Paper short abstract:

We show that high temperature is a threat to individuals' wellbeing. The negative effect of temperature on wellbeing is more pronounced in SSA where there is evidence of geographic exposure with temperature almost twice the global rate and weak capacity to adapt to the temperature variability.

Paper long abstract:

There has been a notable increase in interest in temperature and deprivation in SSA. High temperature is seen to weaken living conditions through several pathways such as agriculture productivity; health; and labour productivity among others. Given the agrarian nature of most African economies, more the 60 percent of the labour force relies heavily on nature for their subsistence, and unfavourable temperature conditions make them vulnerable to fluctuations and this in turn adversely affects their livelihood. Although conceptual links can be drawn to explain the effect of temperature on deprivation given the diverse components of literature, limited evidence exists on the magnitude of the effect of high temperature on deprivation in SSA. We assess wellbeing by employing different subjective measures and we constructed a deprivation index which measures the frequency with which an individual or household suffers insufficiency in basic domains such as food, water, medical care, or cash income. Further, we measure individual deprivation within a non-income context considering the propensity of policymakers to use subjective welfare indicators to assess policy progress and impact. Using the Afrobarometer survey data, our findings show that temperature is positively correlated with deprivation and that high temperature increases the risk of deprivation. Our results also highlight the role of urbanization, institutions and infrastructural attributes in explaining within-country variations in individual deprivation.

Paper short abstract:

Evaluating present ecological practices that have led to food insecurity within the postcolonial African context, this paper explores how indigenous African knowledges can be harnessed to revitalize sustainable food production and combat food insecurity in Africa in the face of current challenges.

Paper long abstract:

The African climate crisis discourse often revolves around fossil fuel extraction and the resulting environmental degradation. While discussions frequently emphasize the direct adverse effects of ecocide on living beings, concerns mostly center on the potential apocalyptic future for Africa and the rest of the world if Global Warming persists. However, it is crucial to consider present urgent issues that require immediate attention. One such current effect of ecological violence in Africa is food insecurity. In addition to fossil fuel extraction, the African food crisis is also intricately linked to other factors. These include land grabs by agribusiness, the shift from subsistent farming to industrialized cash crop production, and the abandonment of indigenous biodiverse polycultures in favour of monocultures driven by industrialized agriculture. These unsustainable and ecocidal developments have resulted in a loss of diverse indigenous foods and limited access to the few available options.

As we grapple with the quest for a sustainable future, it becomes imperative to carefully examine our approach to agriculture and reassess the impact of current practices on both present and future generations of Africans. At the heart of this paper lies a pivotal question: Not overlooking the complex realities of the postcolonial context of most African nations, how can we harness indigenous African food production and distribution knowledge systems to tackle the prevailing food insecurity challenges on the continent? How do we go about restoring sustainable and resilient African food production and distribution practices in the dynamic and globalized world of today?

Paper short abstract:

This study tries to introduce an Afrocentric lens for water management by unveiling insights from the indigenous Amazigh water wisdom in Morocco’s Souss-Massa region. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we propose a model for integrating traditional practices into African public policies.

Paper long abstract:

This research delves into Morocco's Amazigh Souss-Massa region, unravelling the intricate tapestry of traditional water management practices. Focused on enhancing water governance, the study navigates the intersection of ancient wisdom and contemporary challenges. As Africa grapples with ecological crises, the Amazigh communities offer a unique perspective shaped by centuries of sustainable water stewardship. Investigating the historical context and dynamics of these practices, the research aims to bridge the gap between traditional knowledge and modern governance structures. It critically evaluates the efficacy of these practices in fostering resilience against climate-induced water stress.

The study employs a multidisciplinary approach, weaving together anthropology, hydrology, and governance studies. By centring on local narratives and practices, it seeks to amplify marginalized voices and traditions often overshadowed in mainstream discourse. The intricate dance between nature and culture in the water governance paradigm is explored, providing nuanced insights for reconfiguring African studies in the context of environmental challenges. It offers a fresh lens, emphasizing the importance of indigenous wisdom in shaping sustainable futures by outlining various traditional water management categories and proposing a model for their integration into public policies.

As Africa navigates complex environmental shifts, understanding and integrating traditional practices become imperative. The study not only contributes to academic discourse but also holds practical implications for reimagining water governance strategies in the region and beyond.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores sacred forests conservation in Northern Tanzania, highlighting the significance of local beliefs and worldviews in redefining nature-culture relationships for sustainable biodiversity and forest conservation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focus on sacred forests in the North Pare Mountains of Tanzania, which are recognised as biodiversity hotspots and play a vital, yet often underestimated role in biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation. While the impact of Western-oriented mechanistic worldviews is evident worldwide, this paper emphasises the need to explore specific African worldviews promoting ecologically sustainable outcomes to comprehend and shape future Anthropocene dynamics. There is indeed a general consensus in the literature that sacred forests’ conservation is the result of people pursuing traditions and are not primarily conserved for their ecological services. This paper originates from my Master thesis and fieldwork in North Pare and argues that, although younger generations are disinterested in the non-material benefits of sacred forests conservation, other ways of knowing, which acknowledge the interconnectedness between the physical environment and the (invisible) spirit world, persist and continue to inform (positive environmental) behaviour and practices. Highlighting that the illusionary divide between humans and the environment contributes to the Anthropocene and current ecological crisis, the article questions if integrating non-human-centred perspectives into climate action efforts can help transcend short-term, market-driven and externally imposed rational approaches to conservation which have no legitimacy to instigate behavioural change among residents living in proximity to sacred forests.

Paper short abstract:

The earth environment is threatened by all kinds of environmental pollution. Yet, indigenous ecological measures are fast diminishing. Using Gaard’s integral ecofeminist theory, this paper demonstrates the efficacy of traditional festivals and women participation in environmental sustainability.

Paper long abstract:

Globally, the earth environment is threatened by all kinds of environmental pollution and degradation. This however, increasing the demand for environmental safety and sustainability. In contemporary Nigerian literature, ecological writings are dominated by postcolonial eco-critique of socio-economic and political marginalization of the oil rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. While flooding and erosion are ignored as they wipe farms, bring down houses and split roads in very many African communities including Nigeria. From studies, indigenous environmental measures are largely abandoned for unattainable ecological policies. This paper argues that Egba-ala festival of the earth goddess in various communities of Nsukka Igbo is a celebration of the centrality of life which includes soil and waters and the women who share with the environment in life giving and sustenance. In Nsukka Igbo, women environmental relationship is institutionalized in the title of traditional council of women (umuada-oha, umuada-ideke and ndiomu-oha). These titled women were the eye of the earth. Culturally, they are the gods and the earth is their domain. Thus, the keepers of the environment. Using Greta Gaard’s integral ecofeminist theory and life interconnectedness, this paper applies participant observation and narrative technique to demonstrate the efficacy of traditional festivals and women participation in environmental sustainability. It further interrogates the role of Western religion and patriarchy to argue that the fast diminishing tradition of the annual festival of the earth Goddess opens the area to environmental disaster such as erosion, flooding and soil depletion.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses what Ubuntu has offer to questions of sustainable development – or rather the survival of our shared planet – in Southern Africa and beyond and argues for an approach of dialogue and two-eyed seeing.

Paper long abstract:

Ubuntu, here understood as a lived philosophy of "humble togetherness" (Swanson, 2009) among Africa's Bantu people, recognises the interconnectedness of all parts of creation. It refers to humble togetherness of humans but extends beyond the anthropocentric in that humans as one part of nature are interconnected with all other parts of the universe. Thus, Ubuntu embraces caring relationships among humans (including the ancestral world) as well as among humans and other species, the surrounding environment and the universe. In short, Ubuntu's humble togetherness includes ecological togetherness (Murove, 2009). In this paper, we, four African and European academics and practitioners from the field of international politics and development, discuss Ubuntu and ecological togetherness. We focus on what Ubuntu has offer to questions of sustainable development – or rather the survival of our shared planet – in Southern Africa and beyond. After laying a philosophical foundation by accounting for Ubuntu’s vital force which is inherent in Ubuntu through the suffix -ntu, we focus on the role which Ubuntu (could have) played for the current sustainable development goals (SDGs). Moving to an even more practical level, we offer experience of opportunities and challenges of Ubuntu in the field of "sustainable development". Bringing these strands together, we argue for Ubuntu as a suitable paradigm to consider “sustainability”. We further argue for a two-eyed seeing approach in which indigenous knowledge systems as well as so-called Western knowledge enter into dialogue to develop strategies for more sustainable livelihoods.

Paper short abstract:

The divide between universalistic and localistic solutions to local, context-specific socio-ecological challenges persist in Africa. Given the projected severe impacts of climate change and ecological destruction to Africa, appeal to Ubuntu, localized knowledge-value system for insight is in order.

Paper long abstract:

While occasionally successful, application of universalistic (scientistic) approaches to ecological challenges often yield deplorable consequences. Even then, however, there has been an increasing shift from sustainability practices founded on cultural/communal/traditional epistemic systems, whose operationalization manifest context-specificness (referred to herein as localistic worldviews), to universalistic epistemic worldviews, engrained in exclusive preference for what is regarded as ‘objective’ knowledge realms. Such approaches often fail, but they also often appear chauvinistic, by undermining the importance of local knowledge and value systems and their potential contribution to environmental protection discourses.

While humanity is collectively threatened by environmental and climate change insecurities, Africa is most at risk of their effects. In addressing these challenges however, locally-grown solutions are rarely sought. This paper, therefore, seeks to discerns how native epistemic systems, taking Ubuntu as a case of analysis, can be used to inform and improve Africa's contemporary socio-ecological care practices.

In an endeavour to customize socio-ecological care systems; immune from ontological and epistemic and

limitations of the universalistic approaches, one of the most praised Africa's value system; Ubuntu, is evaluated. This aims at reimagining its applicability to Africa’s contemporary practices of socio-ecological care. The questions I seek to answer are; What were the ideal conditions for the embodiment and application of the Ubuntu worldview in traditional socio-ecological care systems of Africa? What was the practice of Ubuntu like? How can the ‘knowledge-value-action’ constituents of the Ubuntu worldview blend with the knowledge-value-action constituents of the scientistic worldview for an improved socio-ecological care systems in Africa?

Paper short abstract:

Ecological toxicities remain a threat to planetary well-being. Such a truism draws in my interest to read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Rwĩmbo rwa Njũkĩ (2013) as an invitation to revitalise indigenous knowledge on planetary well-being. .

Paper long abstract:

Ecological toxicities remain a threat to planetary well-being. Such a truism draws in my interest to explore how literary productions in Africa commit to planetary well-being. To realize this objective, I will offer a close reading of the aestheticisation of the materiality of ecological toxicities in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Rwĩmbo rwa Njũkĩ (2013). My analysis zooms in on how that two teenagers mobilise a song-narrative to elaborate the consequences of disregarding indigenous knowledges on the killing of bees. The narrative juxtaposes two categories of actors occasioning ecological toxicities. On the one hand are missionaries who introduced toxins to kill bees and butterflies found in ecosystems in Africa. On the other hand, are Africans who embrace(d) the use of the toxic substances on their farms without interrogating their impacts on their ecologies. This scandal plays out in the teenagers’ reminiscence of the potency of the song-narrative. The song-narrative speaks to the histories on food insecurity in Africa because of embracing the (mis)use of the agro-chemicals in farming. I, therefore, read Rwĩmbo rwa Njũkĩ as an invitation to revitalise indigenous knowledge on planetary well-being.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on contemporary art projects from Angola, the DRC and Puerto Rico, this paper investigates the ways how plants have been used by artists to investigate the stratigraphies of the everyday, revealing the toxicity of colonial regimes and coloniality, while pointing at possible futures.

Paper long abstract:

Art history has been increasingly dealing with issues related to the environment and the Anthropocene in recent years, forming part of the environmental humanities, and plants have found much renewed scholarly attention in art historical scholarship. Even more, however, plants have come to play key roles in the art world. This paper focuses on case studies and contemporary art projects from Africa and the Caribbean, particularly Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Puerto Rico in which plants take center stage. It interrogates how contemporary artists draw on plants to discuss colonial layers, and complex intersections between the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial. It investigates the ways how plants have been used by artists to investigate the stratigraphies of the everyday cultures of modernity in Africa and the Caribbean, but also how their deceitful display by colonial powers has been negotiated in these works, revealing the toxicity and tropical falsehoods of colonial regimes and coloniality that is on-going, while also pointing at possible futures.

Paper short abstract:

African folklore is under threat of extinction due to excessive reliance on Eurocentric approaches to modern challenges such as climate crisis in Africa. How can it be revived in the global era and most importantly, what is the role of new African literary artists in reconceptualising it?

Paper long abstract:

Despite being a cultural and knowledge reservoir of a people, when it comes to the examination of modern predicaments, such as climate change, folklore in most new African literary works is assigned the role of embellishment. The unrestrained reliance on Eurocentric paradigms/approaches to climate change by both new African writers and major critical works has been used to examine this phenomenon. In recent years, Afrocentric approach to climate change where a return to roots (folklore) is often promoted as a way out of climate crisis in Africa, surface in the academic sphere. However, there is generally a paucity of critical works demonstrating how African folklore can be reconfigured to address the African postcolonial reality (climate crisis in this context). Thus, this study examines The Disappointed Three by Adamu Usman Kyuka, one of the few new writers who have demonstrated that, even with the advent of globalization, African indigenous folklore plays a role in tackling the issue of climate change. This paper posits that new African literary writers must reconsider the role and function of folklore. Based on an analysis of the text, this study concludes that African folklore is dynamic and flexible. Through reconceptualization/reconfiguration, folkloric elements such as songs, myths and folktales that deal with the concept of the African environment have proven to be essential tools in addressing the question of climate change in Africa today.

Paper short abstract:

This study focuses on a documentary premiered by Bus Stop TV in 2020, and a collaborative exhibition by Kiluanji Kia Henda from Angola and Felix Shumba from Zimbabwe from 2023, to explore the role art and artists play in engaging and addressing the exploitation of communities for resources.

Paper long abstract:

Section 13 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe clearly states that communities should and must benefit from the extraction of natural resources within their area. Section 332 of the said constitution is clear on what communal land is, and on the rights the community and the individual have over the land. The same section clearly spells out the role of the traditional chiefs on the governance and distribution of the land. Yet with the surge in the number of European and Chinese companies extracting mineral resources in Zimbabwe, the communities find themselves losing everything to the foreign mining entities. They are being displaced from their ancestral lands and they are losing their farmlands. Livelihoods are being destroyed. Worst of all, they are witnessing the exhumation of the buried relatives, which is more of a taboo to them. Operating between these transnational mining entities and the communities are corrupt local chiefs and government officials whose hands are greased by the extractors. This study focuses on 'Black granite quarrying take toll on Mutoko communities', a documentary premiered by Bus Stop TV (via YouTube in 2020), and 'Memories of the Poisoned River', a collaborative exhibition by Kiluanji Kia Henda from Angola and Felix Shumba from Zimbabwe (at the National History Museum in Luanda in 2023) to explore the role art and artists can play in engaging and addressing the exploitation of communities for resources.