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Paper short abstract:

The inherited rift between art and science is a threat to a sustainable future of environmentalism in African literature. This paper advocates for a shift of emphasis, from the archives, to experiential encounters with nature; for a regime of getaways into the real world that literature recreates.

Paper long abstract:

Ecocriticism's interdisciplinary stance is apparently defeated in African literature by an inherited rift between art and science. Literature students and teachers appraise the environment from archived sources, but lack the tool for empirically validating these sources, for significantly impacting the real world with their knowledge. Chinua Achebe's novels, for instance, have been studied by generations of literary scholars in Nigeria and beyond. Many of these studies have centred on Achebe's representation of nature and the natural environment. Other studies have engaged more recent and environmentally activist writings, like Tanure Ojaide's The Activist, Isidore Okpewho's Tides, and Kaine Agary's Yellow-Yellow, as testaments of some negative consequences of anthropogenic influences on nature. These studies enrich the archives. But, beyond the archives, there seems to be nothing more that literature could do to influence policy towards mitigating glaring destitution of the physical environment, which is often within literature's practitioners' area of influence. This paper, following some suggested environmental imagination praxis, investigates two characters: Unoka, in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Umar-Faruq, in Aliyu Kamal's Fire in my Backyard, as embodiments, respectively of archived, and experimental ecological consciousness. It appraises, in the former text, the practice of rehashing archived knowledge, and the potentials, in the latter, of experiential encounters with nature, in literature. The study concludes that the future of environmentalism in African literature is bleak without a regime of getaways, from the archives, into the real world.