Thematic Article
Nature, ideology, and the ecocritical enterprise: Wangari Maathai’s The Green Belt Movement and Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life
Abstract
The dominant knowledge about African environments informed by Western literature—scientific reports, travelogues, memoirs, journalism, and fiction—has constructed an image of Africa as a pristine wilderness of exotic biodiversity on the verge of destruction due to Africa’s ignorance-based environmental culture. Contrary to this, Wangari Maathai’s and Nadine Gordimer’s environmental discourse, in The Green Belt Movement (2003) and Get a Life (2005), respectively, reveal Africa’s environmental decline as the direct consequence of the long history of colonial and capitalist exploitation of its natural resources, and the transformation of its environment into a resource base for industrial production. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of post-colonial ecocriticism, this article argues that environmental representations are mediated by the ideological configurations that generate them. Consequently, Maathai’s and Gordimer’s environmental discourse repudiates the dominant knowledge of African environments, offering alternative ways of engaging with its ecological issues while highlighting the dangers of capitalist resource exploitation on Africans’ environments, lives, and livelihoods. The image of the environment, in their works, ties politics and ecology together, providing an understanding of how the environment enables a rethinking of socio-political justice in dealing with Africa’s ecological crisis. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘African ecologies: literary, cultural and religious perspectives’, edited by Adriaan von Klinken, Simon Manda, Damaris Parsitau and Abel Ugba.)
Keywords
Africaliteratureideologynatureecologyrepresentationindustrial productionCopyright statement
© The author(s) 2024.Cite this article
Ango (2024), ' Nature, ideology, and the ecocritical enterprise: Wangari Maathai’s The Green Belt Movement and Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life ', Journal of the British Academy, 12(Issue 1 & 2): a16 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a16crossref
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This article offers an introduction to the special section about the theme of ‘African Ecologies: Literature, Culture and Religion’. It explores the current interdisciplinary field of scholarship on ecology, environment, and climate change in Africa, mapping contributions from across the Humanities and the Social and Environmental Sciences. The article positions this special section in this ever-expanding body of literature, specifically deploying the notion of ‘African ecologies’ as a heuristic lens to examine how the relationship and interaction between living organisms, including humans, and the natural environment is conceived. It argues that social, cultural, literary, and religious ecology provide vital perspectives to enrich and expand the understanding of African ecologies, thereby expanding inventories of possibilities as climate change response pathways. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘African ecologies: literary, cultural and religious perspectives’, edited by Adriaan van Klinken, Simon Manda, Damaris Parsitau and Abel Ugba.)
In this personal essay, I reflect on the how cultural shifts in the British art world establishment, have enabled black artists who came of age in the Eighties, to enjoy late career success. I’m particularly interested in the careers of black women, who have traditionally been more overlooked by their male counterparts. I start with my own desire to connect to my Nigerian/African heritage when I was a young woman, one who had grown up brainwashed by the colonial project, and talk about the changes I have witnessed since the Eighties. I interrogate the value placed on transnational artists with ancestral ties to Africa by the art establishment then and now, and how those artists who are currently exhibiting in major art galleries and museums are often showing work created decades ago. This begs the question, if not then, why now? The article arises from a British Academy Lecture delivered on 9 November 2023.
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