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.)

This opinion piece argues that the education system in England suffers from a lack of KAL (Knowledge About Language) which is so extreme that it deserves the name KAL desert because children are taught virtually nothing about the languages that they study, whether English or a foreign language. The dominant view of language sees it merely as a skill, rather than as something interesting which is worth exploring, and the only content taught and tested in language lessons comes from literature rather than linguistics. This desert is to be found not only in our schools but also in our university departments of English and of foreign languages, so future teachers of English and foreign languages are not equipped to teach about language; modern linguistics has very little impact on the school curriculum apart from the Advanced Level exam in English Language. I also show that the present decline in both English and foreign languages actually started about 1970, and may arguably be due in part to the KAL desert. However, I also report evidence from three recent initiatives that a lot of children enjoy exploring language and learning about it, so I suggest that the decline in languages, both English and foreign, might be halted by teaching more KAL. Finally, I suggest a roadmap for achieving this by increasing KAL first in universities and then in schools.