The discourse on ecocriticism in African literature predominantly centers fossil fuel extraction and the consequent ecological degradation. While discussions often underscore the impacts of ecocide on living beings, there is a noticeable lack of attention to some critical socio-ecological issues, such as the abandonment of African indigenous, sustainable agricultural practices for a Western capitalist model, which prioritizes the monocultures of cash crops for the benefit of multinational agribusiness, exacerbating food insecurity across the continent. Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather is one work of African eco-fiction that stands out for its portrayal of issues that emerge when traditional food production methods clash with imported industrial methods. While the novel has been analyzed for such themes as migration and gender roles, its examination of the collision of indigenous and foreign epistemologies in the pursuit of a sustainable and equitable food system in rural Botswana remains insufficiently explored. Focusing on efforts by Gilbert, the British agronomist, to regulate traditional methods of farming in the fictional Botswana town of Golema Mmidi, and drawing from Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s conceptualization of epistemic decoloniality, this paper argues that When Rain Clouds Gather provides a distinctive ecocritical perspective to contemplate factors that inhibit food security in postcolonial Africa.

Since the emergence of African ecocriticism, scholars have primarily focused on Anglophone literary texts. However, a new paradigm is emerging that engages with cultural production beyond that in English. Notably, Francophone works, once on the margins of ecocritical scholarship, now receive particular attention. What is more, ecocritical scholars not only read Francophone African works but also bring them in conversation with those in English from the same ecoregion. While contributing to this trend, this article aims to shift the focus to a specific ecoregion that has been largely overlooked by ecocritics: the Sudanian savanna. It examines a Francophone novel alongside an Anglophone novel from two neighboring countries—Djaïli Amadou Amal’s Cœur du Sahel (2023) and Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday (2015). I intend to show how a decolonial reading of these Cameroonian and Nigerian novels can, especially when read together, draw attention to both the destruction of the environment and provide an antidote to the (neo)colonial representation of the savanna.

This article considers how African children’s picture books depict animist cosmologies and transmit ecological knowledge across generations. With a close reading of Ken Wilson-Max’s Eco Girl (2022) and Helvi Itenge’s Nekwa and the Baobab Tree (2023), it argues that these texts construct relational ontologies in which trees, animals, ancestors, and children participate in a shared moral ecology. Drawing on African philosophies of ubuntu, ukama, and eniyan, and Harry Garuba’s “animist unconscious” and Fikret Berkes’ theory of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), the article provides an analysis on oral esthetics, taboo logic, and intergenerational practices. Nekwa and the Baobab Tree foregrounds the baobab as elder and moral agent, using taboo, song, and multispecies cooperation to stage ecological correction as cosmological rebalancing. Eco Girl presents a quieter ecological becoming grounded in diasporic memory, familial tree-planting rituals, and imaginative kinship with the baobab. These books frame the baobab as an ecological “Tree of Life” and ancestral archive, mediating ethical relations between humans and the more-than-human world. The focus on early-childhood picture books rather than adult fiction extends African ecocriticism into the domain of children’s literature, showing how animist ethics and intergenerational storytelling shape ecological subjectivities and model environmentally embedded forms of African childhood.

Despite being translated twice, the first Yorùbá novel continues to be read from the confessional perspective of a sinner, an interpretive frame that blurs the sociohistorical and gendered complexities. This paper proposes a feminist tradaptation of Itan Igbesi-Aiye Emi Sẹgilọla, one that reimagines the author’s voice beyond the moralistic overtones influenced by colonial traditions and argues that a feminist translation can serve as a critical tool for re-listening to subaltern women’s voices in historical texts. Drawing on Luise von Flotow’s strategies of supplementing and hijacking, alongside Michel Garneau’s notion of tradaptation, this paper develops a translation method rooted in African feminist thought. Rather than claiming to recover a “true” voice, the tradaptation foregrounds feminist listening as an act that responds ethically to the silences, ventriloquisms, and contradictions embedded in colonial-era African women’s narratives, while also suggesting a framework for Yorùbá feminist translation.

Ferality, according to Anna L. Tsing et al., investigates “the ways living beings as well as non-living beings react to the kinds of infrastructural projects humans come up with” (Field Guide 310–11). As a concept in Anthropocene criticism, it serves to explore the often uneven social and environmental imprints of the latter. Referencing characters, landscapes, or narratives that escape or subvert human control, domestication or rational order, ferality is useful and innovative in examining contemporary African poetic responses to the Anthropocene. My article investigates ferality in the Cameroonian, John Ngong Kum Ngong’s “Tall But Bare” and the Nigerian, Niyi Osundare’s “Hole in the Sky.” I underline how both poets, through an aesthetic rooted in critical realism with borrowings from traditional African oral forms and ethics, engage the Anthropocene in its vicious essence, underlining generalized suffering and poverty, pollution, desertification, and ozone layer depletion as some of the unplanned and violent outcomes of infrastructural projects on both human and nonhuman nature. These inadvertent and irrepressible consequences invite a rethinking of what “it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is” (Morton 15) in contemporary Africa and the world at large. Postcolonial ecocriticism serves as an analytical paradigm.

One major intervention in ecocriticism is the notion of nonhuman agency, which acknowledges nonhuman bodies as active agents of consequential power, action, and reaction, especially in relation to human willpower and intentionality. Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory and Jane Bennett’s thing power have energized new materialists and material ecocritics to reconfigure power relations in ways that foreground nonhuman actions even in human activities. Inasmuch as this privileging of nonhuman power shines a light on how we may reorient a human-centered view of the world, its universalizing premise calls for a broader understanding of some of the peculiar ways in which nonhuman entities can be considered to show their power in African literature. In this article, I discuss Kofi Awoonor’s and Kofi Anyidoho’s representations of coastal life to argue for a broader understanding of nonhuman agency in African ecocriticism.

In Une écologie décoloniale (2019), political philosopher Malcom Ferdinand conceptualizes colonization not only as a historical process but as a way of “inhabiting the world.” He argues that European colonizers brought to the Caribbean a mode of “colonial inhabitation,” a notion I situate within Aníbal Quijano’s theory of the coloniality of power. Building on recent Francophone African scholarship on the notion of inhabitation, this article examines how Cameroonian writer Patrice Nganang represents the impact of French colonization on the Bamiléké people in his short story “The Land of Coffee” (2006). While Nganang foregrounds human exploitation and environmental extraction, I argue that the concept of inhabitation foregrounds the ontological dimensions of the ecological crisis experienced by indigenous communities in West Cameroon. A brief comparison with Samuel Mvolo’s Les Fiancés du Grand Fleuve (1973), which depicts colonial extraction and forced labor in 1930s rural Central Cameroon, suggests that inhabitation should be integrated as a philosophical and anthropological tool in African ecocriticism, enabling interdisciplinary and decolonizing readings attentive to the persistence of indigenous ways of inhabiting the world.