Shifting Imaginaries amidst the apocalyptic present: African Eco-fiction and cosmologies of connection

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Shifting Imaginaries amidst the
apocalyptic present: African Eco-fiction
and cosmologies of connection
Alessandra Manzini
amanzini@iuav.it
Urban Planning |University IUAV of Venice
Oladele Madamidola
omm1@st-andrews.ac.uk
Modern Languages |University of St. Andrews
Abstract
The paper addresses the emergency characters of environmental imaginaries
looking at cosmological issues behind them: the place humans have arrogated
themselves in relation to ecosystems. The analysis starts deconstructing the
Western ‘cosmogony’: the economic and political system that has cannibalized the
entire world since 1492, culminating with the partition of Africa. African ecocritical
fiction helps to envision the scale and urgency of the threat. Fictional
representations of ecological realities in sub-Saharan Africa are analysed using
Congo Inc. Bismarck’s Testament and How Beautiful We Were as representative texts.
Perspective analysis is framed by the postcolonial ecocritical postulations of Rob
Nixon and Cajetan Iheka, questioning the anthropocentric view of the environment
which reinforces the nature-culture divide. Contributions from different
perspectives discuss the power of cosmologies and speculative imagination to
envision alternative planetary futures and the fabrication of new imaginaries.
Keywords
Environmental Imaginary | Anthropocene | Post-Colonial African
Ecocriticism | Africa World | Cosmology
ISSN: 2281-8138
N. 22 - Year XII / December 2023 pp. 15-39
www.imagojournal.it

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1. Introduction
n installation of the artist duo Geissler and Sann, "How Does the World End
(for Others)?” found in the exhibition ‘Everybody talks about the weather’ at
Fondazione Prada in Venice, inspired the opening of this introduction. It consists of
37 literary fragments, progressively disposed on a timeline into the future till 2393,
culled from the emerging Cli-fi genre, a subgenre of speculative fiction that concerns
itself with the effects of climate change on human society. One of these fragments:
depicts times in 2054, a future where things have clearly gone awry:
The vegetation and the ground are coloured with unnatural shades of red and
grey, people are facing different pandemics and their repeated waves - with
many living in isolation, by choice or owing to the growing paranoia - and deep
fakes are so widespread that no one believes in anything. In fact, in this society,
images are considered mere comfort objects to be experienced through
holograms or sophisticated retinal chips. Three friends go on a road trip into the
past. On the journey they rediscover lost biodiversity. How could this all have
disappeared? (Everything will change, 2021 directed by Marten Persiel in Geissler-
Sann, 2023, "How Does the World End?”).
The last fragment is set in 2393, and the planet is almost unrecognizable:
Clear warmings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to
soaring in temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and finally the
disaster known as the Great Collapse of 2093. The disintegration of the West
Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the
global order. Writing from the Second People-s Republic of China on the 300th
anniversary of the Great Collapse, a scholar presents a gripping and deeply
disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment - the political and
economic elites of the so called advanced industrial societies - failed to act, and
so brought about the collapse of Western civilization. (Naomi Oreskes, and Erik
M. Conway, 2004, The Collapse of Western Civilization in Geissler-Sann, 2023, "How
Does the World End (for Others)?”
The fact that thus far, only speculative fiction has come to consistently embrace
climate change as inescapable reality of daily 21-century has been a key factor in
Amitav Ghosh’s influential argument concerning the ‘Great Derangement’ of our
time, one that faults the mainstream of cultural production to remain blind towards
the most extreme human challenge of humans’ history in three hundred thousand
years (Ghosh, 2016; Geissler-Sann, 2023). Decrying humans’ refusal to fully
acknowledge and utilise the potency of prose fiction, Amita Ghosh sees humanity’s
collective failure to address human mischief on the environment as rooted in our
inability to properly imagine the scale and urgent nature of the threat. The extreme
nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, asks us to imagine other forms of
human existence—a task to which fiction is the best suited of all cultural forms
(Ghosh, 2016).

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The paper aims to nurture a reflection on the multiple crises of our times namely
global warming and species extinction, addressing the emergency characters of
environmental imaginaries. This paper first tries to set the theoretical ground to
answer the question from our first guest writers from the future re-connecting Cli-fi
ties with decolonial ecofeminist theories and postcolonial ecocriticism found in
African speculative fiction. The analysis starts to interrogate the singularity of
Western history: the economic and political system that has cannibalised the entire
world since 1492, culminating with the partition of Africa. The same system that tried
to erase organic cosmologies of premodern times in the name of Illuminism. The
second section analyses the emergent voices of the ecocritical movement aimed to
deconstruct the dominant mainstream paradigm of neoliberalism in a globalised era.
The third part attempts to put the analytical approach into practice. It therefore
examines fictional representations of ecological realities in sub-Saharan Africa using
In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc. Bismarck’s Testament and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful
We Were as representative texts. A perspective analysis of the texts is framed by the
postcolonial ecocritical postulations of Rob Nixon in Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor, and Cajetan Iheka’s Naturalizing Africa: Ecological
Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature. In examining how
these writers represent ecological realities in the texts, we question the
anthropocentric view of the environment which reinforces the nature-culture divide,
causes the displacement of humans and other living beings, and consider how the
writers portray the effect of the exploitation of nature and the resultant
environmental change. The fourth part fuels the debate on how to shift towards new
imaginaries. Contributions from contemporary Afrofuturistic philosophies of the
entanglement, decolonial feminism, and ecocritical speculative fictions, each one
developing its own narrative while nonetheless coming together, lead the way
towards the fabrication of new imaginaries amidst the apocalyptic present.
Concluding remarks suggest how theories and discourses could answer the
question: “What might alternative scenarios for the present and the future look like?”
2. Deconstructing Western cosmogony
Observation of socio-ecological phenomena shows problems in human
psychological responses to the anthropogenic climate crisis, suggesting that there is
probably another issue at the cosmological level: the place humans have arrogated
themselves in relation to other Earth’s species and ecosystems they belong,
considering that humanity appears doggedly resolved to work against them. These
socio-ecological dynamics are processes initiated and sustained by humans’ activities
since the beginning of the Western singularity: extraction of fuels, gas, and minerals;
carbon emissions; domestication of habitats and ecosystems for humans’
exploitation; soil consumption via urbanisation and sprawling processes; depletion of
megafauna; commodification of natural resources; and so on. They are all causing
anthropogenic climate change (droughts, fires, heat waves, desertification, extreme

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weather events, sea level rise). The scientific literature (Zalasiewicz et al., 2019)
embraces the 'Anthropocene' hypothesis, defining it as a new era in which the impact
of human activities on the planet has been (and continues to be) so significant as to
require a change in the chronology of Earth's history. It is recognised that the planet
has crossed the threshold of the Holocene (which lasted about 11,700 years), the era
of wellbeing, stability and biodiversity richness and entered a new geological era with
a new name – the 'Anthropocene'.
Observing the evolutionary parabola of global warming and gases introduced into
the atmosphere, led political thinkers to conceive the less anonymous term
'Capitalocene' (Moore, 2017), recognising geographical and cultural differences in
'humanity'. The period of great acceleration in human history (1945-2015), in fact,
coincides, according to these studies, with the period of decolonisation in states
dominated by European imperial powers and the takeover of a new institutionalised
social order in Western countries. This order was gradually established in all the
territories that embraced the 'cosmogony' of unlimited economic growth and
capitalism, or whose itinerary was directed towards forms of globalised
modernisation: towards a superficial conception of nature as a commodity, ancillary
to human life on earth (Escobar, 2008).
Comparative planetary studies open a perspective that monitors human action on
the planet and identifies it as the cause of this transition to a new geological era. ESS
(Earth System Studies) theorise the existence of three histories within which events
are defined by different time scales: the history of the planet, the history of life on
the planet, and the history of the globe made up of extractive imperial logics,
capitalism, and technology (Chakrabarty, 2021).
Indeed, the Western neo-liberal system has taken possession of the thesis of
environmental emergency and climate change, transforming it into a hegemonic
discourse and using it for legitimizing itself and its reproduction with some
variations. The language of global environmentalism has been dominated by
Western policy and science. Other voices, experiences, and solutions have been
submerged, such that postcolonial scholars have critiqued the inherent whiteness of
the ‘Anthropocene’. While there has been an increasing focus on the environmental
ruins of the African continent because of the unfriendly treatment of the
environment, there is only a hand-full of research produced by Africans to date on
African eco-fiction which may have led to the slight attention being given to African
understandings, explanations, alternative imaginings, and solutions. This dearth of
interchange of ideas has resulted in the continued imposition of Global North
solutions on issues requiring indigenous resolution.
In this essay, West means what Europe has become since 1492: an economic and
political system that has cannibalised the entire world, culminating with the partition
of Africa in 1884. Since the mercantilist era, European forces imposed unequal
relations towards the African explored territories. With the imposition of extractive
patterns in the territories of Global South (Gudynas, 2015), the relations between the
colony and the centre of the empire during colonialism marked a point of no return.

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The same system nowadays is taking possession of the environmental crisis thesis
and producing the global mainstream policy of the 'green transition’ as a new field of
economic recovery, driven by the keywords of growth and development reproducing
the same patterns of governmentality of the past. This leads to retracing European
steps in history and to analyse the Western singularity: the imposition of an
interpretation of reality where man alienates himself from nature and the universe
and imposes his domination on other spices and non-human entities. It is a work
well demonstrated by the ecofeminist philosopher Carolyne Merchant who shows
how, from modernity, a masculine project has prevailed and from Europe, was going
to conquer the world rejecting everything that is nature and imposing a totally new
order to the living system, killing the nature and de-animating the Universe and the
Cosmos (Merchant, 2020; Kondjo Grandvaux, 2021; Manzini, 2023). The cosmos
inhabited by the mediaeval European peoples was devitalized and transformed into
an order governed by mathematical laws, where non-humans have been de-
animated (Merchant, 2020; Kondjo Grandvaux, 2021, Manzini, 2023). As Merchant
studies show, central to the organic theory was the identification of nature, especially
the earth, with a nurturing mother: a kindly beneficent female who provided for the
needs of mankind in an ordered, planned universe. But another opposing image of
nature as female was also prevalent: wild and uncontrollable nature that could
render violence, storms, droughts, and general chaos. Both were identified with the
female sex and were projections of human perceptions onto the external world.”
(Merchant, 2020:2).
The ecofeminist perspective sustains that gender is a crucial variable, in relation
to class, race, humans/non-humans’ relations and other important dimensions of
political ecology life, especially the economy of ecological resources.
Women in the Global South generally showed a great 'distrust' of feminism:
because they did not know it or found it unsuitable for their situation, or because
they considered it too flashy, too political. Fatou Sarr adds that: "feminism as a social
movement has met with great reluctance on the part of African women, who have
often worried about the dangers of establishing a single model, making feminism a
dogma (Sarr, 1998)." This is why Global South researchers propose an openness to
diversity, giving feminism a plural dimension" (AFARD, 1983 "Feminism as a Social
Movement"). Françoise Verges, one of the prominent afro-descendent decolonial
feminist, in her book Decolonial feminism states that: ”If feminism remains grounded
in the division between women and men, a division that predates slavery, but does
not analyse how slavery, colonialism and imperialism act on this division, nor how
Europe imposes its conception of the women/men division on the peoples it
colonises, or how they create other divisions, then this feminism is racist” (Verges,
2020). Ifi Amadioume in her best-known book: Male Daughters, Female Husbands:
Gender and Sex in an African Society emphasises the impact of colonialism and its
religion (Christianity) on gender, which in the pre-colonial matriarchal era enjoyed an
organic plasticity and fluidity derived from the conditions for its flourishing that
animist religions, including the cult of the ancestors, offered (Amadiume, 1997;
Amadioume, 1987; Anta-Diop, 1989).

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Consequently, African feminism is shaped by African women's resistance to
Western hegemony and its legacy within African culture. It has grown out of a history
of women's integration in corporate and agrarian based societies, which had strong
cultural heritages, but were however disrupted by colonialism (Muthuki, J.M. 2006).
African feminisms hold the view that the erosion of women's power is caused by the
intrusion of foreign systems with different gender orientation and new paradigms of
power organization (see Amadiume, 1987; Arndt, 2002; Kolawole, 1997; Mikell, 1997;
Mohanty, 2003; Narayan, 1997; Oyewumi, 1997 in Muthuki, J.M. 2006). Oyewumi
(1997) points out that colonial practice stemmed from the worldview of the human
over the non-human or subhuman and the masculine over the feminine and the
modern or progressive over the traditional (Muthuki, J.M. 2006). Oyewumi (1997) also
points out that colonization was a process in which male hegemony was instituted
and legitimized within African societies (Muthuki, J.M. 2006). Colonial rule was
therefore characterized by the exclusion of women from the newly created colonial
public sphere. Therefore, an African ecological perspective needs to interrogate the
role of historical circumstances such as colonial rule on the socio-ecological systems
and gender roles. Such a perspective requires an integrative approach to gender
which involves an examination of how organizations work at the community level
based on gender defined roles and relations.
Decolonial feminist theories of Global South make a parallelism between
extractive activities as an expression of colonial capitalism and feminicide as an
expression of patriarchy (Lugones, 2010). If territory and feminine are part of the
same superorganism, similarly extractive activities and feminicide are the two
systemic declinations of the same model of aggression, which has the sole purpose
of dominating bodies and the Earth (Lugones, 2010; Cusicanqui, 2020; Lagardes,
1999; Verges, 2020, Manzini, 2021).
Ecofeminism and ecocriticism have a common angle when it comes to
understanding how the concept of wilderness and nature changed over time, or how
the metaphor of land influences the way humanities treat it. Both are posing
questions on differences between man and woman writings about nature.
Ecocriticism was first developed in the nineties as “the analysis of the relationship
between literature and the physical environment” (Glotfelty, 1996: XIX). In addition to
class, race, and gender with ecocritical perspective, ‘place’ emerged as a new critical
category. It was originally “an earth-centred approach to literary studies” (Glotfelty,
1996: XIX), but it quickly enlarged its field of interest, including human representation
of nature, and the relationship between human and non-human, also critically
analysing the term humanity (Garrard, 2012: 5). Glotfelty opines that all ecological
criticism shares ‘the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the
physical world, affecting it and affected by it’ and that ‘ecocriticism takes as its
subject the interconnectedness between nature and culture, specifically the cultural
artefacts of language and literature,’ and as a ‘theoretical discourse, it negotiates
between the human and the nonhuman’ (21). Although ecocriticism is a movement
that has influenced the Humanities over the past few decades, as Lawrence Buell
notes, it was only in the 1990s that it began to gain momentum, first in the United

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States and in the United Kingdom, as literary scholars began to raise questions
regarding the field’s contribution to human understanding of environmental crises
such as pollution, global warming, deforestation, overpopulation, waste disposal
(including nuclear), climate change, ozone layer depletion (Buell, 2011: 89).
Since its inception, however, the field has been contentious not just because eco-
critics do not have a univocal view in terms of definition and scopes, but also
because many sub-fields have emerged. In his attempt to determine what counts as
ecocriticism, Lawrence Buell suggests four criteria for literature inspired by
environmental and ecological concerns. The first criterion is that environmental
writing, in contrast to nature writing, links natural history to human history. He
further opines that genuine environmental texts must consider the nonhuman and
their ‘interests,’ sometimes privileging a non-androcentric world and its distinct
evolution and history. He is also of the view that environmental writing should show
an ethical orientation that makes human beings responsible and accountable for the
environment as well as its well-being and continuation. Finally, the environmental
text should present the developmental order of nature and critique or avoid a static
model of natural change and ecological transformations (Buell, 1995:7-8). In view of
these criteria, one may be curious to know if texts by African writers demonstrate
similar concerns and what have been the responses of eco-critics from Africa on the
debate. Importantly, it is crucial to ask if there is African ecocriticism at this point and
if there is, should it as a sub-field of ecocriticism align with Buell’s criteria?
3. Is There African Ecocriticism?
In their ‘Introduction’ to African Literature Today, Cajetan Iheka with Stephanie
Newell announces, ‘the arrival of an African ecocriticism’ and claims that ‘the field is
growing rapidly as there is now a rush to adopt ecocriticism in African literary and
cultural studies’ (Iheka & Newell, 2020: 1). The critical responses on African
ecocriticism are reactions to William Slaymaker, who is arguably the most
contentious voice on ecocriticism. Slaymaker in his 2001 essay, ‘Ecoing the Other(s)’,
accuses the Black African writers and critics of a lack of responses to the call for
global green and consequently dismisses African ecocriticism (Slaymaker, 2001: 132-
134). The reason for what Slaymaker sees as the weak response from black African
writers, according to him, is that ‘environmentalism and ecologism threaten to
dominate global economic policies in the new world order enforced by the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund’ and that sustainability, biodiversity,
population control, and land responsibility will be defined by Western world’s
financial and scientific centres (133). Whether this might be the reason for black
African writers’ scepticism will remain debatable as one would ordinarily expect that
such influence would have fuelled a response from Africa as the continent has been
known for her postcolonial writings which resist any form of oppression or injustice.
Following William Slaymaker’s declaration, African scholars have attempted to
define African Ecocriticism in ways that differentiate it from the Euro-American

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conception of ecocriticism. This is because African Ecocriticism is a multifaceted field
that encompasses a range of perspectives and approaches. It goes beyond the
narrow focus on environmental justice, incorporating the agency of nonhuman and
spiritual materialities in nature-human relations (Egya, 2020). This perspective is
rooted in a uniquely African environmental theory that emphasizes the
interconnectedness of humanity and the natural environment (Falola, 2017; Iheka,
2018). It also draws on African environmental ethics, which recognize the importance
of indigenous people and their relationship with the natural habitat (Chemhuru,
2019). In the context of literature, Caminero-Santangelo argues that African
Ecocriticism expands the scope of ecocriticism to include a broad array of African
texts, highlighting the interconnectedness of social struggles and ecological
transformations (2014). The field also offers a local-developed solution to
environmental issues through the concept of eco-communitarianism, which
emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals, communities in socio-ecological
systems (Ab and Gomez-Tagle Leonard, 2018). African Ecocriticism is further enriched
by the inclusion of non-Western epistemologies and the exploration of alternative
narratives in African literature (Caminero-Santangelo and Myers, 2011).
Looking at Slaymaker’s claim from a slightly laidback perspective, however, the
fears that led to the weak responses from Black African writers may have been out of
their volition given the elevated level of politicking involved in global environmental
policymaking. How do we explain that Africa has been a target for waste disposal and
Western policymakers such as Lawrence Summers had justified and covered up
environmental damage and its complex historical causes in Africa? (Nixon, 2011: 1)
According to Caminero-Santangelo, the cover-up or ‘erasure’ ‘has often caused
mainstream conservationists to overlook environmentally destructive extractive
industry in Africa (driven by foreign economic interests) and facilitated the creation
of conservation reserves for tourists from which local communities are evicted and
excluded (Caminero-Santangelo, 2014: 2-3). Caminero-Santangelo further argues that
such exclusion is linked to a narrative depicting Africans as lacking the proper
environmental responsiveness and knowledge to care for valuable biodiversity
hotspots which suggests that environmentalists’ efforts in Africa need to be
conceived and led by non-Africans (3). As far back as 1996, Melissa Leach and Robin
Mearns explain that the ‘received wisdom’ about Africa holds because it helps to
promote ‘external intervention in the control and use of natural resources’ (Leach &
Mearns, 1996: 19-20). The common ground here is that the exclusion of African
voices was a cover-up mechanism for the exploitation and degradation of African
environments by the Global North. As Nixon explains in Slow Violence, such a cover-
up implies that there will be no opposition by Africans to exported pollution onto
African soils (Nixon, 2011: 2).
About half a decade after Slaymaker’s 2001 controversial publication, he showed a
massive understanding of African literature when he acknowledges that ‘Nigerian
literature is a treasure trove for the ecocritics and literary environmentalist’ in his
2007 essay (Slaymaker, 2007:130). The issue for Slaymaker was that unlike white-
African writers including J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, Black African writers

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and critics have focused so much on colonial issues at the expense of the global
environmental crises. Asempasah et al., however, aver that the argument can also be
made that if African literature and literary criticism have been anthropocentric, as
Slaymaker claims, it is because African writers and critics have focused attention on
‘interrogating postcolonial issues that caused the environmental crises rather than
tackling the environmental issues head-on or in isolation’ (Asempasah et al., 2022: 2).
That African writers prioritize other issues should not be a case of subordination
of nature or non-humans to human activities in African Literature. Should African
writers idolise nature when their people battle with hunger, or should they talk about
non-human protection when even humans are not protected? Black African response
reflects the preoccupation of the postcolonial state which focuses on the material
benefits of nature at the expense of its ecological value to the ecosystem. In essence,
any discussion of African ecocriticism should adopt a postcolonial approach which
allows for connecting the sufferings and environmental degradation of Africa to the
over four hundred years of European imperialism (Iheka and Newell, 2020: 4).
In line with the foregoing, our analysis of Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were
and In Koli Bofane’s Congo Inc. in this paper is anchored on the postcolonial
ecocritical approaches of Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” and Cajetan Iheka’s
idea of “Naturalizing Africa” to illuminate how environmental degradation gradually
inflicts harm on marginalised communities, resulting in displacement and profound
socio-economic consequences. Nixon and Iheka’s propositions are apt for our
analysis because of their postcolonial approaches to the discussion of the
environmental crisis.
Nixon's central argument in Slow Violence is that environmental violence is not
always immediate or spectacular in nature, as is often depicted in media and popular
culture. Instead, it often takes the form of slow, incremental processes that occur
over extended periods of time. This slow violence is less visible and, therefore, less
likely to capture public attention and outrage. It affects marginalized communities,
particularly the poor, who lack the resources and political power to address or
mitigate the consequences of environmental degradation (Nixon, 2011). On the other
hand, Iheka’s central argument revolves around the idea that postcolonial African
literature serves as a critical space for contesting and dismantling the “naturalizing”
of Africa. He argues that African writers employ various narrative strategies to unveil
the ecological violence committed against the continent, shedding light on the
environmental degradation and resource exploitation perpetuated by colonial and
neocolonial forces (Iheka, 2018).
4. Textual Representations in In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc. and
Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were
What seems to distinguish eco-fiction from Africa is the distinct representation of
the impact of colonialism and how its metamorphosis continues to impact the earth

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of colonized territories. This echoes Caminero-Santangelo’s view that “African
environmental writing tends to prioritize social justice; lived environments;
livelihoods; and/or the relationship among environmental practice, representation of
nature, power, and privilege” (Caminero-Santangelo, 2014: 7). This is what obtains in
the two novels. In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc., for instance, the character of Old
Lomama, whose attachment to the forest and respect for the animals resonates in
the narrative, epitomises the harmony of culture and nature in traditional African
societies (Bofane, 2018: 128-131). The old chief, who is the custodian of his
community, seeks the permission of the tiger in a bid to hunt in its territory (129) and
after the cold-blooded murder of the tiger – king of the Ekonda forest (Nkoi Mobali) –
by a coalition of warthogs, Old Lomama eulogizes the tiger and blames its death on
globalization (Ivi: 130-131). This sort of relationship is what Iheka calls ‘aesthetics of
proximity’ in Naturalizing Africa (Iheka, 2018:21-56). For Old Lomama then, foreign
interference (imposed globalisation) is to blame for the disconnect between humans
and non-humans in Africa (Ivi: 22, 99-101).
4.1. Congo Inc. (English Translation, 2018) – In Koli Bofane
FIG. 1 – Kinshasa Great Market Area by night (Source: AI fotor generator)
Congo Inc. is a novel about the contradictions of globalisation in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo which could be extended to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. It
conveys the plights of a people in the face of internal conflicts that make many
homeless, children without parents as the reader is presented with the devastating
effects of capitalism and colonialism – the sort that brings back memories of

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Bismarck and Leopold II of Belgium. At the centre of the plot is 25-year-old
Isookanga, a Pygmy from the Ekonda clan, who is supposed to replace his uncle (Old
Lomama) as the chief of his village and become a transporter of their tradition into
the future. While Old Lomama detests globalisation because it interferes with the
traditional ways of life where culture and nature are intertwined, Isookanga
celebrates it. He dresses like a Westerner and admires Western civilisation as he
moves from his village to the country’s capital, Kinshasa, and joins forces with street
children, warlords, and a Chinese friend who becomes a victim of the same
globalisation he tells Isookanga he does not believe in.
To become globalised is to embrace the use of technology. Therefore, rather than
tending the forest, Isookanga prefers to spend his time playing an online game (on a
laptop he steals from a Belgian ethnologist) called Raging Trade, which reveals the
workings of hard power and the mischiefs of world corporations. Acting as
multinational corporations, players compete for the resources of ‘Gondavanaland’ to
gain global dominance, by any means necessary. These means happen to be nuclear
missiles, stealth planes, guerrilla warfare, and even genocide which leave the
environment degraded. Although Isookanga’s Congo Bololo (which represents Africa)
stands its ground in the face of competition, it could not cope for too long because of
the involvement of international regulatory bodies such as the IMF and the UN
(Bofane, 2018: 7). In the foreword to the novel, Dominic Thomas states that
‘journeying alongside Isookanga, we discover the striking correlation between the
online game and the challenges confronting the DRC on the larger geopolitical
landscape of globalization…’ (Bofane, 2018: xv). Africa simply does not stand a chance
against the ferocious forces of the Global North which are bent on exploiting the
continent’s natural resources regardless of what it takes.
It is when Isookanga gets to Kinshasa to seek his fortune as a ‘globalisation
advocate’ who wants to «be in the mainstream, get involved in high technology,
communicate with the world, be in trading, stuff like that», despite his uncle’s
warning that «those who talk of modernity want to eliminate us» that he realizes the
value of living in the relative peace that being closer to nature offers (Bofane,2018: 4).
He takes a riverboat to the city, only to find himself among a group of shégués, street
kids, and like them, he becomes homeless and faced with the cruel reality of the
globalization he seeks and then doubts, he asks: “would the now established
globalization drive people to veiled behaviour even in everyday life, to a ghostlike
secrecy?” (Bofane, 2018: 29). Here, we see the kind of internal and external
colonialism which Ken Sawo-Wiwa talks about at play (Saro-Wiwa, 2012: 16)
1
.
In the final chapter of the novel ‘Game Over’, we see how the notorious warlord
turned administrator – Kiro Bizimungu also known as Commander Kobra Zulu –
meets his brutal death at the hands of a mob who administer jungle justice on him
(setting him ablaze) for his role in terrorising the masses (Bofane, 2018: 175-179). As
1
Ken Saro-Wiwa calls attention to two forms of colonialism which combine to oppress the exploited
communities in Africa – the internal and the external. While the external is obvious, he sees the operations
of the internal (government, local chiefs) in collusion with the international corporations as devastating on
the oppressed.

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Bizimungu breaths his last, he remembers his Rwandan root, being a Tutsi who had
to flee his motherland because «people were hounded and slaughtered with
machetes as if they were cattle», he remembers the mischiefs of the foreign bodies
and how «telephone calls flew back and forth between Paris and New York», and
how « at that moment, the magic of the Whites intervened» and his life takes a turn
he never wanted (171-173). As he thinks about his role as a mere pawn in the game
of chess, he remembers that:
The algorithm Congo Inc. had been created at the moment that Africa was being
chopped up in Berlin between November 1884 and February 1885. Under
Leopold II’s sharecropping, they had hastily developed it so they could supply the
whole world with rubber from the equator, without which the industrial era
wouldn’t have expanded as rapidly as it needed to at the time.
Loyal to Bismarck’s testament, Congo Inc. more recently had been appointed as
the accredited supplier of internationalism, responsible for the delivery of
strategic minerals for the conquest of space, the manufacturing of sophisticated
armaments, the oil industry, and the production of high-tech
telecommunications material (Bofane, 2018: 174-175).
While he has been used and is now implicated as a small fish in the ocean of
international politics, the narrator makes it clear that «they had continued to perfect
the algorithm somewhere between Washington, London, Brussels, and Kigali»
(Bofane: 175). As Bizimungu is facing an agonising death, Isookanga is arrested
alongside his Chinese friend, Zhang Xia, and jailed for being found in the office of the
mobbed Bizimungu whom he is supposed to meet to perfect plans on how to access
the mineral resources under the earth of his village. He is released to go with his
uncle, Old Lomama, and plans are made to return him to the village. Armed with the
map of raw materials burned onto a digital disk, Isookanga asks Old Lomama: «Did
you know there’s gold, bitumen, and diamonds in the Ekonda soil?» When his uncle
answers in affirmation he is angry that his uncle had never told him about it as the
future chief. Old Lomama, however, makes it clear that: «men being what they are, if
you tell them about such things, good-bye calves, cows, pigs: nobody will want to
work anymore» (Bofane, 2018: 183).
Old Lomama’s response is particularly insightful because governments in most
countries in sub-Saharan Africa have become lazy and overdependent on their
natural resources at the expense of human resources. The abandoned humans – the
masses left uncatered to by their governments – have in turn embraced social vices
and the young populations have become what I call ‘criminals by circumstances’ in
countries with huge disregard for the rule of law. The irony of it all is that the Global
North countries who feed on the chaos of Africa do not condone lawlessness in their
countries. The point here is exemplified by the response of Colonel Mosisa at the
headquarters of the Rapid Intervention Police, when Isookanga goes back to see
Zhang Xia, his Chinese friend in jail:

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We received information about him from his embassy. He’s dangerous and being
sought by the police in his country. A firing squad is almost certainly waiting for
him there. He has corrupted functionaries, and in his country, corruption is
officially outlawed. The governor intends to maintain a good relationship with
the Chinese. They asked us politely and we’ve extradited him (Bofane: 184).
If corruption is outlawed in China and other Global North countries, why should
they indirectly encourage corruption in Africa by colluding with politicians and
government officials to impoverish their people and subject their land to
environmental degradation? In the final paragraph of the final chapter (before the
Epilogue), the narrator asks:
In an environment polluted by the deadly waves of uranium, cobalt, columbite-
tantalite, what can one expect from any individual who has passed through the
centrifuge and is developing in the context of a next-generation nuclear reactor?
(Bofane, 2018: 186)
His simple answer to that question is: «…permanent radiation doesn’t bring
innocence back; it leads to rage». He adds that the sensitive souls of the land cannot
escape the eventuality of climate change because the concentration and fission of
environmental degradation is their state capital, Kinshasa, which the narrator
describes as the «laboratory of the future and, incidentally, capital city of the nebula,
Congo Inc» (Bofane, 2018:186). In essence, the people of Kinshasa and indeed,
people living in countries with extraction sites in Africa cannot escape the dangerous
effects of what Nixon calls ‘slow violence’.
4.2 How Beautiful We Were (2021) – Imbolo Mbue

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FIG. 2 – Black Oil Gardens (Source: AI fotor generator)
The novel is an exploration of the plights of a people whose ancestral land is
blessed with oil. Their blessing, however, becomes their woe as their government
gives an oil corporation, Pexton, the right to explore oil and share the profits as it is
done in most oil-producing countries in Africa. Set in the fictional Cameroonian land
of Kosawa and moving back and forth between happenings in Bezam (the state
capital) and America, the multiple narrators – collective and singular, children, and
the elderly – take turn to narrate the ordeals of the Kosawa people. They tell the tales
of how the contamination of their land, water, and air causes the death of children
and shortens the lifespan of their people; of how all these affect their economy and
sources of livelihood (predominantly farming and fishing):
We remembered those who had died from diseases with neither names nor
cures—our siblings and cousins and friends who had perished from the poison
in the water and the poison in the air and the poisoned food growing from the
land that lost its purity the day Pexton came drilling (Mbue, 2020:7). … three
decades before, in Bézam, on a date we’ll never know, at a meeting where none
of us was present, our government had given us to Pexton. Handed, on a sheet
of paper, our land and waters to them. (Mbue, 2020: 14)
The suffering of the people of Kosawa is compounded by the failure of the
community leader, Woja Beki, to speak and stand for his people. This is characteristic
of leaders in Africa who enrich themselves at the expense of their people’s welfare:
Pexton had bought his cooperation and he had, in turn, sold our future to them.
We’d seen with our own eyes, heard with our own ears, how Pexton was
fattening his wives and giving his sons jobs in the capital and handing him
envelopes of cash (Mbue, 2020: 8).
The collusion between the government and the oil corporation is so obvious that
the leader of Pexton could speak on behalf of the government. He affirms that
‘Pexton and the government are your friends,’ and ‘even on your worst day,
remember that we’re thinking about you in Bézam and working hard for you’ (Mbue,
2020:10). This relates strongly to Nixon’s assertion that ‘confronted with the
militarization of both commerce and development, impoverished communities are
often assailed by coercion and bribery that test their cohesive resilience’ (Nixon, 4).
Tired of their helplessness and the lies they have always been fed, the youths
threaten: ‘We’ll march to Bézam and burn down your headquarters... We’ll hurt you
the same way you’re hurting us’ (Mbue, 12). Nixon, however, highlights the
helplessness of such communities as Kosawa when he asks: ‘How will that
community negotiate competing definitions of its own poverty and long-term wealth
when guns, the bulldozers, and moneymen arrive?’ (Nixon, 4). Following Thula’s story
in the part titled «Thula», one is likely to empathize with the children of Kosawa for

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not getting to see how beautiful their community was before the arrival of the oil
corporation. (Mbue, 2020: 30,34) The neo-colonial and neoliberal capitalistic
approach to life makes Thula’s father question the rationale behind being human:
«Wasn’t man’s ability to recognize his fellow human what made him better than
dogs? It was sad how the love of money was corrupting many; truly sad». (Mbue,
2020: 40) One of the child narrators added:
I once overheard about the ocean, which none of them have ever seen, how it’s
bound to dry up someday because of American people like the ones at Pexton,
because of all the toxic wastes they’re dumping into rivers which will flow into
the ocean and choke it dead (Mbue, 2020: 79).
This sort of situation is what Nixon refers to as slow violence – «a violence that
occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed
across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence
at all» (Nixon, 2011: 2). Nixon’s argument is that serious attention should be paid to
such slow violence as environmental degradation caused by the activities of the
Global North on African soil just as it is paid to the invasion of foreign territories with
weapons of mass destruction (Nixon, 2011: 3). The mass destruction of the Kosawa
land and people and their efforts to call the attention of the United States to their
inhuman activities which became even more detrimental to them is an indication of
the hypocrisy behind the idea of social justice at the world level. Africans who are the
recipients of the injustice are «discounted as political agents, discounted as long-time
casualties…of slow violence, and discounted as cultures possessing environmental
practices and concerns of their own » (Nixon,2011: 2). Policies that emanate from
such actions that favour the Global North are indications that the value placed on
human life is not equal – some are protected humans, others are environmentally-
afflicted poor who are «terminally invisible, disposable people» (Nixon, 2011: 278).
How Beautiful We Were particularly touches on issues of failed leadership,
corruption, lack of trust in the judicial system, colonial influence and exploitation,
displacement, the death of traditional belief systems, the helplessness of ordinary
people, and the vulnerability of children in the face of environmental degradation.
The narrators movingly reveal the efforts of the people to take back their land from
the oil corporation and their government, and how their resistance has led to more
suffering, bloodshed, and the death of their heroes – young and old alike. Through
the happenings in and around Thula – who falls in love with education, gets a
scholarship to a school in America, and returns to fight for the restoration of the
rights of her people and the purification of their land and then dies in the struggle
without her body being found – the reader is moved to tears for the people of
Kosawa as their land is taken-over and they become displaced people carrying the
memories of their land and culture only in their hearts (Mbue, 2020: 360).

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5. Cosmologies of connections: towards new imaginaries of Earth and
Cosmos
The debates on the fabrication of new imaginaries amidst the apocalyptic present
was well nurtured by Ateliers de la Pensée (ADLP), among the large planetary
laboratories active in the Global South, founded by Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian
historian and philosopher, and Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese economist and writer,
outstanding for the creative force of the Afrotopian literary, artistic, philosophical,
and aesthetic movement. Launched in 2016, the ADLP have become, within a year, a
veritable 'think tank of ideas,' bringing together leading thinkers, writers, and
academics from Africa and the diaspora in Dakar and St. Louis to reflect on new
issues raised by transformations in the contemporary world and to revive the project
of an Afro-diasporic critical thought. The aim of these workshops was to uptake the
theoretical initiative and cast a plural gaze on the realities of the African continent
and the futures that are emerging, starting from one place: Africa. Ateliers de la
Pensée (ADLP), debates major topics, one of them is the planetary condition and the
politics of the 'living'. ADLP invites us to rethink the quality of the bonds, to ask what
community bonds are and who is included in them. And how, through the quality of
these bonds between all living beings, we produce new forms of life. The search for
alternative ways of inhabiting the planet and relating to the living brings us closer to
some of the new emerging African paradigms from which to start a conception of
new imaginaries reinforcing the Africa-World message (ADLP, 2016).
Achille Mbembe, in Essai sur l'Afrique décolonisée pays homage to Frantz Fanon by
reflecting on decolonization from an autobiographical account that focuses on the
emergence of a cosmopolitan African modernity that the author calls 'Afropolitan'
i.e., the emergence of a complex Creole universe from the continuous socio-cultural
reassembly and incessant displacement of men and cultures within the continent
and in its multiple diasporas (Mbembe, 2010). The current of critical studies of
Afropolitanism emerged from a movement of self-generation or self-explanation of
which the Ateliers de la Pensée are a multiplier. The aesthetics of entanglement
conceptualized in Out of the Dark Night is another pivotal point of his thought
(Mbembe, 2008). The gaze in the mirror is of the African in diaspora, dispersed,
floating, and real, revealing the richness and sensibility acquired between dispersion
and immersion as an Afropolitan citizenship (Mbembe, 2008).
In his latest book, la commonauté Terrestre, Mbembe's thought gains momentum
by proposing a paradigmatic shift in global politics in which humanity rethinks its
planetary communal condition (Mbembe, 2023). He proposes to move from droit de
gens, a right based on land occupation, to droit de vivant rights of the living beings. He
thinks of the Earth as the home of all living beings by proposing the Earth community
as the ‘ultimate utopia’. He proposes a project for the revitalization of planetary
consciousness, beginning with a rethinking of the human beings bonded to the
Cosmos and all living beings, drawing on African animist metaphysics (Mbembe 2023,
Manzini, 2023b). The right to a home in Africa is accompanied by the right to birth,

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far beyond the Western jus soli, with explicit recognition of belonging to a cosmic
ecosystem (Manzini, 2020). Based on the animist Bambara and Dogon cosmogonies
of Mali, Achille Mbembe draws a political ecology in which humans are embedded
into the Earth community with all living beings and rediscovers their cosmic
dimension. A utopia for which inhabiting the world necessarily means living together
and making space for others (human and non-human) and initiating the politics of
the living beings, which implies a primary right to breath and fundamental right to
life based on the rule of interdependence and African hospitality (Mbembe, 2023).
Ateliers de la Pensée 2022 questioned how cosmologies can help address the
deliason: the social, economic, and political disconnection of humans with nature that
plagues the modern age. Accordingly, to Felwine Sarr, there are cosmologies that can
teach us something about how to connect to other living beings to reinvent the
human-not-human-more-than-human relationship and address the planetary
challenges originated by the ecological crisis (Manzini, 2023d). In an interview made
during the last Ecole Doctorale des Ateliers de la Pensée 2022
2
, Sarr answered a
question on how to reconcile hard sciences born during the illuminism revolution
with the organic beliefs systems of premodern times:
In the exact sciences there is an attempt to understand the real and the
relationship within different elements of reality and to systematise them into
intelligible and clear theoretical propositions that explicate laws of nature. In the
domain of cosmology or cosmovision there is first and foremost a relationship
with the imaginary and the explanations that communities develop about the
origin of the Cosmos and their relationship with the Earth. This production of
imaginaries has practical consequences in the production of everyday life: the
way of fishing, farming, using trees, organising the political community, the use
of collective resources, and in the relationships of reciprocity and mutual aid of
the populations that update them. Science should document, especially in the
domain of social and political productivity, what major changes have occurred in
cosmology and consequently in the relationship with nature. There are explicit
cosmologies such as the mechanistic cosmogony, which considers nature an
object to exploit, it’s linked to a developmentalist, mechanical, rational view. It’s a
palpable cosmogony: some people dominate it, others suffer it. The economy is
organised around this cosmogony. The idea which drives the new paradigm of
an economy of the living beings is to do the opposite, to reconstruct narratives
that infuse awareness at different scales, linking gestures toward nature to new
emergent cosmologies. There are at least two important levels of engagement in
this sense: the creation of narratives and the spaces for experimenting with
other ways of connecting with living beings. We are in the process of elaborating
these cosmologies: recognizing them, thinking about them, and reformulating
them.
3
2
Interview with Felwine Sarr in Manzini A. (2023d), “Reinventare l’immaginario relazionale per
un’economia del vivente”, Equilibri Magazine.
3
Interview to Felwine Sarr (Manzini 2022) during Ecole Doctorales des Ateliers de la Pensée.

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In the short essay "Habiter le monde. Essai de politique relationnelle " Felwine Sarr
expresses his concern about the crisis of humanity's relational imaginary:
"Relationships have become the place par excellence of struggle and predation, (...)
instead of being mutually helpful, mutually fruitful or experienced as a positive-sum
game." Sarr expounds his thoughts on the political dimension of relationship:
«Managing human plurality in shared planetary space is the task of politics (...) along
with improving the process of humanization», which in his view remains incomplete
(Sarr, 2017). The creation of a société du vivant, represents for Sarr the challenge of
our time. His political thought questions, on a global scale, the ways in which
resources, places and spaces are appropriated and privatized (capital, proximity and
geography, precedence, etc.) and proposes to limit these processes of resource
grabbing for the good of the greatest number of people (Sarr, 2016).
Another intellectual behind the Ateliers de la Pensée the philosopher Severin
Kodjo-Grandvaux argues that it is the conception of ecology based on the ontological
separation between man and nature that is the knot to untie to get out of the
planetary crisis that Western modernity itself has caused. Kodjo-Grandvaux proposes
to start again from the Cosmos to rediscover humanity's interdependence and
belonging to the Tout Vivant. She explains: «Situating the ecological question on the
cosmic level, allows us to see the ecological crisis as a crisis of resonance, expressed
in the breaking of the link between human beings and the Cosmos. Regenerating this
bond would allow Western 'civilisation' to face the planetary challenge and return to
caring for the planet in common» (Kodjo-Grandvaux, 2021). This gesture
presupposes a paradigmatic change supported by actions of awakening, listening,
and attention so that humanity can once again vibrate with the Tout Vivant (Kodjo-
Grandvaux, 2021). The proposal that Severine Kodjo-Grandvaux makes in "Devenir
Vivant" is to return to a completely different conception of matter and the universe
(Kodjo-Grandvaux, 2021). It is about re-inhabiting the Cosmos and re-interrogating
the duality living matter/inert matter by asking what life (and therefore death) is
(Kodjo-Grandvaux, 2021). The inert is not necessarily inanimate. «Some African and
Amerindian philosophies say this, but so does also quantum physics. Our world is
solid only because the heart of the atom is in constant motion. Hence the proposal
to make cosmology a new philosophy, reintegrating a cosmos that is a life-generating
ecosystem. Everything in the universe has allowed life, as we know it, to appear on a
planet, the one we inhabit» (Manzini, 2023c; Kodjo-Grandvaux, 2021).
The imagery evoked by Malcolm Ferdinand, 'decolonial ecology is understood as a
way out of the grip of the modern world, providing a double key that translates
simultaneously into another way of thinking about decolonisation and another way
of thinking about struggles against the environmental degradation of the earth'
(Ferdinand, 2019:293). The emergence of decolonial thinking was made possible by
the anti-colonial and represents not only the outcome of a process of subjectivation,
but a project of humanity (Mbembe, 2008; Manzini, 2023b).
Francoise Verges brought the decolonial African feminist contribution into the
ADLP debate. In her essay Utopies émancipatrices found in the collective work of
ADLP: Ecrire l'Afrique-Monde, (ADLP, 2016: p.253) Verges discusses the concept of

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daring to imagine a future that goes against the ideologies of hegemonic powers.
She speaks of utopian practices in history that break so radically with the order of
coloniality that they continue to carry within them the idea of the possible – as
maroonage mentioning also utopian literature. Maroon utopian feminism depicted
by Verges referred to the fugitive slaves in search of freedom and new communities
where to live - keeping constant the assumption of relationality, but also that of
displacement and the imagination of spaces of freedom. This undocile and resistant
feminism drew the traces of decolonial feminism (Verges, 2020). In her essay Africa is
presented as a paradoxical place, both a name of absence and a source of unlimited
riches for the construction of the West. Africa is seen as a fertile space for developing
new utopias, especially as it challenges the ideology of lack and the economy of
absence on which the concept of development is based. Afrofuturism, which
emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, is seen as a response to the narratives of lack and
absence, aiming to create temporal complications and disrupt the linear progress
defined by the West (ADLP, 2016). Afrofuturist artists imagine utopias and dystopias,
seeking to correct the errors of the past by looking to the future. Afrofuturism is a
source of inspiration, and Verges proposes to investigate African utopian practices
and experiences to imagine alternative futures that embrace Africa's potential for
abundance and progress.
6. Conclusions
Imbolo Mbue and In Koli Bofane’s How Beautiful We Were and Congo Inc.
respectively sheds light on the intricate relationship between environmental
degradation, displacement, and their socio-economic consequences. These novels
challenge us to recognize the enduring, slow-burning violence of ecological harm,
which disproportionately affects marginalized communities and perpetuates socio-
economic disparities. Thus, through the lens of literature, we are called to confront
the urgent need for environmental justice and the alleviation of socio-economic
inequalities perpetuated by slow violence in a globalized world.
To reimagine the apocalypse of the African environment and the socio-economic
and even psychological effects on both human and the non-human alike is to recall
the huge disconnect between human and nature, owing to the neoliberal activities of
the globalised world. It is important for humanity to look back and see that the
problem like in ecocriticism is that of erasing histories and epistemologies of
indigenous peoples by the colonial conquest that disrupted notions of wilderness
and rooted dwelling. This form of retrospection is important because the African
future is very much linked to its past. The pain of the continent is such that it
emanates from the loss of what can never be regained. If the loss of the past cannot
be regained, it is not in the best interest of humanity to lose what is left of human
connection with the natural world. In essence, the transformation and future of
Africa and its masses, and indeed the world as a global village, depend on the
activities of activist groups, the media, and the political will of governments to check

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the excesses of globalisation and take true ownership of what is theirs. To achieve
this, however, the writer-activist must continue their role as the conscience of society
and storyteller of covered-up stories of injustice and resource exploitation across the
continent.
Overall, it is a work of rediscovery of the African souls and heritages: partly
indigenous, partly hybridized, or projected in the future, understanding their
diversity including religious, artistic, social, and political utopias. A work aware of the
process of transformation and interweaving that, despite globalization, manages to
keep alive some cultural levers for the African renaissance as envisioned by the
ADLP’s collective. The intuition of the founders of the Afrotopian movement is that
this legacy to be awakened is identified with the land from which the 'African at the
mirror' can gain new ground for the future. The land is the practical (experimental)
domain of transversal solidarities that invite transcending ethnicity and race despite
difficult legacies: solidarities that take on transcendental value when they venture
into the cosmogonic territories of religion and worship. These solidarities inspire
mobilization toward a spirituality of liberation, an aesthetics of life and the arts that
becomes a democratic foundation, toward the trans-nationalization of civil society
institutions, far beyond provisional 'free trade spaces'. They inspire a legal
militantism that builds institutions capable of rising to the African challenge,
guaranteeing individual rights, movement, circulation, and the permanence of
societies inclusive of the non-human and more than human.

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