspring. In deterring the boy, Jeebleh makes a poignant remark: “‘When you hurt the dog, I hurt.’”51 Jeebleh’s statement is indicative of the dog’s capacity to act on him and elicit empathy. Connecting the dog’s pain to his, Jeebleh shows their relation and, very importantly, the dog’s ability to elicit his compassion. It must be noted that Jeebleh’s action is not without risk to his life. Jeebleh’s intimacy with the animal is a taboo in the Islamic moral economy in which he ﬁnds himself: “Someone else said that what he had done was un-Islamic; as a Muslim, he was supposed to avoid coming into physical contact with dogs.”52 In a society characterized by violence and lawlessness, Jeebleh’s performance shows an ethical consideration of the Other. Undermining cultural expectations, he shows concern for the dog even when this endangers him. Jeebleh thought that the “fact that many people had missed out on love because of the continued strife . . . did not mean that one should stand by and do nothing or allow further cruelty to be meted out to animals or humans.”53 But focusing mainly on Jeebleh leaves out the fact that his action did not occur autonomously. It is equally important to attend to the fact that implicated in Jeebleh’s action is the dog’s ability to affect him; the dog moved Jeebleh to act. Can the Landscape Act? The previous section illuminated the ways Farah’s novels attend to human-animal relationships and how these interactions undermine the idea of humans as the sole possessor of agency. In what follows, I enlarge the scope of the interrogation to include the land that is often the bone of contention during a war. By this I mean that the ensuing inquiry pays attention to how humans and nonhumans alike interact with the land in a wartime context.

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Farah’s Crossbones provides an important passage to consider for the aforementioned objective. This is the moment when Dajaal reﬂects on three wars he has fought in as an army ofﬁcer: Dajaal walks away, in truth because he wants to be alone with his thoughts for a few minutes. He is revisiting the three wars in which he served as an army ofﬁcer, but what he pictures just now is not scenes of death in battle. The image in the forefront of his mind is of cattle running amok, chased by unseen lions; of goats driven by powers invisible from a place where peace reigns to a scrubland where nothing, absolutely nothing, not even cacti grow–a scrubland so barren and so waterless that the goats feed on stones that they dig from the drought-dry land. Close by, within a short distance from where the cattle have now gathered to graze in the fenced off brushwood, there are mines buried in the ground everywhere, mines planted by the various factions ﬁghting for control of the scrubland. Now and then the goats unearth the mines and they blow up, slaughtering the goats that unearth them, as well as stray cattle; now and again, the mines blow up in the faces of humans, too.54

Dajaal’s reﬂection is rich with relational possibilities that merit my quoting the text in full. The “scrubland” attracts the human constituents of the factions ﬁghting to control it. They, in turn, plant mines in the ground. But the mines cannot detonate themselves. The mines and the human planters need the goats to “unearth” them before they can inﬂict death on the goats, cattle, and humans. There is no one center in this interactive cycle. Land, goats, cattle, humans, and mines interact to bring about effects. Animals and humans are all subjected to the impact of the mines, and the distribution of agency among humans and nonhumans is clear from the passage. One can also argue, following Derrida’s position in “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” that the interaction in the passage demonstrates a shared ﬁnitude between humans and nonhumans. Derrida’s essay refutes the work of Levinas, Heidegger, and others who have sought to diminish the capacities of animals. But he privileges, like Bentham, the question of whether animals can suffer. By so doing, Derrida deemphasizes the question of rationality or language, focusing instead on what he calls the passion of the animal: “Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the ﬁnitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very ﬁnitude of life, to the experience of compassion.”55 In fact, Farah’s work on the Somali crises, be it the Somalia-Ethiopian War over the Ogaden in Maps, the pre–civil war problems in Secrets, or the American invasion and postwar tensions in Links and Crossbones, demonstrates Derrida’s notion of shared suffering. Also evident in Dajaal’s reﬂection is his attention to the different species of animals. Earlier, he remembers cattle, goats, and lions, and

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by the end, he returns to goats and cattle alongside humans. Dajaal avoids the violence that Derrida believes characterizes the use of “animal” to designate the multiplicity of species inhabiting the nonhuman world. For Derrida, “[t]he animal is a word, it is an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to another living creature.”56 He further adds that describing “the Animal in the general singular is perhaps one of the greatest, and most sympathetic idiocies . . . of those who call themselves human.”57 In refusing to lump the different species into the category of animal or its plural, animals, Dajaal respects their heterogeneity. He does not make a clear-cut distinction between the suffering of humans and animals: “Now and then the goats unearth the mines and they blow up, slaughtering the goats that unearth them, as well as stray cattle; now and again, the mines blow up in the faces of humans, too.”58 Dajaal’s description suggests a shared vulnerability among the different creatures subjected to death. As the passage unfolds, humans, goats, and cattle perish with no distinction. It is poignant, too, that “humans” come last in his classiﬁcation. I read this move, and the entire passage, as a deconstruction of the exceptionalism that makes humans the barometer for gauging the casualties or impacts of wars. By casting his reﬂection the way he did, Dajaal, just as the protagonist of Tutuola’s My Life in the previous chapter, not only invites us to complicate our understanding of wars’ violence and subjection; he also accentuates the need to recognize a shared animality between humans and animals and to ultimately rethink our conception of human exceptionalism. The land is not left out of Dajaal’s meditation on wartime vulnerabilities. The ﬁrst half of the passage mentions scrubland, which Jeremy M. B. Smith deﬁnes in the Encyclopedia Britannica as a “diverse assortment of vegetation types sharing the common physical characteristic of dominance by shrubs. A shrub is deﬁned as a woody plant not exceeding 5 metres (16.4 feet) in height if it has a single main stem, or 8 metres if it is multistemmed.”59 While a scrubland usually entails growth, a look at the previous passage shows that nothing is growing in this case. Words like barren, dry, drought, and waterless are employed to emphasize the sterility of this space. Although the passage does not tell us this space is afﬂicted by war, the reference to the fact that the goats are chased from a peaceful place suggests that the scrubland, their destination, is a space affected by the strife. The sterility can therefore be read as a fallout of the war. The sterile land, a departure from the condition in the peaceful area, shows a landscape diminished by the war. The same diminishment characterizes the landscape portrayed in the second half of the passage. This time, the land is assaulted with mines, which in turn engender death and

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destruction. Although the scrubland does not literally die like the humans and the animot (apologies to Derrida), its diminishment should be interpreted as a sign of the mortality it shares with vulnerable humans and animals portrayed in the passage. Dajaal’s reﬂection equally recalls the toxicity that mines introduce to the landscape. Somalia is characterized by a semiarid landscape, which means that only a small portion of the land is fertile. In this geographical economy, one can thus appreciate the destructive impact of mines buried in the limited fertile land. The mines render the space unsuitable for humans, plants, and animals, which is signiﬁcant in a nomadic Somalia where pasturage is crucial. Nixon’s work on the lasting environmental consequences of mines in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is instructive here: The scale of landmine pollution remains forbidding: 100 million unexploded mines lie inches beneath our planet’s skin. Each year they kill 24,000 civilians and maim many times that number. They kill and maim on behalf of wars that ended long ago; they kill and maim as if in afterthought, spreading social and environmental havoc. In neither space nor time can mine-terrorized communities draw a clear line separating war from peace.60

Although Nixon’s work is not speciﬁc to Somalia, which he only mentions in passing, this excerpt assists in understanding the continuous risks that mines portend long after conﬂicts have ended. Whether it is in Crossbones, Links, or Secrets, we see that mines do not discriminate: they kill anyone who tramples on them despite the planters’ intentions and regardless of their afﬁliation in the war. They spare neither humans nor nonhumans. In addition to mines, the land is charred by bombs and other weapons used in war. Throughout the novels, we see the land strafed with such weapons. Not only are the people vulnerable, but the animals and land itself are threatened. Nonno, the grandfather character, observes in Secrets that: Ever present in our thoughts and preoccupations, the odor of death overwhelmed us. I wish I had a way of linking the pungent smell to the country’s slow march towards collapse. Item: the bombing of cities, like Hargeisa, which was razed to the ground; its residents massacred, their corpses lying unburied where they fell, the survivors reduced to refugees. Item: Mogadiscio’s current daily civilian casualties, their bodies hacked to death with machetes. Item: the environment. Item: Fidow and his trampled-on body. Deaths everywhere I looked.61

In this excerpt cataloguing the impact of war on the landscape, Nonno points to the bombs and bodies lying around as well as the pungent smell endangering those living beings lucky enough to survive. What motivates

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the inventory, the conspicuous list of “items”? Item usually denotes a tangible object. More importantly, it tends to be part of a collection, suggesting its dependence on the whole. Itemizing the human and nonhuman casualties of war in the passage dehierarchizes them and places them in a set of relation. Itemizing here emphasizes the inventory’s shared materiality and subsequent ruin as a result of the crisis. Humans directly destroy other humans and the more-than-human world, which can also hurt humans, as in the case of Fidow, who was killed by an elephant. The network of exchange in the passage continues in Nonno’s subsequent remark: “What had been once a fertile land had now turned to ﬁne dust, an earth as lifeless as a cut wire. Trees and forests devastated, wildlife decimated, we had a generation of farmers dead from starvation. Many former farmers were as of now, dependent on meager handouts from their immediate families or reliant on Oxfam and the like.”62 This passage sets up a contrast between what once existed and the present condition, a consequence of war. Therefore, it is predominantly written in the past tense: had, turned, devastated, decimated. The use of words associated with vitality (fertile and lifeless) indicates the agentic possibilities of the land that once made feeding and survival possible for humans and animals. But even in its lifeless phase, we can still decipher the effectivity of a land that has brought about hunger and starvation for those it once nourished. Ultimately, these passages from Secrets point to the way the different actors in the landscape–both human and nonhuman– affect one another and in the process demonstrate a complex network of relations and distributed agency. Like those in Crossbones and Secrets, the landscapes in Links are clearly marked with destruction. Farah discloses in an interview with Anthony Appiah that “[m]y new novel, Links, is about the Somali civil war between 1992 and 1996, including the period when Admiral Howe was ﬁghting it out with General Aideed. In the novel, I try to view the city as the principal character, and the people living in it or visiting it become secondary characters.”63 A few passages from the novel should sufﬁce to underscore the war’s impact on the physical environment. According to the narrator: Mogadiscio had known centuries of attrition: one army leaving death and destruction in its wake, only to be replaced by another and yet another, all equally destructive: the Arabs arrived and got some purchase on the peninsula, and after they pushed their commerce and along with it the Islamic faith, they were replaced by the Italians, then the Russians, and more recently the Americans, nervous, trigger-happy, shooting before they were shot at. The city became awash with guns, and the presence of the gun-crazy Americans escalated the conﬂict to

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greater heights. Would Mogadiscio ever know peace? Would the city’s inhabitants enjoy this commodity ever again?64

The long duration of the city’s suffering is traced not simply to the recent wars but to the series of occupations of the region. From the passage, we recognize that, as a “principal character,” the city enabled Arab commercial activity and their propagation of the Islamic faith. We also see that the city later attracted Italians, Russians, and Americans. The use of words associated with business–purchase and commodity–with relation to the landscape shows that the city has been proﬁtable to the humans who have interacted with it over time. However, humans have not reciprocated the city’s kindness. The continuing “attrition” wrought by the occupiers discloses an exploitative relationship devoid of concern for the more-than-human world. These occupations, the narrator concedes, leave in their wake violence wrought not only by guns but by mines as well: The driver jumped into the opportunity the silence had afforded him to change the subject, telling Jeebleh, “Our young warrior in the back stepped on an antipersonnel mine buried by StrongmanSouth’s militiamen in a corridor of the territory we control. In the opinion of the surgeon in Nairobi, he was lucky to get away with injuries only to his leg–he could ’ve been blown sky high.”65

The boy stepping on a mine buried in the ground evokes transcorporeality, Stacy Alaimo’s term for the way “in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human-world.”66 The fact that the boy’s disability is brought about by the agency of others–fellow humans who planted the mines, the mine itself, and the land on which it was planted–“underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from the environment.”67 And while the bombing and mine planting seem indiscriminate thus far, we also ﬁnd targeted bombing in Crossbones: Of late, however, roadside bombing has become the insurgents’ favorite mode of operation. They study the movements of their victims and plant custom-made, pre-designed explosive devices accordingly, to pick off by remote control a government ofﬁcial traveling by car or an Ethiopian battalion decamping from one base to another, or journalists covering a momentous event.68

Furthermore, Bile “tells Malik about a report on the BBC Somali service, that a Tomahawk cruise missile launched from a U.S. submarine off the coast of Somalia has killed several innocent civilians in addition to their target, a killer and one of the desecrators of the Italian burial sites in Mogadiscio.”69 The point is that the different weapons affect the novel’s spaces in negative ways.

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Nonhuman and human lives in the Somali environment are transformed by the war. Even the various conﬂicts represented in Farah’s novels are triggered by contested land. Change is the only constant thing as humans and nonhumans interact in Somalia. Everything seems vulnerable as the technological sophistication advances from simple weapons in the earlier Secrets to the “custom-made, pre-designed explosive devices” detonated with remote controls in Links and the cruise missile of Crossbones. Commodiﬁcation of Bodies and the Production of Agency To be sure, one disturbing motif in both Links and Secrets is the preponderance of scavengers in the landscape. As Af-Laawe, who arranges a ride for Jeebleh from the airport in Links, explains, “‘Vultures, crows, and marabous have been our constant companions these past few years . . . There’ve been so many corpses abandoned, unburied. You will see that crows are no longer afraid if you try to shoo them away.’”70 The abandoned corpses here are reminiscent of those lying in Secrets. The fact that the scavengers are unafraid shows they are accustomed to the spate of death in a city that the protagonist, Jeebleh, describes as “these heat-ﬂattened, sunburned landscapes . . . these shantytowns.”71 The city has lost the allure that made it attractive to the occupiers and has become a place to die. The scavengers symbolize the more-thanhuman world and are indicative of the rejuvenation of the ecosystem. The vultures rid the landscape of decomposed bodies, which, in turn, offer these scavengers nourishment. Af-Laawe succinctly describes it in a dialogue with Jeebleh: “‘A cynic I know says that thanks to the vultures, the marabous, and the hawks, we have no fear of diseases spreading.’”72 Af-Laawe underscores a symbiotic relationship between the landscape and the scavengers, which rid the environment of the bodies and diseases while being nourished by dead bodily matter. Af-Laawe’s business of burying the dead bodies is another practice that seems aimed at restoring the dignity of the dead and preventing diseases until we learn from Shanta, Bile’s sister, that it is a front for Af-Laawe’s dealing in body organs: Initially established by Af-Laawe as an NGO to help with ferrying and burying the city’s unclaimed dead, it’s recently branched out into other nefarious activities . . . What bothers me is what happens before the corpses are buried. Terrible things are done to the bodies between the time they are collected in Af-Laawe’s van and the time they are taken to the cemetery. A detour is made to a safe house, where surgeons on retainer are on twenty-four-hour call. These surgeons remove the

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kidneys and hearts of the recently dead. Once these internal organs are tested and found to be in a good working order, they are ﬂown to hospitals in the Middle East, where they are sold and transplanted.73

Of pertinence here is the manifestation of organic matter as commodity for export like the elephant bodies in Secrets discussed shortly. As commodity and matter, the organs embark on a transnational journey to places where they animate or make possible the survival of their recipients. To adapt Alaimo’s transcorporeality for our purposes here, one can argue that the organs make possible a form of what I describe as transnational transcorporeality. While Alaimo’s example of silica being transported from rocks to the human bodies of African American workers building a dam for Union Carbide in West Virginia in 1930 shows an instance of transcorporeality within a deﬁned local space, the movements across bodies is transnational in this instance from Farah’s novel. The interaction of bodies (the dead and the potentially living recipient) with the organ (which has taken a new life after its excision from the dead) and places (including where the deceased lived, the death space, the organ’s transit points, and its ﬁnal destination) conﬁrms Alaimo’s claim that “the bodies of all living creatures intra-act with place–with the perpetual ﬂows of water, nutrients, toxicants and other substances.”74 To think of the recipient of the exported organ is to ﬁnd instantiation of one of the ways we are connected with living and nonliving beings within us and, furthermore, to other places and things–means of transporting the organs to the beneﬁciaries, the money that changed hands, and even the environment of war that allows the thriving of such business. Commodiﬁcation of bodies and the network of agency implicated in the process link Farah’s Links with Secrets. If human organs constitute the commodity in Links, exotic animal bodies are the exchange material in Secrets. We are introduced to Fidow, the animal catcher, early in the novel: Fidow used to kill crocodiles, hippopotami, and rhinoceroses on commission, and doubled as a collector of wild honey. I also knew that he would sell all the items found in the killed animals’ second chambers, silver bracelet, gold earrings, watches, belt buckles and suchlike, which the crocodile’s digestive systems could not handle, to my father.75

Fidow is implicated as a destroyer of animals and his choice of prey is remarkable for its exotic nature. What holds the nonhuman animals in the passage together is their position as commodities functioning to satisfy the economic desires of Fidow and his clients. Like human bodies transformed into commodities in Links, the animals as well as jewelry and wild honey are joined together in their market value in Secrets.

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If regulatory practices make it difﬁcult or impossible for Fidow’s business partners (the Chinese) to exploit nonhumans in their native countries, a lawless Somalia provides a conducive atmosphere for such business to thrive. Fidow’s business ﬂourishes until an incident occurs: an elephant comes to his house and tramples him to death. I analyze the elephant incident in detail because it illustrates the primary issue undergirding this chapter, namely the network of actors composed of humans and nonhumans in a war context. In what follows, I focus on the elephant’s role as actant, to borrow Latour’s term, while attentive to the manner in which Farah’s novel addresses a question that Mel Y. Chen poses in Animacies: “[W]hat happens when animals appear on human landscapes?”76 Secrets depicts the elephant’s sudden appearance in the town and how he advances to Fidow’s residence: Finally, those following him in stealthy curiosity report how the elephant comes to a decisive halt, right in front of a compound belonging to a villager named Fidow. He stands his ground for a long while, the elephant does, momentously huge and yet so aware of his surroundings that at one point he steps aside to let the women and children run past him and out of Fidow’s compound . . . It is at this point that Fidow comes out of his compound. He retreats, fast, only to reemerge, armed with a stout gun. The elephant goes berserk, and as quick as death, thrusts his tusk into Fidow, whom he throws to the side before trampling the corpse into a pulp. He steps over Fidow’s dead body, the crowd, aghast, still watching him, and enters the room out of which Fidow emerged earlier. By the time the villagers see him again, the elephant is carrying with him dozens of tusks.77

One way to interpret the elephant’s action is to consider it a revenge against Fidow’s indiscriminate killing of its kin, as Alidou and Mazrui have suggested. The critics insist that the killing should be seen not as the irrational reaction of an animal but as an instance where the elephant acts out the traumas of the violence inﬂicted on its species.78 The passage lends itself to such a reading especially if we consider that the elephant did not hurt anyone else. We see that it is aware of its surroundings and avoids trampling on women and children. That the elephant left with the tusks found in Fidow’s residence also reinforces Alidou and Mazrui’s reading. However, the revenge reading raises the question of intentionality and anthropomorphism. As Huggan and Tifﬁn note, “[t]o speak of ‘nonhuman agency,’ however, immediately invites the allegation of anthropomorphism, potentially imputing to non-humans a capacity for choice, decision-making and conscious planning often considered by human beings to be unique to themselves.”79 Caminero-Santangelo has also knocked such interpretation of nonhuman action in Farah’s Secrets because it assumes the human can know and understand the intentions

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of the Other.80 Bennett, however, has a different take on the anthropomorphism at work in the interpretation of the elephant’s attack as revenge. She justiﬁes the “need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism– the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature–to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world.”81 For Bennett, anthropomorphism can actually bridge the gap between humans and nonhumans by showing that those traits we consider exclusive to humans are shared with other beings.82 Applied to our context, it can be argued, following Bennett, that the elephant’s action discloses that revenge is not a unique human attribute but a trait shared with nonhumans. After all, as Dan Wylie, among other scholars, has pointed out, elephants are known for their “high intelligence, [and] rich emotional lives.”83 I am sympathetic to Bennett’s reasoning but will not go as far as Alidou and Mazrui to suggest the intentionality of the elephant’s act since doing so carries the implicit assumption of knowing the Other. My focus is on the effects produced in this environment as a result of Fidow’s death following the elephant’s attack. My take is that the elephant’s action puts a stop to Fidow’s exploitation of the more-thanhuman world, resulting in the constitution of publics to acknowledge and discuss pressing environmental issues. Put differently, at least two claims can be made concerning the elephant’s agency. Throughout the novel, Fidow is portrayed as a destroyer of animals. His death, therefore, marks the end of his enterprise. Furthermore, extending our attention to the actions or effects produced by the elephant reveals the constitution of the publics that gathered to discuss the event face-to-face but also through mass media. Thus one can say that the elephant produces environmental subjects, those whose thinking is structured by the environment.84 As Kalaman, for instance, drives to his grandfather’s after the incident, he reﬂects on the import of the unusual event: “I surveyed the scene around us and saw nothing but the signs of successive droughts. I concluded that the elephant’s anger had a lot to do with man’s indifference to nature, humankind’s exploitative greed.”85 Kalaman’s conclusion can be critiqued for “assum[ing] he knows the motivation of the nonhuman” as Caminero-Santangelo has done,86 yet his newfound awareness is signiﬁcant because before now he did not spare thought for the environment. His preoccupations were his family, the women in his life, the civil strife, and his business. But on this trip, he “surveyed” his surroundings, taking cognizance of the drought. If the Caller in Mda’s novel discussed in Chapter 1 extends his focus beyond whales to acknowledge human suffering as the novel progresses, Kalaman moves from a focus on the human beings in his life and those ruining the country to an awareness of the imbrication of the human and

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nonhuman worlds. For the ﬁrst time, he indicts Fidow and others like him who take advantage of the environment. Kalaman’s critical awareness also marks a departure from his earlier endorsement of Fidow’s hunting practices: It was all happening right before us: Fidow holding a short dagger, sheath unremoved, in his left hand. In his right hand he had a long spear. Years ago Fidow had earned the melliﬂuous nickname King of the River of Leopards. Now he moved royally toward the confused crocodile, with its diffuse stare on the hunter’s laurels for bravery, immense scars now healed, which he displayed as one did medals acquired in battle.87

Kalaman presents Fidow’s expedition without any trace of indignation or condemnation of the animal cruelty. He even gives a musical spin to Fidow’s nickname, which he complements by describing Fidow’s movement toward his prey in royal terms. Kalaman’s ﬂashback suggests that he endorses Fidow’s dominion over the river and his prey. In short, this endorsement sharply contrasts with the judgmental attitude he evinces in his reﬂection following Fidow’s death. Because of the elephant’s attack on Fidow, Kalaman has “come to think and act in new ways in relation to the environmental domain being governed.”88 We cannot separate Kalaman’s newfound awareness from the performativity of the elephant’s act. It is the elephant’s action that prods Kalaman’s environmental thought. But Kalaman’s changed perspective on the environment soon after the elephant attack is anything but unique; the radio broadcasts and commentaries following the incident are symptomatic of a broader response to the elephant’s action: The world’s wirelesses are broadcasting the news in as many languages as there are. To a radio, they are repeating the amazing feat, the wherefores and mystery of an elephant avenging his kin. They are speaking of an elephant stalking a man who had shot dead half the members of his immediate family, taken their tusks, and hidden them in his house. Not only, they say, has the elephant killed the hunter, but he has reclaimed their tusks. Some of the journalists speculate that the elephant means to give his massacred kin a decent burial. Many of the radio commentators sound triumphant. One of the local radio reporters boastfully predicts that from this day on we will have a green movement in Somalia, the ﬁrst genuine one of its kind in the world.89

The ﬁrst point to note is that the elephant’s action inﬂuences the decision of the radio broadcasters and their editors to devote airtime to the incident. While some broadcasters focus on the actual killing itself, others provide an interpretation of the signiﬁcance of the tusks carried away by the elephant. The ﬁnal thought of one speciﬁc reporter is particularly

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germane: “that the elephant’s action will produce a green movement in Somalia.” This view demonstrates the reporter’s recognition of the elephant’s effect not only on himself but on a group of persons large enough to constitute a movement. The fact that the radio, an ideological instrument, is the tool used for communicating these environmental views also suggests the potential of a larger audience to reﬂect on the event and the reporters’ analyses. Without the radio, the information would be restricted to the witnesses and those they inform. And such hearsay does not have the authoritative credibility and reach of radio broadcasts. It is from this larger audience that the potential green movement could draw its audience. Yet more relevant is the fact that regardless of the elephant’s intention, his action orients the larger community toward the environment (Kalaman, the reporters, the dissemination of the information via the radio, and the potential green movement are examples). To fully understand and appreciate the incident is to pay attention to the constellation of factors: Fidow’s work as a hunter, the elephant attack, the public nature of the attack, and the ampliﬁcation of the incident through the radio. Together, humans (Fidow and broadcasters), nonhuman life forms (surviving elephant and dead ones represented by the tusks the elephant retrieves from Fidow’s home), the public space of the attack, and the radio itself all work together to impact Kalaman and others who reﬂect on the incident. Nevertheless, my analysis raises a concern over the signiﬁcance of the elephant’s tale in the novel. Why is the incident important for the larger narrative? Farah’s insertion of the elephant’s act within the narrative is consistent with his habit of pushing the boundaries of classical realism. Said Samatar, who takes the novel to task for what he calls, “certain concerns of context and credibility,” claims that Farah gestures toward magical realism to rescue a collapsing novel.90 For him, “[t]he elephant in Secrets that crosses ‘international boundaries’ to avenge himself on the poacher Fidow is every bit as fantastical as the ‘Jews of Amsterdam’ invading Garcia Marquez’s mythical South American forest republic.”91 Samatar’s criticism about credibility raises the question of what constitutes realism or the real in a war scenario. I propose that the relevance of the elephant scene be read differently. Farah’s novel pushes the boundaries of the real to highlight the instabilities of war and to create a different world attentive to humannonhuman entanglement. If we expect the realist African novel to be true to believable scenes and episodes, Farah’s novel, like the magic realist novels explored in Chapter 1, destabilizes and reshapes notions of reality. I will add that the insertion of the elephant’s narrative into the larger one is meant to produce in the reader the kind of environmental thinking the novel’s characters engage in after the incident. In fact, another pertinent question is

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why did Farah choose to let the elephant kill Fidow at home in the full glare of people instead of during one of his hunting trips? It seems that Farah is concerned about the witnesses that would have been absent had Fidow been attacked in the bush. Farah’s public spectacle may be aimed at generating reﬂection among witnesses, those who heard about the incident on the radio, and ultimately his readers. As Kalaman and the broadcasters reﬂect on the signiﬁcance of the elephant’s action and of Fidow’s indiscriminate killing of exotic animals, readers are invited to join these characters to reﬂect on their attitude to the environment as well. Farah’s technique can be seen in the context of the weak state structure where different militia groups struggle to retain control of the social order. In such a scenario, concern for nonhuman Others is relegated to the background. CamineroSantangelo provides useful insight into the novel’s context when he writes that “corrupt government ofﬁcials, businessmen, and clan warlords, taking advantage of growing anarchy and the disintegration of the nation cut the forests and sold the wood” to Middle East businesses “during the unrest of the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s.”92 Further, he adds that the period also witnessed “selling off prized pieces of protected animals to Asian middle men.”93 It is to Farah’s credit that he introduces the elephant so readers can extend consideration beyond the humans caught in the conﬂict. The text is ostensibly invested in showing us the larger ecosystem and the exploitative relationship characters like Fidow have toward the environment in a time of war. As we read the characters’ moral judgment over Fidow’s actions and their reﬂection concerning the fate of the elephant species, we are invited to partake in the same moral conversation about our own relationship with the more-than-human world, perhaps with a view toward constituting the green movement that the local reporter mentioned. Readers will notice the shift to questions of intentionality in the last two paragraphs; yet it is worth mentioning that Farah’s authorial agency is inﬂuenced and enabled by various nonhuman factors. As I indicated previously, Farah is responding to the threat to nonhuman lives in a time of war. One can say therefore that the endangered animals inspire the human author just as the dog affected Jeebleh in Links; besides the initial motivation, the author needs an elephant, a nonhuman, to carry out the spectacular killing of Fidow and constitute the public responding to the attack. Furthermore, the book can only come to us as readers thanks to other nonhuman actors: the tree from which the paper is made alongside the computers and other technological infrastructure that enable its production and distribution. As readers interact with the elephant’s story and the responses to it, they are interpellated like the

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audience who witnessed or heard about the elephant attack. Farah’s readers are invited to experience “the text as an animating power–inviting participation,” as Isabelle Stengers states in another context.94 Additionally, we see manifest here what Chen calls the “alchemical magic of language” and the “explicit ways that it animates humans, animals, and things in between.”95 Focusing on the vulnerability they share with Fidow and the elephant pushes the readers to reﬂect on their own attitudes to the environment as Kalaman did on the trip to his grandfather’s house. As this ﬁnal turn shows, it is possible to acknowledge human intentionality and accept one major claim of this chapter: we can decipher nonhuman effectivity and inﬂuence even in cases where the human is acting knowingly. Conclusion: National War, Planetary Implications My reading of Farah’s novels in this chapter reveals how Homo sapiens interact with the more-than-human world in a time of war, even as I explore what these interactions mean for understanding agency. The interaction of human characters and their nonhuman counterparts reveals that they shape one another, thus foreclosing the possibility of limiting agency to the human. My analysis also challenges the conventional assessment of humans as primary (if not the exclusive) casualties of war in African literary scholarship. By seriously considering human entanglement with other beings in the ecosystem and the vulnerability they share during conﬂicts, I hope to extend our understanding of war casualties and reorient current conceptualizations of social crises and victimhood in African literary studies. Farah’s oeuvre also stresses the transnational, rootless exchanges of people, things, and ideas in ways that scholarship in new materialism has not sufﬁciently attended to. Perhaps this is because its focus has fundamentally been on Euro-American contexts and examples. Doing justice to the network of exchanges in Farah’s novels also means addressing the idea of globalization embedded in the narratives. While it is easy to locate the Somali crisis within the African economy of wars, Farah’s work buttresses Ursula Heise’s claim that “the average daily life, in the context of globality, is shaped by structures, processes, and products that originate elsewhere.”96 Heise argues in her book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global that ecologically oriented thinking has yet to come to terms with one of the central insights of current theories of globalization: namely, that the increasing connectedness of societies around the globe entails the emergence of new forms of culture

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that are no longer anchored in place, in a process that many theorists have referred to as “deterritorialization.”97

For her, the central “challenge that deterritorialization poses for the environmental imagination, therefore, is to envision how ecologically based advocacy on behalf of the nonhuman world as well as on behalf of greater socioenvironmental justice might be formulated in terms that are premised no longer primarily on ties to local places but on ties to territories and systems that are understood to encompass the planet as a whole.”98 In these passages, Heise insists that ecological work in an era of globalization needs to be attuned to broader networks and exchanges transcending the local. She insists on transcending the limits of parochial attachment to place and broadening our view of ecological thought to encompass the whole earth. Heise’s work is positioned against the tendency in US environmentalism to celebrate what she calls “an excessive investment in the local.”99 Some of the local strains in US environmentalism that she challenges are “‘dwelling,’ ‘reinhabitation,’ ‘bioregionalism,’ an ‘erotics of place,’ or a ‘land ethic.’”100 While she is not dismissive of a critical appreciation of the local, Heise nevertheless cautions that such might come in the way of an ecological thinking that recognizes that the local is embedded in larger structures elsewhere.101 Heise’s planetary musings are of interest because of their pertinence for understanding the transnational, transatlantic movements and exchanges in Farah’s novels. Although they are set in Somalia, one of Farah’s important achievements, I believe, lies in his ability to foreground the local without losing sight of the broader networks of which Somalia is part. Several countries, including Italy, Yemen, Kenya, Ethiopia, the United States, and Russia, are implicated in the events of the novels: some nations are complicit in Somalia’s colonial history, others are implicated in the sourcing of its weapons and in the humanitarian intervention, while others are ﬁngered in the exploitation of Somalia’s territorial waters. Many of these countries are also involved in granting asylum and refugee status to Somalis ﬂeeing the conﬂict, while others get a mention for serving as recruitment sites or transit routes for Al-Shabaab recruits. Taxiil, in Crossbones, for instance, was recruited from Minnesota, from where he traveled through Abu Dhabi and Kenya to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab. Indeed, Farah’s transnational web opens a space for considering the global dimensions of the Somali crisis and the ecological implications for the planet. In the public display of the American dead solder in Links, we see an internationalization of the Somali tragedy. As the media brought

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the gruesome image to the world and as the world joined America in mourning the traumas of the violence, we see a manifestation of the global impact of the Somali problem. Outside the world of the novel, in September 2013, the globe was shocked to learn of the bombing of the Westgate mall in Kenya. The tragedy, which claimed the life of the African writer and scholar Koﬁ Awoonor, was orchestrated by Al-Shabaab from Somalia. Many foreigners, including Europeans and Americans, were among the casualties. I bring up these instances to buttress Ursula Heise’s point that we need to rethink our sense of the local or place given the onslaught of globalization. For Heise, “what is crucial for ecological awareness and environmental ethics is arguably not so much a sense of place as a sense of planet–a sense of how political, economic, technological, social, cultural, and ecological networks shape daily routines.”102 The destruction wrought by war in Farah’s novels is not containable within the nation-state. Carbon residues from the war will ﬁnd their way into the atmosphere where they can contribute to global warming. This is even more the case given the loss of biodiversity that the destruction of trees and other components of the nonhuman world makes clear. The ecological fallout from the Somali crisis can thus be included in the environmental dangers from the Global South that Wolfgang Sachs believes “threaten in the long run to engulf and to destabilize even the countries of the North.”103 Sachs’s essay, which calls for “ecological adjustment” in the wealthy countries to mitigate climate change, is perceptive in disclosing the porosity of national boundaries in the face of global climatic events. Fredric Jameson makes a similar point in “War and Representation,” where he writes that modern warfare “abolishes or suspends the distinction between the enemy’s landscape and our own, the latter no less fraught with peril than some unknown, hostile terrain.”104 It is not only humans who are at risk in this uncertain future; nonhumans across the world also partake in this vulnerability. Yet this is not the time for despondency. To return to the epigram with which I started the chapter, it is important to concede the affective power of nonhuman beings while recognizing the need for human humility and moral responsibility. These ideas are particularly relevant for postcolonial studies where the human remains the locus of agency. To decolonize the postcolonial ﬁeld entails dismantling the Enlightenment conception of agency based exclusively on intentionality. That way we can begin to appreciate the distributive nature of agency underscored here and its implications for articulating healthy relationships with the environment in Africa and other spaces. When the scope of agency and victimhood is expanded to encompass the human and nonhuman as I have done here, it

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becomes possible to obtain a more comprehensive account of conﬂict actors and the losses that ensue from wars. Given the complementary relationship between agency and resistance in African and postcolonial studies, it is only proper that a reassessment of one should inevitably lead to a review of the other; the following chapter appraises postcolonial resistance within the context of entanglement of human and nonhuman lives in a Niger Delta environment reeling from oil exploration.

3

Rethinking Postcolonial Resistance: The Niger Delta Example

What is climate change if not a consequence of failing to respect or even to notice the elemental medium in which we are immersed? Is not global warming, or global weirding, a simple consequence of taking the air for granted? –David Abram, “The Commonwealth of Breath”1

In “A Thriving Postcolonialism: Toward an Anti-Postcolonial Discourse,” Grant Farred suggests that postcolonialism “has to be at once politically new (and renewed) and old.”2 While Farred agrees that certain strategies of the “anticolonial struggle” are worth keeping, he insists that the new postcolonialism “has to distinguish what was efﬁcacious [in the anticolonial struggle] from what was not, what can be applied to the new terrain and what cannot.”3 I begin this chapter with Farred’s work because of its call for a postcolonialism that revises or at least rethinks strategies of the anticolonial struggle. A revised notion of struggle opens a space for the case I make about rethinking the bombing of oil installations and oil bunkering as strategies of resistance in the Niger Delta context. Postcolonialism inherited violent resistance, among other things, from the anticolonial struggle, typiﬁed by the popular Mau Mau insurrection against the British in Kenya and by the militancy of the African National Congress (ANC) youth wing against apartheid in South Africa. We ought to recall that Frantz Fanon endorsed such armed confrontation with his call for revolution against the colonial forces in The Wretched of the Earth.4 Inspired by Fanon, postcolonial scholars– from the earlier era of decolonization to more recent times–have often celebrated violence as a strategy of resistance. However, I insist that the reconstitution of a new postcolonialism must entail a reconsideration of catastrophic strategies because of the ecological degradation that often characterizes them, as is the case in the Niger Delta examples I highlight later. Postcolonialism needs to be attuned to the ecological implications of colonial and neocolonial oppression and ensure that its responses are not complicit in the problems it seeks to address. 85

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Since 2005, several militant groups have taken up arms against the Nigerian state and oil companies because of their culpability in the degradation of the Delta environment. While the agency of armed youth is manifested in the bombing of oil installations and oil bunkering, which involves scooping spilled oil and selling the unreﬁned crude through illegal channels, as well as kidnapping oil workers and politicians, the palpable threats posed by global warming and climate change call for a reassessment of such activities. Although the kind of violence unleashed by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and other groups in the Delta can be considered a legacy of the anticolonial struggle and interpreted as a means of pressuring the Nigerian state and oil companies to assume their social responsibilities in oil-producing communities, the contributions of such forms of opposition to degradation in an era of ecological decline warrant a search for strategies with less collateral damage. I focus in what follows on three Niger Delta novels–Gabriel Okara’s The Voice,5 Isidore Okpewho’s Tides,6 and Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist7– to show the limitations of violence as a mode of resistance in the Delta and to suggest other approaches crucial to bringing about what Farred describes as “the new terrain of struggle” in the postcolonial arena.8 While critics have often celebrated violence in Okpewho’s and Ojaide’s works, I reveal how insights from ecocriticism complicate and interrogate such endorsements of insurgency.9 I argue that celebrating catastrophic acts like bombing oil installations and oil bunkering ignores their devastating ecological footprint. Before turning to the representation of the Niger Delta environment in the three novels, I offer a historical overview of the Delta, highlighting the insertion of the region into global trade networks and its overall culture. I will then provide a literary history of the evolution of environmental degradation in the region. While critics have primarily read Okara’s novel as a depiction of postindependence disillusionment and have focused primarily on its linguistic peculiarities, I propose The Voice be situated as a Niger Delta text portraying the incubation stage of the environmental crisis.10 If Okara’s novel depicts the incubation phase, Okpewho’s and Ojaide’s novels show the intermediate and advanced phases of the destruction of the Delta environment, respectively. The next section of the chapter reexamines the celebratory readings of violent resistance in both Tides and The Activist. I argue that the ferocious resistance in Tides is destructive to the larger ecosystem and invites a reassessment of such oppositional practice in the region. In a similar vein, I contend that a positive reading of the Activist’s resistance via oil bunkering now appears simplistic and that it is important to put pressure on the idea of

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bunkering to reveal that its liberatory potential in the novel does not mitigate its adverse ecological consequences. One other remarkable feature of the novels beyond their engagement with the Delta crisis is that they all feature intellectuals as their protagonists. This remarkable coincidence testiﬁes to the prominent role of the intellectual in the Delta struggle, a prominence that occasions a reﬂection drawing upon Edward Said’s work in the ﬁnal section of the chapter. I proceed from the assumption that Niger Delta literary texts are characterized by the dimensions of proximity elaborated in Chapter 1, including the fact that nonhumans and humans share spaces within which they interact in the region. Their shared vulnerability in the face of oil exploration is also a major concern of the chapter. To further illuminate the ecological interrelationships necessary for my argument, I employ Morton’s ecological thought, which shares my interest in more-thanhuman presences in African environments, as well as Nixon’s idea of slow violence and Said’s work on the intellectual. As indicated in the Introduction, the conﬂict between Morton’s ecocentric position and the human-centered visions of Nixon and Said notwithstanding, the need to complement Morton’s theory with the formulations of the latter scholars arises due to Morton’s reticence on the sociopolitical dynamics of developing societies disproportionately affected by the deleterious environmental consequences of globalization. Although I share Morton’s sense of ecological interconnection, I consider it expedient to plumb the Niger Delta novels for their articulation of the social conditions of the Delta. Nixon’s socio-environmental angle will aid me in this task just as Said’s exposition will guide my discussion of the role of the intellectual in operationalizing the ecological thought in the postcolony. Morton’s idea is articulated in The Ecological Thought,11 where he undercuts human exceptionalism by insisting that we redeﬁne our notion of personhood to include other beings that we do not normally ascribe to the same category. In his view, it is important to “treat many more beings as people while deconstructing our ideas of what counts as people.”12 For Morton, the main point is “thinking big,” which contrasts with “thinking small” in terms of locale or place and thinking in terms of only human interests. His idea of “thinking big” allows for a recognition of the interdependence of humans and nonhumans, an idea he describes as “the mesh.” For him, “all life forms are the mesh, and so are all dead ones, as are their habitat which are also made up of living and nonliving beings.”13 Morton enjoins humans to consider animals and other elements of the environment as “strange strangers” to enable recognition of the intimacy we share with them despite their strangeness. Morton’s term emphasizes the alterity of nonhumans and the impossibility of knowing them. As he

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puts it, “We can’t predict or anticipate just who or what–and can we tell between ‘who’ and ‘what,’ and how can we tell?”14 Morton is not so naive as to ignore the uncertainty that characterizes ecological thought. He draws attention to debates concerning the rationality and capacity for suffering of nonhumans and asks if these really matter: “We can’t be sure whether sentient beings are machines or not. And it would be dangerous if we thought we could . . . However much we try, we can’t explain the strange stranger away. We‘re stuck with the paradoxes of pure appearance.”15 He opposes the tendency to use the idea of consciousness to demonstrate human superiority over other species. As Morton writes: “The ecological thought should not set consciousness up as yet another deﬁning trait of superiority over nonhumans. Our minds are hugely quantitatively different from other terrestrial minds but perhaps not qualitatively.”16 In other words, the author’s argument is that there is uncertainty concerning nonhuman beings because we as humans cannot really know them. Hence, the term strange strangers dictates that the inconclusive debates on their capacities should not be the basis for denying them ethical treatment. Although Morton’s work does not address the power structures and inequalities that characterize the neoliberal age (for which reason Nixon’s and Said’s works are useful here), I ﬁnd his work relevant for the redeﬁnition of personhood he envisages, his obliteration of a center in ecological thought, and his insistence on recognizing nonhumans as “strange strangers” regardless of their capacities. The strength of Morton’s work for this inquiry relies on decentering the human and on the fact that he does not consider reason or sentience the key parameter for recognizing nonhumans. That their existence is enough to compel respect for them is pivotal for my discussion of the Niger Delta environment. For instance, my reexamination of the violent resistance in the novels under investigation is born out of the fact that it serves human interests to the detriment of nonhumans and by implication the larger ecosystem. And so is my critique of the idea of the river as a dump site in Okara’s The Voice. While it certainly ﬁts the interests of the Chief, it is problematic because it hurts other humans like Okolo and Tuere and because it is devoid of any ecological consideration of the river or the creatures living in it. Morton’s ecological thought holds us to a larger conception of the environment that caters not only to our interests as humans. Ecological thought compels us to conceive of a broader ethic that serves the interests of the different beings inhabiting the environment. To be sure, I do not eschew or denigrate the history of colonial and postcolonial armed struggles, the Fanonian legacy of the twentieth century; rather, in the spirit of a new postcolonialism, I argue for a form of activism based on the

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conceptualization of communities or collectivities premised on a symbiotic relationship between humans and other members of the world(s) they inhabit. The Niger Delta Unveiled The Niger Delta is an important site from which to consider the effects of globalization and resource extraction in Africa.17 The Delta’s proximity to the Atlantic Ocean has made it accessible to foreigners and facilitated trade with outsiders since the sixteenth century.18 It is considered one of the most biologically diverse regions in the world and is home to more than forty ethnic groups, including the Ogoni, the Ijaw, the Urhobo, and the Itsekiri.19 Despite the variations in these communities, they share certain similarities including their reliance on ﬁshing and farming as the mainstays of the traditional economy. Fishing and farming activities are mainly for subsistence, but surplus produce is usually sold in the local markets or transported to bigger cities like Port Harcourt to maximize proﬁt. J. S. Oboreh reports that “prior to oil exploitation and exploration, the Niger Delta region had been a peaceful place with ﬁshing and farming as the main means of livelihood of its denizens.”20 Although Christianity has spread throughout the region, belief in traditional gods and the reverence of ancestors are still commonplace. One of the most inﬂuential deities for the Ijaw is Egbesu, considered to be the god of justice. The spread of Christianity in the region has not obliterated the relevance of Egbesu for individuals and groups such as the “Egbesu boys,” who invoke the god in their ﬁght against the Nigerian state for environmental and economic justice. It is claimed that the “Egbesu boys” and any person fortiﬁed with the Egbesu charm are invulnerable to bullets, a feat they attribute to divine powers gained from the deity.21 One cannot discuss the spirituality of Delta communities without mentioning the signiﬁcance of rivers. As Ken Saro-Wiwa explains, “To the Ogoni, rivers and streams do not only provide water for life– for bathing, drinking, etc.; they do not only provide ﬁsh for food, they are also sacred and are bound up intricately with the life of the community, of the entire Ogoni nation.”22 Saro-Wiwa gestures to the signiﬁcance of the more-than-human world for these African communities. More pointedly, his astute observations suggest a relationship between the people and the rivers and streams that nourish them physically but also constitute a source of spiritual replenishment. In many Delta communities, people believe in the existence of water gods and goddesses that manage the affairs of humans. Like the Egbesu example cited previously, these rivers and streams, as well as the deity attributed to

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them, are the subjects of songs and other rituals too. They have inspired the modern poetry of such artists as Tanure Ojaide, whose novel is studied here.23 Understanding the spiritual dimension of the environment is also useful for analyzing the impact of oil exploration in the region. In fact, Omolade Adunbi’s work on “oil ownership” in the Delta reports a belief in the region that oil is an ancestral gift from the bodies of their ancestors sold into slavery.24 In terms of economics, contacts between the people of the Delta and outsiders can be positioned in three phases: the slave trade; the trade in palm oil; and the crude oil business, following Shell’s 1956 discovery of oil in Oloibiri in present-day Bayelsa State. With the abolition of slavery, the trade in palm oil became a prominent exchange activity between the Deltans and foreigners in the nineteenth century, primarily the British because the commodity was essential for industries and for lubricating railways. The trade engagements were initially spearheaded by the Royal Niger Company.25 Like the slave trade that preceded it and the crude oil megabusiness that followed, the trade in palm oil demonstrated the economic inequality between Africa and the West and the insertion of the region into the global economic order. While palm oil can be considered a key commodity of the nineteenth century, crude oil replaced it in the twentieth. In fact, the earliest exploration for oil in Nigeria started in 1908, conducted by the Nigerian Bitumen Corporation. The First World War stopped exploration activities in 1914.26 It was also in 1914 that Britain’s Lord Lugard amalgamated the Northern and Southern Protectorates to forge what is known as Nigeria today. Britain promulgated the Colonial Mineral Ordinance in 1914, and Shell was given its exploration license the next year.27 Shell achieved a breakthrough in its exploration activity in 1956 with the discovery of oil in commercial quantities.28 But it would be misleading to conclude that the environmental problems caused by oil started in 1956. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), “Oil exploration activities started to have an impact on the Niger Delta vegetation even before a well was drilled or oil produced, and the footprint left by seismic surveys over 50 years can still be seen . . . Seismic lines may make the interior of some wetland areas more accessible, potentially leading to further degradation.”29 The details of the seismic surveys will be fully explored when I discuss them in relation to Okara’s novel in the next section, but the previous passage is useful for understanding the activities of the oil companies before the discovery of oil in large quantities. The beginning of oil exploration also marked the transformation of the Delta environment from a region rich with biodiversity to one encumbered by devastating exploitation.

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Shell had a monopoly on oil exploration until Nigeria’s independence in 1960, but the 1960s witnessed the entrance of other oil majors, such as Mobil, Gulf, and Agip.30 The ﬁrst oil tanker left Oloibiri in 1958, but as Nixon asks: “Who could have dreamed in 1958 that four decades and $600 billion of oil revenues later, some 90 million Nigerians would be surviving on less than a dollar a day?”31 The poverty underscored in Nixon’s rhetorical question is today entrenched in the Niger Delta, where the operations of oil companies have polluted lands and rivers as my subsequent analysis of the novels indicates. The despoliation of the environment is signiﬁcant because farming and ﬁshing are the mainstays of the riverine communities of the Delta but also because of the richness of the region’s biodiversity.32 Not surprisingly, the people of the Delta have taken up what Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier describe as the “environmentalism of the poor.”33 The people’s gripe, as represented in Tides and The Activist, is the destruction of their environment and means of livelihood caused by oil exploration activities. This is so because successive Nigerian governments have placed mineral reserves, including oil, under the administration of the federal government. With oil on the exclusive list of the federal government, the states in the Delta region are entitled to only a meager percentage of the oil proceeds. Since 1999, 13 percent of the oil proceeds have been allocated to the oil-producing states for development projects. Unfortunately, a substantial portion of the allocation goes to service the greed of the corrupt political class.34 The corruption of Nigerian state ofﬁcials in league with the oil multinationals, including Shell, has not gone unchallenged by the people. Under Ibrahim Babangida’s watch as head of state (1985–1993), for instance, the people of Iko and Umuechem, both oil communities in the Delta, protested the assault on their environment and means of livelihood in 1987 and 1989, respectively. These demonstrations were brutally suppressed by Babangida’s military forces.35 In 1990, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) was formed by Ken SaroWiwa and other Ogoni leaders. Later that year, they produced the Ogoni Bill of Rights, which emphasized the rights of the Ogoni to a livable and healthy environment. MOSOP mounted a peaceful and nonviolent struggle that attracted the support of most of the Ogoni people. The government of Babangida and the subsequent administration of General Sani Abacha, who toppled the interim government imposed after the annulment of the 1993 presidential election, did not take kindly to the Ogoni agitation for self-determination.36 With pressure from the oil companies, which felt threatened by MOSOP under the leadership of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the government arrested and detained MOSOP leaders. The charge was

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the murder of four Ogoni leaders who had fallen out with MOSOP. The military tribunal, headed by Justice Ibrahim Auta, was declared a charade by both local and international observers of the process. Saro-Wiwa’s legal team, headed by the late human rights lawyer Gani Fahwehnmi, resigned in protest against the tribunal’s procedures.37 Ultimately, Saro-Wiwa and eight others were found guilty for murder and executed (via hanging) by the Abacha junta on November 10, 1995.38 Key witnesses in the trial have since recounted how they were induced by agents of the state to testify against Saro-Wiwa and the others.39 Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth of Nations after the death of the environmental martyr, writer, and activist. Signiﬁcantly, it did not take long before Saro-Wiwa’s prophecy was realized–namely, that the inability of the government to give peaceful change a chance would result in violent political upheaval. Since the late 1990s, violent actions, including the kidnapping of oil workers and bombing of oil installations in the Delta, have been carried out by different groups, of which the most notable is the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).40 These violent activities have to be understood within the context of what Michael Watts terms “long and deeper geography of exclusion and marginalization” in the region.41 With the failure of the state and oil companies to create the necessary sociopolitical conditions for Delta communities to thrive, even as their region produces the nation’s wealth, it follows that young people– unemployed, poor, and bereft of any form of social capital–will resort to violence, especially after they have seen the failure of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s nonviolent movement to achieve the desired change. Many of these young people, hitherto employed and armed by politicians to help them win elections in 2003, were discarded immediately after the triumph of their principals and so channeled the weapons at their disposal into insurgent activities.42 MEND, the most popular of the insurgency organizations, has claimed responsibility for several militant activities since 2005 and was one of the groups that accepted the amnesty program of the late President Yar Adua in 2009.43 Although the spate of militancy and unrest has signiﬁcantly diminished since the beginning of the amnesty program, the people in the oil-producing communities continue to claim that there is no substantial development in their region or change in the operational procedures of the oil companies for environmental sustainability. Gas continues to ﬂare nonstop day and night, oil continues to spill, and the environment continues to suffer. The UNEP report on the state of the region provides ample evidence of the extent of environmental damage. According to the report’s executive

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summary, “UNEP’s ﬁeld observations and scientiﬁc investigations found that oil contamination in Ogoniland is widespread and severely impacting many components of the environment. Even though the oil industry is no longer actively drilling in Ogoniland, oil spills continue to occur with alarming regularity. The Ogoni people live with this pollution every day.”44 The report focuses on Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoniland and chronicles the devastation of Ogoni’s land, waters, and vegetation: “At one site, Ejama-Ebubu in Eleme local government area (LGA), the study found heavy contamination present 40 years after an oil spill occurred, despite repeated clean-up attempts.”45 The fact that this site remains polluted long after the spill and despite cleaning efforts speaks to the extent of the devastation. The foregoing presents the Delta as a site of exploitation and unequal exchange. The UNEP report shows the rapid deterioration of the region since oil exploration started there. The pollution, according to the report, has chased the ﬁsh farther into the sea, thereby necessitating the catching of young, immature ﬁsh by the ﬁshermen. The report notes that the locals go deepwater ﬁshing because the oil has either killed the remaining ﬁsh or chased them downstream. It is no wonder the Delta is often cited as an illustration of the resource curse in Africa. Given African literature’s investment in social issues, it is unsurprising that the Delta is the primary setting of a corpus of literary works, including those analyzed in the following sections.46 Okara’s The Voice and the Incubation Phase of Niger Delta Environmental Degradation Gabriel Okara’s The Voice explores postindependence disillusionment within a society transitioning from a traditional economy to modernity and can thus be read as belonging to Kenneth Harrow’s “literatures of the oxymoron,” which is to say African “literatures expressive of postindependence contradictions and frustrations.”47 The novel focalizes its interrogation of society’s moral bankruptcy through its protagonist, Okolo. Throughout the narrative, the educated Okolo is in search of what he calls “it.” Although “it” remains undeﬁned, readers can conclude that “it” refers to moral values and social conscience. According to Hugh Webb, “Okolo’s search, then, is seen as a challenge to those whose interests are in a conservative retention of power. It implies an inner search, an end to corruption and selﬁshness.”48 In this sense, a curious isomorphism exists between Okolo’s search for “it” and the search for oil discussed in this chapter. Okolo is disturbed by the loss of moral values by the community leaders and their followers. He challenges Chief Izongo and the elders by

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asking them if they have got “it.” They, in turn, ask him to stop looking for “it” or face the consequences. Okolo is tortured and banished from the town on the orders of Chief Izongo for refusing to discontinue his search. But everywhere he goes, they tell him to forget his quest for “it.” Okolo decides to return to Amatu and ﬁnds the people celebrating his departure with food and drinks. Chief Izongo is infuriated about Okolo’s return and orders that he be tied to a canoe and drowned in the river. In his introduction to the African Writers Series edition of The Voice, Arthur Ravenscroft states that the novel is “a political parable that applies equally to the political state of the Federation of Nigeria in the early 1960s (before the ﬁrst military coup) as to any political situation in any country where government is incompetent and corrupt.”49 Several times in the novel, the characters point to the coming of the white man and the quest for money and material goods. An example is when one of the elders, Tembeowei, visits Okolo to persuade him to stop searching for “it” and ignore the moral convulsion around him. Tembeowei attributes the rising materialism to the emphasis on wealth and the commodities it can obtain. The quest for money and wealth, as presented in the novel, is traceable to modernity’s capitalist drive and de-emphasis on morality. Chief Izongo and his ilk function as the postcolonial elite who have tasted power and decided to hold on to it at all costs. They have the money and cannot stand the voice of Okolo on their consciences. Repression thus becomes a way of making people toe the party line, as one of the elders describes it. The ordinary people, too, are not untouched by the craze for money. Chief Izongo’s messengers who torture Okolo are his erstwhile friends. When we eavesdrop on their conversation through Ukule, the disabled man, we understand that one of them is disturbed by the fact that they betrayed a friend for money. The other friend reproaches the ﬁrst, emphasizing the monetary reward of the transaction. While Webb and Ravenscroft have interpreted the novel as a critique of corruption in a postindependence society, I suggest we also consider the text as a novel depicting the incubation phase of the Niger Delta environmental crisis. Although the novel does not describe itself in this way, its language, the naming of its characters, and its riverine setting betray its Niger Delta context. Much of the criticism of the novel has focused on the creative use of Ijaw English in the rendering of the text. For Bernth Lindfors, “Okara appears to have made an attempt to render into English the expressive idiom of his native tongue, Ijaw. He takes liberties with English syntax, reduplicates nouns, adjectives, and adverbs (‘smile smile,’ ‘black black,’ ‘softly softly’), and uses concrete metaphorical language to express abstract concepts.”50

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While the critical responses to the linguistic experiment have been largely positive, it must be understood within the context of the debate over what constitutes an authentic language for African literary productions already mentioned in the Introduction. Writers like Gabriel Okara and Chinua Achebe believed that English could be retained as the language of literary expression but has to be made new, an English inﬂected with the nuances of indigenous African languages.51 In Okara’s case, his native Ijaw provides the foundation on which he imposes the English language, giving rise to expressions like “‘If you are coming in people be, then come in.’ The people opened not their mouths. ‘Who are you?’ Okolo again asked, walking to the men. As Okolo closer to the men walked, the men quickly turned and ran out.”52 This passage provides a demonstrable instance of Okara’s subversion of English’s subject-verb-object (SVO) syntactic structure in favor of the structure of his native Ijaw.53 The naming of characters and their gods also foregrounds the Delta setting of the novel. Okolo, for example, means the voice or spokesperson in Ijaw. Izongo, Abadi, Tuere, and Ukele–all names of characters in the novel–are equally Ijaw names with various meanings. The names of the gods invoked in the novel are undoubtedly drawn from the Delta. Tuere, for example, asks Woyengi, an Ijaw goddess of creation, to intervene in the crisis between Okolo and the community.54 We also ﬁnd other gods invoked during the storm that rocks the boat conveying Okolo and the other passengers to Sologa. The passengers beseech Amadasu and Egbesu, and it is no coincidence that these, too, are Ijaw gods. Clearly, the invocation of the deities reinforces the importance of the supernatural in the Niger Delta. The other pointer to the Delta setting of the novel is the emphasis on the river. Recall that the Delta is ﬁlled with riverine communities.55 Rivers stand out in the novel as means of transportation and as space for dumping waste. As Okolo travels to Sologa after his banishment by Chief Izongo, he travels by river. Earlier in the novel, villagers are returning to the community via the river: “And, on the river, canoes were crawling home with bent backs and tired hands, paddling. A girl with only a cloth tied around her waist and the half-ripe mango breasts, paddled, driving her paddle into the river with a sweet inside.”56 The weariness of the paddlers suggests their return from the day’s labor. More precisely, “bent backs” and “tired hands” suggest that the returnees are non-mechanized farmers. Such farmers rely on their hands and their backs, which are stooped to the ground as they work. The choice of metaphor to describe the growing breasts is also agricultural. But of utmost concern here is that the river is fundamental to

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transportation in the village of Amatu. Although the narrator mentions that the elders were acquiring cars, the automobiles are not put in use by the characters. The preponderance of riparian imagery manifests itself again in the last scene of the novel where both Okolo and Tuere are ﬂoating on the river: When day broke the following day it broke on a canoe aimlessly ﬂoating down the river. And in the canoe tied together back to back with their feet tied to the seats of the canoe, were Okolo and Tuere. Down they ﬂoated from one bank of the river to the other like debris, carried by the current. Then the canoe was drawn into a whirlpool. It spun round and round and was slowly drawn into the core and ﬁnally disappeared. And the water rolled over the top and the river ﬂowed smoothly over as if nothing had happened.57

This moment occurs after Okolo returns to Amatu and crashes Chief Izongo’s celebration. It is remarkable that this party was held in the ﬁrst place to celebrate Chief Izongo’s success in banishing Okolo. But as it turns out, the courageous Okolo decides to return in order to challenge the elders and the people for not having “it.” Chief Izongo is angered by Okolo’s stubbornness and decides to drown him and his foremost supporter, Tuere. This last scene of the novel has attracted the interest of critics. These critics, including Emeka Okeke-Ezigbo, agree that “although Okolo is hastily plucked off, there is evidence that the spiritual reawakening he initiated will burgeon in strength with time.”58 The evidence includes the fact that Ukule, the disabled man, is a strong critic of the elders’ ways. One of the messengers detailed to arrest Okolo also regrets his participation toward the end of the novel. Ukule, who eavesdrops on the messengers’ conversation, reports to Tuere: “He says the money paid them by Izongo is bad money and that he, too, like Okolo will speak. Only he says the time is not correct yet.”59 It is expected that Ukule and the seemingly repentant messenger will constitute the new voice at the death of Okolo– hence the enthusiasm of the scholars who have paid attention to this passage. This reading is adequate to the degree that we are concerned about the human beings in this environment without considering Morton’s point that “the ecological thought” presumes there is more involved than just the human point of view. An ecological reading of the passage blights the hopeful rendering of the scene. The method chosen by Chief Izongo to murder Okolo and Tuere is worth reexamining because of the idea it promotes, namely of the water as a dump site. Readers of the novel will recall that Chief Izongo initially banishes Okolo to ward off the nuisance that the young intellectual has come to pose. When that move fails and

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Okolo returns to the community during the Chief’s party, he orders that Okolo and Tuere, his sympathizer, be drowned to get rid of them. Chief Izongo’s decision to drown his critics suggests his failure to exhibit an ethical responsibility toward fellow humans; moreover, he does not consider the interests of the inhabitants of the water ecosystem in such rationalizations. To fully appreciate the scenario, we ought to remember Morton’s thesis that “the ecological thought has to do with warmth and tenderness; hospitality, wonder, and love; vulnerability and responsibility.”60 Of course, the fellow feeling should be extended beyond humans to encompass nonhumans as the idea of “ecological democracy” suggests. Unfortunately, Chief Izongo fails this test in the novel. Not only does he kill humans, but there is no evidence that he considers the interests of the “strange strangers” in the water before deciding to dump the bodies there. Self-interest certainly plays a role here as against the interest of the larger ecological community. Writing in “Waste Aesthetics: Form as Restitution,” Susan Signe Morrison rightly asserts: “Once something has lost its usefulness and becomes trash, it is convenient to send it to poor parts of the world and then those parts of the world become trash.”61 Although the context of Morrison’s work is the dumping of wastes by Western nations, the insight of her work has implications here. More speciﬁcally, her conclusion that the dump site becomes trash is relevant for understanding the river following Chief Izongo’s decision to dump the human debris in the water. As the humans devolve into trash, so, too, does the water, and those beings whose home is within it appear disposable. In addition, this dumping is signiﬁcant because it somewhat presages the dumping of waste material from oil exploration into the waters. There is a striking similarity between Chief Izongo’s decision to drown his adversaries and the dumping of wastes from oil production in the waters in Okpewho’s and Ojaide’s novels discussed later in this chapter. Besides the pollution that both activities constitute, it is remarkable that Chief Izongo’s “waste” is those humans who are impediments to his penchant for wealth accumulation. In fact, the preceding passage tells the reader that “they ﬂoated like debris.” The choice of simile is telling. The Oxford English Dictionary deﬁnes debris as “the remains of anything broken down or destroyed; ruins, wreck,” suggesting that the comparison is meant to highlight that the bodies are ruins from Chief Izongo’s adventures. Similarly, the toxic waste from oil exploration is irrelevant for the companies’ business, as we will see in the novels later in the chapter. The fact that the companies choose to dump wastes in the water instead of ﬁnding more environmentally sustainable methods of disposal is also indicative of an unbridled quest for proﬁt. The drowning of Okolo and Tuere

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anticipates the impact of oil exploration on the waters in contemporary novels of the Delta such as Okpewho’s Tides and Ojaide’s The Activist. As the preceding analysis situates The Voice in its Niger Delta setting, in what follows I examine the Niger Delta environment depicted in the text, the ﬂora and fauna represented. Of course, the environment is not the central focus of Okara’s novel; this represents a departure from his poetry, which foregrounds the environment. “The Call of the River Nun,” for instance, is focused on a Delta waterway. In reading Okara’s poem, Obi Maduakor claims that “the poet expresses his desire to escape from the complexities of urban life and to settle by the banks of his village river, the Nun.”62 In the novel, however, there is no romantic attachment to nature as the river becomes a site for movement and waste disposal. If nature appears central to Okara’s poem, the naturalization of the community into a form of modern citizenship, evidenced by the quest for wealth and cars, has dwarfed the possibility of connecting to the nonhuman components of the environment in The Voice. Yet the physical landscape is described a few times in the novel. The ﬁrst and only elaborate description occurs early on when Okolo looks out the window: It was the day’s ending and Okolo by a window stood. Okolo stood looking at the sun behind the tree tops falling. The river was ﬂowing, reﬂecting the ﬁnishing sun, like a dying away memory. It was like an idol’s face, no one knowing what is behind. Okolo at the palm trees looked. They were like women with hair hanging down, dancing, possessed. Egrets, like white ﬂower petals strung slackly across the river, swaying up and down, were returning home. And, on the river, canoes were crawling home with bent backs and tired hands, paddling. A girl with only a cloth tied around her waist and the half-ripe mango breasts, paddled, driving her paddle into the river with a sweet inside.63

Given the portrayal of destroyed environments in more recent novels set in the Delta, one cannot miss the characteristics of the terrestrial and aquatic components of the ecosystem depicted in the passage. The river, “reﬂecting the ﬁnishing sun,” captures a ﬁne evening view. The choice of “possessed” to describe the trees’ dance suggests a vigorous sway to the wind. Aquatic creatures like egrets are also resplendent in their whiteness, without blots, in this description. We also see tired bodies returning from the farm. The passage certainly portrays the human and nonhumans inhabiting this environment. And except for the fatigue caused by the day’s work, everything looks good. The signiﬁcance of such a portrayal in this passage will become clearer when the more recent Tides and The Activist are discussed, but sufﬁce it to say that the other moments where the environment is mentioned carry positive connotation except for that last river scene already analyzed. During the boat ride to Sologa,

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the narrator indicates that “the engine canoe against the strong water pushed and slowly, slowly it walked along the wide river with the tall iroko trees, kapok trees, palm trees, standing on its banks, the sky’s eye reaching.”64 Since texts are products of a time and place, we can surmise that this literary imaginary seems untroubled by the prospect of ecological degradation in the early 1960s Nigeria when the novel was set. The environment appears healthy and clean without the impact of oil. After all, oil was only discovered in commercial quantities in 1956, and as noted earlier, the ﬁrst tanker of oil did not leave Nigeria until 1958, just six years before the original publication of The Voice. Moreover, the novel does not discuss the oil business explicitly. However, it is possible to complicate such a conclusion if the history of oil prospecting and its slow violence are considered in relation to Okara’s novel. What this seemingly convincing position that oil pollution was not a problem at the time the novel was published misses is that Shell began prospecting for oil in the Delta in 1937.65 Tracing the exploitation of the Delta environment to the 1930s is pertinent because the processes of exploration, especially at the initial stage of seismic activities and drilling, are destructive to the environment too. As Alexander Jebiminih Moro has noted in a study on the social and ecological outcome of oil exploration in the Delta, the “explosives used in seismic operations, irrespective of killing the ﬂora and fauna within the immediate environment they are being used, have the effect of driving away these animals from their natural habitat.”66 In Okonta and Douglas’ view: During the oil company’s seismic activities, forests are invaded and cleared, and animal species endemic to that particular habitat are either expelled or killed. Bush clearing during the line-cutting stage also makes the forests accessible to humankind, a process that further accelerates the destruction of rare animal species. It is in the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta that the ravages of Shell’s seismic activities are most noticeable. Here the aerial roots of tall mangrove trees are mauled and ravaged, and it takes them over three decades to regenerate– that is, if the area is not disturbed by renewed oil exploration activities.67

The authors note that, at the drilling stage, as with the “seismic surveys, trees and other vegetation [are] cut down in the process of site preparation,” thus causing “serious damage to the Niger Delta ecosystem.”68 They add that “dredging is particularly harmful to the Delta ecology. Apart from land that is lost in the process of the dredging proper, dredged material is dumped on either side of the canals, and because this waste is usually high in organic content and turns acidic in the process of oxidation, it destroys the ecology of the surrounding area where it is dumped.”69 The combination of seismic surveys and drilling is harmful

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to the land, to the forests that are cut down, to the wildlife that is either killed or chased away by the noise of the high-capacity machinery employed by these companies, and to the rivers and lakes where the chemicals and dredged materials end up. But the salient point to underscore is the fact that these destructive processes can be traced back to Shell’s exploration activities in the 1930s, well before oil was discovered in commercial quantities or the departure of the ﬁrst tanker. In short, oil exploration already posed environmental challenges decades before Okara’s novel appeared. That said, a celebratory attitude toward the healthy environment as portrayed in Okara’s novel needs to be reassessed because oil exploration aptly ﬁts Nixon’s concept of slow violence. It is to Nixon’s credit that he asks us to transcend the view of violence “as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility.”70 Instead, he urges his readers to consider the idea of slow violence; that is, those instances of violence that are not spontaneous like the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States or the campaign of terror of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. Nixon’s critical lens is rather on those forms of violence “that are slow moving and long in the making.”71 In fact, the ecocritic devotes a chapter to the work of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his son, Ken Wiwa Jr., in his book on slow violence. The reason I cite Nixon here is to suggest that rather than view the ﬂora and fauna in The Voice as evidence of an unpolluted environment, we should consider the violence of oil exploration as “slow in the making” and an accretive process. The bodies “ﬂoating like debris” in the novel are worth recalling here as an instance of slow violence. It is remarkable that the narrator cannot decipher the violence enacted on the river by the drowning bodies. In fact, the narrator states that the canoe “spun round and round and was slowly drawn into the core and ﬁnally disappeared. And the water rolled over the top and the river ﬂowed smoothly over as if nothing had happened.”72 The passage tells us the canoe with the bodies “disappeared.” In disappearing, the canoe and its bodies leave the ﬁeld of vision, becoming imperceptible in a manner similar to the violence Nixon alludes to. The disappearance is further buttressed by the water that covers it. Again, the narrator tells us that the “river ﬂowed smoothly over” the canoe. The passage suggests the representational challenge of portraying violence that is not spontaneous. Given that there is no immediate, spectacular outcome from the drowning and the fact that the bodies are out of sight within a short time, it is easy to dismiss the drowning as inconsequential, imagine the constituted violence as limited, and discourage the interrogation of the near and future ecological aftermaths.

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If oil pollution, like the drowning of Okolo and Tuere, can be considered a slow violence, the destroyed environment we will encounter in the subsequent reading of Tides and The Activist can be seen as a culmination of a violence that began with Shell’s activities during its seismic surveys and drilling activities. We can thus argue that the environment in Okara’s novel is at what Freud, in his work on trauma, calls the “incubation period”: It may happen that someone gets away, apparently unharmed, from the spot where he has suffered a shocking incident, for instance a train collision. In the course of the following weeks, however, he develops a series of grave psychical and motor symptoms, which can be ascribed only to his shock or whatever else happened at the time of the accident. He has developed a “traumatic neurosis.” This appears quite incomprehensive and is therefore a novel fact. The time that elapsed between the accident and the ﬁrst appearance of the symptoms is called the “incubation period,” a transparent allusion to the pathology of infectious disease.73

Although Freud uses the incubation period to designate a time lag between a traumatic event and the appearance of the symptoms of its reliving, the term is useful in denoting that the absence of symptom does not mean the problem is nonexistent. It may also mean there is a latency that can give way to the appearance of the symptoms at any time. In relation to the environment in Okara’s novel, the notion of incubation period is productive because it suggests that the absence of overt signs of a despoiled environment in The Voice does not mean, for instance, that the river is not already being contaminated by pollutants from the search for oil (echoed by the “it” that Okolo searches for) or that the drowning of Okolo and Tuere would not constitute any ecological problem over time. Rather, Freud’s term provides a vocabulary for understanding the slowness of environmental time and the unpredictable time lag between the destructive events and their reactive manifestation in the ecosystem. Hence, in my reading, the environment in The Voice is suspended between the occurrence of acts destructive to the environment and the period it takes for the effects of oil exploration on the environment to become visible in the later Tides and The Activist. Okpewho’s Tides and the Intermediate Phase of Niger Delta Degradation If The Voice depicts the incubation stage, Okpewho’s Tides is crucial for seeing the early manifestation of the violence of oil exploration at the intermediate stage of environmental devastation in the Delta. Okpewho’s epistolary novel, set between August 25, 1976, and February 28, 1978, follows a literary tradition in African literature popularized by Mariama

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Ba’s So Long a Letter.74 The novel records letter exchanges between two friends, Piriye and Tonwe. Both are from the Niger Delta and were given early retirement from the state-owned Chronicle newspaper in what they perceive as an ethnic-oriented layoff. Tonwe retires to his village in the Delta soon afterward until Piriye’s letter detailing the need for an investigative project on oil pollution and the Kwarafa Dam. Although Tonwe initially refuses to participate in the project, he changes his position after some ﬁshermen visit to enlist his support in reporting Atlantic Fuels Company to the appropriate authorities over the negative impacts of its oil exploration activities. Tonwe tries to dialogue with the commissioner of health and the army commander in Benin to address the ﬁshermen’s challenges. Neither intervention yields positive results, but he insists that peaceful negotiation is key to bridging the impasse. Meanwhile, Piriye associates with a radical activist, Bickerbug, who launches tirades against the government and oil companies for the exploitation of the Deltan communities. He is arrested and released soon after Piriye, who was also detained for associating with him, regains his freedom. At the end of the novel, Bickerbug is rearrested after he bombs a bridge in Lagos, several oil installations in the Delta, and the Kwarafa Dam. Tonwe is arrested as well for receiving Bickerbug in his home without reporting him to the police, while Piriye’s fate is undecided. As the novel ends, Piriye’s pregnant wife, Lati, is yet to return from her journalistic trip to cover the impending destruction of the Kwarafa Dam, and he does not know what the interrogation of Bickerbug and Tonwe will turn up against him. Both Piriye and Tonwe bring their journalistic experience to bear in resisting the destruction of their environment and therefore qualify as “journalist-conservationists,” to use Stephanie LeMenager’s phrase.75 Despite his retirement, Piriye continues to freelance for different newspapers and magazines. His journalistic practice also gives him access to Bickerbug, who helps to deepen Piriye’s knowledge of the Delta crisis. Tonwe’s participation in the book project is also signiﬁcant as he bears witness to the goings-on in the Delta based on his habitation there. While Piriye handles the Lagos front, it is through Tonwe that we learn of the spillage and other forms of destruction as they affect the farms, rivers, and local people. At one point, he describes the kerosene taste from the drinking water and uses his connections to try to mitigate the tragedy in the Delta, as we will see when the role of the intellectuals in these novels is taken up in the ﬁnal section of this chapter. Introducing the investigative project to Tonwe, Piriye identiﬁes the central conﬂict of the novel, which is the devastation of the Delta environment from oil exploration:

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You know very well how badly the traditional economy of the Delta communities has been faring as a result of two modern industrial projects which purport to enhance the economy of this country. First there is the Kwarafa Dam, which has severely reduced the volume of water ﬂowing down the Niger and so curtailed the ﬁshing activity in the Delta–and our people are nothing if not ﬁshermen. Secondly, the spillage of crude petroleum from the oil rigs down there–one of which is in fact located near your own village–has proved an absolute menace to agricultural life, for many farms are practically buried in thick layers of crude, which kills off many ﬁshes and other forms of life.76

This passage is a sharp contrast to the image of the Delta environment seen earlier in Okara’s text. Flowing rivers in The Voice have given way to rivers with less volume of water because of the construction of the Kwarafa Dam. Similarly, the trees swaying to the wind and egrets returning home at sunset in The Voice are nowhere to be found, as the nonhuman world here is endangered. The oil spills have severely affected the rivers as well as the land. The choice of “buried” to describe the condition of the farms is instructive because it suggests at least three things: being lifeless, occupying space underneath the ground, and being out of sight. These three denotations are relevant for understanding the adverse consequence of the crude oil on the farms, the ﬁsh, and other life forms. The idea of “thick layers of crude” itself is telling; it stresses a large quantity unlike if the passage had merely said “crude” without qualiﬁcation. Tonwe underscores the impact of the oil business on the community when he recounts Opene’s visit to enlist his help in reporting Atlantic Fuels, the oil company, to the government authorities in Benin: “Apparently these search-lights were trained on the waters from dawn to dusk, and the delegation was asking if the lights could be switched off during those hours of daylight when the ﬁshermen were engaged in ﬁshing.”77 Instead of listening to and negotiating with the ﬁshermen, the company representative treats them contemptuously; the company does not stop there, instead radioing the military, which descends on the poor ﬁshermen and harasses them. Not only do the spills destroy the land and the ﬁsh; the searchlight also scares away the surviving ﬁsh, thereby further eroding the survival of these life forms. One way to understand the emphasis on loss of ﬁshing opportunities in the narrative is to read the novel conventionally as pertaining to the needs of the human population, as demonstrating an anthropocentric understanding of devastation in the Niger Delta. To do so, however, is to ignore the ecological enmeshment the text foregrounds. Okpewho problematizes an anthropocentric interpretation, especially if we consider the moments where the text asserts the interconnection and interdependence of the different beings in the environment. The passage cited previously,

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for instance, shows how “agricultural life . . . and other forms of life” are susceptible to devastation resulting from oil spillage. By foregrounding a shared vulnerability in the face oil exploration, Okpewho’s novel underscores an ecological position that moves away from a human-centered perspective. Bickerbug further highlights this interconnection when he educates Piriye on the challenges of oil exploration in the Delta: Okay. Now, the dangers of all this oil pollution to the environment are sufﬁciently well known to you. The ﬁshes die because the ﬂoating oil blocks the oxygen from the water or because their respiratory membranes are clogged by the oil. Even the birds that dip in the water to catch ﬁsh and other foods suffer–their wings are matted by the oil and they cannot ﬂy so they sink and drown or die on dry land from asphyxiation, having taken in so much grease. The farms, too, are ruined– the crops won’t grow because the oil ﬂoating on the irrigation chokes the soil. Even the drinking water is affected.78

This passage conﬁrms Morton’s position that “the best environmental thinking is thinking big.”79 It is to Bickerbug’s credit that he expands consideration beyond the ﬁshing and farming needs of the people in the passage. The reader sees here how oil spillage affects the land (farms), aquatic life (ﬁsh), and even creatures of the air (birds). Such broader consideration gives a more comprehensive assessment of the impacts of oil pollution. Moreover, at the heart of the passage is an interconnection that is central to the ecological thought. The oxygen from the water is critical for the ﬁsh’s survival, while the birds need the ﬁsh and other water creatures to survive. Humans of course need crops from the land and ﬁsh for survival, and in certain circumstances the activities of birds are important for agricultural success. The entanglement evident in the excerpt and throughout the novel supports Morton’s position that the ecological thought is a “process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are concerned with other beings.”80 In all, the reader is left with the impression that while the cost to humans is a prominent issue in Okpewho’s novel, the narrative deconstructs any attempt to separate humans from other life forms by articulating a shared vulnerability, showing clearly that the impact of oil pollution is not limited to only a partial aspect of the land community. Ojaide’s The Activist and the Advanced Phase of Ecological Degradation in the Delta Like Okpewho’s text, Ojaide’s The Activist explores the destruction of the Niger Delta environment and its people by the machinations of oil companies and the federal military government. The narrative begins with the

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return to Nigeria of the Activist, a Nigerian-born academic, who has resided in the United States for twenty-ﬁve years. Upon his arrival, he joins the staff of the Niger Delta State University, where he meets his future wife, Ebi, another academic. With Ebi, the Activist teams up with student groups, community members, and a militant youth group, the Egba boys, to protest the activities of the oil companies. In the novel, we see men, women, and youth work together to protect their environment from the destructive practices of the oil companies. The government responds to the protests with arrests and other forms of brutality, including the use of tear gas on a group of elderly women who embark on a nude protest. In The Activist, the efforts of local people to protect the ecosystem takes the forms of kidnapping by the Egba boys, oil bunkering by the Activist and Pere, the sending of a delegation to international conferences organized by the UN, student protests, and establishing a newspaper, The Patriot, that dissects environmental exploitation and includes photographs to foreground the devastation. At the novel’s end, the Activist campaigns for and wins the governorship of the Niger Delta State and establishes a ministry to oversee the environment. As he surveys his surroundings following his relocation to the Delta, the Activist reﬂects on the toll of oil exploration on his natal land. The narrator describes the environment in the following words: The Niger Delta that the Activist returned to had changed as much from what it used to be, even as it remained the same landmass. It had been seriously scarred by Bell Oil Company whose emblem of a red-rimmed shell of yellow ﬂames was seen all over the area. In the company’s inordinate hunger for more barrels of oil to ship out to increase yearly record proﬁts, the landscape was gradually turning into a wasteland.81

The novel is sensitive to these changes in detailing the pollution of the rivers and the threat to ﬁsh and other life forms. In fact, there is a steady progression of devastation in this passage, culminating with the description of the land as a “wasteland.” While the land portrayed in Okpewho’s novel is scarred by oil pollution, it is not rendered as a wasteland. The narrator outlines the devastation more clearly as we follow Pere, the leader of the Egba boys who will later become the Activist’s business associate: His people needed the ﬁsh that had sustained them from the beginning of time. So also did they need the farmlands to cultivate cassava, yams, and other subsistence crops to live on! They also had to grow much needed vegetables. And of course, they had to live a healthy life. The air used to be cool because of constant rain and the luxuriant forest, but oil slicks, blowouts, and gas ﬂares had destroyed that life. Even the rain that fell was so soot-black that no more did anybody drink

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rainwater, which of all waters, used to be described as God-given water. The people had lost their green refuge as well. Their forests used to have deep green and lush foliage, the pride of the tropics, but that had changed, since ﬁres often followed oil and gas accidents.82

The language of the passage alternates between a glorious past and a sorry present: the constant rain, normally seen as the best of all water sources, has turned “soot-black” from oil pollution. The once “luxuriant forest” has also lost its greenness. Technical language from oil exploration–“oil slicks, blowouts, and gas ﬂares”–is deployed to foreground the devastation. In all, one gets a nostalgic longing for the past from the narrator. Again, the latter passage is a radical departure from Tides, which tells only of the effect of the dam on the volume of water and notes that oil ﬂoats on the creek after Bickerbug’s acts of resistance. In The Activist, however, the air, the rain, and the rivers have been contaminated. One can also notice the interdependence of the different creatures depicted in the passage. The forest needs the rain to thrive, while humans need the forest and other components of the environment to survive. No environmental component is an island here, which buttresses both Morton’s claim about the interconnection of the mesh and the idea of human-nonhuman proximity elaborated in Chapter 1. We can see that humans are not the only victims in Ojaide’s narrative; the toxins in the rain are equally destructive to the nonhuman world, including the land and the animals. Even the forest is not spared in the devastation the passage depicts. Its greenness is lost to the oil spills and the ﬁres that often accompany them. The importance of forests to the ecosystem has already been explored in previous chapters, so it will sufﬁce to state that the carbon emissions that trees normally absorb remain in the atmosphere in their absence. The wildlife that makes its home in the forests is also either killed directly or driven away. To be sure, it may seem that the preceding passage focuses on people, Pere’s people, which suggests an anthropocentric conception of environmental problems. After all, the subject of most of the sentences that make up the excerpt is the people. Following Morton, who claims that “in an age of ecology without Nature, we would treat many more beings as people while deconstructing our ideas of what counts as people,” I posit that we should read “people” differently here.83 In the spirit of ecological thought, I would like to stretch the semantic possibilities of the term. Earlier, in my reading of Okpewho’s Tides, we see the birds affected by oil spillage as they perch over the water in search of ﬁsh to eat. Recalling that earlier analysis is necessary to show that the people in the ﬁrst sentence of the previous passage, who depend on ﬁsh, are not necessarily humans.

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Many birds, as Okpewho’s novel reminds us, need ﬁsh for sustenance. My point is that the sentence supports Morton’s idea of deconstructing the limited conception of people and arguing for a more encompassing deﬁnition. The last two sentences deserve attention as well: “The people had lost their green refuge as well. Their forests used to have deep green and lush foliage, the pride of the tropics, but that had changed, since ﬁres often followed oil and gas accidents.”84 Again, while it is easy to read Pere’s people here as humans, we can consider nonhumans in this category. The idea of refuge evokes protection, a shelter, and it seems to me that nonhuman animals particularly depend on green refuge. As seen in the discussion of deforestation in Okri’s novel in Chapter 1 and of animal poaching in Farah’s Secrets in the previous chapter, different animals live in these forests and suffer directly from environmental degradation; hence they can be included among Pere’s people. In short, my goal is to complicate a reading of Pere’s people that includes only members of his human community. The passage is expansive enough to accommodate a broader conception of people. In fact, an ecological reading of “people” intertwines the human (Pere) with the birds, ﬁsh, wild animals, and their surroundings. Yet the most important evidence that the slow violence of oil pollution that appears ﬁrst in Okara’s novel has come full circle in The Activist is when the women narrate the impacts on the communities. One woman from Umutor says, “I don’t know what is happening elsewhere, but in the Oginibo area the women are ﬁnding it difﬁcult to conceive.”85 Another named Titi agrees: “What our sister from Umutor has said is very true. But there is much more happening to us women in recent years. Our pregnant women are delivering so many malformed babies. What used to be a rarity is now commonplace.”86 Their leader also adds her voice: “Our mothers did not complain of any burning inside their bodies. I don’t know whether those of you that are past childbearing like me feel it, but I live it daily with this new condition. It is as if a ﬁre is blazing inside me. I have heard others complain of the same burning that our educated sisters call hot ﬂushes.”87 As the narrator concludes: “All their problems centered on the oil that was discovered in the area. The older women narrated what life was before Bell Oil Company arrived.”88 In their nostalgia, the women underscore the difference between the era before oil exploration and the period following the arrival of Bell Oil Company. While some cannot get pregnant at all, those that can conceive deliver malformed babies. Overall, what the novel critiques is the threat to generational continuity of the Delta communities. Whether we consider the women who cannot procreate or the similarly egregious extinction of the other life forms in the “wasteland,” one achievement of The Activist is

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its engaging and gripping expression of extinction. Hence my claim that of the three novels examined so far, The Activist portrays the climax of the Delta crisis. From a seemingly innocuous, healthy environment seen in Okara’s The Voice to the early manifestation of the impact of environmental pollution in Tides, we arrive at the heightened violence of extinction in The Activist. Let’s Blow Things Up: Violence and the Possibilities of Ecological Collectivities As the previous sections have established the progressive deterioration of the Delta environment, this segment takes as its central preoccupation the strategies of resistance employed in these narratives to combat environmental degradation. I particularly put pressure on those acts of resistance in the novels of Okpewho and Ojaide (blowing up oil installations, bunkering, etc.) that are inimical to the environment even if they are viewed as serving human interests. In my reading of Okpewho’s novel, I reassess the violent revolution of Bickerbug as against the collaborative, nonviolent forms of resistance that the novelist’s use of the epistolary form evokes. Of interest are the violent acts of resistance Bickerbug unleashes at the end of the novel because his activities ironically endanger the environment he is ﬁghting to protect. The scant criticism on this text has praised the resistance at the end of the novel, where Bickerbug bombs some oil installations, the Kwarafa Dam, and Lugard Bridge. Feghabo, for instance, compares Bickerbug to Ken Saro-Wiwa, arguing that Bickerbug’s portrayal as a “nonmaterialistic and nonideological activist truly devoted to the salvation of his people matches Saro-Wiwa’s personality. Like Bickerbug, he was a graduate of English, not known for materialism, or as a Marxist.”89 Although there are similarities between both, Bickerbug’s adoption of violence radically sets him apart from Saro-Wiwa, whose adherence to nonviolence is known to have inﬂuenced environmental movements across the world.90 Bickerbug’s violent tactics are signiﬁcant for drawing attention to the plight of the Delta, but they are problematic. His violent acts are inimical to the environment they purportedly seek to safeguard. Bickerbug’s actions are dangerous to the “people” in the environment of the novel, thereby begging a reassessment of the celebratory critical interpretation. I argue in this section that while these violent activities draw attention to the problems, showcase the agency of the participants, and can be read as a legitimate assertion of a right to a better life, they are problematic because they are injurious to fellow humans as well as the “strange strangers” in the environment.

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In bombing oil infrastructure, Bickerbug registers a strong protest against the government and oil companies for despoiling the environment and frustrating peaceful means of resolving the crisis. But more importantly, he seems to want to return the land and water to a “natural” state. This return ﬁts into what Grant Hamilton, in writing of the natives’ destruction of the state’s irrigation system in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, has described as a “double process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.”91 Hamilton’s Deleuzian analysis of Coetzee’s novel is relevant for understanding Bickerbug’s attempt to return the environment to an original state, yet such a return to nature proves impossible. As the novel ends, Bickerbug tells Piriye after his arrest: “Our people have won . . . The water is ﬂowing again, full stream. The tides are here again. Soon there’ll be plenty of ﬁshes swimming again, eh?”92 Bickerbug’s celebratory tone ignores the extent of the damage to the environment, which we will see later. In fact, rather than return us to an original state, his action compounds the problem. His actions seem typical of what Morton calls “‘one at a time’ sequencing.”93 Morton uses this term to describe the tendency in environmentalism to ﬁxate on which component of the mesh is more important and deserving of preference. Morton insists, however, that such questions become useless if we consider the mesh as a whole and the interconnections of its constituents. To return to the novel, we see Bickerbug ﬁxated on ensuring the ﬂow of the river while ignoring the implications for other beings in this environment. In his last letter to Piriye, Tonwe describes the devastation of the Delta environment by the destruction of the installations: By now you must have heard the terrible news. No less than ﬁve oil installations in the Delta have been destroyed by bomb explosions. These include three offshore rigs like the one at Ebrima near my village where, you will recall my telling you about a year ago, Opene and his companions had been assaulted by men of the naval patrol. The huge storage tanks at Apelebiri near Angiama, Harrison’s village, and at Ogbodobiri have also been blown up. You cannot imagine how much oil is ﬂoating about now in these creeks. It is better seen than described.94

In the last sentence of the passage, Tonwe registers the representational challenge of using writing to convey the enormity of the pollution of the Delta. Tonwe’s insistence on physical witnessing shows the limit of language to depict the enormity of the tragedy. Blowing up ﬁve installations located in different villages suggests the pollution of a vast expanse of landscape and waterscape by the spillage. Were we to ask Morton, he would remind us that “thinking big means realizing that there is always more than our point of view. There is indeed an environment, yet when we examine it, we ﬁnd it is made of strange strangers.”95 One question

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that the ecological thought raises here is how do the explosions impact the strange strangers in this community? The image presented in this passage surely undermines Bickerbug’s claim that the water is ﬂowing and that ﬁsh aplenty will soon be swimming again. If water is ﬂowing at all, it is contaminated by spilled oil and rendered useless as habitat for aquatic beings and a source of replenishment. Worth recalling also is that Lati, the journalist wife of Piriye, who went to cover the destruction of the Kwarafa Dam, is still missing as the novel ends. The futility of the hospital search for Lati negates hope of her being found alive. Lati can be read as symbolic of the human toll of the explosions, but we need not stop there. If oil spillage is an example of slow violence, as Nixon’s work tells us, the passage invites us to transcend the spectacular and arresting image portrayed by Tonwe and to reﬂect on the long-term consequence of such explosions for the different beings in that environment. That said, this passage also captivates me because of its irony. While Bickerbug will argue that his actions are in the interest of the environment and seems genuinely excited that the river is ﬂowing again and that the ﬁsh will soon be plentiful, it is noteworthy that the damage he inﬂicts on the land and river appears more devastating than other forms of environmental damage portrayed in the novel. Bickerbug fails here to acknowledge what Timothy Mitchell has evocatively called the “imbroglios of the technical, the natural, and the human” in his work on the intersection between fossil fuel and democracy.96 Mitchell uses the expression to encapsulate the entanglement of our collective social life in order to critique the tendency to separate the human from nature in the economic and political calculations underpinning the oil extractive industry as well as in “our theories of collective life.”97 Bickerbug’s example and that of the Activist we will see shortly in Ojaide’s novel are proof that the resistance against oil exploitation does not always acknowledge the ecological imbrication that Mitchell adumbrates in Carbon Democracy. In their work where they contest the appropriateness of the term ecoterrorism for describing the destruction of property by environmental activists, the ecocritics David Thomas Sumner and Lisa M. Wiedman contend that while terrorists do not care about life, for “environmental activists, however, the sacredness of life is the motivating idea for their actions.”98 Sumner and Wiedman’s work is relevant for insisting on respect for life as an important factor in environmental activism, just as Morton’s is for urging his readers to respect the importance of all lives and the interconnectedness of beings inhabiting a shared environment. Obviously, Bickerbug’s environmentalism fails because his actions do not bear witness to the sanctity of lives in the environment. Whether it is the lives of humans taken by the explosions or those of the strange

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strangers under threat because of the polluted land and rivers, what is at stake is the violation of life. In fact, one can add, following Morton, that Bickerbug fails to think big. Actions like Bickerbug’s demonstrate that violence can be more destructive to the environment they purport to be saving, even when, as in The Activist, discussed next, it is an “enabling violation” or strategy of obtaining beneﬁts from the government and oil companies.99 Where Bickerbug’s bombing of oil installations is the primary object of critique in the preceding analysis, my focus here is on the Activist’s involvement in oil bunkering and his ultimate entry onto the political scene as a gubernatorial candidate in the Niger Delta state election.100 In justifying his involvement in the illegal bunkering business, “he thought of the philosophy of ATTACK and assured himself that hurting destroyers of the natural environment was a good thing to do. His thoughts went to Ebi sleeping in the other bedroom. Would she approve of this? From her concern about the rivers, forests, and the ocean, she would like whatever would scale down the activities of the oil companies.”101 The Activist is excited about the possibility of hurting the oil companies and the government, whom he describes as “the two principal outsiders that were robbing and destroying the people of the Niger Delta.”102 Critics, including Sunny Ahwefeada and Augustine Uka Nwanyanwu, have hailed the Activist’s action as subversive in that it is disruptive of the activities of the oil companies. There is value in that position, but such a perspective does not seem attentive to the larger ecological problems posed by oil bunkering. One can put pressure on that perspective by positing the following questions: Does oil bunkering signiﬁcantly affect the oil company and the government? And what are the environmental implications of this oppositional practice? In other words, what are the impacts of bunkering on the various beings in the environment? While it is true that oil companies and the government lose revenue if they are unable to meet their production quota due to bunkering, the loss is negligible in comparison to the problem it poses to the “people” in the ecosystem. Sabotaging of oil operations via bunkering is not an antidote to ecological devastation. Instead, it gives the oil companies excuses not to curtail oil spills, which eventually result in ﬁres. The novel provides examples where the multinational Bell Oil deﬂects responsibility for oil spills by arguing that the villagers broke the pipeline to extort compensation from the company. Beyond the novel, in the real Delta, there are instances where the oil companies have blamed the locals for bunkering and refused to take responsibility for compensation and cleanup. The oil spill problem is so prevalent that Amnesty International commissioned an investigation. Amnesty’s report notes that “Shell now claims that

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75 percent or more of the oil spilt from its activities in the Niger Delta is due to sabotage and theft.”103 In the summary of its ﬁndings, Amnesty International concludes, “Sabotage and theft of oil are serious problems in the Niger Delta. However, international oil companies are overstating the case in an effort to deﬂect attention away from the oil spills that are due to corrosion and equipment failure.”104 The 1998 Jesse ﬁre incident that resulted from oil spillage and scooping of fuel comes to mind. This tragedy, which claimed more than 1,000 lives, resulted from broken pipelines from which the residents were obtaining petroleum before the explosion. It took ﬁreﬁghters from the United States to extinguish the ﬁre that raged for days, but not before some serious devastation was wrought on the environment. The UNEP report cited earlier also contains information on devastation caused by several spills, including “one such incident in 2006” observed by “the UNEP team . . . during aerial reconnaissance of Ogoniland. A massive ﬁre was raging at the Yorla 13 oil well and apparently continued burning for over a month. Such ﬁres cause damage to the vegetation immediately around the well site and can produce partly burned hydrocarbons that may be carried for considerable distances before falling on farmland or housing.”105 As both examples suggest, the aftermath of an oil spill is dangerous to humans and nonhumans alike.106 The oil seeps into the land, ruining it for plant and animal use. The salient point is that consideration of these adverse effects of bunkering calls into question the celebration of the Activist’s bunkering by critics. As the novel portrays it, bunkering is advantageous to the Activist and his business partner, Pere. They not only become rich but are equally able to provide employment opportunities for others. The wealth from the bunkering business is also what enables the Activist to fund his gubernatorial ambition. Oil bunkering, therefore, functions as what Spivak would describe as an “enabling violation.” Without it, the jobs created by the Delta Cartel and the possibility of change brought about by the election of the Activist as governor would be impossible. But one cannot lose sight of its destructive effect on the larger environment. In the ﬁnal chapter of his work, titled “Forward Thinking,” Morton contends that ecological thought “compel[s] us to imagine collectivity”107 and that the “ecological thought must imagine economic change.”108 However, his work falls short of charting a programmatic course of action for the formation of an ecological collectivity or even ways of bringing about economic change. His work raises a fundamental question: How do we operationalize the ecological thought, especially in the postcolony, where human and nonhuman beings are under siege from the agglomeration of governmental and multinational forces? We can turn to Okpewho’s and

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Ojaide’s novels for answers because they experiment with possible alternatives to the forms of contestation discussed previously. I interpret these alternatives as mechanisms for operationalizing the ecological thought in the Niger Delta. Ecological collectivity in Okpewho’s Tides, I suggest, is constituted through its epistolary form as well as the prison open forum I discuss later. Ojaide’s The Activist operationalizes the ecological thought with the election of the Activist as governor and the eco-friendly directions of his administration. The epistolary form of Okpewho’s narrative creates a space for critiquing the problems associated with Bickerbug’s environmentalism, but it also buttresses what I call a pre-collectivity critical for addressing the problems of the Delta region. First, the idea of letters implicates an addresser and an addressee, thereby suggesting a form of collaboration. The grim, inconclusive ending of the novel makes the collaboration more germane. As the novel ends, Bickerbug and Tonwe are arrested while Priboye, the letter carrier, is on the run from state security operatives. Meanwhile, the pregnant Lati is yet to be found, and the fate of her husband, Piriye, hangs on what the interrogation of Bickerbug and Tonwe will reveal about his complicity. This pessimistic ending leaves unresolved the Niger Delta’s challenges and undermines the celebratory reading of Bickerbug’s revolutionary actions. The ending suggests we look elsewhere in the narrative for viable alternatives to the grim condition imposed by Bickerbug’s violence. To look elsewhere is to ponder more seriously the collaboration between Tonwe and Piriye vis-à-vis the form that enables it. It is remarkable that the two major characters denounce violence at various points in the narrative. Tonwe, for instance, because he is “against violent confrontation in any form and at any level,”109 warns Piriye to be careful about associating with Bickerbug. Similarly, Piriye asserts, “I am not a violent man. I do not enjoy doing harm to people’s feelings or to things.”110 Their nonviolent position is situated against Bickerbug’s combative posture. Additionally, the epistolary form is pertinent for gaining access to the narrative, given the repressive bent of the state. We see how Piriye is harassed by security operatives for publishing his views on the Delta and Nigeria in various news outlets. Bickerbug is also incarcerated earlier in the story for staging rallies where he denounces the government and oil companies. Given these scenarios, the conﬁdentiality of the letter form allows the interlocutors to continue their investigation and to provide the narrative as a testament against the devastation of the Delta ecosystem.111 In a pre-Internet and pre–social media setting, the epistolary form allows the major characters to deliver ﬁrst-person accounts of their respective locations in ways that the conventional singular ﬁrst-person voice would

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not permit. Jane Gurkin Altman has noted that “as a tangible document the conﬁdential letter is subject to being ‘overheard’ by anyone at any time, with all of the resulting consequences.”112 Altman’s point is instructive for reading the ending of Okpewho’s narrative when their letters are “overheard” by the operatives of the state who search Tonwe’s house. As Tonwe is arrested and Priboye goes into hiding, the reader is left wondering what will be the fate of the Delta environment and of Piriye, who is yet to be arrested in Lagos. If the collaboration between Tonwe and Piriye instantiates a precollectivity, the “open forum” Bickerbug convenes during his incarceration emblematizes the collectivity in Okpewho’s novel. It is remarkable that the prison becomes a site for Jurgen Habermas’s notion of a public sphere, in the absence of such opportunities outside the prison wall. According to Habermas, the public sphere is a space for debate and interactions independent of the state. Habermas contends that the primary criterion for this sphere is that it “preserve[s] a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregard[s] status altogether.”113 In his view, the public sphere is a space where the quality of the argument rather than status wins the day. It evolved in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but became fully developed in the nineteenth century and could be seen in salons, coffeehouses, and the pages of texts like novels, newspapers, and so on. In sum, the primary characteristic of this European notion of the public sphere was freedom of expression even when the discourse was oppositional to the state. As Joseph Slaughter describes it in Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, “the liberal public sphere maintains a healthy democratic suspicion of the state, which is constitutionally Janus-faced, both the administrator and violator of human rights.”114 Habermas’s conception of the public sphere has been elaborated and critiqued by scholars, but it remains useful for my purposes because its insights on freedom of expression and the irrelevance of social status to the acceptability of one’s viewpoints are applicable to Bickerbug’s open forum in Tides.115 Describing the discussions of the open forum to Tonwe in a letter, Piriye indicates that “the session was also thoroughly democratic–everything was conducted in pidgin so that both the educated and the not so educated could deliberate on equal terms and hold a true dialogue.”116 Readers of the novel will remember attempts by state agents to stiﬂe dissent when they clamped down on Bickerbug’s public campaigns against corruption; as such, it is signiﬁcant that the space of conﬁnement becomes a productive space for the unhindered discussion of sociopolitical issues denied expression by the autocratic military leaders outside the prison walls.

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The open forum gives expression to these important issues and allows the inmates to freely participate without restrictions. All of the inmates, including the political prisoners who are university professors, diplomats, and military ofﬁcers as well as the miscreants, are able to articulate their positions without barrier. Another leveler is the use of pidgin English to enable the participation of those without standard English abilities. Bickerbug even “made one of the bigwigs–the ofﬁcer from the NYSV, a soldier for that matter!–apologize to some small fellow whose language he had referred to as ‘street talk.’”117 Besides being a public sphere, Bickerbug’s open forum is also ecological, if we consider Morton’s position that “human beings need each other as much as they need an environment. Human beings are each other’s environment. Thinking ecologically isn’t simply about nonhuman things. Ecology has to do with you and me.”118 Morton’s position shows that the ecological is not restricted to human interconnection with the nonhuman but also involves relationships with fellow humans. Bickerbug’s open forum typiﬁes a nonhierarchical ecological set of interactions between humans that ﬁt Morton’s schema. In prison, with its environmental and emotional restrictions, the inmates depend on each other for support and for articulating a collective position on matters affecting the nation. The nonhierarchical nature of this public sphere is also indicative of a transformative space where the rights and obligations to nonhumans, to the larger environment, can be given serious consideration. Worthy of mention is that the open forum discusses women’s rights, a marginal subject in the novel. The workings of the open forum signal that it is in such a space of equality that our superior attitude toward marginal subjects–lower-class humans, women, the larger environment–can be challenged and transformed toward a realization of the principles of ecological thought. If “epistolary writing,” according to Altman, “refracts events through not one but two prisms–that of reader as well as that of writer,”119 the third-person or omniscient narrative point of view of Ojaide’s The Activist showcases multiple prisms. The narrative point of view is signiﬁcant because it helps to deemphasize the Activist and allows readers to focus on his relationships with others. As we follow the protagonist throughout the novel, we see that his notable actions happen in collaboration with others. For instance, he gets fully involved in the community after marrying Ebi. Also his bunkering business is carried out in collaboration with Pere and their employees. Furthermore, he becomes governor only after the masses vote for him. The third-person narrative voice shows that the Activist’s potential is realized in conjunction with others.

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A discussion of the Activist’s foray into politics and the ecological collectivity in The Activist would have to begin with the regime change that opened the electoral space. Before then, the military was in charge, but the resolve of the women becomes a catalyst for change. With the women, Ojaide’s novel introduces a gendered response to the Delta’s problems. In response to the oil pollution, the women establish the Women of the Delta Forum (WODEFOR). As the omniscient narrator explains: “The women primed themselves for action. They would look for ways to talk to the oil companies to persuade them to arrest the deteriorating environmental situation in the Niger Delta. They would also address the military government about their concerns.”120 It is remarkable that the women choose a nude march to protest the oil companies’ tactics. Older women are selected for the exercise, but the protesters are quickly dispersed by the military, even before they get started, to the chagrin of the foreign journalists already positioned to capture photos of topless black women. This protest draws from a traditional belief that a nude protest of elderly women is a taboo punishable by the gods. As Peter Okadike, an employee at Bell Oil, explains it to his white superior, “Women’s nude protest is the worst curse possible in the traditional society. It’s a curse invoked when all measures to seek redress or justice have failed. And those cursed always died within days.”121 This protest generated a palpable anxiety in the community that necessitated its disruption by the navy. Although the women’s right to stage a peaceful protest is denied, the consequence of their action is not mitigated. Both Bell Oil’s boss, Mr. Van Hoort, and the leader of the federal military government, General Mustapha Ali Dongo, die soon after.122 Their deaths follow Ebi’s press statement on behalf of the women: “Only those who ordered and carried out our violation know what they deserve. God and our ancestors are not sleeping, they were witnesses! Let those who assaulted us know the crime they have committed.”123 This protest and the overall activities of the women showcase their active role in the Delta struggle, unlike in Okpewho’s Tides where the men drive the narrative action.124 Although the nude protest incident and the accompanying deaths may seem trivial, the women’s effort generates the possibility of social change that elections portend in the novel. The death of General Dogon, which alludes to General Abacha’s death in Nigeria in 1998, paves the way for transition to democracy. Dogon’s continuous reign as head of state would have blighted the hope we see at the novel’s end when the Activist becomes governor and Dennis Ishaka is appointed the commissioner of the Ministry of the Environment.

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Speaking of the Activist’s election, his brand of political campaign is different from that of the other politicians. He takes his political campaign to the rural areas where he personally canvasses for votes. By contrast, The Patriot, the newspaper he establishes from the proceeds of oil bunkering, is targeted at urban voters. His rural mobilization differentiates the Activist from the other politicians who focus only on the towns and cities. Here, the text complicates Spivak’s claim that “access to ‘citizenship’ (civil society) by becoming a voter (in the nation) is indeed the symbolic circuit of the mobilizing of subalternity into hegemony.”125 While Spivak’s fears about co-optation are understandable, the restriction she places on subalterns forecloses the possibility of their participation in processes capable of producing social change. In The Activist, the protagonist recognizes the agency of the local people by campaigning directly in their communities. His local campaign is an instance of what Pheng Cheah, in Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, describes as “counter-ofﬁcial popular nationalism and electoral education of the masses that proceeds from below.”126 Consequently, we see the coming together of the country and the city, to borrow the title of Raymond Williams’s book.127 The Activist’s mobilization of the public sphere ensures his victory at the polls. The Activist’s ascension to power sees the creation of the Ministry of the Environment, headed by Dennis, to serve the interests of the ecological community. Dennis, a ﬁrst-class graduate of petroleum engineering, is employed by Bell Oil but is left out of actual drilling practices because, as the oil boss rationalizes, “allowing him to acquire technical drilling experience would be suicidal for the expatriate staff and business.”128 Although the novel ends before the reader gets an opportunity to assess the new leaders and to compare their performance to that of their predecessors, one expects Dennis to use his knowledge of petroleum engineering to pressure the oil companies to adopt sustainable oil exploration practices. One also expects him to bring an understanding and care of his birthplace environment to bear in his new role. In fact, his father encouraged him to study petroleum engineering for this very reason: “Would the situation not be better if an indigene that knew the environment as an engineer drilled for oil in a way that would save the land from the negative excesses of the foreign drillers? Who would empathize more with the fate of crops than the sons and daughters of farmers? Who would protect the creeks, streams, and rivers more than the children of ﬁshermen and women?”129 Chief Ishaka’s rationale for educating his son draws from his belief in the inﬂuence of a local sense of place on decisions concerning the environment. Chief Ishaka produces

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evidence of ecological thinking here by his interest in the plight of the larger environment: the land, creeks, rivers, and so on. He is optimistic that a Delta indigene, cognizant of the interrelationship of all life forms in the region, would share his concern for other beings in the environment. Taken together, the election of the Activist and the subsequent appointment of Dennis Ishaka as environment commissioner signal a paradigm shift from upholding the sacredness of neoliberal resource extraction–often detrimental to the environment–toward what Anthony Carrigan sees as “multivalent sacredness.”130 In the prior paradigm, the oil companies and the government are only concerned about production quotas and revenues. The ecological issues emanating from oil production and the fact that oil practices sometimes infringe on public spaces, both sacred and mundane, are discounted by the oil drillers and their government collaborators. That is why the oil companies and government only worry about the complaints of the people when their moves threaten oil production and/or have the capacity to paint their image in a poor light in the international media. But with the ushering in of a new dispensation at the end of the novel, the Activist’s pedigree suggests his mission will be to reconcile the competing demands for foreign exchange earnings from oil production on the one hand and the need for sustainable practices that do not sacriﬁce the environment in the quest for maximum yields on the other. The Activist’s governing motto can be gleaned from the placard he carries at the rally against capitalism in Washington, DC. It reads, “every life matters.”131 To be sure, the placard’s message has no connection to the reprehensible All Lives Matter retort to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States since 2015. Rather, the Activist’s slogan reads like something literally taken out of Morton’s The Ecological Thought and deserves to be interpreted in that light. For Morton, “if we think the ecological thought, two things happen. Our perspective becomes very vast. More and more aspects of the Universe become included in the ecological thought.”132 The words on the Activist’s placard demonstrate a vast perspective, both formally and in terms of content. That the message is written in capitals not only emphasizes its point; it conveys a vast sweep. The qualiﬁer every encapsulates Morton’s “more and more aspects of the Universe.” No life in the universe is discounted in this encompassing ecological collectivity, unlike in the anthropocentric view that would restrict the focus to certain human lives. The Activist’s participation in the rally in the United States also accentuates his ecological consciousness. Morton concedes that ecological thought transcends national boundaries and that “ecological thought

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permits no distance. Thinking interdependence involves dissolving the barrier between ‘over here’ and ‘over there.’”133 The Activist considers it necessary to participate in a protest against global capitalism in the United States where he is visiting. In so doing, he demonstrates the global interconnection of his local Delta in Nigeria to other parts of the world, especially the United States that purchases approximately 40 percent of Nigeria’s oil.134 The governor’s outlook is typical of what Morton calls a “progressive ecology that was big, not small; spacious, not place-ist; global, not local.”135 As is clear from the foregoing discussion, the intellectual-asprotagonist is a feature Ojaide’s work shares with the other novels discussed in this chapter, thereby illuminating the pertinent role all three narratives assign to the intellectual in the Delta struggle. In the next section, I examine the place of intellectual labor in the struggle for a sustainable Delta environment in these narratives. Representations of the Intellectual in Niger Delta Literature The riff on Edward Said’s title to arrive at the heading of this section is testament to the inﬂuence of his work on the following examination of the intellectual in the novels under study. In Representations of the Intellectual, Said postulates: In the end, it is the intellectual as a representative ﬁgure that matters–someone who visibly represents a standpoint of some kind, and someone who makes articulate representations to his or her public despite all sorts of barriers. My argument is that intellectuals are individuals with a vocation for the art of representing, whether that is talking, writing, teaching, appearing on television. And that vocation is important to the extent that it is publicly recognizable and involves both commitment and risk, boldness and vulnerability.136

Said’s vision of the public intellectual, one who is not cloistered in an institution, one who avails society of one’s talent, is essential to a reading of Okolo in The Voice and Piriye, Bickerbug, and Tonwe in Tides as well as the protagonist in The Activist. Except in the case of Okolo, the rest of the characters are discussed in relation to their environmentalism. Okolo is positioned as a counterpoint to Abadi, another educated character in Okara’s novel. While Abadi, who holds a PhD, aligns with the establishment of the corrupt Chief Izongo and is a traditional intellectual in the Gramscian sense, Okolo refuses to join ranks with them. Instead, his educational exposure inﬂuences his quest for “it.” He courageously challenges the chiefs and exhorts them to get “it.” His courage

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enables him to return from exile to face the elders. Although his return costs him his life, we cannot lose sight of the seed that he has planted. As Ukule tells Okolo, “Your spoken words will not die” before the latter’s death, we come to believe that the seed will bear productive fruit that will permeate the village of Amatu. Okolo confronts the corrupt order even when he is aware of Chief Izongo’s desperation and the efforts to silence him. The risk underlined in Okolo’s task speaks to Said’s emphasis on the vulnerability of the intellectual. While Okara’s novel features only one character that we can consider a public intellectual, there are three major intellectual characters in Okpewho’s novel. In fact, the intellectual dimension of the struggle is introduced on the ﬁrst page of Piriye’s ﬁrst letter to Tonwe, asking for the latter’s participation in the project. In Piriye’s words: “Between us we should be able to follow the events to their logical conclusion and eventually produce a book that will remain long an authoritative testimony to the plight of our people, the Beniotu people, in these times.”137 Piriye’s commitment to the Delta cause is outstanding considering the risks to his life when he visits the incarcerated Bickerbug. After listening to Bickerbug’s lecture on oil pollution, he writes to Tonwe: All those academic details about oil exploration and oil pollution were thoroughly enlightening. I must read up on them to supplement the information given by Bickerbug, for certainly they will come in handy when we come to do our book on this whole problem. I know we are going to have to talk to the oil companies and various ofﬁcials to get their sides of the story. But I must confess that Bickerbug’s revelations opened up my eyes more than a little.138

Piriye’s relationship with Bickerbug, despite Tonwe’s warning of the possible risks, is insightful for understanding his commitment to the cause of his people. This relationship shows what Judith Butler describes as “mobilization of bodily exposure” in her analysis of vulnerability as a form of agency. For Butler, “in such practices of nonviolent resistance, we can come to understand bodily vulnerability as something that is actually marshaled or mobilized for the purpose of resistance.”139 By fraternizing with Bickerbug, a security risk, and visiting him in prison, Piriye exposes himself to police brutality. Not surprisingly, he is detained, and it takes the intervention of Justice Ekundayo Benson, Lati’s uncle, to effect his release. As already noted, he is aware of the vulnerability implied in his decision to visit Bickerbug in detention, but his understanding of Bickerbug’s critical role in the resistance against the despoliation in the Delta trumps concern for his own well-being.

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Signiﬁcantly, Piriye does not content himself with researching the book but does freelance pieces for local and international outlets. The publication of these writings rattles the government, as seen when excerpts are presented as evidence of treason by the state operatives who detain him. By internationalizing the Delta struggle through foreign media outlets, Piriye seems to be demonstrating the point made by Said that “you [the intellectual] want to speak your piece where it can be heard best; and also you want it represented in such a way as to inﬂuence with [sic] an ongoing and actual process, for instance, the cause of peace and justice.”140 Negative publicity at the international stage, the kind made possible by Piriye’s publications, embarrasses the government and the multinational corporations, who are particularly concerned about their image, and may move them to action. Despite his initial reluctance to participate in the book project, Tonwe forgoes his quiet retirement to take up the case of the ﬁshermen and to work with Piriye. His educational background and credentials as a former journalist give him access to the military commander, permanent secretary, and commissioner of health in Benin. It is instructive that the ﬁshermen choose him to speak for them; his selection in no way suggests he is better than them, but as Neil Lazarus has argued in his reading of Said’s work, the intellectual is “socially endowed with the resources, the status, and social capital, to do this particular kind of work.”141 Although the interventions in Benin do not yield any positive development for the ﬁshermen, Tonwe is included in a stakeholders’ meeting of oil companies, government ofﬁcials, and representatives of the affected oilproducing communities. This meeting enables Tonwe to ask tough questions concerning oil spills. The oil company representative is visibly shaken, and even though the questions are not answered satisfactorily, the meeting provides an opportunity to register a voice of protest and to further understand the workings of the partnership between the oil companies and the government. These outcomes would be useful for the book project, at the very least. By his actions on the committee, Tonwe presents himself as an “amateur” in the Saidian sense. For Said, the amateur is “someone who is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves one’s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens as well as with other societies.”142 Although Frank, the oil company spokesperson, attempts to confuse the committee with the technicalities and jargon of oil exploration, Tonwe insists on raising the moral questions implicated in the oil companies’ activities. Unlike the corrupt local chief and the politicians, Tonwe’s passion “is fueled by care and affection rather than by proﬁt and selﬁsh, narrow specialization.”143

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Bickerbug’s violent actions notwithstanding, the intellectual dimension of his struggle is worth considering. He is a smart graduate of English invested in books and ideas. Early in the novel, he recognizes the role of the media in raising public awareness and releases press statements against the ecological problems of the Delta. He also engages directly with the public, one aspect of the job of the intellectual, during the publicawareness campaign on Campos Square. Bickerbug sensitizes the people on the problems of the Delta. In fact, Piriye tells us that Bickerbug’s rhetoric at this event wins him over. Piriye also notes that the audience was so wooed by Bickerbug’s presentation that they resist the attempt to arrest him. In the long lecture he gives Piriye, Bickerbug is persuasive as he uncovers the intricacies of oil exploration, and we know that such knowledge certainly expanded Piriye’s horizon. In fact, the latter tells us that “he [Bickerbug] ﬁshed among the books in the corner and brought out about four or ﬁve volumes. One was a Civil Engineering book I’d seen about in the room, but the others were on other subjects, petroleum engineering, a book on dams and bridges, another on environmental pollution and another on petroleum law. I was a little perplexed.”144 The interdisciplinary breadth of Bickerbug’s reading and knowledge repertoire is telling of his commitment to understanding the workings of the oil business and his interest in the ecological welfare of the Delta. His training in the humanities did not stop him from educating himself in the science of petroleum engineering and drawing from that knowledge to educate the masses gathered at his rallies and fellow travelers in the Delta struggle like Piriye. As the novel ends, the reader is left imagining the contributions Bickerbug could have made to the movement if he had not embraced sabotage as a means of addressing the ecological devastation in the Delta. If the intellectuals in both Okara’s and Okpewho’s novels have lived in Nigeria for all their lives, the Activist in Ojaide’s novel brings his transnational experience to bear on his intellectual endeavors. Early in The Activist, the narrator notes: The Activist was one of those people described by American armchair psychologists as protest bugs that showed up whenever there was a big protest to attract media attention. He always tried to make time to join what he considered a necessary cause, and many causes were necessary in his view. He was on the mailing list of many organizations and more often than not responded to calls for major protests. To him answering such calls was not a civic but a human duty. He had ﬂown to Europe several times on chartered ﬂights to carry placards against Bell Oil International and the Group of Seven over debt relief for Third World Countries.145

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This passage is notable because it betrays the inﬂuence of Western environmentalism on the Activist’s strategy of resistance in the Delta. Upon arriving back in Nigeria, he refuses to align with the oil company or the government. Rather, he seeks to understand his surroundings by associating with Pere and other members of his community. That he chooses to befriend Pere, an uneducated man, shows his desire to bridge the gap between the educated and uneducated classes. It is not a coincidence that the community decides to send a lobby team abroad shortly after the Activist’s return. Of course, he draws from his understanding of the West to assist the delegation in preparing their documents. Knowing the value of photographs as evidence in Europe and America, he encourages the people to ﬁnd a photographer and take color photographs that will be useful in the presentation of their case. Al Gedicks justiﬁes the kind of international lobbying effort planned by the Activist’s community when he writes that movements threatened by state violence shift their cause to the international scene where they align with “international environmental and human rights groups, exchanged information, shared resources, used the international media and exerted political leverage over multinational corporations, development-oriented states and multilateral development.”146 Moreover, the international lobbying supported by the Activist demonstrates Said’s point about universalizing the experience the intellectual is grappling with without losing its historical speciﬁcity. In Said’s view, “For the intellectual the task, I believe, is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered.”147 Following Said, then, the efforts of the delegation can be read as an effort to give a greater scope to sufferings in the Delta and to include the oil crisis among cases of environmental exploitation being pursued at the United Nations and in the international community more broadly. The Activist and the Delta delegation can be considered “rooted cosmopolitans,” deﬁned by Shalini Randeria as those activists who often transcend their locality and nation-state for alliances against the oppression of local communities everywhere. In Randeria’s words, “these rooted cosmopolitans often forge issue-based transnational alliances” to address the concerns of their constituencies.148 Whereas Piriye and Tonwe worked for newspapers, the Activist establishes one, having recognized the critical role of the media in social activism. With the help of his wife, Ebi, who resigns her position as an art lecturer to edit the newspaper, the Activist uses the outlet to push issues of interest in the Delta, a move similar to Piriye’s use of his articles to highlight the environmental challenges of the region. The newspaper

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becomes a public sphere for sensitizing people to the problems around them; the newspaper also becomes a technology for ecological thought even as it supports the Activist’s gubernatorial campaign. As the narrator describes it, “The newspaper was patriotic, pro-people, and for justice and fairness. As the readership increased, it became a daily without Saturday and Sunday editions.”149 One page later, the reader is informed that “the paper did not mind being called the champion of resource control. It showed in coloured and black-and-white photographs the damage done to the environment.”150 Said’s reﬂection on the alienation of the exiled intellectual is pertinent to my reading of the character of the Activist. For Said, “It is also very important to stress that the condition [of alienation] carries with it certain reward and, yes, even privileges.”151 The recollection of the Activist’s sojourn in America qualiﬁes as “alienated.” He remained in the margins of that society and did not ﬁnd fulﬁllment in either his teaching position at a poorly funded college or his romantic relationship there. But the experiences gathered from participating in environmental movements and following the democratic process in exile gave him an advantage on his return. The initial skepticism as to why someone would leave the United States to return to work in the troubled Delta soon gives way to respect and an eagerness to work with the Activist in the interest of the environment. Like Okolo, Tonwe, Piriye, and Bickerbug, he does not refuse to lend his talent to his people. Interestingly, the Activist transcends the role of the public intellectual when he contests and wins the gubernatorial election. While the intellectuals in the other novels shun political ofﬁces as Said suggests, the Activist’s entry into the electoral space as a candidate shows one way he complicates Said’s notion of the outsider role of the intellectual: In underlining the intellectual’s role as outsider I have had in mind how powerless one often feels in the face of an overwhelmingly powerful network of social authorities–the media, the government and corporations, etc.–who crowd out the possibilities for achieving any change. To deliberately not belong to these authorities is in many ways not to be able to effect direct change and, alas, even at times to be relegated to the role of witness who testiﬁes to a horror otherwise unrecorded.152

The Activist recognizes the limited opportunity for direct social impact available to him as a mere critic of the status quo and seeks an elective position to effect direct change. As the novel ends, there are inklings that the government of the former public intellectual is headed in the right direction toward ecological sustainability.

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Conclusion This chapter examined the question of environmental degradation and the forms of resistance against ecological ruin in three novels on the Niger Delta by Gabriel Okara, Isidore Okpewho, and Tanure Ojaide. While blowing up oil installations and bunkering are subversive acts pointing to human agency, as existing scholarship on these novels indicates, the challenge to which this chapter rises is to put pressure on these otherwise salutary acts of resistance by asking how they ﬁt with the need for ecological sustainability. These texts invite a conversation about the environmental impacts of sabotage while not losing sight of their critical role in a country where the government tends to understand mainly (if not only) the language of force. The narratives insist that the interest of the larger ecological system needs to be at the forefront of all struggles. While the emphasis on agency and resistance in postcolonial studies remains important, the ecocritical perspective emphasized in this chapter illuminates the need for ecological appraisals of resistant strategies. Given contemporary concerns over global warming and climate change, postcolonial studies ought to reassess those actions hitherto applauded for demonstrating the agency of the oppressed to ensure they are cognizant of nonhuman interests. If Tim Morton succeeds in elucidating the contours of his ecological thought, the novels studied here extend his work by translating that thought into practical forms relevant for the postcolonial Delta context. In Tides, we see an emphasis on a public sphere where ecological survival matters. Furthermore, The Activist contends that the role of the intellectual transcends critiquing the status quo and overseeing the public sphere like Bickerbug did in prison; the Activist’s gubernatorial ambition and his eventual election as governor recommend that the intellectual run for ofﬁce to steer positive change. Unlike Tides, which ends on a less optimistic note, The Activist closes on a more promising note with the intellectual-turned-governor creating a special ministry to address the environmental challenges facing the region. These novels signal that the intellectual has a critical role to play in the social restructuring of the Delta environment and cannot afford to be missing from the public sphere of progressive conversation about the future of the region. Whether intellectuals serve as social gadﬂy or politician, these narratives insist that their participation is crucial if the Niger Delta crisis is not to degenerate into the kind of full-blown war that we saw in the Somalia of Chapter 2.

4

Resistance from the Ground: Agriculture, Gender, and Manual Labor

In the previous chapter, I discussed the contradictions of bombing oil installations and bunkering as strategies of resistance in literary texts focusing on the Niger Delta. I argued that despite the good intentions of the actors, these resistance strategies are complicit in ecological devastation. It bears repeating that although certain forms of resistance in the Delta interrupt the activities of the multinational corporations, this in no way justiﬁes neglecting the ecological implications of such activism unless one assumes that human interests should always take priority. In the spirit of an ecocriticism attentive to ecological survival, it is pertinent to interrogate the contradictions implicit in resistance strategies (whether they concern themselves with environmentalism or not) and to engage with alternative forms of resistance that circumvent the ecological drawbacks associated with sabotaging oil facilities. The present chapter extends the analysis of resistance in the previous one by focusing on those oppositional practices connected to the “ground.” Whereas the previous chapter examined the question of resistance in the context of Niger Delta petroliterature, this chapter takes up what I describe as “resistance from the ground” within the ambit of narratives focusing on agricultural practices, including Wangari Maathai’s memoir Unbowed,1 Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather,2 and J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K.3 Why bring together a 2006 nonﬁction memoir by a Kenyan female scientist with the novels of Bessie Head and J. M. Coetzee, the former a social realist writer of the 1960s and the latter a writer of the postmodern trend of the 1980s? The many differences among these writers notwithstanding, their investment in agricultural practices can be read as an oppositional strategy. My claim is that land cultivation is portrayed as an alternative to the destruction that patriarchal systems enact in all three narratives. I am not positing a rigid dichotomy separating peaceful, nurturing women from destructive men. The narratives resist such simple categorization by promoting a notion of collectivity where like-minded men and women work together for their common interests. Yet all three narratives portray agricultural activities directly linked to women even 126

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when men are involved, just as the various forms of oppression are connected to traditional patriarchal structures–the state and traditional authorities, to be precise. Resistance from the ground denotes two kinds of oppositional practice. The ﬁrst comprises those actual agricultural practices tied to the land/ ground. In this instance, I concentrate on the ways that farming, gardening, afforestation practices, and similar land-use measures constitute resistance to hegemonic, patriarchal, and other oppressive strictures. Take the example of tree planting, which Maathai assiduously champions in Unbowed as a challenge to the oppressive structures of postindependence Kenya where the leaders destroy forest resources and impoverish the human population in the name of development. Planting trees in this context to combat deforestation and to enrich the lives of the masses serves as a counterweight to the government’s agenda. As we will see in the analysis of the narratives that follows, the resistance enacted in this ﬁrst kind is subtler in comparison to the second form of resistance, which entails grassroots mobilization and efforts that directly challenge the status quo. Examples of the second form include Maathai’s mobilization of the masses to participate in the democratic processes that ultimately ousted the rapacious Daniel arap Moi’s government in Kenya and, in Head’s novel, the protest of the people of Golema Mmidi against their Chief Matenge when they besieged his residence to register their displeasure at his high-handedness. Operation Plant a Tree: Maathai, Ecofeminism, and Kenya’s Threatened Landscapes Maathai’s memoir is a remarkable text for understanding resistance from the ground given her unique experiences and the role of the environment in Kenya’s complex history. Maathai was born about ten years before the famous Mau Mau Rebellion against colonialism in Kenya. As a child growing up in rural Kenya, she was literally bred on the ground. The introductory pages of her memoir chronicle the impact of her mother’s farming endeavors on the young Maathai and how her mother’s injunction “Don’t idle around during the rains, plant something” steers her toward the environment.4 It should be recalled that the ritual marking her birth also symbolizes a tethering to the land, the source of life and replenishment.5 Maathai writes of how the ﬁrst meal served to her and any other child born of Kikuyu ancestry is prepared from the fruits of the land. Together, this ritual and her mother’s injunction to plant orient the young woman’s interest in her environment. Of course, these practices put emphasis on the interconnection between humans and their

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environment. What emerges in Unbowed then is a movement whose resistance is shaped by indigenous environmental practices and rural women who worked to actualize its objectives. While scholarship on Maathai’s memoir has focused primarily on her work and experiences with the Green Belt Movement (GBM), my discussion of the memoir will discuss the movement’s work as resistance from the ground but also the grassroots inﬂuences that lead to its success.6 These include indigenous environmental practices and Maathai’s mother who inculcated those environmental values in her as well as the broader masses of women who planted and nurtured the trees that formed the backbone of GBM’s work. Maathai’s work with the GBM falls within the purview of ecofeminism, which Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy deﬁne as “a practical movement for social change arising out of the struggles of women to sustain themselves, their families, and their communities.” The struggles here are pitted against “environmental degradation caused by patriarchal societies, multinational corporations, and global capitalism” in order to bring about “environmental balance, heterarchical and matrifocal societies, the continuance of indigenous cultures, and economic values and programs based on subsistence and sustainability.”7 Ecofeminism foregrounds the concerns of women and the exploitation of the environment by patriarchal and capitalist structures. However, this parallel must not be reduced to a simple equivalence between women and nature. Gaard has explained that “poststructuralist and other third-wave feminisms portrayed all ecofeminisms as an exclusively essentialist equation of women with nature, discrediting ecofeminism’s diversity of arguments and standpoints.”8 This essentialist conﬂation is problematic because it “can undermine ecofeminism’s potential for subverting dominant ideologies.”9 Armbruster holds this view “because the erasure of difference within the category ‘women and nature’ simply displaces difference elsewhere, where it often serves to reinforce dualism and hierarchy.”10 She insists on the importance of a more complex, nuanced analysis of the relationship between the exploitation of women and the environment. Armbruster’s careful deconstruction of ecofeminist essentialism echoes Spivak’s critique of the idea of homogeneous women, women of color, or Third World women and her insistence on difference based on notions of race, class, and gender in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.11 Many scholars who work at the intersection of environmentalism and feminism have avoided ecofeminism for the aforementioned essentialist risk. Bina Agarwal, for example, prefers “feminist environmentalism” to describe her framework.12 Agarwal’s work is sensitive to the locational dynamics and the need for speciﬁcity that Spivak is concerned about. For her, “the processes of environmental degradation and appropriation of

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natural resources by a few have speciﬁc class-gender as well as locational differences.” Agarwal argues that “‘[w]omen’ therefore cannot be posited . . . as a unitary category, even within a country, let alone across the Third World or globally.”13 This passage is remarkably Spivakian in its deconstruction of the singular idea of womanhood and insistence on speciﬁcity and that environmental degradation intersects with issues of class, gender, and race. The speciﬁcity emphasized by Spivak, Agarwal, and other feminist scholars is an incontestable quality of the work of Maathai in Unbowed. The Nobel Prize winner very early in her career recognized the critical point being made in the present book: the fact that we cannot separate environmental health from good governance and the welfare of the citizenry in a postcolonial context like Kenya’s. As such, her lifework was devoted to a form of resistance grounded in planting trees and grassroots mobilizing, acts that are exemplary of a bottom-up model of resistance. Maathai’s approach differs from the violent inclination of the Mau Mau insurrectionary group, whose activities nonetheless facilitated Kenya’s independence. Like Maathai, these young revolutionaries also had connections to the environment, to Kenya’s forests and woodlands, speciﬁcally. As a group emerging after World War II, it made sense that some of the ﬁghters were war veterans who had fought on the British side in the war, many of whom were neglected after the conﬂict. The war’s end also saw the displacement of those veterans whose lands in Kenya had been appropriated for use by white settlers. Driven by the quest for freedom and the right to lands from which the Kenyans were being displaced, especially in the Highlands, these revolutionaries joined likeminded people to form a movement that succeeded in hastening the arrival of independence in Kenya. Evan Mwangi captures the popularity of the movement across ethnic lines when he explains that although most of its membership was drawn from the Kikuyu ethnic group, the Mau Mau movement also attracted “nationwide support among indigenous Kenyans in the 1950s because of its opposition to colonialism.”14 Yet the movement was not wholly understood or accepted as a legitimate expression of Kenyan nationalism. As Daniel Branch puts it, the “war did not simply pit oppressive British forces against noble Kenyan nationalist rebels.”15 The British counterinsurgency effort was supported by loyalist forces made up of Kikuyus who fought against the Mau Mau. Moreover, even among Kenyan nationalists and postindependence elites, one can see an aversion to Mau Mau politics.16 To actualize their ambition, the Mau Mau ﬁghters found solace in the forest, which offered refuge during this turbulent era of Kenya’s history.

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The forest provided food for these ﬁghters, but its difﬁcult terrain also made it inaccessible to the British soldiers ﬁghting the rebels. As such, the forest became a home for the ﬁghters where they strategized, from which they launched attacks, and to which they returned for refuge. Writing on the important role of the forest for the movement’s guerrilla warfare, Wunyabari Maloba contends that entering the forest showed a commitment to ﬁght and acceptance of the safety afforded by its environment.17 The forest and wooded areas also served as shelter for more than just the rebels during the insurrection. As Maathai admits in her memoir, she and other girls were safely lodged away in the wooded area when the Mau Mau insurgents, notorious for abducting young women, raided their communities. Whether for the Mau Mau or for other members of the community like Maathai, the forest served as a source of food and energy and as refuge against aggression. It is not an understatement to acknowledge the signiﬁcant role that forests played in Kenya’s political history and in shaping people like Maathai whose lifework and career manifest the reciprocity between people and their environment. In describing the environment of her childhood, Maathai vividly paints a biodiverse Kenya with forests, hills, rivers, mountains, plants, and animals. In fact, the Kenyan environment seen here exempliﬁes the characteristics of proximity outlined in Chapter 1, including the portrayal of multispecies presence and intimate relationships between the human and the nonhuman. The proximity is characterized by respect for biodiversity and human recognition of the sustaining capacity of the nonhuman. Maathai explains well these interconnections in the following words: “The reverence the communities had for the ﬁg tree helped to preserve the stream and the tadpoles that so captivated me. The trees also held the soil together, reducing erosion and landslides. In such ways, without conscious or deliberate effort, these cultural and spiritual practices contributed to the conservation of biodiversity.”18 In this way, the activist and politician underscores the basis of indigenous environmental knowledge and its relevance for ecological well-being. The world that Maathai depicts is one where the nonhuman aspects inspire humans and the latter are very aware of such impacts. As we will see later when I discuss the grassroots source of her environmental activism, Maathai acknowledges indigenous practices as critical to her lifework as an environmentalist. By doing so early in the text, Maathai forestalls the possibility of eliding local wisdom and attributing her success entirely to Western practices gleaned from time studying in the United States and Germany. The foregoing background information is equally relevant for understanding the environmental changes that the rise of colonial and postcolonial modernity brought about in Maathai’s environment and that

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formed the impetus for her lifework of resisting environmental exploitation and bad governance. As she describes early in the narrative, “[a]t about this time, something profound started happening in the hitherto pristine Aberdare forest. The colonial government had decided to encroach into the forest and establish commercial plantations of nonnative trees. I remember seeing huge bonﬁres as the natural forests went up in smoke . . . These trees grew fast and strong and contributed to the development of the newly emerging timber and building industry.”19 It is worth noting that the environmental change coincides with the beginning of Maathai’s robust planting campaign. As Maathai begins to plant following her mother’s injunction, she also witnesses the indiscriminate exploitation of forest resources to lubricate the colonial machine. The importance of trees and forest for ecological balance should already be clear enough that it needs no belaboring here, other than to point out that colonial practices laid the groundwork for the postindependence exploitation of environmental resources that Maathai fought against under the umbrella of the GBM. It is to her method of resistance that the discussion will now turn. In explicating the rationale for the GBM, Maathai writes: Now it is one thing to understand the issues. It is quite another to do something about them. But I have always been interested in ﬁnding solutions . . . it just came to me: ‘Why not plant trees?’ The trees would provide a supply of wood that would enable women to cook nutritious foods. They would also have wood for fencing and fodder for cattle and goats. The trees would offer shade for humans and animals, protect watersheds and bind the soil, and if they were fruit trees, provide food. They would also heal the land by bringing back birds and small animals and regenerate the vitality of the earth.20

Maathai is referring to deforestation alongside other large-scale agricultural practices detrimental to the environment and linked to malnutrition and poverty in Kenya’s rural communities. In responding to these ecological challenges, Maathai did not take up arms against the exploiters; nor did she hug trees as done by the popular Chipko movement in India. Rather, her answer lay in planting more trees. In doing so she deﬁes the status quo–that is, the capitalist establishment in cahoots with the government keen on advancing the personal and political interests of the few to the detriment of the majority and the environment. The GBM succeeded in planting millions of trees, thereby countering the activities of the exploiters. Despite the initial disappointments and discouragements even from her then husband, Mwangi Mathai, she remains determined to make her world a better place. Looking at the broader effects of her tree-planting activities, one sees an effort not only to resist

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exploitation but also to improve the lives of her community–both the human and the nonhuman aspects of it. The trees would check malnutrition in community by providing food and empowering the women to provide for their families. Afforestation would also increase biodiversity as it makes shelter available for different species. The soil’s vitality is guaranteed as well in the absence of erosion. Overall, Maathai’s solution to the problem is one that counters the antics of the environmental exploiters. As a counterpractice, tree planting foils the efforts of the government and business interests even as it promotes the health of the environment, including that of the people typically on the losing side in postindependence Kenya. As trees are felled, seedlings go into the ground and ultimately grow to replace those fallen, thereby frustrating the ambitions of the destroyers. Moreover, Maathai’s GBM, by its practices, is reclaiming public spaces and refusing to concede to the exploitative mindset that results in deforestation. If the soil/land is always linked to the nation, as we see in evocations of motherland and fatherland, planting or nurturing the soil can be read as a means of repairing or nurturing a nation being bled by its rapacious rulers. Resistance from the ground is also ostensible in the GBM’s mobilization against the ultramodern complex to be built at Uhuru Park and the planned development of Karura Forest. Regarding the latter, Maathai writes that “for me, the destruction of Karura forest, like the malnourished women in the 1970s, the Times complex in Uhuru Park, and the political prisoners detained without trial, were problems that needed to be solved, and the authorities were stopping me from ﬁnding a solution.”21 The passage departs from the tendency to focus mainly on sociopolitical issues emanating from the postindependence African state as if those nationalist, political concerns can be divorced from feminist or environmental problems. It is a remarkable characteristic of this passage, in which Maathai establishes one of the conﬂicts to which she devoted her lifework, that she considers the destruction of the environment, the poverty of women, and the repression of the Daniel arap Moi regime as all-important and deserving attention. There is no seeming prioritization of any of these problems; rather, she demonstrates the link between the oppression of the people and their environment. Maathai’s contribution to the solution of this crisis is also based on an ecological vision, aimed at the sustainability of the larger ecosystem. The activist’s choice of planting trees is strategic. Where the government and its cronies are bent on privatizing the forest for the purposes of political patronage, Maathai recognizes the potential of afforestation as a strategy for nonviolent demonstration, as a vehicle for empowering women, and as a veritable means for nourishing the nonhuman

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components of the environment, including animals, plants, and water. Even when the main entrance is blocked, Maathai and other protesters still ﬁnd their way into the forest. When they are accosted and asked to leave by the police, Maathai insists on staying, reminding the ofﬁcers that she only wants to plant trees, a harmless act. Although the trees in the forest are earmarked for destruction, this does not discourage her from patiently planting her seedlings and drawing water with the help of the police to nourish the trees. And when she and other protesters are later molested by thugs at the forest gate, her celebrity status draws attention to the exploitation at work. The “unsavory government behavior,” as Ellen W. Gorsevski puts it, consists of the decimation of the forest but also the brutalization of women including Maathai, who signed her police statement with blood from injuries to her head.22 Unsurprisingly, the local and international outrage following the event at Karura Public Forest is sufﬁcient to quash the planned transformation of the forest into luxurious buildings and golf courses for the Kenyan elite. By planting trees and exposing themselves to bodily harm in Karura, Maathai and the protesters save the forest, the only one of its kind left in Nairobi, both for the present sustenance it provides and as heritage for the future.23 The resistance against the development of Uhuru Park is even more signiﬁcant given that the space connotes the independence, freedom, and liberation of the Kenyan people–a liberation that the environment played a critical role in bringing about, recalling the activities of the Mau Mau discussed earlier. Interestingly, Moi’s government choose this space for the ultramodern ediﬁce that would eloquently announce Nairobi’s involvement in the project of modernity. In her campaign against the project and in support of the park, Maathai reminds the government and citizens of the importance of preserving such a treasure. Maathai and her people plant seven trees in the park to celebrate the heroes of Kenya drawn from the different ethnic groups. While the government’s divide-and-rule tactics inherited from the colonial era succeeded in creating tensions among the ethnic groups, the GBM’s counterpractice, consisting of planting trees, authenticates the value of nature and its transformative effects. Moreover, the tree-planting exercise contradicts the divide-and-rule tactics of the government with the celebration of heroes drawn from across Kenya’s multiple ethnicities. In celebrating the diversity of Kenya and the contributions that the separate ethnic groups have made to nation building, the seven trees suggest that ethnic considerations be subordinated to national ones. There is also a sense of wholeness or completeness that the number seven connotes. In honoring seven heroes with seven trees, our heroine, Maathai, may also be indicating the

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incompleteness of each ethnic group on its own and how completion and wholeness can only be attained by the togetherness that the trees represent. Maathai reafﬁrms the unity symbolism of the trees when she encourages the warring parties to plant trees in the Rift Valley where government policies have once again stoked ethnic crises. The invitation to the warring parties to plant seeds together or to provide seedlings to their supposed enemies becomes an opportunity for reconciliation and unity, even if only symbolically. So far I have shown how tree planting constitutes a counterpractice to oppressive governance in post-independent Kenya; in what follows, I demonstrate that Maathai’s grassroots mobilization and emphasis on personal and communal responsibility reveal other methods of resistance from the ground portrayed in Unbowed. Raymond Oenbring’s suggestion that tree planting, in Maathai’s vision, inspires the people “to engage in broader progressive action” is insightful for understanding that this activity is only one component of her investment in the idea of a well-rounded citizenry committed to social transformation.24 Maathai’s grassroots mobilization efforts are indicative of how she successfully connects deforestation to larger political issues and the need for personal responsibility. Thus at a meeting where the participants are quick to point accusing ﬁngers at the government for their problems, Maathai seems to deploy the proverbial saying that when you point a ﬁnger at someone, the other ﬁngers point at you. In a speech that stresses personal responsibility, she states: However, I felt strongly that people needed to understand that the government was not the only culprit. Citizens, too, played a part in the problems the communities identiﬁed. One way was by not standing up for what they strongly believed in and demanding that the government provide it. Another was that people did not protect what they themselves had. “It is your land,” I said. “You own it, but you are not taking care of it. You’re allowing soil erosion to take place and you could do something about it. You could plant trees.”25

In addition to encouraging the community to care for the environment and plant trees to control erosion, Maathai insists that the masses serve as vigilant citizens ready to make their government accountable to them. Maathai’s advice is revolutionary given the autocratic bent of the government described throughout her book. Politically motivated assassinations of politicians and activists as well as illegal arrests were prevalent during these times. Maathai herself is not spared the humiliation of arrest and detention several times. Yet in her advice to the people she emphasizes that only they can check Moi’s dictatorial tendencies. By reminding them of their power she is pushing for a grassroots resistance movement that can challenge the status quo based on democratic principles.

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Given her mission to conjoin environmental issues with democratic tenets, it came as no surprise that the GBM aligned with other political and pressure groups canvassing for multiparty democracy in Kenya. Of this alignment, which he describes as an example of “intersectional environmentalism,” Nixon has suggested that partnerships with different civil groups enabled the GBM to broaden “their base and credibility.”26 Maathai recognizes that it will take more than planting trees to thwart the ruthless tenacity of the postcolonial state and its allies. The GBM, therefore, “joined others in carrying out prodemocracy activities such as registering voters for the election and pressing for constitutional reforms and political space to ensure freedom of thought and expression.”27 Drawing on a grassroots mechanism hitherto established for planting trees, the GBM mobilized, from the ground up, a critical mass ready to demand and make use of their rights as citizens to push for a progressive Kenyan society. Maathai captures this resistant spirit more clearly when she informs the reader that “in this way, the GBM was not only an environmental, women’s, and human rights movement, but also part of the broader movement for democracy.”28 The GBM stands out as a movement that succeeded in checking the destruction of forest resources without ﬁring a shot but by planting trees and mobilizing the masses to reject the sale of their national treasures. The GBM also used its established platform to mobilize people to recognize and deploy the powers of citizenship in the quest for a better, livable Kenya where human and environmental rights are interlinked and seriously protected. Although multiparty democracy did not return to Kenya until 2002 when President Kibaki was elected to ofﬁce and Maathai herself was voted into parliament, the enduring work of the GBM in conjunction with other interested parties paved the way for this democratic moment. And it is a testament to the remarkable vision of Maathai and the value of her form of resistance, one founded on peace and nonviolence, that the Nobel Committee awarded her its Peace Prize in 2004, the ﬁrst time an environmentalist was recognized with such a prestigious award. In doing so, the Oslo-based committee conﬁrmed the point being made here: that Maathai’s strategies of resistance are critical to the attainment of peace in Kenya and capable of inspiring peaceful movements across the globe. The crises across ethnic lines that followed the 2007 Kenyan elections, which led to the loss of lives and property, reveal the high costs of deploying violence to resolve social conﬂicts. The 2007 tragedy suggests that we should more deeply appreciate the roles of groups like the GBM in maintaining peace when they can.

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One crucial component of Maathai’s memoir that is yet to be sufﬁciently addressed in its scholarship is the primary source of her environmental vision. In the rest of the section, I want to suggest that taken together, the activities of the GBM showcase the inﬂuence of indigenous environmental knowledge and the important role of rural women in the group’s subversive practices. Commenting on Maathai’s portrayal of indigenous environmental knowledge in her memoir, CamineroSantangelo observes an idealized representation of a harmonious relationship with nature that hurts the possibility of seriously addressing the complex environmental issues confronting Kenya.29 We can take this critic’s point seriously and also recognize the strategic essentialism at work in Maathai’s description. As I argue in the Introduction, indigenous environmental beliefs positioning the human in relation to the environment should be taken seriously even if those communities do not always live according to the dictates of their mores. Foregrounding the indigenous source of Maathai’s environmental vision is imperative for at least two reasons. First, it gives credit where it is due and highlights the important role that such indigenous environmental practices have played (and can still play) in the ﬁght against climate change. Moreover, this recognition makes it difﬁcult to trace the GBM’s work to Western practices Maathai discovered during her academic sojourn in the United States and Germany, as is the case of the late Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Saro-Wiwa’s environmentalism is often traced to his visit to the United States, ignoring the fact that he was already ﬁghting for a liveable Ogoni environment before this trip. My point is that Maathai’s recollection of indigenous environmental practices from her childhood discloses a grassroots source of her resistance. As she recollects her mother’s injunction to plant, the older woman’s instruction on animal behavior, the proper treatment of land, and the interconnection of these environmental components with humans, Maathai notes that these “were the experiences that made me feel very close to the land and appreciate the beauty of the environment.”30 The memoirist is pointing to local practices as the impetus of her lifework, which means that the resistance of the GBM outlined earlier emanates from the grounds of her Kikuyu upbringing. Like the case of Saro-Wiwa, Maathai’s education and global travel might have reﬁned her philosophy and its translation into the GBM, but paying attention to her description of her childhood suggests that we locate her environmental vision there. As she tells us in her memoir, “experiences of childhood are what mold us and make us who we are.”31 The rural women who translated the GBM’s philosophy into praxis also drew from indigenous environmental knowledge and practices, “the

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wisdom of my people,” as Maathai describes it. Although her memoir foregrounds the ﬁrst person “I,” as the genre often demands, the book creates the space to see the ways the rural women demonstrated their agency. Maathai’s text conﬁrms Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s point that although “testimonies may not use a ‘we,’ they speak on behalf of, and at times, through, multiple voices.”32 The collective or multiplicity here is the membership of the GBM without whom Maathai’s achievements would have remained a dream. It is the determination of the members to be “foresters without diplomas,” to quote the title of one of Maathai’s chapters, that leads to the successful implementation of the program. As the foresters’ plan to teach the women the science of tree planting fails, Maathai realizes that, like her, these women were bred on the ground and have been planting crops for most of their lives. She then encourages them to draw on their knowledge of the soil to plant trees. This works. It is they, like the women we will encounter in Head’s novel later, who planted across the nation; they are also the ones who talked to the participants at the conference marking the conclusion of the Decade for Women in Nairobi in 1985.33 The women’s ability to share their work with the conference participants also instantiates another form of resistance from the ground. The activities of the women, as Caminero-Santangelo has noted, undermines “the gendered conﬁguration of the nation, the family, and the nation-asfamily.”34 In a Kenyan society where women are to be seen but not heard, in a society where Maathai was chastised and excoriated for not being a good woman in the patriarchal sense, the ordinary women utilize a public platform to regale the participants with stories of their achievements and offer a view of development or progress from below. By their actions, these women push forward a vision of nationhood premised on planting trees as well as civic engagement. The women’s activities buttress Anne McClintock’s point that “progressive nationalism” is nationalism that seriously includes women and recognizes their contributions to nation building.35 Without the women, Maathai’s GBM dream would have ﬁzzled out. Without them, the millions of trees planted across the nation would have been impossible. But most importantly, without them, there would have been no Wangari Maathai, the Nobel Prize winner who gave us Unbowed. Tearing the Patriarchal Veil: Head’s Botswana and Its Agricultural Ecologies While East Africa’s Kenya is the main setting of Maathai’s memoir, Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather begins with a man hiding in a hut by the

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South Africa-Botswana border. The man, Makhaya, sneaks into Botswana in the middle of night, and later we ﬁnd out that he has just been released from a South African prison, where he was jailed for having in his pocket a paper declaring his intention to bomb certain installations. Makhaya ﬂees into Botswana because “he could not marry and have children in a country where black men were called ‘boy’ and ‘dog’ and ‘kafﬁr.’”36 Many South Africans, including Head herself, found refuge in landlocked Botswana when they ﬂed the apartheid regime because the country was free from the white settler rule that also predominated neighboring Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and Namibia. Initially a British colony, Botswana gained independence in 1966. In Botswana, Makhaya meets Gilbert, a British agricultural volunteer, who has come to apply his agricultural expertise to the arid land of Botswana. Makhaya teams up with Gilbert to improve the agricultural and economic fortunes of Golema Mmidi. As the narrator tells us, “Golema Mmidi acquired its name from the occupation the villagers followed, which was crop growing. It was one of the very few areas in the country where people were permanently settled on the land.”37 Through a people-oriented agricultural cooperative similar to that in Head’s other novel, A Question of Power, Makhaya, Gilbert, Paulina, Mma-Millipede, and other members of the community develop a progressive society different from the South African apartheid system from which Makhaya has escaped. As the novel ends, we see a society rid of the scheming Chief Matenge, who attempts to frustrate the developmental strides of his community for personal gain. Critics of the novel have focused on what Huma Ibrahim describes as its “exilic consciousness.” For Ibrahim, Head’s “notion of exilic consciousness includes an escape from systems of oppression that give rise to desires which encompass the sphere of belonging not to your own but to another people.”38 Ibrahim emphasizes Head’s preference for freedom, liberty, and progress over the constrictions of ethnicity, nation, and race. Exploring the novel’s exilic consciousness further, Coreen Brown argues that “it is only within the new freedom offered by the exile experience that past traumas can be rejected and a new society fashioned in which cultural and racial diversity holds the key to harmony and cohesion.”39 For Nixon, the violence and exclusions associated with the nation-state as Head knows them in South Africa are responsible for her advocacy of a “rural transnationalism.”40 There have also been critiques of Head’s preference for the foreign, external, or colonial in her representation of progress in Golema Mmidi. For Jonathan Highﬁeld, “while Head provides a detailed and empathetic portrayal of women’s roles in the growing of foodstuffs and the creation of

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food, her discussion of agriculture in her adopted country underemphasizes the extent to which colonialism and imported agricultural practice affected the foodways in Southern Africa.”41 He adds that with her preference for imported European knowledge as represented by Gilbert in When Rain Clouds Gather, “Head misses the importance of local knowledge in the advancement of agriculture and the alleviation of poverty in the region.”42 Similarly, Caminero-Santangelo, in Different Shades of Green, contends that “Head’s depiction of Gilbert reinforces many of the assumptions underpinning hegemonic colonial conservation.”43 He notes that while Gilbert’s scientiﬁc expertise and knowledge of the local geography are key for progress in the community, “local people and culture are represented as ecologically ignorant and destructive. Their consciousness is determined by custom and by the local environment to such an extent that they cannot, on their own, foster the proper objectivity and perspective that will enable sustainable development.”44 Although the novel is invested in ideas of modernity and progress, it is obvious that Highﬁeld’s and Caminero-Santangelo’s critiques lapse into the either/or category. The either/or manifests itself in the indigenous/ imported and tradition/modernity paradigms within which these critics couch their readings. The problem is that these critics do not separate modernity from colonialism, which means that as Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò explains elsewhere, it becomes difﬁcult to embrace change without “being dubbed colonialists or allies of the colonialists.”45 In Táíwò’s book, the failure to make the crucial distinction results in “the false tradition-versus-modernity dichotomy whereby Africans were traditionalists and all modernizers were colonialists.”46 To be sure, African traditions have always been dynamic in that they are mutable and open to change. The character Dinorego in Head’s novel in fact captures this dynamism when he tells Makhaya: “A Batswana man thinks like this: ‘If there is a way to improve my life, I shall do it.’”47 Dinorego’s statement, like his acceptance of both Gilbert and Makhaya–foreigners in the land–is indicative of a propensity to embrace change as far as it is in their best interests. The modern agricultural practices introduced in the novel complement rather than displace the indigenous cattle-rearing and farming methods. Gilbert does not encourage entirely jettisoning cattle rearing and other traditional practices, unlike the capitalist Charlie in Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing, who encourages his neighbor, Dick, to focus exclusively on cash crops such as tobacco.48 To the contrary, Gilbert promotes a more sustainable approach to cattle rearing. The insight of his position is clear from the impact of the drought in the novel. As their cattle, the community’s mainstay, die off, a certain gloom pervades the

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environment. Agricultural diversiﬁcation and the dam project, rather than functioning as replacement for traditional practices, complement them to mitigate the impact of droughts. The introduction of modern technology to enhance efﬁciency and productivity is laudable from a developmental perspective and brings about a mixing of tradition with the so-called modern or foreign elements. It is the changes brought about in Golema Mmidi by this intermixing to which I now turn because they illuminate varieties of resistance from the ground. Perhaps there is no better place to start than the beginning of the novel where we see Makhaya waiting for darkness to cross into Botswana from apartheid South Africa. While he waits for the right time to cross the border, he brings out a piece of paper, which he burns. A few pages later we learn that he had been imprisoned for carrying in his pocket a paper with the threat to commit arson. In burning the unidentiﬁed paper as the novel opens, Makhaya is rejecting arson and the violence it can constitute not only for the oppressors but also for innocent humans and the broader environment. As the paper burns, the violent idea it represents melts into oblivion. In the place of violence, he embraces other forms of resistance: ﬂeeing from the watch of the South African state and cultivating the land in Botswana. As he waits patiently for the opportune moment to make his crossing, Makhaya studies the patrol times in order to successfully evade capture by the apartheid state. Makhaya’s escape undermines the conﬁnes of the South African state like Michael K’s in Coetzee’s novel discussed later while showing the limits of power, which is never absolute and remains permeable to inﬁltration and subversion. Once in Botswana, Makhaya ﬁnds himself in Golema Mmidi, a community undergoing transformation. Chief Matenge is a cog in development’s wheel because his interests lie in self-preservation without concern for the people. Golema Mmidi is also a society dependent on agriculture, yet yields have remained poor due to climatic conditions and the use of outdated equipment and practices. In seeking change in Golema Mmidi, Gilbert recognizes that his revolutionary ideas need to make sense to the people to work. He comes to the realization that a topdown model is incongruent with the progress he hopes to achieve: “Three years of uphill battling had already made clear to him his own limitations in putting his ideas across to people, and he had also learned that change, if it was to take place at all, would in some way have to follow the natural course of people’s lives rather than impose itself in a sudden and dramatic way from on top.”49 Like Maathai in the preceding Kenyan case, Gilbert realizes that his project would have to adapt to the needs and beliefs of the local people and not vice versa. This

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realization is captured in his analysis of gender roles in his community and their possible impact on his project: He felt that he had stumbled on to one of the major blockages to agricultural progress in the country. The women were the traditional tillers of the earth, not the men. The women were the backbone of agriculture while the men on the whole were cattle drovers. But when it came to programmes for improved techniques in agriculture, soil conservation, the use of pesticides and fertilizers, and the production of cash crops, the lecture rooms were open to men only. Why give training to a section of the population who may never use it but continue to leave it to their wives to erode the soil by unsound agricultural practices? Why start talking about development and food production without taking into account who is really producing the food?50

Gilbert is gesturing here to traditional practices that keep women invisible even when they are the major food producers, procreators, and caregivers. The role of Tswana women, as Barbara Harlow submits, “had consisted in acceptance of prolonged and arduous labor” and total submission to their husbands.51 Working with Makhaya and the women, Gilbert challenges patriarchy by involving women in decision-making processes and the business of wealth creation. Recognizing the importance of women allies, Gilbert and Makhaya enlist the support of Mma-Millipede and Paulina. As the novel progresses, the women move from being silent, submissive tillers of the earth to become partners in a commercial agricultural economy involving cash crop production, controlled cattle rearing, and food production. If they are hardly visible (except Maria) when the novel begins, they have become active participants in their social constitution when the novel ends. The reader witnesses an instance of the women’s transformation at one of their meetings with Makhaya. The narrator explains: “The small group of women, including Paulina, at ﬁrst felt a little inhibited. They were unaccustomed to a man speaking to them as an equal. They stood back awhile with uneasy expressions but once it struck them that he paid no attention to them as women, they also forgot he was a man and became absorbed in following his explanations.”52 The narrator is describing women moored in a tradition where they are considered unequal and inferior to the men. But as the meeting progresses, the male-dominated hierarchy is undermined as both parties interact freely. And as they later work together, the women are amazed that the educated, male Makhaya works “side by side” with them.53 The novel’s choice of words is signiﬁcant because side by side emphasizes complementarity in ways that ahead, before, or behind do not. The passage inscribes a movement from inequality to complementarity even as it

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creates vistas for economic advancement. As the women listen to Makhaya explain the opportunities that tobacco would bring them, we see an effort to convince them, to enlist their support as against the colonial, patriarchal attitude of unilateral (male) decision-making. As the women listen, they are attracted to the opportunities for advancement that the soil provides. Paulina speaks for them when she says that the “women will grow it [tobacco] as they have never worked for money before, and we Batswana like money.”54 If planting trees challenges the patriarchal status quo in Maathai’s work, the growing of cash crops and other agricultural practices provide the means for challenging patriarchy in Head’s novel. As the women meet and work with Makhaya, they get the opportunity they lacked in the past, an opportunity to take part in public discourses about matters affecting them. At ﬁrst, Head’s women typify “a proper woman, in the African tradition,” as Florence Ebila describes the patriarchal expectation of women. A proper woman, according to Ebila, is “one imagined to exist within an ideal Africa” who is “expected to mother the children and household.”55 The proper woman is deﬁned by domesticity, is conﬁned to the household, and contributes little to the public sphere even regarding issues that primarily affect her. But as the women are brought into the money economy later in Head’s novel, they are empowered like the Kenyan women that Maathai worked with. They can support their family with the money they earn while furthering the independence engendered by the cooperative society, an empowering grassroots mobilization mechanism similar to the GBM in Maathai’s Kenya. If the nature of resistance described so far has been primarily human, Head’s novel also instantiates an actual resistance from the ground. As a community of agriculturalists, Golema Mmidi depends on the land for sustenance. But as the drought worsens, the land becomes sterile and therefore cannot support the needs of the people and of the cattle. A sense of the destruction caused by the drought is seen when Makhaya, Gilbert, and Paulina drive to the outpost in search of Paulina’s son tending the cattle there: They were always after something, these lovely birds, and she [Paulina] had always kept corn seed in the pocket of her skirt to scatter along the pathway. Now, the vultures, full and gorged, adorned the bare trees, and beneath their resting places lay the white, picked bones of the dead cattle. Those in the trees stared arrogantly at the passing vehicle, and those on the ground merely waddled out of the way. They were the kings of the bush and would remain so throughout this long year of no rain and no crops.56

The novel contrasts Paulina’s previous visits to the outpost with the present. In the past, “lovely birds” don her paths and she drops corn

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seed on her way. The presence of vultures, similar to those in the Somali landscapes in Chapter 2, foreshadows the dead cattle and the decomposing corpse of Paulina’s son. Even the tree, described as “bare,” is not left out of the devastation. As they drive on, the land has become dry and littered with more carcasses, including Paulina’s cattle: “Long before they reached Paulina’s cattle post they saw the vultures circling above it in the sky. This marked it out right away as one of the death points. Once they drew close, they could see that not a living thing moved on the ground. All those eighty cattle lay scattered about, quite still, quite dead. It was like a ﬁnal statement of all the terrible story of the bush.”57 Ultimately, they ﬁnd the skeleton of Paulina’s son, Isaac, who has died from tuberculosis. The powerful description of the losses brought about by the drought shifts our perspective away from the idea of a sustaining environment. Here, nature brings about destruction. The atmosphere seems to have turned its back on the people as it inﬂicts tragic consequences on the community. Moreover, the drought provides anecdotal evidence for Gilbert’s argument on the need for the people of Golema Mmidi to modernize their agricultural practices so that they can withstand similar disasters in the future. As such, Alma Jean BillingsleaBrown is correct in interpreting the death of Isaac, Paulina’s son, “as a metaphoric representation of the death of the cattle post economy.”58 As Gilbert reﬂects on the drought and the opportunity it presents to convince the people of Golema Mmidi of the need to reﬁne their agricultural practices, it becomes clear that the death knell of the old economy is irreversible. Billingslea-Brown posits that Isaac’s death “also functions as a structural climax for the narrative.”59 In this critic’s view, Isaac’s death solidiﬁes the people’s resolve to confront Matenge after he summons the grieving Paulina to his palace. We can add that the drought is a contributory factor to this instantiation of resistance from below. Note that neither Gilbert the European nor Dinorego the elder nor even Mma-Millipede leads the protest to Chief Matenge’s house. It is a spontaneous mass of people tired of Matenge’s antics, a people reeling from losses to the drought, that marches to his palace after he summons a grieving Paulina. In their loss of cattle, a mainstay of their traditional economy and an important aspect of their Batswana identity, the people share in Paulina’s vulnerability and accompany her to the Chief’s residence. The gathering at Matenge’s palace is also signiﬁcant because it presents women visibly in the public sphere in accordance with their status in the current dispensation where they are seen and heard. Like Maathai and the protesters who save Karura Forest and Uhuru Park without ﬁring a gun,

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the people of Golema Mmidi bring an end to the tyrannical reign of Matenge. As the novel ends, we can imagine a future without the chief and the antagonistic tendencies he represents–a future where traditional practices are complemented by modern farming practices and where men and women work together in both the public and private spheres to bring about progress. The titular rain clouds that gather and the hopefulness they suggest seem plausible by the end of the story. Although the drought seems to justify Gilbert’s vision and the foregoing interpretation of the narrative provides a positive account of the agricultural development in the novel, these conclusions by no means deny that Gilbert’s developmental plan raises certain ecological questions. Elspeth Tulloch speaks to one of these environmental issues when she comments on the preparation of the land for tobacco cropping. Tulloch contends that “Makhaya’s blowing up of the land to engineer dams becomes a complex symbol of the destruction and reconstruction of power structures, the land and the way of life it supported.”60 Although the dams would serve irrigation purposes, undermine the powerful effects of the drought, and pave the way for agricultural progress, there is a violent tinge to the process of blasting the rocks and the land change it precipitates. Similarly, the commodiﬁcation of the animals in the new dispensation is of relevance for discussing the ambivalence of Gilbert’s vision. Describing Gilbert’s proposal to enclose land and the cattle for control, the narrator states: “The plan was to keep no more than two hundred cattle at a time on a ranch of seven thousand acres. If fewer beasts were kept, they could be better fed, and this would bring an increase in their cash value.”61 Although the beginning of this passage suggests Gilbert’s concern for the well-being of the cattle, the monetary phrase at the end, “increase in their cash value,” commodiﬁes them. Further illuminating the monetary intent is the idea of producing “high grade beef” repeated throughout the novel. The choice of “high grade beef” to describe the commodity raises the question of the welfare of the animals and if the end justiﬁes whatever treatment is meted to them. Yet Gilbert’s other reason for controlled cattle rearing deserves pondering: Gilbert travelled all over the eastern watershed area and in dismay often came upon abandoned villages that had been turned into sandy wastelands through the grazing of the cattle and the goats. In some of these wastelands even the carrot-seed grass has completely died out, and the only type of vegetation that held the soil together was the thornbush. These observations convinced him that only large-scale fencing of the land and controlled grazing would save the parts that had not yet become completely eroded and uninhabitable for man and animals.62

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If the wasteland in the previous chapter about the Niger Delta is a consequence of human extraction of oil, the ones in Head’s passage are brought about by cattle grazing, which has made the land unsuitable for humans and nonhumans. As such, Gilbert’s commodiﬁcation of the cattle is not a clear-cut case of human exploitation of animals. As the passage suggests, uncontrolled cattle rearing threatens the environment. However, Gilbert’s solution–commodiﬁcation of animals–poses its own problem for animal rights. How do we resolve such a conundrum? What is the right number of cattle to keep? And does the harm being done to the land justify killing the cattle? Is it even possible for “development” to happen in a “right” manner? The novel stages this ambivalence without providing a clear-cut solution. The novel does not directly speak to the ecological implications of its developmental projects, but the ambiguities leave open the space for raising them. One signiﬁcant lesson from Head’s narrative is that human developmental agenda must be cognizant of the rights and obligations to nonhumans. Sustainable human development cannot be pursued at the expense of other beings who equally deserve to ﬂourish and thrive. As we encounter the blasting of the earth for irrigation purposes, the reader is reminded of Nixon’s salient observation in Slow Violence that we need to pay attention to the violence that happens gradually and out of sight.63 To heed Nixon’s call is not to pay attention only to the immediate gains of development–read here as year-round water for irrigation purposes. Rather, developmental gains need to be evaluated in relation to the larger environmental consequences that may be slow in the making. Yet the wider focus here is on the different forms of resistance exhibited in the novel: the opportunity to undercut the patriarchal hold on the society as the women gain visibility and voice through their involvement in the agricultural cooperative society alongside the possibility of empowerment that agricultural development provides for men and women alike. Of course, we also catch glimpses of nonhuman resistance and agency in When Rain Clouds Gather. It is important to recognize that most human actions in the novel are triggered by environmental factors. For instance, Gilbert’s controlled grazing initiative is a consequence of overgrazing by the cattle. The dam project is also a response to drought. These examples tell a story of nature’s vitality and underscore the fact that human actions cannot be divorced from the effects on their environment and vice versa. Together, men, women, the land, cattle, and the larger environment write and rewrite one another’s script in Head’s portrayal of Golema Mmidi.

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Coetzee’s Michael K, Gardening, and Resistance Like Maathai’s and Head’s narratives, J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K encompasses forms of resistance connected to agriculture, although where the agricultural practices in the already discussed texts are commercial and communal, Michael K’s gardening practice in Coetzee’s work is for subsistence purposes and mainly personal. Life & Times follows its protagonist, Michael K, a vagrant, who struggles against poverty, displacement, and conﬁnement in a South African war context. Michael K is born with disﬁguration around his mouth that makes him a subject of scorn among his coevals. He is sent to a school for disabled kids and ultimately becomes a gardener for the city. Meanwhile, his mother, who works as a maid, falls ill during the war and decides to leave the city for the countryside where she was born. Michael K tries to obtain a pass to allow them to leave the city, but when this takes longer than expected, he decides to leave without it. He is sent back on the ﬁrst attempt, but he remains undeterred. The second time, he avoids the major roads and ends up in Stellenbosch, where his mother dies in a hospital. Without Michael K’s consent, the hospital cremates Anna K and hands her remains to him. From that point, Michael K becomes an itinerant and lives in bushes, by the roadside, and in the mountains. He is arrested and thrown into conﬁnement, but he soon ﬁnds himself on the street again as he refuses to stay locked up. The novel’s protagonist cherishes his freedom and takes to gardening to keep the earth alive as war wreaks destruction around him. Coetzee’s Life & Times has been the subject of critical analyses that can be broadly categorized into two schools of thought–namely, the political and the ecological. In the ﬁrst camp are those who critique the novel for being escapist and not addressing head-on the tense social and political circumstances of apartheid South Africa. A well-cited proponent of this view is Nadine Gordimer, who remarks that K’s position on the margin of his society obliterates his agency and possibility of ﬁghting the system that keeps his people down. There are, however, others who hold an opposing view. Derek Attridge, for instance, asserts that “K’s relation to the earth and to cultivation implies a resistance to modernity’s drive to exploit natural resources.”64 For Kelly Hewson, “Michael K’s retreat from History to cultivate his own garden can thus be understood as a creative, radical attempt to maintain innocence and to assert his own history.”65 Dominating the ecological camp are those critics who see Michael K’s gardening as a recuperation of ecological thought in the novel. While Gordimer decries the seeming lack of resistance in the novel, she celebrates Michael K’s closeness to the land: “Under the noise of the cicadas,

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with delicacy and sureness, Coetzee has been drawing upon the strength of the earth to keep his deceptively passive protagonist and the passionate vitality of the book alive.”66 Gordimer concludes that “beyond all creeds and moralities, this work of art asserts, there is only one: to keep the earth alive, and only one salvation, the survival that comes from her.”67 Gordimer’s position has been corroborated by others, including Michael Marais, who is of the opinion that “K becomes similar to the environment. His behavior is mimetic in the sense that he makes himself like it. Indeed, the fact that he does not disturb the land . . . together with his aversion to fences . . . suggests his recognition that it exists for itself rather than for him.”68 However, Anthony Vital thinks differently, arguing instead that we need to look beyond Michael K and the novel to ﬁnd an inspiring ecological character. Vital bases his view on the fact that “crucial to ecological discourse is the idea of relation,”69 but “in its realist dimension, the narrative inscribes nature using a standard romantic trope, marking it with the sign of distance from the social.”70 Vital dismisses Michael K’s ecological credentials because the latter refuses to enter into social relationships. Vital proposes that a social perspective implicated in history is fundamental to a serious African ecological practice. It is true that Coetzee’s novel lacks the explicit resistance characterizing the earlier narratives–particularly the mobilizations of the GBM against deforestation and a kleptomaniac Kenyan state in Maathai’s memoir or, in the case of Head’s novel, the agitation against traditional structures by the residents of Golema Mmidi. To understand the distinction between Coetzee’s text and the other works discussed in this chapter is to distinguish their realism from the postmodern sensibilities that Life & Times shares with Farah’s work in Chapter 2. It appears that Coetzee’s novel bears out a question that has worried critics who have sought to resolve the tension between postmodernism and ecocriticism. SueEllen Campbell, for instance, identiﬁes the problem as a tension between poststructuralism’s accent on textuality as against the praxis that ecocriticism foregrounds.71 As a way out of the seeming binary, Serpil Oppermann, in another context, proposes a “reconstructive postmodern theory” as a fruitful outcome of a productive dialogue between postmodernism and ecocriticism. For Oppermann, this critical approach is important because “it opens space for mutually constitutive relationships between culture and nature” but also for engendering “a cooperative learning process shifting attention from the position of authority to the idea of relationality.”72 When Oppermann’s point is considered in relation to Coetzee’s novel, a form of resistance, albeit different from Maathai’s and

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Head’s, emerges. In other words, “the originality of the resistance you [Michael K] offer[s],” to borrow the words of the medical ofﬁcer in the camp from which K escapes, lies in his determination to refuse conﬁnement and in his resolve to plant as well as nurture the earth amid the ravages of war. Yet the most important insight that postmodernism contributes to a notion of resistance in Coetzee’s text is the interpretive lens for understanding Michael K’s relation to the land as a subversion of anthropocentric principles that places the human in a superior position in the environment. Let us begin with Michael K’s ecological activities, as they are useful for apprehending his resistance against the unjust social system within which he lives. On arrival at St. Albert after leaving Cape Town with his mother, Michael K sets out to cultivate the garden. He fertilizes the earth with his mother’s ashes and plants the pumpkin seeds he ﬁnds: This was the beginning of his life as a cultivator . . . In the space of a week he cleared the land near the dam and restored the system of furrows that irrigated it. Then he planted a small patch of pumpkins and a small patch of mealies; and some distance away on the river bank, where he would have to carry water to it, he planted his bean, so that if it grew it could climb into the thorntrees.73

Michael K demonstrates in this passage a knowledge of plant needs and cultivation techniques. He diversiﬁes his crops and spaces them to allow for growth. Even the “small” quantity of the crops suggests a need for prudence, to avoid wastage. Overall he puts to use land that has been neglected. Thus while other spaces are being destroyed by the war, Michael K transforms this particular land into a productive space. K himself reveals the contrast between the war and gardening in one of his reﬂections on his life’s purpose: “[E]nough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening, because once the cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children.”74 Michael K’s ecological character is revealed in his depiction of the earth as a parent that nourishes “her children,” who should not abandon their mother to avoid being rejected after the war. If the war consists of destruction–and we see many destructive incidents in the novel as we learn of yet another explosion or occasion of sabotage or arson–gardening functions as a counterpractice hinged on creating rather than destroying. If the war’s promise of future happiness is dependent on hatred and violence, Michael K’s gardening has nurturing and love at its core. Even Michael K’s use of water is guided by prudence, an important ecological principle: “He pumped only as much as his garden needed,

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allowing the level in the dam to drop to a few inches and watching without emotion as the marsh dried up, the mud caked, the grass withered, the frogs turned on their backs and died. He did not know how underground waters replenished themselves but knew it was bad to be prodigal.”75 Of pertinence is his emphasis on drawing only what he needs and recognition of the problems of being “prodigal.” In these passages, Michael K comes across as a character who makes conscious efforts to take only what he needs from the land. We get a reason for his action later when he engages in a dialogue with Noel at the labor camp: “This garden you had,” said Noel: “what did you grow there?” “It was a vegetable garden.” “Who were these vegetables for? Who did you give them to?” “They weren’t mine. They came from the earth.” “I asked, who did you give them to?” “The soldiers took them.” “Did you mind it that the soldiers took your vegetables?” He shrugged. “What grows is for all of us. We are all the children of the earth.”76

To properly understand the deconstruction of the grand narrative of human superiority in this passage where Michael K places himself in relation to the land as well as to fellow humans, it is pertinent to establish the way the novel builds up to this pivotal moment. As early as the novel’s ﬁrst paragraph where Michael K’s physiognomy is described, the narrator posits that he had a “hare lip.”77 This positioning of Michael K’s corporeality in relation to other aspects of the environment, especially animals, continues throughout the text, including the scene of his arrest. Readers will recall the narrator’s comment that Coetzee’s protagonist “baulked like a beast at the shambles” in response to his conscription for forced labor on the railroad.78 These instances where Michael K and other characters are placed in some relationship with the nonhuman (animal, land, and so on) raise a question as to their signiﬁcance. As in the preceding chapters, the manipulation of language to link K with other living beings throughout Life & Times works to undercut human-centeredness. Michael K’s fellow laborer on the rail track renders this point poignantly when he tells Coetzee’s protagonist, “‘there’s nothing special about you,’ . . . ‘There’s nothing special about any of us.’”79 In a scene in which they are reduced to their labor, Michael K’s interlocutor takes a swipe at the uniqueness of the human being, rendering obsolete the idea of human superiority. If the obsolescence of the idea of human distinctiveness is read alongside the narrator’s and the protagonist’s positioning of humans with members of the land community, often regarded as beneath the anthropos, what emerges is

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Oppermann’s shift in “authority [from mastery] to the idea of relationality.”80 Additionally, it is remarkable that Michael K eschews the individualistic and/or mastery “I” in the dialogue with Noel. Even when “mine” is used, it is negatively deployed to distance himself from ownership of the vegetables even though he planted them. Rather, he emphasizes the earth’s ownership of the produce that “grows for all of us” who are “children of the earth.” This passage in fact marks my departure from Vital, who writes that Michael K’s “imagining of a familiar relation with earth and crop do reveal sentimental attachments, but such affection, though, it forms in the novel the ground for reading K as gentle, caring, nondominating, does need to be distinguished from a sense of ecological relation.”81 It seems to me that Coetzee’s protagonist positions himself in a double set of relations here. The ﬁrst is to the earth, to which he relates as a child. The second set of relation is to other humans and other life forms captured in “We are all the children of the earth.” The collective markers–“we,” “us,” and “all”–point to a relation that expansively includes humans and nonhumans. Michael K adumbrates human subjection to the earth as he underscores the earth’s resources as commonwealth. He displaces the notion of the earth’s resources being for a select few and reiterates a preference for common redistribution. Michael K’s gardening practice can therefore be described as a form of infrapolitics, following James C. Scott, who uses this term to delineate hidden, often subtle resistant practices that oppressed peoples deploy against their oppressors. Scott insists that although such practices occur behind the oppressor’s back, these songs, folktales, bits of gossip and rumor, and stealing, among other techniques, should be read as the resistant practices that they are.82 The operative word in Scott’s conception of infrapolitics, hidden, is germane for understanding Michael K’s gardening activity. First, the farm is hidden for the most part of the novel until its discovery by the soldiers who arrest him. Even when they appear on the farm, the soldiers cannot decipher the political import of the garden despite Michael K’s articulation of its signiﬁcance. As a process constituted by planting in the ground and tending above its surface as the plant germinates, gardening also manifests another dimension of the “hidden,” whose ecological and restorative value remains concealed from the marauding soldiers. As such, it is easy to miss or totally dismiss the political signiﬁcance of Michael K’s commentary on the need for redistribution when he argues compellingly that “what grows is for all of us. We are all the children of the earth.”83 The preceding passage is one of the few moments where Michael K speaks or meaningfully interacts with others. Writing on Michael K’s

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reticence, Gillian Dooley argues that “Coetzee uses K as a ﬁgure of a nontranscendent, disruptive silence in order to stage the complexity of the relationship of ethical responsibility to political action.”84 Dooley’s essay draws out the political and ethical implications of K’s silence, to which we can add that the silence equally has some ecological implications. Those instances where Michael K departs from his reticence often have to do with his gardening practice. One such moment occurs toward the novel’s end: “It excited him, he found, to say, recklessly, the truth, the truth about me. ‘I am a gardener,’ he said again, aloud.”85 Michael K is excited to be afﬁliated with the land and expresses this sentiment loudly in the same way he articulates clearly an earthly philosophy in his response to Noel. Michael K’s identity is connected with his care for the earth, and the narrative emphasizes that point (with italics) so that the reader does not miss it. Michael K maintains his relation to the earth even after harvesting his plants. For instance, he notes, “All that remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating the food that my own labour has made the earth to yield. All that remains is to be a tender of the soil.”86 It is tempting to interpret the seeming detachment as a rejection of the social, but this has to be seen within the larger context of the novel. One important point is that Michael K’s disﬁguration made him amenable to derision while growing up. In a sense, while his disﬁgured mouth imposes silence on him as a social being, he negates and overcomes that imposed silence by an utterance that transcends words. Through a commitment to planting, K speaks while being silent, thus forging a relationship with a society that derides him for his speech impediments. Furthermore, given the state of emergency outside the farm where people are conscripted to ﬁght in wars or thrown in prison or the camp, Michael K’s nomadic existence outside what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would describe as the striated space of the state and its war machine can be read as a form of resistance.87 By refusing to be locked up or become attached to anybody in the camp, Michael K maintains his freedom; it makes sense, therefore, that he seizes the earliest opportunity to escape detention. Michael K’s escape is signiﬁcant because as Dominic Head reminds us, his “life as a cultivator, indeed, is only possible when he escapes the camps.”88 Michael K’s alienation from the medical ofﬁcer who tries to befriend him in the camp can also be interpreted as an important step toward escaping the conﬁnes of the state and its regulatory mechanisms. Similarly, he rebuffs the farmer who encourages him to take up fencing as a profession. On the surface, K comes across as asocial or snobbish. But as David Babcock aptly puts it, “Because he is performing the work as an anonymous unit of labor power in the economic

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calculations of the state, K cannot respond to the farmer as a fellow craftsman.”89 Like Makhaya in Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather, Michael K’s interest in freedom produces his anxiety about staying in the proper place: “It was better in the mountains, K thought. It was better on the farm, it was better on the road. It was better in Cape Town.”90 The places mentioned here have one thing in common for him: they are spaces of freedom or the illusion of it where he is unaffected by the ravages of war. It is not a coincidence that Michael K detests the deserting soldier, who introduces himself as the “boss Visagie’s grandson.”91 For Coetzee’s protagonist, unequivocal about his desire to be free, the idea of “boss” in this introduction triggers a concern and foreshadows his departure from the farm to avoid “the Visagie grandson who had tried to turn him into a body-servant.”92 Rather than interpret Michael K’s seeming disinterest in sociality as a limitation, one should consider his alienation an effort to evade the capture of the state machine. Timothy Wright, among others, has contended that the farm allows Coetzee to undermine the pastoral vision in South Africa. As Wright maintains, the land belonging to the Visagies must have belonged to a black person or family before the current owners gained access to it.93 Michael K’s presence on the farm functions alongside the arrival of the “owner’s” grandson to highlight and interrogate the power structures and rights claims in this environment, thereby upstaging the pastoral myth of idyllic, virgin land. The novel conﬁrms a point that Huggan and Tifﬁn have made in connection to Disgrace, another novel by Coetzee: namely that “for postcolonial writers and thinkers, at any rate, there can be no pastoral without politics.”94 I should add that Michael K’s interrogatory tone extends the political project of the text. Paying attention to K’s questioning attitude is particularly helpful in further dismantling grand narratives and elucidating his politics of resistance. The interrogatory instances discussed later do conﬁrm Timothy Wright’s point that Coetzee’s text uses his protagonist to question “the foundations and origins of the state and its subjects.”95 Notice Michael K’s interrogation of the war when one of the soldiers confronts him on his way to Prince Albert. He asks the soldier: “What do you think the war is for?”96 Michael K’s unfazed interaction with the armed soldier presents an instance of his examination of the war’s ideological justiﬁcation. Tellingly, the question is posed to a solider, an ofﬁcial of the state’s repressive apparatus, perhaps with a view to make him rethink his subject-position and loyalty. Much later in the hospital, we ﬁnd a more extended interrogation of the colonial premise of geographical naming in South Africa when Michael K asks the nurse to tell him who Prince Albert and Prince Alfred are.97 Both speech acts are couched in

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questions, which go unanswered, to interrogate the basis of the war and the larger ideological underpinning from which it derives relevance. By leaving the questions unaddressed by both the soldier and the nurse, Coetzee ensures that these characters and the reader will ponder these questions and perhaps reject the war. Perhaps like Michael K, they can love and care for the earth and one another instead. If K’s gardening has been personal thus far, the ending of the novel evinces a glimpse of its social dimension. Dooley has pointed to the hopefulness of the ending of Coetzee’s Life & Times, which is quite insightful for further highlighting the ecological-cum-political vision of the novel.98 Dooley’s reading is anchored on the possibility of Michael K meeting a man with whom he will cultivate many seeds. In this imaginary future, K hopes for a man who will take him as he is, engendering a genuine human relationship, while retaining his connection to the land. Michael K’s imagined companion, the old man, is not deﬁned in relation to color or economic status, suggesting a form of the ideal postapartheid South African subjectivity. There is also a generational fusion as both the young (Michael K) and the old are expected to work together toward the attainment of their goals. This old man will take him as he is (despite his disﬁguration) and will not mock him or hurt him, as many individuals he has met in the course of his life have done. To borrow the words that Rita Barnard has used for a reading of the closing moments of Coetzee’s Disgrace, Michael K “begins for the ﬁrst time to muse in a positive way about the future.”99 The positive nature of this ecological future is buttressed in the imagined response to his future partner’s inquiry concerning water: “[H]e, Michael K, would produce a teaspoon from his pocket, a teaspoon and a long roll of string . . . He would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live.”100 With a partner, plenty of seeds to plant, and water from the earth, Michael K’s continuous interaction with his fellow humans and his environment seems assured. In this new dispensation imagined at the end of the novel, K’s relation to the earth will be sustained while the potential for a robust relationship with a fellow human being is clearly on the horizon. To be sure, Michael K’s ruminations engender a new form of politics constitutive of ecological practices. In foregrounding the earth and its resources, alongside a new set of relations with a fellow human without care for color or national origin, K projects an alternative vision different from the oppressive, destructive system he is escaping from. Note also that this new man is someone who disregards the curfew–that is, an

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individual resistant to the strictures of the state. Michael K also includes the earth in this new interrelationship by recognizing human dependence on the land and the land’s generative abilities. Michael K’s ecological vision can therefore be read as a nonviolent form of resistance from the ground without the ecological baggage accompanying the destruction resulting from war. Moreover, K’s approach to resistance avoids the ecological problems seen in the analysis of violent resistance in the Niger Delta in the previous chapter. Despite Michael K’s ecological credentials, his attitude toward animals in the novel is worth contemplating because it buttresses Karen Thornber’s claim about how a person can have “at once positive, negative, uncertain, or apathetic emotions about different species.”101 While Michael K respects the land and sees himself and all of us as “children of the earth,” his relationship with animals is less consistent. The ambiguity surrounding Michael K’s treatment of animals aligns Life & Times with other texts in Coetzee’s oeuvre invested in the question of animal rights in a (post)colonial context. In the novel, Michael K kills a goat, regrets his decision, and refuses to eat it: “After two days the hot and cold ﬁts ended; after another day he began to recover. The goat in the pantry was stinking. The lesson, if there was a lesson, if there were lessons embedded in events, seemed to be not to kill such large animals.”102 Michael K’s action here ﬁts within what Laura Wright describes as “the connection between animal slaughter, consumption, and the concept of forgiveness.”103 Michael K’s contrition and repentance appear limited to protecting “large animals.” To put it in Vital’s words, even in his repentant state, Michael K “shows dexterity in dispatching (and cooking) lizards and birds, grasshoppers and termites.”104 Michael K positions himself as an opposite of Gilbert in Head’s novel, who sees no problem in killing cows to produce “high grade beef” but dotes on a lizard. Unlike Gilbert, Michael K has no problem eating a lizard or any other small animal, which raises certain questions: Does his exclusion of larger animals from consumption not introduce a hierarchy? How does this hierarchy affect Michael K’s ecological vision? How are we to understand Michael K’s overall environmental ethic within the context of war in which he lives? Teresa Dovey is correct when she reads Michael K as “a ﬁgure who can represent the possibility of eluding the meanings inherent in any system.”105 He eludes not only the efforts of the institutions to conﬁne him but also those of critics who have tried to pigeonhole him into ecological/non-ecological or political/apolitical categories. Michael K ﬁts and confounds these categories at the same time, hence my position

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that we accommodate his complexities while leaving open the possibility of appreciating the peculiarities of his resistance. Conclusion: Manual Labor, Gender, and Community This chapter has focused on agricultural practices deployed as resistance strategies in the works of Wangari Maathai, Bessie Head, and J. M. Coetzee. Whether it appears as tree planting or grassroots mobilization in Maathai’s Unbowed, the people-oriented agricultural projects in Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather, or even Michael K’s gardening outside the conﬁnes of the state structures in Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, these projects constitute forms of resistance from the ground. To be sure, these projects have their singularities, but they are joined together by their functioning as counterpractices as well as their investment in manual labor and gender politics. Building on Chapter 3’s discussion of the status of intellectual labor in the Niger Delta, I privilege here the labors of ordinary men and women that are easily elided when particular attention is paid to intellectual and other forms of elite labor. Although Maathai herself was a member of the elite or intellectual class, the roots of her ecological vision can be traced to manual labor: in her mother’s devotion to nurturing the environment and the indigenous knowledge that shapes the environmental practices of her rural Kenyan community. Moreover, it is to Maathai’s credit that Unbowed creates the space for deciphering the works of the women who planted trees across the nation. Contrary to the forest ofﬁcials’ belief that the business of forestry is the exclusive domain of the formally trained, the women, drawing from their knowledge of farming, overturn the notion of local people as destroyers of the environment. The successful implementation of the green initiative positions these hardworking women as protectors of their environment. Sophia Obiajulu Ogwude’s claim that work is central to Head’s oeuvre is particularly relevant for understanding the signiﬁcance of manual labor in When Rain Clouds Gather.106 Head’s Golema Mmidi is populated primarily by manual laborers, men and women who engage in non-mechanized farming. To be sure, one similarity shared by both Maathai’s and Head’s narratives is the value attached to local or grassroots perspectives. Like Maathai, whose work would have been impossible without the rural women, Gilbert also realizes early in the narrative that the support of the African women is critical for his schemes to thrive. From there the narrative scope of the novel enlarges to accommodate the efforts of the men and women working together to develop their community. While Gilbert’s vision may have been the guiding

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framework, his limited knowledge of the land and the need for labor rationalize his reliance on Makhaya and the local people who work together to plant food and cash crops. Although the agricultural enterprise in Coetzee’s novel is smaller in scope if compared to the extensive versions in Maathai’s and Head’s narratives, Michael K’s life nonetheless revolves around manual labor. His gardening practice, as I argue previously, amounts to a labor of love and sustenance amid the ravages of war. His effort may be minuscule when compared to the overall destruction around him, yet he keeps the hope of gardening, of nurturing, of actually building alive. It is remarkable as well that the ecological future imagined at the novel’s end is steeped in manual labor. In the future to come, Michael K will plant with an old man but with the same bare accoutrements: seed, spoon, and water. Taken together, the manual labors represented in these texts are also connected to gender. In Unbowed, the women under the auspices of the GBM work to thwart the neocolonial policies and programs of Moi’s patriarchal regime by planting trees and engaging in civic mobilization. Similarly, where the patriarchal traditional order represented by Chief Matenge in Head’s novel insists on keeping the people, especially the women, invisible and socially regressive, Head’s portrayal of the new community reveals inspiring women such as Paulina and MmaMillipede who galvanize fellow women to become agents of change. Although Coetzee’s text is authored by a man and does not present the kind of inspiring women that Maathai and Head provide, there is an implicit feminine perspective to Michael K’s gardening. Michael K’s gardening can be read as an alternative to the destruction of the environment by the patriarchal state’s war machine. While the war machine plants land mines and bombs, putting at risk the biotic and abiotic components of the environment, Michael K’s planting of seeds provides a counterpoint to the violent disposition of the military state. The ashes from the cremation of his mother, Anna K, poignantly highlight the female dimension of his gardening. Readers will recall that Michael K distributes his mother’s ashes across the farm: “[H]e distributed the ﬁne grey ﬂakes over the earth, afterwards turning the earth over spadeful by spadeful.”107 The postmodern insistence on the relationality of nature and culture is quite clear here. The idea of nature without culture is undermined as the earth needs Michael K’s seeds to bear fruits. Yet the seed, a product of nature-culture interaction, is insufﬁcient by itself without fertilizer. The ashes from the cremation of Michael K’s mother thus serve the purpose of enriching the soil for it to bear good harvest and of establishing female genealogy. Critics may ﬂinch at the seeming conﬂation of earth and woman, but K’s earlier comment about

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us being children of the earth is instructive here. Michael K’s mother returns to the earth at her demise, and her body mixes with the soil to produce food to feed her son. If earlier we see the human in relation to other living beings, here the human body is reduced to ash, useful only to the extent that it can nourish the land. In fact, the narrator tells us that this rite marks “the beginning of his life as a cultivator,”108 therefore reinforcing the notion of female fertility. Anna K symbolizes the potential of fertility, of enriching the soil to yield a rich harvest. As Michael K moves from caring for his mother to tending the earth encoded with his mother’s body, he overloads the earth with feminine meaning and power. It is not surprising, then, that he tells the soldiers that “we are children of the earth.” By this admission, Michael K adumbrates the gendered nature of his intervention and asks us to interpret his resistance for what it is: a response to the destruction being perpetrated by the patriarchal state apparatus. That said, it should not be misconstrued that the gender dynamics of the texts operate on a binary level, where women are builders and men merely exist to destroy. Ebila makes a related argument concerning Maathai’s narrative when she indicates that not all men are portrayed negatively in Unbowed. She is correct that men like Dr. Makanga worked with the GBM to actualize its socioecological vision.109 In my analysis of Head’s work, I also showed the complementarity suggested by the use of “side by side” to describe Makhaya’s working relationship with the women and how the cooperative society that replaces Matenge’s venture hinges on collaboration between men and women. However, Coetzee’s novel, given its postmodern qualities, is skeptical about the forms of collectivities premised on the nation or its approximation in Maathai’s and Head’s works. This skepticism explains his rejection of the war and his interrogation of geographical naming in the novel, given that all these are implicated in the grand narrative of the nation. Yet Life & Times illustrates what I call pre-collectivity in the previous chapter with the hopeful future imagined by the protagonist at the novel’s end. Whereas Michael K has tended the earth on his own throughout the novel, this imagined future indicates a form of collaboration between him and an old man. If we see the realization of the collectivities galvanized by Head and Maathai in their texts, Coetzee’s novel defers this manifestation in keeping with postmodernism’s suspicion of such collectivities and its insistence on the deferment of meaning.

Epilogue: Rehabilitating the Human

In the Introduction where I contrast the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the regular oil spillage in the Niger Delta of Nigeria, I am not only pointing to the impetus for my engagement with Africa’s ecological issues in this book. I am also gesturing to the imbalance of power and geopolitical calculation that make certain parts of the world expendable, disposable, or–to use Naomi Klein’s apt phrase–“sacriﬁce zone[s].”1 In part, this book has been about the status of African environments as sacriﬁce zones for discarded discontents of globalization. In recounting this narrative of dispossession, I have also been careful to demonstrate how oil pollution, deforestation, and conﬂict that arise as a result of power struggle and resource extraction impact more than human bodies. Considering the entanglement of both human and nonhuman lives on the continent, what I describe as their proximity in the preceding pages, I argue for taking seriously nonhuman lives–plants, animals, sea life, and so on– caught in the tragedy of ecological devastation in Africa. In the story that this book tells, the resilience, agency, and resistance of humans are pertinent, but also paramount are the active roles that nonhumans assume in the literary texts. As my introductory anecdote captures an incident that happened in America, far from the geographical context of this book, I have chosen to close with an event that took place on the continent, in Zimbabwe, precisely, as the writing of this book neared its completion. I am referring to the death of Cecil the Lion in Hwange Park, Zimbabwe, at the hands of an American dentist in July 2015. Walter Palmer, big game hunter and dentist, traveled to Zimbabwe to hunt and kill the lion. When the news broke in the American media, there was an overwhelming condemnation of the violence against the animal body. Images of the lion and condemnation of the killer saturated social media and various news outlets. As a black male in America, for me, it was interesting to see so much outrage over the hunter’s violence against the animal body and so little outrage over police brutality against black bodies. Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, many wondered why the death of the lion would elicit such an outrage.2 158

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I ﬁnd this incident particularly instructive because it illuminates one problem I seek to address with this book: the limited conception of environmental crisis in African/postcolonial literary studies that focuses on certain species at a time while neglecting others. The animal lovers in the United States could easily shed tears for Cecil, a lion faraway in Zimbabwe, but could not muster similar emotional outrage over the decimation of black lives around them. Meanwhile, many Zimbabweans could not fathom mourning the deceased animal because they have more pressing human issues to deal with, issues of hunger, poverty, diseases, and other aberrations of the postcolonial state. In their focus on human or anthropocentric concerns, the Zimbabweans elide the fact that their suffering, their disposability, is not altogether disconnected from the fact that an American could stroll into their country, bribe a few ofﬁcials, and take a shot at whatever life he so desired. How is this case different from the indiscriminate dumping of toxic wastes in the continent’s territorial waters or the testing of pharmaceutical products on its children? All these events share a certain premise: African environments are porous as well as malleable to the toxicity introduced by Western agents and their African collaborators. To properly understand and address the forms of exploitation implicated in the Zimbabwean incident and in the chapters constituting this book is to embrace the interconnection of human and nonhuman lives. Whether it is in the ﬁrst two chapters, where I articulate a theory of proximity as I track human relationships with other life forms to show a sense of shared attributes, including agency and vulnerability, or in the last two, where I illuminate the nonhuman as both agent and casualty of resistance, this book is about decentering the human and smashing the pedestal on which he/she has lorded it over the nonhuman world for generations. This book advocates for an intersectional politics where the rights and obligations toward nonhumans are seriously considered. In this schema, human environmental concerns are not subordinated to the wellbeing of other life forms either. On many counts, this book occupies the same jurisdictional arena with the posthuman intellectual tradition. More speciﬁcally, they share an interest in decentering the human while elevating nonhumans to a level where their agency and needs are not subordinated to those of human beings. Of the different strands of the posthuman intellectual tradition, my project is closer in spirit to the posthuman subjectivity championed by Rosi Braidotti, for whom the posthuman subject is “a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable.”3 This subject abhors human supremacy even as he/she

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embraces “an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism.”4 Yet I am wary of the appropriateness of the posthuman label for Africa’s ecologies. Writing from an African context and embracing that standpoint make it difﬁcult to succumb to the posthuman lure. To be sure, it is a productive term that has generated inspiring intellectual and political work. Yet it is not without its pitfalls, one of which, in the words of Eduardo Kohn, is the tendency to “arrive at reductionistic solutions that ﬂatten important distinctions between humans and other kinds of beings, as well as those between selves and objects.”5 Another problem, which Alexander Weheliye stresses is the slow recognition of the tenuous relationship that oppressed people including Africans and African Americans have had with the project of humanity.6 Weheliye knocks the tendency in posthumanism to assume that people everywhere “have now entered a stage in human development where all subjects have been granted equal access to western humanity and that this is, indeed, what we all want to overcome.”7 Considering Kohn’s and Weheliye’s submissions, it is quite disturbing that posthumanism is gaining currency at a time when Africans and other formerly colonized people are beginning to see the fruits of their struggle for human rights. While I admire and ﬁnd inspiring the tenets of the posthuman creed, it is difﬁcult to subscribe to that appellation at a time that many Africans are reaping the fruits of their assertive struggle to be recognized as human and many others are still battling to get that recognition. It may be argued that the violence committed against the planet in the name of human superiority is adequate justiﬁcation for the posthuman turn. But here too, we should note that while Africans are not ecological saints and are complicit in environmental degradation, the ongoing ecological crisis is an outcome of Western colonizing practices, consumption, commodiﬁcation, and objectiﬁcation of lives, human and nonhuman. It is problematic to expect those who have contributed the least to global warming to suffer the consequence of the West’s abuse of the human condition. Moreover, the technological advancements at the heart of the posthuman idea make it unsuitable for the African context. Take for instance Braidotti’s celebration of the enmeshment of the human with the technological: “The merger of the human with the technological results in a new transversal compound, a new kind of eco-sophical unity, not unlike the symbiotic relationship between the animal and its planetary habitat.”8 In celebrating the process of “becoming machine,” or the human-techno hybrid, Braidotti and other posthumanists forget that many parts of the

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world, including Africa, have unequal access to equipment of technological mediation or that their reliance on the West for these technologies has been indispensable to their exploitation by their unequal partners in the Global North. Furthermore, from drone violence to the slow violence of other forms of precision weaponry, Africans have endured extremities brought about by these technologies. Everything considered, as useful and important as the term posthuman appears to be, it is a limiting concept from an African perspective. In its place, I am drawn to the seductive charm of the idea of a rehabilitated human. Granted that Braidotti, among others, has aptly documented many transgressions committed in the name of Humanism–the decimation of populations and the elevation of a certain kind of human, always male, white, and good-looking as the benchmark of the subject of the Enlightenment, being just a few. Yet the rehabilitative potential of the human–with a lower h–means that I have not given up on the term. This human embodies the deconstructive sensibility that was useful for rejecting the universalist posture of the Enlightenment Man and takes pride in the idea of the decentered self that is always in a relation to the Other. The rehabilitated human, in some ways, echoes that which Judith Butler proposes in Precarious Life, where she writes that “there is a more general conception of the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself, and, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary Other.”9 Like Frantz Fanon before her in Black Skin, White Masks, Butler’s articulation of a new human subjectivity is such that it opens toward the Other in all their alterity and difference.10 Questions of superiority give way here for compassion and empathy. I retain the spirit of Fanon’s and Butler’s call for a new human but extend their organizing logic to capture a planetary network of human and nonhuman beings. If Fanon and Butler insist that opening up to fellow humans, who may not necessarily look like us, is pertinent for creating a better world, my conclusion from the analyses in this book is that opening up to both human and nonhuman Others is an ethical obligation. The “primary others” in Butler’s schema must be elastic enough to include nonhuman life forms in its conceptualization. Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days, a novel initially discussed in Chapter 1, provides some directions for the elaboration of this rehabilitated human subjectivity. This novel, narrated from the perspective of a dog, Mboudjak, features two incidents dramatizing the tension between being properly human and its aberrations. The ﬁrst is when Soumi, whose father owns the dog, kicks Mboudjak around. In his response to the now familiar,

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repetitive violence by Soumi and his father, the dog-protagonist laments: “To tell the truth, once I had gotten over my amusement, I realized I had come back to this criminal house less to laugh at Soumi’s bumbling ﬂights than to learn how and why a man (or a child, what’s the difference!) could be so inhuman.”11 The speaking dog equates Soumi’s violence (and his father’s) to inhumanity. Notice that the violence is not attributed to the state of being human but its negation. To be human, therefore, in the view of this protagonist, it is important to treat nonhumans, such as the dog, in an ethical fashion, with compassion and empathy. The novel suggests that being human is connected to treating other beings with care. This point is made more poignant in the second incident from the novel. Readers of Dog Days will recall the scene where the commissioner of police tries to arrest the cigarette vendor for calling him Etienne. Except for the dog-protagonist, Mboudjak, and the writer, Crow, all other witnesses including Mboudjak’s owner, Yo, do nothing to intervene in the commissioner’s abuse of power. Only Crow raises his voice against the oppressive act and is arrested for his effrontery. In his response to the incident, Panther, one of the bar patrons, makes some instructive points worthy of quoting in full: Didn’t I say you had nothing but beers in your head? Money’s your only friend, right? I’m sure one day we’re gonna hear you’ve sold Soumi to Famla. Here’s a guy you spend all your days with. You see the police haul him off, and you stay calm. As for the rest of you, didn’t you all turn your stories to the writer? He was arrested right in front of your eyes, and why? Because he wanted to defend one of you. You let him get hauled off and did nothing about it. Yeah, and you call yourselves men!12

Panther indicts Massa Yo and other patrons for their cowardice in the face of tyranny. Yet more interesting for my purposes is the case he builds against them. If Mboudjak links tyranny to inhumanity, Panther questions the humanity of the bar owner and his customers because they have not exhibited concern for Others. In questioning their humanity (“Yeah, and you call yourselves men!”), Panther, like Mboudjak, is insisting that to be human is not a prepackaged condition but actually involves a process of becoming. The lesson of Nganang’s novel is that being properly human entails responsibility to Others: fellow humans as Panther’s example shows, but also nonhuman beings. It is signiﬁcant as well that Crow and Panther, both names of animals, are ascribed to human characters associated with ethics in their words (Panther) and by action (Crow, who intervenes as the commissioner oppresses the vendor). It seems to me that the novel wants us to

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disaggregate animality from the negative stereotypes with which it has been associated. In colonial discourse, for example, one strategy of abjection is the animalization of the colonized Other to differentiate him/her from the superior colonizer, the proper human subject.13 Colonization may have ofﬁcially ended, but such stereotypes remain in contemporary society. “Monkey,” for instance, remains a pejorative racist epithet for describing black people in the West. If we are to rehabilitate the human and see the nonhuman as strangers to be respected and shown compassion, then it is time to dismantle the stereotypical association of animals with negativity. This move will restore dignity to debased creatures and make it easier to relate to them in a more ethical fashion. This move can also blunt the colonialist and racist treatment of humans seen as inferior. In other words, if the monkey or swine is distanced from the negative connotations that such names carry in discourses of animality, then it becomes ineffectual or pointless to try to debase humans by linking them to animals. The rehabilitation of animals, in other words, is also tantamount to a stab in the structures of colonialist discourse. Critics can question the idea of decentering Homo sapiens when many Africans are reeling from bad postcolonial governance and the longue duree of the colonial encounter. Why should anyone be concerned with the plight of animals or trees when a good number of people on the continent live below the poverty line, are chronically affected by hunger and diseases, and are victims of an insidiously high mortality rate? As I hope to have made clear in the foregoing chapters, the intersectional politics that inserts nonhumans into ethical and political calculations ought not be at the expense of genuine concerns of human beings. That amounts to privileging one life form over others. Wangari Maathai’s work, discussed in Chapter 4, provides a model for the kind of intersectional approach I am urging here. When she recognizes that deforestation in postindependence Kenya is coterminous with the exploitation of the human masses, she does not ignore or prioritize one issue over the other. Rather, her work with the Green Belt Movement shows an investment in ecological survival. In planting trees, she ensures soil vitality even as she encourages the thriving of biodiversity. The humans in these communities also depend on forest resources for sustenance, which also means that they beneﬁt from the afforestation exercise. Additionally, these trees serve as lungs for carbon dioxide, which is then kept away from the atmosphere. To be sure, this enviable movement paid attention to the needs of the human society but also ensured that the larger ecosystem did not suffer in the process of making this African nation a better place for the anthropos. Maathai’s example is one among many that problematizes

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the argument that postcolonial societies cannot address the needs of nonhumans when they have yet to meet the developmental needs of their human population. That said, there is another reason to reexamine our relationship to the nonhuman world in addition to the fact that it is the right thing to do and can help us become better at being human. This has to do with the shared vulnerability on display in all the chapters of this book. The fact that humans and nonhumans are united in suffering and mortality, which is discussed in Chapter 1, carries through in Chapter 2 where bodies– human and nonhuman–fall victim to war in Somalia and in Chapter 3 where all life forms are caught in the ecological devastation spurned by the oil extractive industry in Nigeria as well as in Chapter 4 where plants, animals, and even forests come under attack in Kenya, Botswana, and South Africa. The shared vulnerability also plays out in the reciprocal forms of destruction to which this book bears witness. On one hand, we see human exploitation of the environment throughout, but as the analyses of the storm in Okri’s The Famished Road in Chapter 1, Fidow’s death in the hands of the elephant in Chapter 2, and even the drought that ravaged Golema Mmidi of Head’s novel in Chapter 4 demonstrate, the nonhuman world does inﬂict violence on humans. Nature can be nurturing and supportive, but it can also be inclement. To minimize the occurrences of nature’s catastrophes is to invest in practices and values that promote ecological sustenance. The ecological responsibility crucial for an appropriate form of humanity, in my book, is the signpost to the sustainable future where nature’s violence is mitigated. Emphasizing our shared vulnerability also enables a rethinking of a human-based conceptualization of postcolonial resistance. Given the palpable realities of global warming and climate change, postcolonial studies need to take seriously the ecological effects not only of colonialism and imperialism but of postcolonial resistance as well. As seen in the Niger Delta chapter, certain forms of postcolonial resistance retain elements of environmental degradation they purport to ﬁght. The ecocritical challenge therefore is to envisage “green” resistance strategies that are effective and equally take the environment into serious consideration. It is indeed time to heed a point that Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt made in their introduction to Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives: “[A]ny postcolonial critique must be thoroughly ecocritical at the same time.”14 Ultimately, even as this book emphasizes symbiotic exchanges between humans and Others who share the environment with them, it will be misleading to conceive of a straightforward or unencumbered set of ecological relationships. Karen Thornber’s work on “ecoambiguity” in

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Asian literature has shown the ambivalence that often structures human ecological relationship to others. For Thornber, Environmental ambiguity manifests in multiple, intertwined ways, including ambivalent attitudes toward nature; confusion about the actual condition of the nonhuman, often a consequence of ambiguous information; contradictory human behaviors toward ecosystems; and discrepancies among attitudes, conditions, and behaviors that lead to actively downplaying and acquiescing to nonhuman degradation, as well as to inadvertently harming the very environments one is attempting to protect.15

Cary Wolfe makes a related point more pointedly when he asserts that “we must choose, and by deﬁnition we cannot choose everyone and everything at once.”16 One important achievement that Wolfe achieves in Before the Law is his insistence that every decision regarding ecological sustainability and the protection of the spectrum of lives on the planet will always exclude or disadvantage some over others in the same way that biopolitical calculations favor certain groups over those excluded from protection. Yet he warns against complacency, arguing that this reality calls for “unconditional hospitality,” “which in turn calls forth the need to be more fully responsible than we have already been.”17 As readers, critics, and citizens, it behooves us to be attentive to those contradictions that debunk the myth of a harmonious relationship with the environment while being mindful of complacency in our practices. Although this project is about ecological communities in African literature, all the chapters demonstrate Africa’s place in the world and the compression of spaces that is the signature of globalization. The analyses in this book show not only the connection of humans and nonhumans but also the interconnections of spaces. A prominent feature of the narratives analyzed in this book is the way events in African environments are shaped by other spaces and vice versa. In addition to blurring boundaries and reiterating global ﬂows, the transatlantic interactions here illuminate the unequal exchange that is a feature of globalization. The transnationalism also undermines the “here versus there” binary by reinforcing the intermingling of environments, even as it foregrounds the pertinence of vigilance in our work as teachers, students, activists, and citizens. As teachers and students, especially in the Western academy, we ought to orient our pedagogical practices to account for complicities in the environmental issues explored in the narratives. It is not enough to practice close reading of these texts or draw awareness to the problems they address. In our roles as teachers, scholars, students, and/or activists, we are called to consider the effects of, say, our energy use on places such as the Niger Delta where oil is drilled or of our fashion choices on wildlife in

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Africa and elsewhere. Or as Kevin Bales puts it in the context of gold, “we don’t have to give up gold; we just have to give up the slavery and environmental destruction that make gold so ugly even in its beauty.” Thankfully, Bales provides guidance on achieving this goal: “[W]e can do that by watching how gold is being mined, and refusing to buy gold that hurts people or the environment.”18 The ﬁnal word here is vigilance! Vigilance is needed so that our solutions do not exacerbate the problems! Vigilance is also a felicity condition for seeing the complicities in our indifference and in our ennobling gestures!

Notes

Introduction: Naturalizing Africa 1. According to Paul Orogun, about 5,000 spill incidents occurred between 1976 and 1996 in the Delta. A total of 2,369,470 oil barrels leaked into the environment from these occurrences. See Orogun, “Resource Control, Revenue Allocation and Petroleum Politics in Nigeria: The Niger Delta Question,” Geojournal 75 (2010): 459–507. 2. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, “Introduction: A Postcolonial Environmental Humanities,” Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (London: Routledge, 2015), 2. 3. Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 35. 4. See Jonathan Steinwand, “What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novels by Witi Ihimaera, Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav Ghosh,” Postcolonial Ecologies, ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 182–199; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014). 5. Olakunle George, Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), ix. 6. Ibid., x. 7. D. O. Fagunwa, Forest of a Thousand Daemons, trans. Wole Soyinka (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982). 8. In Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), Latour explains that an “actant” can be either a human or a nonhuman entity that produces action, whose “competence is deduced from performance rather than posited in advance of the action” (237). 9. See Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987). 10. Charles Cliff Feghabo, “Isidore Okpewho’s Tides and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and a Day: A Kinesis of Eco-Activism from Theory to Praxis,” EcoCritical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes, ed. Ogaga Okuyade (New York: African Heritage Press, 2013), 60; Sunny Ahwefeada, 167

168

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

Notes to pages 5–7 “A Nameless Activist in the Service of the Fatherland,” The Guardian, January 22, 2007, 45. Tejumola Olaniyan, “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (2016): 393. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 171. For Leopold, “a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such” (171). While the ecological attitude recommended by Leopold is important, the de-emphasis on humans, especially those disadvantaged as a result of their race, class, gender, and so on, constitutes a limit to his work. Or as Caminero-Santangelo puts it, Leopold’s work is insufﬁciently attentive to the “mediation by political relationships of biotic communities and the conceptualizing of them” (170). Although Leopold pays attention to the land quite well, the fraught relationship that people of color in his America have to the land and nature is not really considered even when he references the civil war, uses “slave” to describe exploited land, and evokes other indicators of US history of dispossession and displacement of Native communities and black people. I offer a corrective to the lapse in Leopold’s work by being attuned to the sociopolitical realities of Africans in the texts I analyze even as I emphasize consideration for nonhuman lives in our reading and living practices. The “Anthropocene” is Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer’s term for the current geological epoch, deﬁned precisely by the global impact of humankind on the earth and atmosphere. Crutzen and Stoermer contend that human impact since the late eighteenth century has signiﬁcantly altered climatic conditions and that “mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come” (18). Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” IGBP Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18. William Slaymaker, “Echoing the Other(s): The Global Green and Black African Responses,” PMLA 116.1 (2001): 133. Rob Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 235. Ibid. Ibid. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Going Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1.1 (1996): 15. Postcolonial ecocriticism emerged to offer correctives to the limitations of the ﬁeld of ecocriticism, which focused primarily on the West while ignoring environments of the Global South. Postcolonial ecocritics also address the omission of the environmental dimensions of colonialism and imperialism in postcolonial theory. For an exemplary work in postcolonial ecocriticism, see Graham Huggan and Helen Tifﬁn, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2010). Huggan and Tifﬁn

Notes to pages 7–9

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

169

explain that postcolonial ecocriticism “performs an advocacy function both in relation to the real world(s) it inhabits and to the imaginary spaces it opens for contemplation of how the real world might be transformed” (13). Other critics like Caminero-Santangelo and Garth Myers have critiqued the pastoral or wilderness conservation ethic of ﬁrst-wave ecocriticism. See their introduction to the collection Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 1–21. It must be said, however, that not only postcolonial ecocritics take exception to wilderness portrayals. Michael Dash, for example, illuminates the portrayal of the New World as Edenic or devoid of history in his analysis of the tropics in The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3. For a discussion of the origin and tenets of the environmental justice movement, see David Harvey, “What’s Green and Makes the Environment Go Around,” The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 327–355. For a discussion of the relevance of environmental justice to postcolonial contexts, see Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades. Caminero-Santangelo has addressed the limitation of postcolonial ecocriticism elsewhere, so I do not need to elaborate this issue here. He particularly warns that the ﬁeld should not “become tied to overly speciﬁc theoretical positions and/or conclusions ﬂawed by the repression of geographical and social difference.” See Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades, 14–15. Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (London: Heinemann, 1964). Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). See William Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment, 1770–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 335–336; Kai Horsthemke, Animals and African Ethics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4–5; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, “In Place: Tourism, Cosmopolitan Bioregionalism, and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness,” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 299–300. Anna L. Peterson, Being Human: Ethics, Environment, and Our Place in the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 99. For a discussion of the concept of human superiority in the Western tradition, see Peterson, Being Human, 28–50. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43.1 (Winter 2012): 1–2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 7. I should note that animalization was not speciﬁc to Africans. In her book Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal, Carrie Rohman argues that “displacing animality onto marginalized groups, whether they be Jews, blacks, women, or the poor, is a common feature of modernist

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31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

Notes to pages 10–14 literature. This displacement–this scapegoating–enacts an anxious disavowal of Darwin’s incriminating suggestion that even Western subjectivity has animal roots” (29–30). Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995); and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 231. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 27–28. Kaine Agary, Yellow-Yellow (Lagos: Dtalkshop, 2006). Tanure Ojaide, The Activist (Lagos: Faraﬁna Press, 2006). Helon Habila, Oil on Water (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2011). Nixon, Slow Violence. Wendy Woodward, The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008). Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades, 4. Ibid. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). As World Bank chief economist, Lawrence Summers sent an internal memo encouraging the dumping of waste in Africa and other developing countries. Summers’s rationale is that these countries have low emissions rates and that their human mortality rate is already high. For an excerpt of the leaked memo and discussion, see Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 10. James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 9–10. Kevin Bales, Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World (New York: Spiegel & Graw, 2016), 16–17. Bryan G. Norton associates strong anthropocentricism with “extractive and exploitative” uses of nature that puts unquestioned human desire as “determining value” (135). Norton differentiates strong anthropocentrism from weak anthropocentrism, which is predicated on harmonious relationship with nature and “criticizing preferences that merely exploit nature” (135). The use of nature is well considered and conforms to rational ideals in weak anthropocentrism. See Norton, “Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthropocentrism,” Environmental Ethics 6 (1984): 131–148.

Notes to pages 14–18

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51. For an overview of the language debate, see Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: Heinemann, 1986). 52. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi. 53. Adeleke Adeeko, “Accounting for African Presence in Aesthetic Modernity in Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste,” Research in African Literatures 45.4 (2014): 2. 54. Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades, 15. 55. Scott Slovic, “Editor’s Note,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17.4 (2010): 639. 56. In biocentrism, humans appear as only one component of the ecology while to be anthropocentric is to be human-centered. For further discussion of the relationship between biocentrism and anthropocentrism, see Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71–83; and Leo Marx, “The Struggle over Thoreau,” New York Review of Books (June 24, 1999). www.nybooks.com/articles/1999/06/24/ the-struggle-over-thoreau/. 57. Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 198. 58. Zakes Mda, The Whale Caller (New York: Picador, 2006). 59. Amos Tutuola, The Palmwine Drinkard (London: Faber and Faber, 1952). 60. Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (London: Faber and Faber, 1954). 61. Gabriel Okara, The Voice (London: Heinemann, 1970). 62. See Nuruddin Farah, Crossbones (New York: Penguin, 2012); Links (New York: Penguin, 2003); Secrets (New York: Arcade Publications, 1998). 63. J. M. Coetzee, Life &Times of Michael K (New York: Penguin Books, 1983). 64. Ato Quayson, “Magic Realism and the African Novel,” The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, ed. F. Abiola Irele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 164. 65. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 239. 66. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). 67. Mia Couto, Sleepwalking Land, trans. David Brookshaw (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2006). 68. Helon Habila terms this “Caine-prize aesthetic,” after the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing, which he also won in 2001. See his review of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names for his critique: www .theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayo-review. 69. Chima Korieh and Ifeanyi Ezeonu, ed. Remembering Biafra: Narrative, History, and Memory of the Nigeria-Biafra War (Glassboro: Goldline and Jacobs, 2010). 70. See the essays in Ernest Emenyonu, ed. War in African Literature Today 26 (2008).

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Notes to pages 21–27

1

African Literature and the Aesthetics of Proximity

1. Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reﬂection beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural Anthropology 25.2 (2010): 341. 2. Joni Adamson, “Cosmovisions: Environmental Justice, Transnational American Studies, and Indigenous Literature,” The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 183. 3. Harry Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/ Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society,” Public Culture 15.2 (2003): 265. 4. Ibid., 269. 5. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 6. Amos Tutuola, The Palmwine Drinkard (London: Faber and Faber, 1952). 7. Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (London: Faber and Faber, 1954). 8. Ben Okri, The Famished Road (London and New York: Random House, 1991). 9. Zakes Mda, The Whale Caller (New York: Picador, 2006). 10. Patrice Nganang, Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle, trans. Amy Baram Reid (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). 11. Katie Kitamura, Gone to the Forest (London: The Clerkenwell Press, 2013). 12. Laura Wright, “Wilderness into Civilized Shapes”: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 16. 13. See Moradewun Adejunmobi, “The Infrapolitics of Subordination in Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 32.4 (2014): 438–452; Kenneth Harrow, “Patrice Nganang’s L’invention du beau regard and Dog Days: Three Phases of Capitalism with Two Dogs and One Devouring Pig,” Research in African Literatures 41.2 (2010): 55–73; Ngwarsungu Chiwengo, “Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle (Review)” African Studies Review 50.2 (2007): 278–280. 14. Neel Ahuja, “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World,” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 559. 15. For analysis of the relationship between Tutuola’s work and Fagunwa’s, see Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 174–197; and Olakunle George, Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 134–137. 16. Achille Mbembe, “Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola,” Research in African Literatures 34.4 (2003): 5. 17. Chris Dunton, “Pupils, Witch Doctor, Vengeance: Amos Tutuola as Playwright,” Research in African Literatures 37.4 (2006): 10. 18. Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), 61. 19. Bernth Lindfors, “Introduction,” Critical Perspectives on Amos Tutuola (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1975), xiii. For an overview of the text’s reception, see Gail Low, “The Naturalist Artist: Publishing Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard in Postwar Britain,” Research in African

Notes to pages 27–33

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

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Literatures 37.4 (2006): 15–33; and Peter Kalliney, Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 146–147, 153–158. For a detailed discussion of this Yoruba worldview, see Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Tutuola, My Life, 19. Ibid. Jennifer Wenzel, “Forest Fictions and Ecological Crises: Reading the Politics of Survival in Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Dhowli,’” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 140. Mbembe, “Life, Sovereignty,” 6. See Chapter Nine of Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (London: Heinemann, 1988), 62–76. Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 46. I use “contact zone” in Pratt’s sense of the term as a meeting point where cultures interact. For Pratt, contact zones are “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.” Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7. Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 124. Erin James, The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 171. Douglas McCabe, “Histories of Errancy: Oral Yoruba Abiku Texts and Soyinka’s ‘Abiku,’” Research in African Literatures 33.1 (2002): 46. Okri, The Famished Road, 3. Douglas McCabe, “Higher Realities: New Age Spirituality in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road,” Research in African Literatures 36.4 (2005): 17. Okri, The Famished Road, 4. Esther de Bruijn, “Coming to Terms with New Ageist Contamination: Cosmopolitanism in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road,” Research in African Literatures 38.4 (2007): 171. Okri, The Famished Road, 16. Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 26. Ibid., 28. Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2004), 68. Diana Adesola Mafe, “Ghostly Girls in the ‘Eerie Bush’: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus as Postcolonial Female Gothic Fiction,” Research in African Literatures 43.3 (2012): 23. Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 46. Okri, The Famished Road, 38. Ibid. Ibid., 39.

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Notes to pages 33–42

44. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 14. 45. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369–418. 46. Okri, The Famished Road, 104. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 287. 49. Ibid., 236. 50. Jonathan Steinwand, “What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novels by Witi Ihimaera, Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav Ghosh,” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 182. 51. Wendy Woodward, “Whales, Clones, and Two Ecological Novels: The Whale Caller and Jane Rosenthal’s Souvenir,” Ways of Writing: Critical Essays on Zakes Mda, ed. David Bell and J. U. Jacobs (KwaZulu-Natal: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009), 338. 52. David Bell and J. U. Jacobs, “Introduction,” Ways of Writing: Critical Essays on Zakes Mda (KwaZulu-Natal: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009), 2. 53. Ibid. 54. Mda, The Whale Caller, 66. 55. Ibid., 13. 56. Ibid., 37. 57. Gabeba Baderoon, “The African Oceans–Tracing the Sea as Memory of Slavery in South African Literature and Culture,” Research in African Literatures 40.4 (2009): 97. 58. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Ordinary Futures: Interspecies Worldings in the Anthropocene,” Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan (London: Routledge, 2015), 356. 59. Roman Bartosch, Environmentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 182–183. 60. Harry Sewlall, “Border Crossings,” Scrutiny2 12.1 (2007): 132. 61. Ibid. 62. Mda, The Whale Caller, 76. 63. Ibid., 77–78. 64. Michael Lundblad, “Malignant and Beneﬁcent Fictions: Constructing Nature in Ecocriticism and Achebe’s Arrow of God,” West Africa Review 3.1 (2001): 15. 65. Mda, The Whale Caller, 77. 66. Steinwand, “What the Whales Would Tell Us,” 185. 67. S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology 25.4 (2010): 555. 68. Chiwengo, “Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle (review),” 278–280. 69. Harrow, “Patrice Nganang’s L’invention,” 65. 70. Nganang, Dog Days, 98.

Notes to pages 42–53

175

71. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 243. 72. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006). 73. Nganang, Dog Days, 21. 74. Ibid., 22. 75. Ibid., 101. 76. Ibid., 206. 77. Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism,” 284. 78. Steven M. Tobias, “Amos Tutuola and the Colonial Carnival,” Research in African Literatures 30.2 (1999): 68. 79. Simon Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2. 80. Tutuola, The Palmwine Drinkard, 9. 81. Quayson, Strategic Transformations, 54–55. 82. Kalliney, Commonwealth of Letters, 170. 83. Arlene A. Elder, Narrative Shape-Shifting: Myth, Humor, and History in the Fiction of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing and Yvonne Vera (Suffolk: James Currey, 2009), 20. 84. Ben Obumselu, “Ben Okri’s The Famished Road: A Re-evaluation,” Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 48.1 (2011): 26–38. 85. Okri, The Famished Road, 288. 86. Ibid. 87. Kim Anderson Sasser, Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism: Strategizing Belonging (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 77. 88. Okri, The Famished Road, 499. 89. Kitamura, Gone to the Forest, 40. 90. Ibid., 41–42. 91. Ibid., 43. 92. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 64. 93. Richard Grusin, “Introduction,” The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Kindle ebook ﬁle. 94. Jeffery Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 16. 95. Ibid., 5. 96. Tutuola, The Palmwine Drinkard, 83. 97. Robert Stam, “Beyond Third Cinema: The Aesthetics of Hybridity,” Rethinking Third Cinema, ed. Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake (London: Routledge, 2003), 33. 98. Tutuola, My Life, 44. 99. Ibid., 36. 100. Ibid., 37. 101. Ibid., 39. 102. Laura Murphy, Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 64. 103. Ibid. 104. Stam, “Beyond Third Cinema,” 32.

176

Notes to pages 53–58

105. Ibid., 35. 106. Allison Carruth, “Compassion, Commodiﬁcation, and the Lives of Animals: J.M. Coetzee’s Recent Fiction,” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 202. 107. Mda, The Whale Caller, 138 108. Achille Mbembe, “Variations on the Beautiful in Congolese Worlds of Sound,” Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, ed. Sarah Nuttall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 74. 109. Kitamura, Gone to the Forest, 109. 110. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi.

2

Beyond Human Agency: Nuruddin Farah and Somalia’s Ecologies of War

1. Serpil Oppermann, “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency,” Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 21–36. 2. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half a Yellow Sun (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). 3. Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007). 4. Mia Couto, Sleepwalking Land, trans. David Brookshaw (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2006). 5. Chris Abani, Song for Night: A Novella (New York: Akashic Books, 2007). 6. See the essays in Remembering Biafra: Narrative, History, and Memory of the Nigeria-Biafra War, ed. Chima Korieh and Ifeanyi Ezeonu (Glassboro: Goldline and Jacobs, 2010); John Masterson, The Disorder of Things: A Foucauldian Approach to the Work of Nuruddin Farah (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2013); Derek Wright, The Novels of Nuruddin Farah (Bayreuth: Pia Thielmann & Eckhard Breitinger, 1994); Clement Okafor, “Sacriﬁce & the Contestation of Identity in Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn,” War in African Literature Today 26 (2008): 33–48; Grace Okereke, “The Nigerian Civil War and the Female Imagination: Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra,” Feminism in African Literature: Essays on Criticism, ed. Helen Chukwuma (Enugu: New Generation Books, 1994), 144–158. 7. Nuruddin Farah, Secrets (New York: Arcade Publications, 1998). 8. Nuruddin Farah, Links (New York: Penguin, 2003). 9. Nuruddin Farah, Crossbones (New York: Penguin, 2012). 10. Scholars have commented speciﬁcally on the animal imagery in Farah’s oeuvre. Ousseina D. Alidou and Alamin M. Mazrui, for instance, argue that Farah uses animal imagery to foreground the human exploitation of nonhuman life. Ousseina D. Alidou and Alamin Mazrui, “‘Secrets’: ‘Things Fall Apart,’” Research in African Literatures 31.1 (2000): 126. Also, Minna Niemi contends that the tale of an eagle and chickens that plays

Notes to pages 58–62

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

177

a central role in Knots (a novel not analyzed here) is “a subtext and . . . metaphor for hope that the novel strongly underlines.” Minna Niemi, “Witnessing Contemporary Somalia from Abroad: An Interview with Nuruddin Farah,” Callaloo 35.2 (2012): 339. Similarly, Byron CamineroSantangelo claims that Farah critiques the view of “nonhuman ‘others’ as only having value to the degree to which they can be manipulated and used to satiate desire.” Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 58. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71. Ibid., 43. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 37. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 31. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity,” Ecozon@ 3.1 (2012): 79. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Introduction,” Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 3. See Harry Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/ Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society,” Public Culture 15.2 (2003): 261–285. For Nurit Bird-David, relational epistemology implies that humans are not self-sufﬁcient subjects but are always in relationship with fellow humans and other species around them. Such relationship implies mutual reciprocity and responsibility. As Bird-David puts it, relationality “is expecting response and responding, growing into mutual responsiveness and furthermore, possibly into mutual responsibility” with human and nonhuman beings around us.” Nurit Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology 40.S1 (Supplement, February 1999): S77. See Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1871). Anselm Franke, “Introduction–‘Animism.’” e-ﬂux.com 36 (July 2012). www .e-ﬂux.com/journal/36/61244/introduction-animism/ Graham Huggan and Helen Tifﬁn, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (New York: Routledge, 2010), 191. Ibid. Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction,” 2–3. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 10. Farah’s Close Sesame, the third novel of his ﬁrst trilogy on the theme of an African dictatorship, has dealt with the historical realities of colonial Somalia and how it informs the country’s postcolonial condition. See Raymond Ntalindwa’s “Linkages of History in the Narrative of Close Sesame,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 12.2 (1999): 187–202 for an exploration of the historical dynamics of the text. Nuruddin Farah, “The Family House,” Transition 99 (2008): 9.

178

Notes to pages 62–70

28. Niemi, “Witnessing Contemporary Somalia from Abroad,” 340. 29. Michelle Lynn Brown, “Bleeding for the Mother(Land): Reading Testimonial Bodies in Nuruddin Farah’s Maps,” Research in African Literatures 41.4 (2010): 126. 30. “The Family House,” 9. For further discussion of Ethiopia-Somalia relations, see Alexander De Waal, Evil Days: Thirty Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1991). 31. Farah, “The Family House,” 10. 32. Ines Mzali, “Wars of Representation: Metonymy and Nuruddin Farah’s Links,” College Literature 37.3 (2010): 85. 33. Clive Schoﬁeld, “Plundered Waters: Somalia’s Maritime Resource Insecurity,” Crucible of Survival, ed. Timothy Doyle and Melissa Risely (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 103. 34. Francis Ngaboh-Smart, Beyond Empire and Nation: Postnational Arguments in the Fiction of Nuruddin Farah and B. Kojo Laing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 133. 35. Mzali, “Wars of Representation,” 84–85. 36. Farah, Links, 36. 37. Nicholas Hildyard, “Blood, Babies and the Social Roots of Conﬂict,” Ecology, Politics & Violent Conﬂict, ed. Mohamed Suliman (London: Zed Books, 1999), 21. 38. Wright, The Novels of Nuruddin Farah, 5. 39. Garth Myers, African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice (London: Zed Books, 2011), 152. 40. Patricia Alden and Louis Tremaine, “Reinventing Family in the Second Trilogy of Nuruddin Farah,” World Literature Today 72.4 (Autumn 1998): 763. 41. Ibid. 42. Alidou and Mazrui, “Secrets,” 125. 43. Emmanuel Levinas, Difﬁcult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 153. 44. Ibid., 152–153. 45. Ibid., 153. 46. Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 55. 47. Alidou and Mazrui, “Secrets,” 125. 48. Levinas, Difﬁcult Freedom, 153. 49. Farah, Secrets, 2. 50. Jacqueline Bardolph, “Brothers and Sisters in Nuruddin Farah’s Two Trilogies,” World Literature Today 72.4 (1998): 731. 51. Farah, Links, 130. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 131. 54. Farah, Crossbones, 158. 55. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 396. 56. Ibid., 392.

Notes to pages 70–79

179

57. Ibid., 409. 58. Farah, Crossbones, 158. 59. Jeremy M. B. Smith, “Scrubland,” Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica .com/science/scrubland. Updated September 15, 2009. 60. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environment of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 222. 61. Farah, Secrets, 108. 62. Ibid., 123. 63. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Nuruddin Farah, “Nuruddin Farah,” Bomb 87 (2004): 58. 64. Farah, Links, 14–15. 65. Ibid., 31. 66. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2. 67. Ibid. 68. Farah, Crossbones, 337. 69. Ibid., 359. 70. Farah, Links, 65. 71. Ibid., 36. 72. Ibid., 68. 73. Ibid., 208–209. 74. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 157–158. 75. Farah, Secrets, 58–59. 76. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 90. 77. Farah, Secrets, 93. 78. Alidou and Mazrui, “Secrets,” 126. 79. Huggan and Tifﬁn, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 191. 80. Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades, 70–71. 81. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xvi. 82. Ibid., 99. 83. Dan Wylie, “Touching Trunks: Elephants, Ecology and Compassion in Three Southern African Teen Novels,” Journal of Literary Studies 30.4 (2014): 26. 84. Arun Agrawal uses “the term environmental subjects to nominate those who thus care about the environment. More precisely, the environment constitutes for them a conceptual category that organizes some of their thinking; it is also a domain in conscious relation to which they perform some of their actions.” Arun Agrawal, Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 164–165. 85. Farah, Secrets, 98. 86. Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades, 70. 87. Farah, Secrets, 60. 88. Agrawal, Environmentality, 7. 89. Farah, Secrets, 93. 90. Said Samatar, “Are There Secrets in Secrets?” Research in African Literatures 31.1 (2000): 137.

180 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104.

3

Notes to pages 79–86 Ibid., 141. Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades, 59. Ibid. Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” e-ﬂux.com 36. July 2012. www .eﬂux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/ Chen, Animacies, 23. Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 54. Ibid., 10. Ibid. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 10. Ibid. Ibid., 55. Wolfgang Sachs, “Social Justice and Environmental Sustainability in the PostDevelopment Era,” Ecology, Politics, and Violent Conﬂict, ed. Mohamed Suliman (London: Zed Books, 1999), 60. Fredric Jameson, “War and Representation,” PMLA 124.5 (2009): 1537.

Rethinking Postcolonial Resistance: The Niger Delta Example

1. David Abram, “The Commonwealth of Breath,” Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 301. 2. Grant Farred, “A Thriving Postcolonialism: Toward an Anti-Postcolonial Discourse,” Neplanta: Views from South 2.2 (2001): 245. 3. Ibid. 4. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 6. 5. Gabriel Okara, The Voice (London: Heinemann, 1970). 6. Isidore Okpewho, Tides (London: Longman, 1993). 7. Tanure Ojaide, The Activist (Lagos: Faraﬁna Press, 2006). 8. Farred, “A Thriving Postcolonialism,” 245. 9. For endorsement of violence as a strategy of resistance in Niger Delta literature, see Charles Cliff Feghabo, “Isidore Okpewho’s Tides and Ken SaroWiwa’s A Month and a Day: A Kinesis of Eco-Activism from Theory to Praxis,” Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes, ed. Ogaga Okuyade (New York: African Heritage Press, 2013), 60; and Sunny Ahwefeada, “A Nameless Activist in the Service of the Fatherland,” The Guardian (January 22, 2007), 45. 10. For a discussion of The Voice as a novel depicting postcolonial corruption and disillusionment, see Hugh Webb, “Allegory: Okara’s The Voice,” English in Africa 5.2 (1978): 66–73; Arthur Ravenscroft, “Introduction,” The Voice (London: Heinemann, 1970), 1–21; Eustace Palmer, “Social Comment in the West African Novel,” Studies in the Novel 4.2 (1972): 218–230.

Notes to pages 87–91

181

11. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 12. Ibid., 8. 13. Ibid., 29. 14. Ibid., 38. 15. Ibid., 79. 16. Ibid., 72. 17. Joseph Ushie, “The Niger-Delta Crisis, Origins and Neo-colonialist Complications: An Entremesa Discourse,” Journal of African Literature and the Environment 1.2 (2011): 1–26. 18. Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas, Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights and Oil (London: Verso Books, 2003), 5–6. 19. Paul Orogun, “Resource Control, Revenue Allocation and Petroleum Politics in Nigeria: The Niger Delta Question,” Geojournal 75 (2010): 460. 20. J. S. Oboreh, “The Origins and the Causes of Crisis in the Niger-Delta: The Way Forward,” Anatomy of the Niger Delta Crisis: Causes, Consequences and Opportunities for Peace, ed. Victor Ojakorotu (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2010), 18. 21. Tekena N. Tamuno, Oil Wars in the Niger Delta 1849–2009 (Ibadan: StirlingHorden Publishers Ltd., 2011), 193. 22. Ken Saro-Wiwa, Genocide in Nigeria: The Ogoni Tragedy (London: Saro International Publishers, 1992), 12–13. 23. For a discussion of Ojaide’s use of Mami water imagery and other deities in his poetry, see Nester A. Alu and Vashti Yusuf Suwa, “Tanure Ojaide: The Poet-Priest of the Niger-Delta and the Land Saga,” AFFREV LALIGENS 1.1 (2012): 132–144. For a general discussion of the Niger Delta in Ojaide’s poetry, see Senayon S. Olaoluwa, “Where Do We Go from Here? Niger Delta, Crumbling Urbanscape and Migration in Tanure Ojaide’s When It No Longer Matters Where You Live,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 18.2 (2009): 175–195. 24. Omolade Adunbi, Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 168–169. 25. Samuel Ovuete Aghalino, Crude Oil Business in the Western Niger Delta Nigeria 1956–1995 (Enugu: Rhyce Kerex, 2009), 36–37. 26. See Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, “Development of Nigeria’s Oil Industry,” 2010. www.nnpcgroup.com/NNPCBusiness/BusinessInformation/ OilGasinNigeria/DevelopmentoftheIndustry.aspx (accessed March 19, 2016). 27. Okonta and Douglas, Where Vultures Feast, 23. 28. Jebiminih Moro, Socio-Political Crisis in the Niger Delta (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 2009), xii. 29. United Nations Environment Programme, Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland Report (2011): 155–156. For the complete report, see http://post conﬂict.unep.ch/publications/OEA/UNEP_OEA.pdf (accessed March 19, 2016). 30. L. H. Schatzel, Petroleum in Nigeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 4; J. K. Onoh, The Nigerian Oil Economy: From Prosperity to Glut (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983), 22.

182

Notes to pages 91–93

31. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environment of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 106. 32. Cyril Obi and Siri Aas Rustad, “Introduction: Petro-violence in the Niger Delta–the Complex Politics of an Insurgency,” Oil and Insurgency in the Niger Delta (London: Zed Books, 2011), 3–4. 33. Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London: Routledge, 1997), 12. 34. See Tarila Marclint Ebiede, “Conﬂict Drivers: Environmental Degradation and Corruption in the Niger Delta Region,” African Conﬂict & Peacebuilding Review 1.1 (2011): 139–151. 35. Okonta and Douglas, Where Vultures Feast, 32. 36. Ibid., 116–117. 37. Okonta and Douglas, Where Vultures Feast, 128–134; Amnesty International, Nigeria: The Ogoni Trials and Detentions, Amnesty International Publications, 1995. www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr44/020/1995/en/ (accessed November 24, 2014); Howard W. French, “Nigeria Executes Critic of Regime; Nations Protest,” New York Times, November 11, 1995. www .nytimes.com/1995/11/11/world/nigeria-executes-critic-of-regime-nation s-protest.html?pagewanted=1 (accessed March 19, 2016). 38. For an overview of the militarization of the Delta region, see Charles Ukeje, “Changing the Paradigm of Paciﬁcation in Nigeria’s Delta Region,” Oil and Insurgency in the Niger Delta, ed. Cyril Obi and Siri Aas Rustad (London: Zed Books, 2011), 83–98. 39. Okonta and Douglas, Where Vultures Feast, 134; Amnesty International, “Nigeria: Amnesty International Condemns Death Sentences Imposed on Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Ogoni Detainees after Blatantly Unfair Trials,” www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AFR44/026/1995/en/0a910fab-eb2c-11d d-92ac-295bdf97101f/afr440261995en.pdf (accessed November 20, 2014). 40. For a discussion of the kinds of militancy in the Delta, see Augustine Ikelegbe, “Popular and Criminal Violence as Instruments of Struggle in the Niger Delta,” Oil and Insurgency in the Niger Delta, ed. Cyril Obi and Siri Aas Rustad (London: Zed Books, 2011), 130. For an overview of MEND and its kidnapping operations, see Temitope B. Oriola, Criminal Resistance?: The Politics of Kidnapping Oil Workers (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013). 41. Michael Watts, “Anatomy of an Oil Insurgency: Violence and Militants in the Niger Delta, Nigeria,” Extractive Economies and Conﬂicts in the Global South: Multi-Regional Perspectives on Rentier Politics, ed. Kenneth Omeje (Surrey: Ashgate, 2008), 66. 42. Ibid., 59; Adunbi, Oil Wealth, 194. 43. Lawrence Likar, Eco-Warriors, Nihilist Terrorists and the Environment (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011), 179. 44. United Nations Environment Programme, Environmental Assessment, 2. 45. Ibid., 9. 46. For analysis of the Delta using the resource curse paradigm, see Freedom C. Onuoha and Gerald E. Ezirim, “The Resource Curse and National Development in Nigeria,” Niger-Delta: Constraints and Pathways to

Notes to pages 93–99

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

183

Development, ed. Ibaba Samuel Ibaba (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). Kenneth Harrow, Thresholds of Change in African Literature: The Emergence of a Tradition (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994), x. Webb, “Allegory,” 69. Ravenscroft, “Introduction,” 10. Bernth Lindfors, “Five Nigerian Novels,” Books Abroad 39.4 (Autumn 1965): 411. Patrick Scott and Emeka Okeke-Ezigbo have also interrogated Okara’s use of language in “‘The Voice’: The Non-Ijo Reader and the Pragmatics of Translingualism,” Research in African Literatures 21.3 (1990): 75–88; and “J. M. Synge and Gabriel Okara: The Heideggerian Search for a Quintessential Language,” Comparative Literature Studies 26.4 (1989): 324–340, respectively. The question of the language of African literature dominated debates in the ﬁeld in the 1960s and 1970s. It was the focus of the famous 1962 Makerere Conference, where Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Obi Wali argued for the use of indigenous African languages for African literary writing. Others such as Chinua Achebe and Gabriel Okara contended that the English language is adaptable to reﬂect the African experience. For an overview of the debate, see Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind (London: Heinemann, 1986). Okara, The Voice, 27. For a detailed analysis of Okara’s linguistic experiment in The Voice and the interplay of Ijaw and English in the novel, see Scott, “‘The Voice’: The NonIjo Reader,” 75–88 For further description of this god, see Godchecker Inc., “Woyengi,” www.godchecker.com/pantheon/african-mythology.php?deity=WOYEN GI, January 23, 2014 (accessed March 19, 2016). For a description of the region’s geography, see Orogun, “Resource Control,” 477. Okara, The Voice, 26. Ibid., 127. Okeke-Ezigbo, “J. M. Synge and Gabriel Okara,” 326. Bernth Lindfors and Eustace Palmer agree that the ending of the novel offers a hopeful future for Amatu. Lindfors, for example, asserts that “although the story ends with Okolo’s death, it ends afﬁrmatively and optimistically. One is made to feel that the powers of darkness have triumphed only temporarily over the powers of enlightenment, that goodness will eventually rise up and vanquish evil.” Lindfors, “Five Nigerian Novels,” 411. Okara, The Voice, 96. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 77. Susan Signe Morrison, “Waste Aesthetics: Form as Restitution,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.3 (2013): 467. Obi Maduakor, “Gabriel Okara: Poet of the Mystic Inside,” World Literature Today 61.1 (1987): 43. Okara, The Voice, 26. Ibid., 61. Okonta and Douglas, Where Vultures Feast, 49.

184

Notes to pages 99–111

66. Moro, Socio-Political Crisis, 55. 67. Okonta and Douglas, Where Vultures Feast, 69. For further discussion of seismic surveys, see Aghalino, Crude Oil Business, 79. 68. Okonta and Douglas, Where Vultures Feast, 71. 69. Ibid., 70. 70. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2. 71. Ibid., 3. 72. Okara, The Voice, 127. 73. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, 1939), 84. 74. Mariama Ba, So Long a Letter (London: Heinemann, 1981). 75. Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 128. 76. Okpewho, Tides, 2. 77. Ibid., 12. 78. Ibid., 146. 79. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 20. 80. Ibid., 7. 81. Ojaide, The Activist, 53. 82. Ibid., 82. 83. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 8 84. Ojaide, The Activist, 82. 85. Ibid., 239. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., 240–241. 88. Ibid., 241. 89. Feghabo, “Isidore Okpewho’s Tides and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and a Day,” 59. 90. For an interesting analysis of Saro-Wiwa’s life and work, see Nixon, Slow Violence, 103–127. 91. Grant Hamilton, On Representation: Deleuze and Coetzee on the Colonized Subject (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 95. 92. Okpewho, Tides, 198. 93. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 38. 94. Okpewho, Tides, 178. 95. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 57–58. 96. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso Books, 2011), 239. 97. Ibid. 98. David Thomas Sumner and Lisa M. Wiedman, “Eco-terrorism or Eco-tage: An Argument for the Proper Frame,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.4 (2013): 870. 99. “Enabling violation” is Spivak’s term for a form of violation that produces a positive outcome but that does not validate the initial damage. In Spivak’s illustration, it is “a rape that produces a healthy child, whose existence cannot be advanced as a justiﬁcation for the rape.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 309.

Notes to pages 111–114

185

100. For a description of the bunkering process, see Paul Ugor, “The Niger-Delta Wetland, Illegal Oil Bunkering and Youth Identity Politics in Nigeria,” Postcolonial Text 8.3 (2013): 8–10. 101. Ojaide, The Activist, 155. 102. Ibid. 103. Amnesty International, Bad Information: Oil Spill Investigations in the Niger Delta (London: Amnesty International Publications, 2013), 11. For the complete report, see www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AFR44/028/2013/ en/b0a9e2c9-9a4a-4e77-8f8c-8af41cb53102/afr440282013en.pdf (accessed November 20, 2014). 104. Ibid., 6. 105. United Nations Environment Programme, Environmental Assessment, 100. 106. As Ngozi Chuma-Udeh remarks in a reading of oil spills in Kaine Agary’s novel Yellow-Yellow: “The resultant oil spill wrought heavy contamination of land and underground water courses, sometimes more than 40 years after oil spilled.” Ngozi Chuma-Udeh, “The Niger-Delta, Environment, Women, and the Politics of Survival in Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow,” EcoCritical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes, ed. Ogaga Okuyade (New York: African Heritage Press, 2013), 119. Patrick Bond shares a similar view in his foreword to Temitope B. Oriola’s Criminal Resistance?: The Politics of Kidnapping Oil Workers (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013). For Bond, “Oil bunkering and pipeline sabotage, for example–are similarly fraught given the collateral damage including explosions and ecological devastation” (x). For a discussion of the accusations and counteraccusations about oil spills, see Ebiede, “Conﬂict Drivers,” 142; and Orogun, “Resource Control,” 464, 494–502. 107. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 135. 108. Ibid., 19. 109. Okpewho, Tides, 24. 110. Ibid., 62. 111. Janet Gurkin Altman includes “Conﬁdence and Conﬁdants” as a characteristic of the epistolary novel in Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1982). She notes that “the conﬁdential role, letter, tone, and relationship are necessary components of epistolary narrative” (83). It should be clear that Piriye’s conﬁdence in Tonwe precipitates his decision to involve his retired colleague in the investigation. Tonwe, for his part, worries about Priboye, who carries their letters until Piriye reassures him of his trust for the intermediary. 112. Altman, Epistolarity, 51. 113. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1989), 36. 114. Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 151–152. 115. One remarkable critique of Habermas’s work is Houston Baker’s. For Baker, the ideal public sphere was a site of exclusion, since women and blacks were left out of these European spaces. For more on

186

116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139.

Notes to pages 114–120 Baker’s critique and his theorization of alternative public spheres, see “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” Public Culture 7.1 (Fall 1994): 3–33. Okpewho, Tides, 105. Ibid. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 4. Altman, Epistolarity, 92. Ojaide, The Activist, 243. Ibid., 267. Ibid., 275. Ibid., 273. The nude protest calls to mind a 2002 incident where women seized Chevron’s oil facility in the Delta. For a discussion of that incident and the role of women in the Delta struggle, see Edlyne Ezenongaya Anugwom and Kenechukwu N. Anugwom, “The Other Side of Civil Society Story: Women, Oil, and the Niger Delta Environmental Struggle in Nigeria,” GeoJournal 74.4 (2009): 333–346. Spivak, Critique, 309. Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 43. Raymond Williams’s well-known text is The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Ojaide, The Activist, 299. Ibid., 178. Carrigan “use[s] this term to suggest an interface between contrasting ideologies of development where the distribution of power is not stable but operates in a condition of ﬂux as the interests of different empowered actors oscillate between conﬂict and coalition. Embracing the nexus of past, present, and future genealogical claims (cultural sacredness), notions of nationality, signiﬁcant areas that safeguard nature’s sanctity (environmental sacredness), and tourism-related economic concerns (the sacred principle of capital accumulation), it allows the extrinsic value of sacred spaces to become negotiable by multiple parties without collapsing the terms of discussion into a purely economic idiom.” Anthony Carrigan, Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 91. Ojaide, The Activist, 349. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 38. Ibid., 39. Nixon, Slow Violence, 106. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 28. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (London: Vintage Books, 1994), 12–13. Okpewho, Tides, 3. Ibid., 155. Butler’s point was made in a lecture titled “Vulnerability and Resistance” at the 2014 MLA Convention in Chicago. A version of the paper can be found

Notes to pages 121–128

140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147.

148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

4 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

187

at http://profession.commons.mla.org/2014/03/19/vulnerability-andresistance/ (accessed March 19, 2016). Said, Representations, 101–102. Neil Lazarus, “Representations of the Intellectual in ‘Representations of the Intellectual,’” Research in African Literatures 36.3 (2005): 117. Said, Representations, 82–83. Ibid., 82. Okpewho, Tides, 141. Ojaide, The Activist, 22. Al Gedicks, Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), 197. Said, Representations, 43–44. Said’s position is shared by Pierre Bourdieu, who writes that “the spokesman’s problem is to offer a language that enables the individuals concerned to universalize their experiences without thereby effectively excluding them from the expression of their own experience.” Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1993), 38. Shalini Randeria, “Global Designs and Local Lifeworlds,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 9.1 (2007): 23. Ojaide, The Activist, 292. Ibid., 293. Said, Representations, 59. Ibid., xvi–xvii.

Resistance from the Ground: Agriculture, Gender, and Manual Labor

Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather (Oxford: Heinemann, 1969). J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (New York: Penguin Books, 1983). Maathai, Unbowed, 38. Ibid. For examples of this scholarship, see Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014). 7. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, “Introduction,” Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 2. 8. Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism,” Feminist Formations 23.2 (2011): 31. 9. Karla Armbruster, “‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’: A Call for Boundary-Crossing in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism,” Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 103.

188

Notes to pages 128–137

10. Ibid. 11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 12. Bina Agarwal, “The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India,” Feminist Studies 18.1 (1992): 119. Ecological feminism, social ecofeminism, and critical feminist eco-socialism are some terms that have been used synonymously with ecofeminism. For a trajectory of ecofeminism and its offshoots, see Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited.” 13. Agarwal, “The Gender and Environment Debate,” 150. 14. Evan Mwangi, “The Incomplete Rebellion: Mau Mau Movement in Twenty-First Century Kenyan Popular Culture,” African Studies Review 57.2 (2010): 93. 15. Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xii. 16. See Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, xii; and Mwangi, “The Incomplete Rebellion,” 91–93. 17. Wunyabari Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 114–115. 18. Maathai, Unbowed, 46. 19. Ibid., 39. 20. Ibid., 125. 21. Ibid., 272. 22. Ellen W. Gorsevski, “Wangari Maathai’s Emplaced Rhetoric: Greening Global Peacebuilding,” Environmental Communication 6.3 (2012): 298. 23. For a scholarly account of the struggle over Karura Forest, see Jeremia Njeru, “‘Defying’ Democratization and Environmental Protection in Kenya: The Case of Karura Forest Reserve in Nairobi,” Political Geography 29 (2010): 336–341. 24. Raymond Oenbring, “Strategic Essentialism and the Representation of the Natural: The Case of Ecofeminist/Scientist Wangari Maathai,” Agency in the Margins: Stories of Outsider Rhetoric, ed. Anne Meade Stockdell-Giesler (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), 300. 25. Maathai, Unbowed, 173. 26. Nixon, Slow Violence, 133. 27. Maathai, Unbowed, 182. 28. Ibid. 29. Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades of Green, 48. 30. Maathai, Unbowed, 48. 31. Ibid., 52. 32. Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson, “Witness or False Witness: Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Veriﬁcation in First-Person Testimony,” Biography 35.4 (2012): 600. 33. Nixon notes that by 2004, “the movement had created 6,000 local tree nurseries and employed 100,000 women to plant 30 million trees, mostly in

Notes to pages 137–144

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

189

Kenya, but in a dozen other African countries as well” (Slow Violence and Environmentalism, 129). Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades, 47. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 386. Head, When Rain, 10. Ibid., 16. Huma Ibrahim, Bessie Head: Subversive Identities in Exile (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 2. Coreen Brown, The Creative Vision of Bessie Head (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2003), 64. Rob Nixon, “Rural Transnationalism: Bessie Head’s Southern Spaces,” Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature, and History in South Africa and Australia, ed. Kate Darien-Smith, Elizabeth Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall (London: Routledge, 1996), 243–245. Jonathan Highﬁeld, “‘Relations with Food’: Agriculture, Colonialism, and Foodways in the Writing of Bessie Head,” Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives, ed. Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 103. Ibid., 112. Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades, 90. Ibid. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 12 Ibid. Head, When Rain, 19. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing (London: Michael Joseph Publishers, 1950). Head, When Rain, 25. Ibid., 29. Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), 135. Head, When Rain, 102. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 114. Florence Ebila, “‘A Proper Woman, in the African Tradition’: The Construction of Gender and Nationalism in Wangari Maathai’s Autobiography Unbowed,” TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE 52.1 (2015): 147. Head, When Rain, 157. Ibid. Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown, “New Codes of Honor and Human Values in Bessie Head’s ‘When Rain Clouds Gather,’” South Atlantic Review 75.2 (2010): 90. Ibid. Elspeth Tulloch, “Husbandry, Agriculture and Ecocide: Reading Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather as a Postcolonial Georgic,” European Journal of English Studies 16.2 (2012): 144.

190

Notes to pages 144–151

61. Head, When Rain, 34. For a discussion of enclosure as a colonial and imperial practice, see Robert Marzec, An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 62. Head, When Rain, 32. 63. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2. 64. Derek Attridge, “Against Allegory: Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, and the Question of Literary Reading,” J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual, ed. Jane Poyner (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 75. 65. Kelly Hewson, “Making the ‘Revolutionary Gesture’: Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Some Variations on the Writer’s Responsibility,” Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Sue Kossew (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998), 151. 66. Nadine Gordimer, “The Idea of Gardening: Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee [Review],” Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Sue Kossew. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998), 143. 67. Ibid., 144. 68. Michael Marais, “From the Standpoint of Redemption: Aesthetic Autonomy and Social Engagement in J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction of the Late Apartheid Period,” Journal of Narrative Theory 38.2 (2008): 238. 69. Anthony Vital, “Toward an African Ecocriticism: Postcolonialism, Ecology and ‘Life & Times of Michael K,’” Research in African Literatures 39.1 (2008): 92. 70. Ibid., 96. 71. SueEllen Campbell, “The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet,” Western American Literature 24 (1989): 199–211. 72. Serpil Oppermann, “Theorizing Ecocriticism: Toward a Postmodern Ecocritical Practice,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 13.2 (2006): 116. 73. Coetzee, Life & Times, 59. 74. Ibid., 109. 75. Ibid., 60. 76. Ibid., 139. 77. Ibid., 3. 78. Ibid., 40. 79. Ibid., 43. 80. Oppermann, “Theorizing Ecocriticism,” 116. 81. Vital, “Toward an African,” 92–93. 82. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 83. Coetzee, Life & Times, 139. 84. Gillian Dooley, J. M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010), 316. 85. Coetzee, Life & Times, 182. 86. Ibid., 113.

Notes to pages 151–158

191

87. For Deleuze and Guattari, a striated space is an ordered space, regulated by the state to make it amenable to control and regulation. It “is that which intertwines ﬁxed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms, and organizes horizontal melodic lines and vertical harmonic planes.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 478. A smooth or nomadic space, on the other hand, exists outside the conﬁnes of regulated space. As Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize it, it is a dynamic space devoid of the strictures of striated space. 88. Dominic Head, “The (im)Possibility of Ecocriticism,” Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism & Literature, ed. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (London & New York: Zed Books, 1998), 36. 89. David Babcock, “Professional Subjectivity and the Attenuation of Character in J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K,” PMLA 127.4 (2012): 895. 90. Coetzee, Life & Times, 77. 91. Ibid., 60. 92. Ibid., 65. 93. Timothy Wright, “The Art of Evasion: Writing and the State in J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K,” JLS/TLW 28.3 (2012): 55–76. 94. Graham Huggan and Helen Tifﬁn, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (New York: Routledge, 2010), 121. 95. Wright, “The Art of Evasion,” 62. 96. Coetzee, Life & Times, 37. 97. Ibid., 70–71. 98. Dooley, J. M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative, 181–182. 99. Rita Barnard, “J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Disgrace’ and the South African Pastoral,” Contemporary Literature 44.2 (2003): 219. 100. Coetzee, Life & Times, 183–184. 101. Karen Thornber, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 103. 102. Coetzee, Life & Times, 57. 103. Laura Wright, “Wilderness into Civilized Shapes”: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 100. 104. Vital, “Toward an African,” 97. 105. Teresa Dovey, “J. M. Coetzee: Writing in the Middle Voice,” Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Sue Kossew (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998), 24. 106. Sophia Obiajulu Ogwude, “Protest and Commitment in Bessie Head’s Utopia,” Research in Research Literatures 29.3 (1998): 78. 107. Coetzee, Life & Times, 59. 108. Ibid. 109. Ebila, “A Proper Woman,” 152.

Epilogue: Rehabilitating the Human 1. Klein describes the characteristics of sacriﬁce zones: “They were poor places. Out-of-the-way places. Places where residents lacked political power, usually

192

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

Notes to pages 158–166 having to do with some combination of race, language, and class.” For further discussion of sacriﬁce zones, see Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 310–315. For a discussion of the lion’s death and its aftermath, see Peter Holley, “‘It’s Destroyed Us,’ Says Cecil the Lion Hunting Guide,” The Washington Post, October 17, 2015. Accessed August 8, 2016. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 49. See pages 38–50 for a discussion of the different strands of the posthuman. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 49–50. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 7. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 8. Ibid., 10. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 92. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 31. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1968). Patrice Nganang, Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle, trans. Amy Baram Reid (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 2. Ibid., 101. For a discussion of animalization in colonial discourse, see Graham Huggan and Helen Tifﬁn, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (New York: Routledge, 2010), 134–135. Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt, “Introduction: Narrative of Survival, Sustainability, and Justice,” Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 3. Karen Thornber, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 6. Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 103. Ibid., 86. Kevin Bales, Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2016), 166.

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Index

Abacha, Sani, 91, 116 Abani, Chris, 57 Abiku. See Famished Road, The Abram, David, 85 Achebe, Chinua, 7, 14, 29 actant. See Latour, Bruno Activist, The. See Niger Delta, Ojaide, Tanure Adamson, Joni, 21–22 Adichie, Chimamanda, 57 Adunbi, Omolade, 90 African literature criticism, 2, 5, 6, 25, 57 language, 14, 94–95 typology, 16 African National Congress (ANC), 85 Agamben, Giorgio, 23 Agarwal, Bina, 128, See also ecofeminism Agary, Kaine, 11 agency, 2–4, 44–50, 57–84 Agrawal, Arun, 179 agriculture, 126–157 Ahuja, Neel, 25 Ahwefeada, Sunny, 86, 111 Al Shabaab, 62, 64, 82 Alaimo, Stacy, 73, 75 Alidou, Ousseina D, 65, 66, 67, 76 Altman, Jane Gurkin, 114 Amnesty International, 111 amnesty program, 92 animal exploitation, 52, 53–54, 68 The Animal That Therefore I am, 33, 69–70 animism, 60, See also indigenous cosmologies animist materialism, 21, 59, See also Garuba, Harry, animism Anthropocene, 5, 168 anthropocentricism, 2, 170 strong, 170 anthropomorphism, 76–77 strategic, 14–15

anticolonial struggle, 48, 85 apartheid, 38, See also South Africa Appiah, Anthony, 42, 72 Armbruster, Karla, 128, See also ecofeminism Arrow of God, 7, See also Achebe, Chinua Attridge, Derek, 146 Ba, Mariama, 102 Babangida, Ibrahim, 91 Babcock, David, 151 Bales, Kevin, 14, 166 Barnard, Rita, 153 Beinart, William, 8 Bennett, Jane, 14, 55, 58, 61, 77, See also anthropomorphism Bhabha, Homi, 9, 50–51 Billingslea-Brown, Alma Jean, 143 biodiversity, 13, 83, 90, 91, 130, 132, 163 bombs, 4, 64, 71, 102, 108, 156 Botswana. See When Rain Clouds Gather BP (British Petroleum), 1, 2, 158 Braidotti, Rosi, 12, 159–161, See also posthuman Branch, Daniel, 129 Britain, 61–62, 90 Brown, Coreen, 138 Buell, Lawrence, 7 Butler, Judith, 120, 161 Calarco, Matthew, 66 Cameroon. See Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle Caminero-Santangelo, Byron, 8, 12, 76, 80, 136, 137, 139 Campbell, SueEllen, 147 Carrigan, Anthony, 118 Carruth, Allison, 54 casualties of war, 52, 70, 72, 81 Cecil the Lion, 158 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 8, 17 Cheah, Pheng, 117

207

208

Index

Chen, Mel Y., 76, 81 Chiwengo, Ngwarsungu, 41 civil war, 14, 57, 62, 72 climate change, 8, See also global warming Coetzee, J.M. See Life & Times of Michael K Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 51 collectivity, 112–118 colonialism, 4, 27, 129, 164, See also postcolonialism commodiﬁcation animals, 144, See also animal exploitation bodies, 54, 75, 160 contact zone, 29, 173 Cooper, Brenda, 32 Couto, Mia, 18 Cronon, William, 6 Crossbones, 18, 64–65, 69–71, See also Farah, Nuruddin de Bruijn, Esther, 31 de la Cadena, Marisol, 21 deep ecology, 6–7 deforestation, 2, 19, 33–34, 47, 107, 127–134 Deleuze, Gilles, 58, 67, 151 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 36 Derrida, Jacques. See “The Animal That Therefore I am” development, 19, 33, See also agriculture Dog Days An Animal Chronicle, 24–25, 39–44, 161–163, See also proximity, aesthetics of Dooley, Gillian, 151, 153 Douglas, Oronto, 99–100 drought, 77, 139–144 Dunton, Chris, 26 earth beings, 21, See also de la Cadena, Marisol ecoambiguity, 164, See also Thornber, Karen ecocriticism material, 59 postcolonial, 7, 168 ecofeminism, 128–129, See also gender ecological thought, the. See Morton, Tim ecological violence, 5, 33 ecologies of war, 57–84 ecophobia, 45 ecoterrorism, 110 Egbesu, 89 Elder, Arlene A., 46 Enlightenment, 8–9, 17, 50, 58, 83, 161 entanglement, 7, 20, See also proximity, aesthetics of

environmental actors, 2, 44, See also proximity, aesthetics of environmental justice, 2, 7, 15 environmental racism, 7 environmental subjects. See Agrawal, Arun environmental violence, 5, 18 epistolary form. See Tides Estok, Simon. See ecophobia ethical, 5, 30, 54, 161, 163 Ethiopia, 57, 62–63, 82 exilic consciousness, 138 Fagunwa, 3, 26 Famished Road, The, 16, 17, 24, 30–34, 46–47 Fanon, Frantz, 4, 9–10, 85, 161 Farah, Nuruddin, 18, 57–84, See also Somalia Farred, Grant, 85 Feghabo, Charles C., 86, 108 Ferguson, James, 13 Forest of a Thousand Daemons. See Fagunwa Franke, Anselm, 60 Freud, Sigmund, 101 Gaard, Greta, 128, See also ecofeminism gardening, 146–157 Garuba, Harry, 21, 44, 59 gas ﬂaring, 1, 13 Gedicks, Al, 123 gender, 20, 116, 156–157 George, Olakunle, 3 Ghosh, Amitav, 33 global warming, 18, 24, 86, 125, 160, 164 globalization, 13, 158, 165–166 Gone to the Forest. See Kitamura, Katie Gordimer, Nadine, 146 grassroots mobilization. See Unbowed Green Belt Movement (GBM), 127–137 Grusin, Richard, 51 Guattari, Félix, 58, 67, 151 Guha, Ramachandra, 91 Gulf of Mexico. See BP (British Petroleum) Habermas, Jurgen, 114 Habila, Helon, 11, 18 Haraway, Donna, 12, 42 Harlow, Barbara, 141 Harrow, Kenneth, 41, 93 Head, Bessie. See When Rain Clouds Gather Head, Dominic, 151 Heise, Ursula, 15, 61, 81–83

209

Index Hewson, Kelly, 146 Highﬁeld, Jonathan, 138–139 Hildyard, Nicholas, 64 Horsthemke, Kai, 8 Huggan, Graham, 7, 60, 76, 152 human agency. See agency human exceptionalism, 5, 23, 50, 149–150 Hunt, Alex, 164 Hwange Park, 158 hybridity, 52, 65 Ibrahim, Huma, 138 Ijaw, 89, See also Niger Delta illegal ﬁshing, 14, 64 indigenous cosmologies, 4, 21–22, 58, 59 indigenous environmental knowledge, 130, 136–137, See also indigenous cosmologies infrapolitics, 150 intellectual, the, 87, 119–124 interspecies relations. See proximity, aesthetics of Iovino, Serenella, 59, 60 Italy, 61, 82 James, Erin, 30 Jameson, Fredric, 83 Jesse ﬁre incident, 112 Kalliney, Peter, 46 Karura Forest, 132–133, See also Unbowed Kenya. See Unbowed kidnapping, 86, 92, 105 Kikuyu, 8, 127, 129, 136 Kitamura, Katie, 48–49, 54–55 Klein, Naomi, 158 Kohn, Eduardo, 12, 192 land ethic, 168 landmine, 64, 69, 70, 71, 73, 156 landscape, 4, 9, 10, 68–74, 98 Latour, Bruno, 4, 58, 76 Lazarus, Neil, 2, 121 LeMenager, Stephanie, 102 Leopold, Aldo, 5 Levinas, Emmanuel, 66 Life & Times of Michael K, 19, 146–157 Lindfors, Bernth, 27, 94 Links, 18, 63–64, 68, 72–73, 74–75, See also Farah, Nuruddin literary history of the Niger Delta, 86 incubation phase, 93–101 intermediate phase, 101–104, See also Tides

advanced phase, 104–108, See also Ojaide, Tanure Lundblad, Michael, 38 Maathai, Wangari. See Unbowed Maduakor, Obi, 98 magical realism, 16–17, 22, 79, See also Tutuola, Amos, Famished Road, The manual labor, 155–156 Marais, Michael, 147 Martinez-Alier, Joan, 91 Mau Mau, 4, 127, 129–130 Mazrui, Alamin, 65, 66, 67, 76 Mbembe, Achille, 26, 29, 54 McCabe, Douglas, 30 McClintock, Anne, 10, 137 Mda, Zakes. See Whale Caller, The mesh, 87, See also Morton, Tim Mitchell, Timothy, 110 Mogadiscio. See Somalia Moi, Daniel arap, 127, 132 Morton, Tim, 11, 87–89, 96–97, 104, 106, 109, 112–113, 118–119 Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), 86, 92 Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), 91–92, See also Ogoni, Saro-Wiwa, Ken Murphy, Laura, 53 Murphy, Patrick D., 128 Mwangi, Evan, 129 My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. See Tutuola, Amos Myers, Garth, 65 Mzali, Ines, 63 naturalizing Africa, 10–11, 27, 98 Ngaboh-Smart, Francis, 63 Nganang, Patrice. See Dog Days:An Animal Chronicle Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 14 Niger Delta, 1, 2, 4, 11, 13, 18–19, 85–125 Nigeria, 1, 27, 86–125, 158 Nigerian Bitumen Corporation, 90 Nixon, Rob, 6, 15, 91, See also slow violence nonhuman agency. See agency Obama, Barack, 1 Oboreh, J. S., 89 Obumselu, Ben, 46 Ogaden, 62, 69 Ogoni, 89, 91, See also Saro-Wiwa, Ken

210

Index

Ogwude, Sophia Obiajulu, 155 oil bunkering, 4, 13, 19, 85, 86, 105, 111, 117, 180 companies, 13, 86, 90–92 drilling, 93, 99–101 exploration, 13, 90–91, 99–100, 105–106 pollution, 2, 19, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 116, 120, 158 spill, 1, 92–93, 106, 111–112 Ojaide, Tanure, 19, 86, 104–108, 111–113, 115–119, 122–125 Okara, Gabriel. See Voice, The Okonta, Ike, 99–100 Okpewho, Isidore. See also Niger Delta, Tides Okri, Ben. See Famished Road, The Olaniyan, Tejumola, 5 Oloibiri, 90, See also Niger Delta Oppermann, Serpil, 59, 60, 147–148 Oriola, Temitope, 182, See also kidnapping Palmwine Drinkard, The. See Tutuola, Amos pastoral, 152 Peterson, Anna L., 8 piracy, 36, 64 postcolonial disillusionment, 16 postcolonial studies, 2, See also postcolonialism postcolonialism, 9, 10, 85–86, See also colonialism posthuman, 159–161 postmodern, 60, 147–148, 157 poverty, 20, 38, 41, 91, 131, 159, 163 Pratt, Mary Louise, 10, See also contact zone proximity, aesthetics of, 2, 5, 17, 22–26, 87, 130, 158 multispecies presence, 23, 25, 26–29 interspecies relationship, 29–44 distributed agency, 2, 44–50, 58–61 indistinction, 50–55 public sphere, 115 Quayson, Ato, 17, 27, 30, 31, 46 Ravenscroft, Arthur, 94 redemption of detritus, 53 rehabilitated human, 161–162 relationality, 45, 147, 150, 177 Representations of the Intellectual, 119–124 resistance, 4, 18–19, 20, 27, 85–125, 159 resistance from the ground, 19–20, 126–154, See also resistance

reterritorialization, 34, 47, 67, See also Deleuze, Gilles Roos, Bonnie, 164 Sachs, Wolfgang, 83 Said, Edward. See intellectual, the Samatar, Said, 79 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 19, 89, 91–92, 108, 136 Scott, James C., 150 Secrets, 63, 65–68, 71–72, 75–81, See also Farah, Nuruddin seismic surveys, 99–100, See also Niger Delta Sewlall, Harry, 37 shared vulnerability, 70, 104, 164 Shell. See Niger Delta Slaughter, Joseph, 114 Slaymaker, William, 6 Slovic, Scott, 15 slow violence, 11–12, 99–101, 110 Smith, Sidonie, 137 social ecology, 7 Somalia, 14, 57–84 South Africa, 34–39, 85, 137–138, 140, 146–154 Soyinka, Wole, 26 Spivak, Gayatri, 9, 42, 112, 117, 128–129 Stam, Robert, 52, 53 Steinwand, Jonathan, 35, 39 Stengers, Isabelle, 81 strange strangers, 87 Summers, Lawrence, 13 sustainability, 2, 125, 132, 165 Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi, 139 Thoreau, Henry David, 6 Thornber, Karen, 154, 164–165 Tides, 19, 86, 101–104, 108–111, 112–115, 120–122, 125, See also Niger Delta Tifﬁn, Helen, 7, See also Huggan, Graham toxic waste, 14, 64, 97 transcorporeality. See Alaimo, Stacy tree planting. See Green Belt Movement (GBM) Tulloch, Elspeth, 144 Tutuola, Amos, 16, 24, 26, 45–46, 51–54 Tylor, Edward B., 59 Ugor, Paul, 185 Uhuru Park, 133–134, See also Unbowed Unbowed, 8, 20, 127–137, 156 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 90, 92–93, 112 United States, 1, 7, 62, 64, 100, 112, 118–119, 159

211

Index violent resistance, 2, 4, 20, 85, 86, 88 Vital, Anthony, 147 Voice, The, 16, 19, 86, 88, 93–101, See also Niger Delta Watson, Julia, 137 Watts, Michael, 92 Webb, Hugh, 93, 94 Weheliye, Alexander, 160 Wenzel, Jennifer, 28 Whale Caller, The, 16, 34–39, 54, See also South Africa When Rain Clouds Gather, 19, 126, 137–145, 155–157 When Species Meet. See Haraway, Donna

wilderness, 6 Wolfe, Cary, 165 Woodward, Wendy, 11, 12, 35 Wretched of the Earth, The, 9, 18, 85 Wright, Derek, 65 Wright, Laura, 24, 154 Wright, Timothy, 152 Wylie, Dan, 77 Yar Adua, 92 Yoruba, 7, See also Famished Road, The, Tutuola, Amos Zimbabwe, 158

Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature

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