Paper short abstract:

Drawing on scholarship in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism and anthropological insights in the field of disaster studies, I examine the ways in which Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were bears witness to the malevolent complicity between American Petro-imperialism and postcolonial autocracy.

Paper long abstract:

Set in the 1980s in an unspecified African country, Mbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were is a captivating narrative of one community’s harrowing experience with the rapaciousness and duplicity of global oil capitalism. Told from the perspective of children turned revolutionaries, the novel documents four decades of the struggles of a fictional African village of Kosawa with the calamitous consequences of the relentless extractive activities of an American oil company, Pexton. Enabled by the local chief (Woja Beki) and the nation’s dictator (His Excellency), Pexton operates with impunity in Kosawa, poisoning the land, the bodies of water, and the local inhabitants with noxious chemicals and gases, causing high infant mortality rate in the community. But buoyed by the activism and suggestion of Konga, the village madman, the village takes the representatives of Pexton hostage, leading to a stand-off between transnational forces of oil capitalism and indigenous resistance aimed at protecting their land. Drawing and building on scholarship in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism and new anthropological insights in the field of disaster studies, I examine the ways in which Mbue’s novel bears witness to the malevolent complicity between American Petro-imperialism and postcolonial autocracy. I specifically demonstrate the ways in which the novel aestheticizes the nonchalant sociopathic activities of transnational oil corporations and their collusion with indigenous political elite to animate irreversible eco-social calamities in Africa.