Normal View Dyslexic View
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 productionIntroduction
Environmental scholarship across varied disciplines has established that human activity is the dominant influence on the environment and climate. Africa suffers some of the worst consequences of climate change and environmental decline due to the continued exploitation of its natural resources by capitalist industries (Caminero-Santangelo 2014; Hamann et al. 2020). Against this backdrop, African literary studies deploy ecocritical concepts to engage the ways that African writers represent the history and material practice of resource exploitation on the landscapes and people of Africa (Caminero-Santangelo 2014; Iheka 2018). This article examines Wangari Maathai’s and Nadine Gordimer’s representations of resource exploitation, environmental devastation, and the attendant devastation of lives and livelihoods in two seminal texts.
Ecocriticism studies the relationship between literature and the physical environment (Buell 1995; Glotfelty 2006). In doing so it is set to address two broad aims: to recognise and foreground the physical environment in literature and to advocate for justice for degraded places and the people inhabiting them (Egya 2015). An ecocritical approach therefore engages the physical environment, represented either as pristine and beautiful or as used and abused. This article is based on the premise that a writer’s experience with their environment is crucial to the way they represent it. Experience of the environment is not neutral, but is informed by knowledge, which is acquired through interaction and education, and thus by definition is ideological. While a common-sense understanding of the concept of the environment readily refers us to our surrounding landscape or terrain, in creative representations (drawings, paintings, films, or literature) the implication of the concept goes beyond the common-sense view. It encompasses the writer’s connection to the environment, which is mediated by history, ideology, and politics (Bender 1992; Vital 2008; Wright 2010). Against this backdrop, this article analyses the environmental representation in Wangari Maathai’s The Green Belt Movement (2003) and Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life (2005) to demonstrate the links between literature and environmental and political discourses. It contends that Maathai and Gordimer, from their standpoints as African writers-cum-activists, engage an environmental discourse that unravels the inextricable connection between Africa’s environmental crisis and the colonial and capitalist exploitation of its natural resources for modern development. This is an important contribution to scholarship in de-colonial ecocriticism because it brings to the fore the implication of Western-oriented development models on Africa’s environments, as well as offering an alternative model, grounded in an Africanist worldview, that suggests a possible way out of Africa’s environmental decline.
Drawing on the theoretical concept of post-colonial ecocriticism, the article points to the view that Maathai’s and Gordimer’s environmental discourses are mediated by an anti(de)-colonial ideology. In The Green Belt Movement, Maathai’s signification of the Kenyan environment indicts colonialism for the devastation of the environment, just as it promotes a revival of indigenous knowledge systems for environmental restoration and preservation. Gordimer’s depiction of the environment in Get a Life interrogates the neo-liberal commercialisation of nature and the devastating impacts of environmental exploitation on poor, especially black, communities. On the whole, Maathai’s and Gordimer’s environmental representation calls attention to issues of social and racial justice that post-colonial ecocriticism pursues. To develop this argument, in the following section, I will first introduce post-colonial ecocriticism as a theoretical framework, before turning to an analysis of the two primary texts.
Post-colonial ecocriticism and environmental representation
Literature and nature have had an age-long relationship. From Homer’s classical epics to the European romantic movement, literature has designated the human–nature relationship as organic and reciprocal. However, the enormity of environmental damage caused by humanity’s quest for industrial and technological advancement from the dawn of the 20th century gave rise to a literature that vigorously engages the growing threat to the ecosystem (Glotfelty 2006). This prompted the emergence, in the mid-1990s, of ecocriticism as a theoretical model for approaching literature, which focuses on the relationship between literature and the natural environment (Glotfelty 2006: ii).
From this springboard, post-colonial scholars working in the field of ecocriticism saw the need for an ecocritical perspective that would best articulate the distinctive concerns of post-colonial societies. These concerns range from the histories of conquest, colonisation, racism, and sexism, and their legacy on the relations between the colonised and coloniser, societies, and culture (Huggan & Tiffin 2010: 6), ‘the joint oppression of the original owners of the land and the land itself’ (Estok 2005: 224), to the ways that writers from post-colonial regions, nay the Global South, have imagined and inscribed the environment, in ways that provide vital perspectives on how ecological change is entangled with colonialism, capitalism, and globalisation (Cilano & DeLoughrey 2007: 72). In light of these, post-colonial ecocriticism offers the critical and conceptual insights to interrogate environmental issues in the context of global power relations.
Post-colonial ecocriticism thus highlights the fact that, although ecocriticism explores the role of literature in the struggle against environmental destruction, it pays less attention to the ‘historical relationships of power, to colonial history and its effects, and cultural differences’ (Caminero-Santangelo & Myers 2011: 5). In this light, this article presents Maathai and Gordimer as important thinkers, as they each bring environmental history and colonial legacies into conversation with ecocriticism by raising fundamental questions about nature, colonial history, and politics. Although there is a growing body of ecocritical scholarship on both these writers (e.g., Caminero-Santangelo 2011; Iheka 2018; Muhonja 2020; Musila 2020; Nixon 2005; van Klinken 2022), this article is the first that reads them alongside each other with a distinct focus on their engagement with Africa’s environmental crisis from a de-colonial perspective. My focus on Maathai, a scientist and environmental activist, and Gordimer, a novelist and political activist, also unravels the links between literature, politics, and the environment. The analysis of Maathai’s polemical account of nature’s exploitation in The Green Belt Movement and Gordimer’s tale of ecological destruction in Get a Life enables us to ‘read the environment in the literary text … and read the literary text in the environment’ (Branch 1998: xiv). While Maathai deploys literary devices and narrative strategies to articulate environmental problems that largely stem from colonial and capitalist policies and practices, Gordimer draws from such policies and practices to craft a story that profoundly links environmental decline to social problems in Africa. Putting the texts in conversation with each other thus demonstrates ecocriticism as a field with ‘a triple allegiance to the scientific study of nature, the scholarly analysis of cultural representation and the political struggle for more sustainable ways of inhabiting the natural world’ (Heise 2006: 506). In this regard, Maathai’s and Gordimer’s ecological vision further intervenes within broader debates on the environmental crisis in Africa.
Environmental conservation and anti-colonial politics in The Green Belt Movement
The Green Belt Movement (henceforth, The GBM), first published in 1985, is Maathai’s first book, which documents her involvement in several environmental and humanitarian activities in Kenya. The book is semi-autobiographical and an instructional manual for Maathai’s environmental literacy programme. It details how she launched a tree-planting model as a way of restoring deforested landscapes. Connecting Kenya’s environmental problems to food insecurity, malnutrition, and poverty, Maathai organised rural women and youth to plant trees that would provide wood for cooking, fodder for livestock, and material for fencing; also, to protect watersheds and stabilise the soil for improved agriculture. In addition to this, the book contains her advocacy for good governance, probity, and accountability as prerequisites for a prosperous nation.
The GMB has been subject to various critical analyses revolving around Maathai’s anti-colonial philosophy, environmental conservation, literacy, and women’s empowerment. Okuyade (2013) posits that Maathai traces the cause of environmental destruction in Kenya to colonialism: thus, her literacy programme centres on promoting traditional environmental knowledge that is tailored to pursue socio-economic and political emancipation for Africans. Similarly, Kushner (2009) explains that The GBM primarily expounds the links between corrupt governance, exploitation of natural resources, and environmental degradation in Kenya. In the same vein, Gorsevski (2012) avers that The GMB unravels Maathai’s attempt to revive indigenous knowledge in the restoration of African environments. This article builds on these perspectives by highlighting how Maathai’s anti-colonial thought compounds her polemic and serves to foreground her de-colonial ideology and environmental activism within the post-colonial context.
Maathai’s environmental discourse is anchored on three poetics of post-colonial ecocriticism, as surmised by DeLoughrey (2015): It explores how environmental change is entwined with the narratives, histories, and material practice of colonialism and globalisation; it emphasises how experiences of environmental violence, rupture, and displacement are central ecological challenges across the Global South; it identifies possibilities for imaginative recuperation that are compatible with anti-colonial politics. In the first instance, Maathai invokes a pastoral narrative trope which depicts a pre-colonial Kenya where people lived in harmony with nature. She then indicts colonialism for estranging Kenyans from nature, thereby encouraging their violation of it. Secondly, Maathai shows how environmental changes, such as deforestation, and food and water shortages, have adversely affected the people’s quality of life. Thirdly, Maathai fashions a literacy and advocacy programme that re-centres traditional knowledge of environmental conservation which colonialism had denigrated; asserting that many of Africa’s problems stem from colonialism’s obliteration of indigenous cultures, and the spread of a foreign capitalistic culture that encourages the commodification of nature.
The pastoral narrative: environmental change and violence in The GBM
Maathai deploys the pastoral trope to foreground the active role of colonialism in destroying the symbiotic relationship that Africans once enjoyed with their environment, as well as depicting the adverse effect of environmental exploitation. A pastoral narrative is a way of writing that presents the purity and simplicity of rustic life, often contrasted with the corruption and artificiality of the city. Writers use pastoral narratives to celebrate the beauty and purity of nature and simple lowly people, often in juxtaposition to dissolute urban settings (Alpers 2016). In Africa, the pastoral narrative was popular with anti-colonial writing. Closeness to nature, commonality, and the simplicity of traditional African societies are often contrasted with the corrupting influence of colonialism. Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers (1979), Ngugi wa Thiongo’s The River Between (1965), and Okot p‘Bitek’s Song of Lawino (1984) are key examples of how African writers have tried to re-create the African past through the pastoralist trope.
Proceeding from the pastoral vantage point, The GMB interrogates the policies and material practices of colonialism and offers alternative environmental regeneration strategies grounded in African traditional belief systems. Maathai is emphatic that colonialism altered Kenya’s natural and social landscape by its introduction of an exploitative culture, and a materialistic worldview, which promoted nature’s exploitation. She stresses that the cultural values of Kenyans ‘were eroded, trivialised, and deliberately destroyed during colonisation. As a result, many Kenyans became less appreciative of the environment because they perceived it as a commodity to be privatized and exploited’ (46). Although Kenyans partake in the destruction of the environment, Maathai blames their actions on the erasure of their values and traditions. In this context, she creates a victor/victim stasis that forms the dialectic on which her anti-colonial polemics unravel.
The GBM’s narrative unravels through a juxtaposition of traditional values that are fundamental to environmental conservation with the modern materialistic culture that destroys the environment. As a key example, Maathai states that ‘coded in our songs, dances, and values … there was something in our people that helped them preserve those forests. They were not looking at trees and seeing timber’ (46). The metaphoric expression ‘looking at trees and seeing timber’ contrasts the coloniser’s appreciation of natural resources only in terms of their commercial value, with the Kenyans’ celebration of nature as an organic part of their existence. Maathai’s representation of pre-colonial idyllic landscapes, romantic images of indigenous communities and an organic bond between humans and nature can thus be construed as having a socio-ecological underpinning that interrogates the negative impacts of colonialism. By depicting an ideal ecological indigenous identity, she calls for a return to a homogenous culture unsullied by the social contradictions of colonial ideologies.
In The GBM, Mathaai argues that African traditional beliefs support an organic relationship between humans and nature because they teach humankind to see God as present in the natural environment, including humans and other creatures, rather than in a far-removed heaven (91). This cultural and spiritual value links the people with their ‘roots, God and environment’ (48). In pre-colonial times, the environment had spiritual and cultural values which the people respected; hence they treated the environment with care. She explains that the people used the local biodiversity for virtually all their needs: medicinal purposes, building shelter, spiritual ceremonies, food, and fodder (82). Maathai also shows how the people’s cultural knowledge and practices helped in preserving biodiversity. She notes that African traditional societies had a lot of knowledge and wisdom regarding agricultural practices and the values of varieties of plants which was passed across generations. This knowledge guided the people in preserving their environment. Because the culture, through its material practices, had imbued in the people a strong organic and spiritual connection with the landscape, they lived with a deep sense of appreciation for it. Maathai contends that colonialism destroyed the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature when ‘the cultural values and systems of indigenous Kenyans were eroded, trivialized and deliberately destroyed in the process of colonization. As a result, many people are less appreciative of the environment because they now perceive it as a commodity to be privatized and exploited’ (48).
The colonial introduction of cash crop production, and the monetary economic order precipitated humankind’s reckless exploitation of the environment. This will later lead to graver environmental challenges that affect lives and livelihoods in the form of food and water shortage, malnutrition and poverty, instead of the perceived wealth that it was envisioned to bring. The denigration of ‘Africa’s indigenous culture led to the virtual disappearance of the cultivation of many indigenous foods …, as well as the decimation of wildlife, all in favour of a small variety of cash crops … the loss of indigenous plants and the methods to grow them has contributed not only to food insecurity but also to malnutrition, hunger, and a reduction of local biodiversity’ (175). This is compounded by forced migration and displacements, as many poor people are forced to move in search of better lives.
The GBM ‘emphasize[s] how experiences of environmental violence, rapture, and displacement are central ecological challenges across the Global South’. Maathai explores this premise to articulate how increasing demand for timber, commercial agriculture, and industrialisation are gradually destroying the environment and degrading the lives of the poor. Equating the forces of environmental destruction with an ‘invading enemy’ (39), Maathai posits that ‘sustained hunger, malnutrition, widespread poverty, unemployment, overpopulation, energy crisis, soil erosion, lack of clean drinking water, lack of building materials …’ (40) are forms of environmental violence being unleashed on the poor. Maathai’s discourse of environmental violence connects to Rob Nixon’s discussion on the correlation between environmental change and the effects on the poor; people who lack access to economic and political power. Nixon’s formulation of slow violence—‘a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous but instead is incremental, as its calamitous repercussions are postponed across a range of temporal scale’ (2005: 257)—just like Maathai’s analogy of losing the ecosystem to an ‘invading enemy’, is centred on the vulnerability of poor people. Their direct dependence on the environment for subsistence makes them the major victims of environmental change. In her exposition of Kenyan’s environmental challenges, Maathai shows that many Kenyans are direct casualties of environmental destruction because the majority of the population lives in rural areas and are mostly peasants whose livelihood is dependent on the land for farming and herding. They also use the local biodiversity for medicinal purposes, construction, and spiritual-based ceremonies (82). Thus, losing their natural environment becomes an existential threat.
The disconnect with nature, which occurs as a result of dispossession, is crucial to The GBM’s approach to restoring the land via (1) conservation, (2) de-colonisation, and (3) demand for good governance. Hence the book focuses on teaching the local people: reforestation as a way of curbing soil erosion; organic farming to maintain soil fertility; and subsistence farming to ensure household food security (42–5). On point (2) above, the book identifies colonialism as the root cause of environmental degradation in Kenya. As such, it seeks to re-centre Africanist traditional environmental knowledge that was abandoned at the advent of colonialism. As for the demand for good governance (point (3) above), Maathai argues that bad policies, such as support for industrialisation at the expense of environmental conservation, privatisation of forests, and excessive commercialisation of agriculture (115), must be resisted. Maathai’s ecological credo in The GBM is thus anchored on reviving Africanist knowledge and wisdom for environmental restoration, conservation, and harmonious co-existence between human beings and nature.
‘Destructive development’: nature and industrialisation in Get a Life
The threat to harmonious co-existence between human beings and nature informs the thrust of Gordimer’s Get a Life. Described as one of the most prominent literary voices for political freedom and racial equality in South Africa (by the Nobel Committee in 1991), Gordimer was one of the leading figures in the South African literary scene from the 1960s to the time of her death in 2014. Many critics have attested that her creative enterprise was primarily focused on writing the story of her society. Her works largely signify the various ways that the political climate in South Africa, especially during apartheid, defined the lives of individuals (Clingman 1992). With the collapse of apartheid, Gordimer’s’ attention turned to other emerging problems in the South African polity. Ileana Dimitriu (2009: 12) posits that new tendencies surfaced in Gordimer’s writing as she began to venture ‘beyond the national question, … steps out of cultural isolation and plunge into the whirlpool of the larger, post-ideological world scene’, suggesting that Gordimer started to take a more involved interest in global matters, even though she did not desert the local. This aptly describes her concern in Get a Life (2005) where she explores, among other themes, the proliferation of nuclear power, HIV and AIDS, and the neo-liberal commercialisation of nature.
Analysing Get a Life, Caminero-Santangelo elucidates the ideological underpinnings of modern ecology as the novel’s central concern, opining that, for Gordimer, the natural cannot be separated from the political. His analysis focuses on the problem inherent in setting the environment as a category before the political, as ‘ideology and the environment are involved in a mutual determination’ (2011: 72). Sharing a similar view, Vital (2008: 90) argues that Gordimer critiques the capitalist manoeuvring of ecology to serve its purposes in terms of exploitation of natural resources, on the one hand, and environmental protection, on the other. Like Santangelo’s, Vital’s exposition calls attention to Gordimer’s engagement with environmental concerns fuelled by capitalist accumulation, thus pointing to the inevitability of an environmental representation devoid of political and ideological footing. Along these lines, my analysis shows the threat that capitalist industrialisation poses to the survival of the environment and its human inhabitants. It highlights Gordimer’s portrayal of the interconnectivity of life forms, and how the destruction of one ultimately leads to the destruction of all. Gordimer evokes the more socially positive role that ecology can play in its interrogation of nature’s exploitation through, among other means, involving people’s participation in protecting their environment against powerful usurpers.
Get a Life revolves around a white middle-class family confronted with crises from multiple fronts. Paul Bannerman is an ecologist who undergoes treatment for cancer of the thyroid gland and is quarantined for the period of recovery. At the centre of this narrative is a powerful critique of nature’s commodification. Gordimer calls attention to the ways that capitalist multinational corporations exploit Africa’s natural resources, altering its physical and social landscapes in the process. In this light, Gordimer links the natural and the social in ways that stress the idea of an ‘ecology of justice’, which posits, according to Hetch and Cockburn, that those working for an ecology of justice are not working to ‘save nature’, but are working for a ‘social nature’ where ‘humans and nature are not seen as separate entities and where the practice of justice restructures the concepts of nature’ (quoted in Adamson 2001: 14). Gordimer advocates for an ecological practice that recognises the people inhabiting the spaces. For Gordimer, the Pondolan dunes, the Okavongo Lake, and the wild coast (sites of the three projects), are not just resource bases for the industrialists to exploit; they are home to creatures, human and non-human, whose existence, in all ramifications, is bound together. Gordimer’s involvement with nature is that which champions the preservation of the environment and its inhabitants.
Get a Life offers in so many ways a critique of global capitalism’s power to shape the lives and destinies of people, just like imperialism did under apartheid. In articulating this problem, Gordimer shows how inequality transcends the racial divide. The state protects the economic interests of foreign capitalist corporations, giving little attention to the interests of the impoverished majority within the nation. The racial boundaries erected by apartheid are continually blurred as local players collude with foreign companies to harness natural resources that abound, in the guise of development. Gordimer depicts this problem from three government planned projects: the pebble-bed nuclear reactor project, ten dams in the Okavongo Lake, and a toll super-highway across the dunes in the wild coast. The government maintains its responsibility for providing basic amenities, jobs, and wealth for its citizens. To do that, it has to exploit its natural resources. Thus, the nuclear reactor has to be built to generate electricity, the dams to produce water for consumption and industrial purposes, and the toll highway to generate revenue from tourism.
Paul, Thabelo, and Derek, a team of independent ecologists, battle for the survival of these natural landscapes threatened by the projects. In their submission, the power grid can only work for forty years, but the coastline and the villages will be destroyed by radiation. Obstruction of the Okavongo will invariably affect the connectivity of rivers, streams, trees, and aquatic beings. As for the super-highway across the sand dunes, displacement of communities is inevitable (86). Through the perspective of these ecologists, Gordimer underscores the adverse effects of these projects. While the government considers the projects as developmental strides, the ecologists maintain they are ‘destructive developments’ (85). Paul and his colleagues work from a viewpoint that underlines the interconnectedness of all life forms. Their work ‘informs their understanding of the world and their place as agents within it, from the perspective that everyone, like it or not, admit it or not, acts upon the world in some ways. Spray a weed killer on this lawn and the Hoopoe delicately thrusting the tailor’s needle of its beak, after insects in the grass, imbibes poison’ (83). As such, they analyse the impacts that the projects will have on society, from the remotest to the most glaring. From where:
the rivers and streams converge and the patterns of their flow—meeting, opposing—create islands out of the sand they carry, landscape within the waterscape. Trees grow; where do the seeds come from to germinate them, does the water bring detritus roots which find new foothold? If we identify the three species, you’ll learn from how far and from where water journeys have brought them? What journeys! They have brought sand and it it’s leached from along its routes, salt. Six hundred and sixty tons a year! That’s the figure! In that calm delta disturbed only by the hippos and crocodiles … (87).
Paul’s analysis shows that the three projects are not separate but connected. The lake, from the convergence of streams and rivers, creates the island and coastline sites of the project. In nature’s sequence, ‘the trees suck up the water for the island for growth. Salt comes with it. The sands filter the brackish stuff: clean water flows back, supports fish and the predators of fish, the crocs, hippos, fish eagles … the salt kills the trees … the island disintegrates back into water … the next rainy season the rivers come down again’ (92). The verdict is that the entire project is ‘a total negation’, a complete wreckage of the ‘beautifully managed balance’ of nature (92).
An Australian company strikes a partnership with a 51 per cent black-owned company. In addition, the blacks are to have a 15 percent share in the dunes mining project (182). A huge sum of money will come into the country for the empowerment of the black communities, so the government argues. However, Thabelo expresses a contrary opinion which supports the view that Africans are always at the losing end. The toll highway, which the government says is meant to attract tourists is in reality built for carrying the derived minerals and ilmenite used in fabric and cosmetic manufacturing, to a smelter and processor in East London (183). The people are ordered to vacate their homes. They are given documents of the agreement to sign; many of them are illiterate, so they do not understand the terms of the agreements. Many have lost their cattle and sheep as a result of being forced to move.
The nuclear reactor, the dam, and the highway are complete catastrophes, Thabelo explains. ‘The pebble-bed nuclear experiment may be the apocalyptic one.’ The dams will destroy the progression of nature, and the toll highway will ruin the beaches and the coastline. It will displace five communities of the Amadiba living along the wild coast, as it ‘plunges right through people’s houses and fields, straight over their mealies. Staple food.’ These, for Thabelo, are ‘Destructive Development, a closed corporation of disaster’ (89). Thabelo’s submission, connects to Vandava Shiva’s (1995) formulation of ‘maldevelopment’, a process of development which ‘militates against equality in diversity and superimposes the ideologically constructed category of Western technological man as the uniform measure of the worth of class, culture, genders’ (1989: 5). Indeed, Gordimer suggests this when she questions ‘who is to decide?’—should Africans continue in their “primitivism” or embrace “modernity”?; should they give up their lands, ancestral occupations for jobs in the industries which ‘may bring in weekly wages to replace the sacrifice, God’s gift of a few crop fields, unique endemism, and twenty-two kilometres of sand dunes which used to be fished from instead of mined. Bring Hi-fi systems and cars … who is to decide’ (185). This is Africa’s quagmire.
In the last analysis, Gordimer’s criticism of modern development stems from the fact that capitalist investments in Africa have not had positive impacts on the majority of its populace, as they substantially remain consumers of the products and projects that emanate. While the development in industry, science, and technology has accelerated the economic prospects of the West, Africa’s prospects continue to dwindle amid environmental crises. This is worsened by the continued marginalisation of its masses; victims of these developments. They are the most exposed to poverty, malnutrition, pollution, and dispossession. They lack access to political (which in the case of Africa translates into economic) power and are often left ‘to gradually rot to death through the process of slow violence’ (Egya 2015: 4). Gordimer’s treatment of fiction in Get a Life interrogates capitalist development. Like a Greek gift, the danger is hidden with finery. In this instance, while it brings luxury, it erodes the very basis of the existence of many, subjecting them to misery.
Conclusions
This article has discussed the intertwining of ideology and politics in the literary representation of natural environments in Maathai’s The Green Belt Movement and Gordimer’s Get a Life. It argues that these two writers/activists engage with environmental issues in connection to socio-political issues in ways that reveal their ideological positioning as anti-colonial writers and crusaders for social justice. Maathai’s The GBM exposes the impact of colonialism/capitalism on the Kenyan physical, spiritual, and political landscape. Maathai attributes the problems of food insecurity and poverty in Kenya, nay most of Africa, to colonialism’s denigration of Africa’s traditional environmental knowledge and the imposition of industrial agriculture for global capital. Similarly, Gordimer calls attention to the role of neo-liberalism in transforming Africa’s natural environment into a resource base for industrial and technological development at the expense of the balance between nature and human beings and the living conditions of especially the poor. Get a Life shows the threat that capitalist industrialisation poses to the survival of the environment and its human inhabitants. It highlights Gordimer’s portrayal of the interconnectivity of life forms and how the destruction of one ultimately leads to the destruction of all. Gordimer evokes the more socially positive role that ecology can play in its interrogation of nature’s exploitation through, among other means, involving people’s participation in protecting their environment against powerful usurpers. The analysis reveals that Gordimer, like Maathai, ties concepts of environmental conservation with anti-capitalist struggle and social justice in terms of the distribution of natural resources and development. Maathai’s and Gordimer’s works are, therefore, valuable resources for understanding the link between environmental exploitation, human degradation, and social justice in Africa, and enhancing environmental protection and respect for human life and dignity. Given the current quest for industrial development which is based on the consistent assault on natural resources across Africa, Maathai and Gordimer issue here a cautionary note to African leaders on the need to pay close attention to the adverse effects of such developmental models that destroy the environment and threaten the existence of many people. Their critique of capitalist exploitation of resources and advocacy for more sustainable and equitable ways of inhibiting the earth suggest a way out of Africa’s current ecological crisis.
References
AdamsonC.J. (2001), American Indian Literature: Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism (Tucson, AZ, University of Arizona Press).
AlpersP. (2016), What is Pastoral? (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press).
ArmahA.K. (1979), The Healers (London, William Heinemann).
BenderB. (1992), ‘Landscape, meaning and action’, in
BenderB. (ed.), Landscapes: Politics and Perspectives (Providence, RI, Berg), 1–17.
BranchP.M. (1998), Reading The Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment (Caldwell, ID, University of Idaho Press).
BuellL. (1995), The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature and the Foundation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1nzfgsv
Caminero-SantangeloB. (2011), ‘Never a final solution: Nadine Gordimer and the environmental unconscious’, in
Caminero-SantangeloB. & MyersG.A. (eds), Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa (Athens, OH, Ohio University Press), 213–234.
Caminero-SantangeloB. (2014), Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice and Political Ecology (Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Press). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt6wrp2w
Caminero-SantangeloB. & MyersG.A. (2011), ‘Introduction’, in
Caminero-SantageloB. & MyersG.A. (eds), Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa (Athens, OH, Ohio University Press), 1–20.
CilanoC. & DeLoughreyE. (2007), ‘Against authenticity: global knowledge and postcolonial ecocriticism’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 14(1): 71–87. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/14.1.71
ClingmanS. (1992), The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press).
DeLoughreyE. (2015), ‘Postcolonialism’, in
DeLoughreyE., DidurJ. & CarriganA. (eds), Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities Postcolonial Approach (London, Routledge). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315738635
DimitriuI. (2009), ‘Nadine Gordimer: getting a life after apartheid’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern African Literature, 21(1–2): 117–137. Beyond 2000: South African Literature Today. https://doi.org.10.1080/1013929x.2009.9678314
EgyaS.E. (2015), ‘Nature and environmentalism of the poor: eco-poetry from the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 28(1): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2015.1083848
EstokS. (2005), ‘Afterward: reckoning with irreversibilities in biotic and political ecologies’, A Review of International English Literature, 4: 219–232. https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2013.0029
GlotfeltyC. (2006), ‘Introduction: literary studies in an age of environmental crisis’, in
GlotfeltyC. & FrommH. (eds), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press), xv–xxxvii.
GordimerN. (2005), Get a Life (London, Bloomsbury).
GorsevskiE. (2012), ‘Wangari Maathai’s emplaced rhetoric: greening global peacebuilding’, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 6: 290–307. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2012.689776
HamannH. (2020), ‘Scenarios of good anthropocenes in Southern Africa’, Futures, 118: 102526. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2020.102526
HeiseU.K. (2006), ‘The Hitchhikers guide to ecocriticism’, PLMA, 121(2): 506–516. https://doi.org/10.1632/003081206X129684
HugganG. & TiffinH. (2010), Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (New York, Routledge). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203498170
IhekaC. (2018), Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
KushnerJ. (2009), ‘Wangari Maathai: righteous leader of environmental and social change’, Adult Education Quarterly, 4(2): 16–31.
MaathaiW. (2003), The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (New York, Lantern Books).
MuhonjaB.B. (2020), Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideas of Wangari Maathai (Athens, OH, Ohio University Press). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv224tww3
MusilaG. (ed.) (2020), Wangari Maathai’s Register of Freedom (Cape Town, HSRC Press), 305–319.
Ngugi waT. (1965), The River Between (London, William Heinemann).
NixonR. (2005), ‘Environmentalism and postcolonialism’, in
LoombaA., KaulS., BunzlM., BurtonA. & EtsyJ. (eds), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham, NC, Duke University Press), 233–251.
OkuyadeO. (2013), ‘Can the earth be belted? Rethinking eco-literacy and ecological justice in Wangari Maathai’s unbowed: a memoir’, in
OkuyadeO. (ed.), Eco-critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes (New York, African Heritage Press).
p’BitekO. (1984), in Heron, G.A. (ed.), Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol (London, Heinemann).
ShivaV. (1995), Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London, Zed Books).
van KlinkenA. (2022), ‘Wangari Maathai’s environmental Bible as an African knowledge: eco-spirituality, christianity and decolonial thought’, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, 8(3): 156–176. https://doi.org/10.1080/23277408.2021.1922129
VitalA. (2008), ‘Another kind of Combat in the bush: get a life and Gordimer’s critique of ecology in a globalized world’, English in Africa, 35(2): 89–118. https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v35i2.42853
WrightL. (2010), Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a16
Published on: 22 May 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 1 & 2
Article view count: 498
Article download count: 26
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Ango, Z. (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(1/2): a16 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a16Crossref
Dimensions
Altmetric
Article metrics
View count: 498
Download count: 26
No Data Found
No Data Found
No Data Found
Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
Creating spaces for co-research Rachel Proefke, Anna Barford
In the current era of peak youth, young people’s voices and authentic participation are needed more than ever. This article focuses on how youth participation in research can enhance wider understanding of young people’s experiences, perspectives and solutions, while also empowering young people. There is an established tradition of engaging young people and children with the qualitative research process, ranging from youth focussed research to youth-led participatory action research. Within this we occupy a middle ground, arguing for the need to create heterotopic spaces for participation in which both young researchers and professional researchers learn from one another’s expertise. Mindful of the roadblocks to authentic participation, this article systematically approaches engaging young people at six critical stages in the research process, namely: setting the framework; question design; data collection; analysis; validation; and sharing results for discussion and action. Youth co-research offers methodological rigour grounded in a reconceptualization of where expertise can be found, a committed approach to research training and youth empowerment, greater access to hard-to-reach groups of young people and data validity built upon close engagement with young researchers. To demonstrate our approach, we share in this article three youth co-research case studies, which focus on young people experiencing climate change disruptions in Uganda, young people impacted by COVID-19 in Indonesia and Nepal and a youth think tank convened between East, West and Southern Africa. The rigour and value of youth-engaged qualitative methodologies can benefit young people, as well as the academics, policymakers and NGOs with whom they work.
2 November 2023
‘What are you doing here?’: (mis)trust, COVID-19 pandemic, and sexual reproductive health rights Winstoun Muga, Emmy Kageha Igonya
We explore how the government’s messaging on COVID-19 pandemic response perpetuated mistrust and impeded people’s ability to access and utilise sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services. While the need for SRH information increased, public health messages fostered mistrust in sexual and reproductive health services. We draw on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions conducted among women, girls, and healthcare providers in five African countries (Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda) between May and October 2021. We show how trust was largely eroded through preventive measures, such as stay-at-home directives, social distancing, curfews, and lockdowns. We argue that, on one hand, while state-led epidemic preparedness and response were geared towards the common good, i.e., controlling the virus, on the other hand, de-prioritisation of much-needed services for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), as well as a lack of transparency among some of the service providers, bred mistrust in healthcare. We conclude that ambiguity in communication and implementation of COVID-19 prevention measures further compromised access to and utilisation of sexual and reproductive health services.
19 December 2023
No Data Found