Nature, Environment, and Activism in Nigerian Literature

197 Pages·2020·2.176 MB·English

by  Sule E. Egya

Nature, Environment, and
Activism in Nigerian Literature
Nature, Environment, and Activism in Nigerian Literature is a critical study of
environmental writing, covering a range of genres and generations of writers
in Nigeria.
W ith a sustained concentration on the Nigerian experience in postcolonial
ecocriticism, the book pays attention to textual strategies as well as distinctive
historicity at the heart of the ecological force in contemporary writing.
Focusing on nature, the environment, and activism, the author decentres African
ecocriticism, affirming the eco-social vision that differentiates environmental
writing in Nigeria from those of other nations on the continent. The book
demonstrates how Nigerian writers, beyond connecting themselves to the natures
of their communities, respond to ecological problems through indigenous literary
instrumentalism. Anchored on the analytical concepts of nature, environment,
and activism, the study is definitive in foregrounding the contribution of
Nigerian writing to studies in ecocriticism at continental and global levels.
This book will be of interest to scholars of African and postcolonial literature,
ecocriticism, and environmental humanities.
Sule E. Egya is Professor of African Literature and Cultural Studies at Ibrahim
Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria. He is also an award-winning
poet and novelist who writes under the pen name E. E. Sule.
Routledge Contemporary Africa Series
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T heories, Issues and Practices
N ojeem A. Amodu
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R alph Luken and Edward Clarence-Smith
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Nature, Environment,
and Activism in Nigerian
Literature
Sule E. Egya
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2020 Sule E. Egya
The right of Sule E. Egya to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-0-367-43605-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-00457-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
This book is dedicated to the fond memory of Sani Ede
Osu. He also sowed the seed.

Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1 Introduction: the Nigerian experience in postcolonial
ecocriticism 1
2 Natures 22
3 Environments 70
4 Activisms 120
5 Conclusion: the future of Nigerian ecocriticism 169
Works cited 176
Index 184
Acknowledgements
I started this research late in 2015 while an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow
and scholar-in-residence at the Institute of Asian and African studies, Hum-
boldt University, Berlin. I thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for
the opportunities since 2009. Prof. Dr. Susanne Gehrmann and Dr. Pepetual
Chiangong Mforbe of the Institute, along with their postgraduate students,
made useful contributions to the early versions of the work. My gratitude to
all of you.
I completed the first draft of this book while a fellow at the Rachel Carson
Centre for Environment and Society, University of Munich, Munich. My pro-
found gratitude to the centre for the excellent atmosphere that enabled me to
complete the research and writing. I thank the 2018/2019 fellows who read
part of the work and gave crucial suggestions on the project. My discussion
with Christof Mauch, the centre’s director, on the work was also very useful.
Thank you, Christof.
I also received funding for this research from Nigeria’s Tertiary Education
Trust Fund through its national research grant instrument. My deep gratitude.
Other scholars I have interacted with who have assisted me in different ways
in the course of this research are Michal Musialowski, Carli Coetzee, Douglas
Kaze, Ogaga Okuyade, and Cajetan Iheka. Thank you for your suggestions.
Also deserving of thanks are the anonymous reviewers engaged by Routledge
whose suggestions greatly improved the work. I thank Leanne Hinves of Rout-
ledge and her team for their interest in this work. I also thank Autumn Spalding
of Apex CoVantage and her team for doing a great editorial job.
For their love and care at home, my gratitude to Oshone, Aisha, Joy, Wasila,
Anyalewa, Oyigwu, Taofiq, Egya, Ene, and Emayabo.
1 Introduction
The Nigerian experience in postcolonial
ecocriticism
In the concluding chapter of his book Different Shades of Green: African Lit-
erature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology , Byron Caminero-Santangelo
remarks that “postcolonial regional particularism will not only be attentive to
shared characteristics of a place in the world but also pay close attention to dif-
ferences within such a place” (184). In this book, I pursue this logic further:
ecocriticism in Africa needs to go beyond regional particularism to a national
one for greater attentiveness to differences within the region. That is, we need
to decentre the category “Africa” as we think in terms of ecological differences.
There are two immediate reasons for this. First, it is by now a well-known epis-
temological argument that we cannot lump together the historical and cultural
particularities of the region’s peoples, whether in the precolonial past or post-
colonial present, especially as it regards knowledge production.1 Beyond visible
commonalities, differences abound, some of them profound and with socio-
ecological consequences. Second, ecocriticism as a field of studies thrives on
the notion of difference. Launched in North America, as its history indicates,
with studies of the particularities of American nature writers (see especially
Lawrence Buell’s T he Environmental Imagination) , ecocriticism has continued to
emphasise that while ecological crises can be of a global scale, the best way to
view them would be from a local lens by which the local becomes the locus of
understanding the global. Besides, with an increasing focus on the nonhuman,
the material, there is the need to continue to stretch the logic of difference
because natural worlds are rooted in localities.
N igerian literature is famously rich in evocation of environment, both phys-
ical and non-physical. In the non-physical aspect, the imagination is tied to
writers’ cultural, spiritual connection to a place, usually their birthplace (as in
the case of Christopher Okigbo hinging his inspiration to his birthplace’s water
goddess Mother Idoto and Wole Soyinka to the god Ogun). In the physical
aspect, there is a lot of attention to natural (biotic and abiotic) life forms such
as water, trees, mountains, the sun, and the moon. There is a growing activism
for the protection of such life forms, especially in sites of industrial extrac-
tions. This book is a theoretical and analytical study of this broad spectrum of
the environment in Nigerian literature, under three linked and intertwined
conceptual categories: nature, the environment, and activism. It is crucial to