Zulu Poems of (and for) Nature: Bhekinkosi Ntuli’s Environmental Imagination in Imvunge Yemvelo (1972)

Oliver Nyambi,Patricks Voua Otomo

doi:10.1017/asr.2020.135

Abstract

AbstractNature, climate crisis, and the Anthropocene have carved space in recent inter-, cross-, and multi-disciplinary humanities studies. In South Africa, such studies have barely touched literature in African languages. Nyambi and Otomo focus on the tropes of “lady nature,” nostalgia, and dystopia in Zulu writer Bhekinkosi Ntuli’s Imvunge Yemvelo to explore the complex ways in which these tropes test the normative epistemes of ecological crises. Beyond rejecting imperial distortions of indigenous environmentalism, Ntuli’s poems re-center local knowledge of nature in understanding its relationship with humans. That knowledge subverts epistemic structures of colonial conservation, revising and re-visioning racially geo-politicized knowledge hierarchies.

Highlights

In the prevailing rush tocenter the humanities in discussions and debates about the environment, climate change, and the Anthropocene, it is critical to avoid sweeping generalizations, for instance, about what cultural perspectives of human-nature relations can reveal about the environmental future
What is meant by “the environment” and perceptions and conceptions of its harm and/or protection necessarily differ (Murdoch & Marsden 1995). This difference constitutes one of the most important sources of global quarrels, about the state of global warming and the human factor in it, and as we have seen in recent American politics under the presidency of Donald Trump, the very question of whether or not global warming is happening at all
This study aims to disentangle knowledge of the environment from realms of African, South African, and sub-Saharan African national categories and focus it on a particular culture—Zulu—to discover what new perspectives of the environmental present this culture offers

Summary

Introduction

In the prevailing rush to (re-)center the humanities in discussions and debates about the environment, climate change, and the Anthropocene, it is critical to avoid sweeping generalizations, for instance, about what cultural perspectives of human-nature relations can reveal about the environmental future. For humanity will continue to think and feel about (and act on) the environment as dictated by attitudes, beliefs, and notions of the environment that are shaped by humans’ inherently eccentric spatial temporalities In this light, what is meant by “the environment” and perceptions and conceptions of its harm and/or protection necessarily differ (Murdoch & Marsden 1995). What is meant by “the environment” and perceptions and conceptions of its harm and/or protection necessarily differ (Murdoch & Marsden 1995) This difference constitutes one of the most important sources of global quarrels, about the state of global warming and the human factor in it, and as we have seen in recent American politics under the presidency of Donald Trump, the very question of whether or not global warming is happening at all.

Objectives

Conclusion