The ecopolitics of water pollution and disorderly urbanization in Congo‐Basin plays

Abstract

AbstractThis essay explores the ecopolitics of water pollution and land (ab)use through disorderly urbanization in two plays from the Congo Basin. I argue that bad governance, in the form of absented‐absence and corruption‐plagued presence, leads to the double violation of human rights and the rights of nature through water pollution and haphazard urbanization. In other words, I use two plays to suggest that political absence and bad governance amount to governmental responsibility for ecological vulnerability manifested through freshwater pollution and unregulated urban expansion. In the first part, I suggest that the government’s failure to provide potable water to its citizens leads to water pollution, violations of the rights of nature and the human right to water and sanitation, as well as disregard for the entangled relations between humans and nature in Ekpe Inyang’s Water Na Life ([2002] 2006). In the second part, I use Henri Djombo’s Le mal de terre (2014) to examine urban sprawl and its effects on the rights of nature as well as land disputes and contested claims to land as consequences of bad governance. Overall, the essay foregrounds freshwater pollution, urban sprawl, and land (ab)uses which are often neglected in ecocritical scholarship from/on Africa.