Nature, ideology, and the ecocritical enterprise: Wangari Maathai’s The Green Belt Movement and Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life

Abstract

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.)