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Paper short abstract:

This paper makes a start in strengthening Kevin Behrens’ argument for a strong environmentalist thread in African thought (2008) by turning to cultural texts. It looks at Ubuntu-philosophy specifically and illustrates with examples from African speculative cultural texts moving in digital currents.

Paper long abstract:

The African continent is threatened and vulnerable to the effects of human-induced climate change. With the scale of this ‘wicked problem’ and precarious lifeworlds it is easy to ‘close off’ imagined futures, instead miring in the sense of despair (Wood, 2022). Yet, as Donna Haraway (Haraway, 2016) reminds us: “neither [hope nor despair] is a sensible attitude. Neither despair nor hope is ruined to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence” (4). There are environmental movements across the continent, yet fewer that explicitly emphasize the links between climate anxiety and structures of global injustice. Can we develop a stronger environmentalism, urgently needed, for and from Africa in the 21st century? One that is more material, mindful, as well as well-rooted in pervasive pre-existing knowledge systems?

This paper makes a start in strengthening Kevin Behrens’ argument for a strong environmentalist thread in African thought (2008) by turning to cultural texts. It looks at Ubuntu-philosophy specifically and illustrates with examples from African speculative cultural texts moving in digital currents (including but not limited to a 3D sculpture by digital artist Yaw Oniya, digital art by Jacque Njeri and artist /spiritual healer Nkosana “the art” Nkomo, short-story We broke Nairobi by Noel Cheruto (2021, Strange Horizons), and recent science fiction musical-film Neptune frost (2021, set in Burundi, by husband-and-wife team Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman)).

In the process, it touches on the notions that 1) The study of African philosophy is often the study of African history in disguise. 2) Modern African philosophy cannot sufficiently be studied without including the contemporary cultural realm. I would argue that much of values, norms and philosophy, including Ubuntu, is not only articulated but partially constructed within art and play on the African continent. Therefore, art (meant here in the broadest sense), politics and philosophy are aspects of a whole, and as scholars we are misunderstanding the African context if we only look at one or the other, or give any one more import than the others. By only looking in academic books and journals for African philosophy, we are missing half the story. This may be applicable to the study of other non-Western thought-systems as well, such as various indigenous cosmologies.

I conclude that Ubuntu is a deep well to draw from when it comes to developing an integrated environmentalism. I examine various aspects of Ubuntu in relation to environmentalism. The spirit, totem and taboo avenue I turn away from. Instead, I argue that the sense of ecological justice, obligations to the not-yet-born and planetarity contained within Ubuntu are strong building blocks in developing an integrated African environmentalism.

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. North Carolina: North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Wood, N. (2022). Just Stories: The Role of Speculative Fiction in Challenging the Growing Climate Apartheid. Psychology in Society, 63. Retrieved from https://www.pins.org.za/pins/pins63/PINS-Issue- 63_Article_Wood_Meyer.pdf