Paper short abstract:

The language of global environmentalism has been dominated by policy and science from the west. Global South experiences and solutions have been submerged, leading to the imposition of Global North solutions on issues requiring an indigenous resolution.

Paper long abstract:

The language of global environmentalism has been dominated by Western policy and science. Other voices, experiences, and solutions have been submerged, such that postcolonial scholars have critiqued the inherent whiteness of the ‘Anthropocene’. While there has been an increasing focus on the environmental ruins of the African continent because of the unfriendly treatment of the environment, there is only a hand-full of research produced by Africans to date on African eco-fiction which may have led to the slight attention being given to African understandings, explanations, alternative imaginings, and solutions. This dearth of interchange of ideas has resulted in the continued imposition of Global North solutions on issues requiring indigenous resolution. This paper examines fictional representations of ecological realities in In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc. (2014) and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021). My analysis of the texts is framed by the postulations of Rob Nixon's Slow Violence (2011), Cajetan Iheka’s Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (2018), and Sule Egya’s Nature, Environment, and Activism in Nigerian Literature (2021). In examining how these writers represent ecological realities in the texts, I ask what African eco-fiction is, whether eco-fiction by African authors promotes the citizens as agents rather than victims of environmental change, and consider why African writers tend to embrace activism. I argue that African ecocriticism cannot be detangled from postcolonial issues particularly because the colonial past and postcolonial present are a continuum so entwined that they have become inseparable.