African Environmental Ethics: Lessons from the Rain-Maker’s Moral and Cosmological Perspectives

Abstract

Can African Environmental Ethics learn anything from folk ecology? Simultaneously, I wonder if the rain-making ceremony and African Ecological accounts from the Rain-makers, are still relevant to prevailing philosophical debates about human relations with the environment. This paper is a retrospective attempt to engage African Environmental Ethics in a conversation with traditional wisdom from ‘folk’ ecology. In a similar manner with the quest to decolonize African Philosophy in general, I argue that African Environmental Ethics is fundamentally inseparable from the Rain-maker’s understanding of reality and the moral status of the environment. In this chapter, I will put the rainmaker’s worldview into conversation with African Philosophy’s search for a normative Environmental ethics. I hold the argument that the nature of such an ethic ought to be trans-anthropocentric and I make use of the Rain-maker’s perspectives to show the intrinsic moral value of non-human forms of life in African Philosophy. The important point to note is that Rain-makers in their time, had an eco-political authority which enabled them to prescribe on various moral and environmental issues in a way which can be argued to depict an African Environmental Ethics. This ‘primitive’ epistemological epoch cannot thus be sidelined in contemporary discourses about African Environmental Ethics.