African Orature as Ecophilosophy: Tuning in to the Voices of the Land

Abstract

This article puts political theory and ethnography into an engagement with orature to advance a new model of agency, authority, and collectivity, in which politics reveals itself to be an “ecological” process involving the conjoint action of the living, the ancestors, and the land. I explore the orature of the Gurensi and Boosi people of Ghana in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “minor literature,” which refers to a way of appropriating language as a collective utterance to call forth new political identities and sensitivities. By sensitizing us to the expressivity of the land as reciprocating ancestors, I argue that Gurensi and Boosi orature might affect a “stutter” in the majoritarian orientations of European American ecophilosophy, which has hitherto neglected African traditions of thought. It might give voice to the subjugated knowledges and earthen languages of African people that trouble the dual colonization of the aural–oral by the literary and of nonhumans by humans.