This article explores the complex entanglements of (bodies of) water and coloniality, indigenous epistemologies and alternative ways of being in recent African poetry, short fiction and performance. Idza Luhumyo’s short story “Five Years Next Sunday” gauges the Black female power to create and contain water against the White male thirst for domination, while Koleka Putuma’s poem “Water” offers a haunting insight into an acknowledgement of the sea as archive. The research-based multi-media project Lalela uLwandle by the Empatheatre Collective meditates on our communal relationship with the ocean in the face of exploitation and resource extraction on the coasts of South Africa. These texts redefine the meaning of bodies of water, broaden the significance of wet matters and offer ways of being otherwise through the aquatic and maritime imagination. This article merges Black African feminist critique, decolonial thought and environmental activism in a tidalectic reading of three artistic interventions in our relationship with water. In thinking with and in water, this article embraces a more fluid understanding of the category of the human and argues for a re-enchanted existence with and within the more-than-human world as well as challenges eco-social injustices through an exploration of hydrocolonialism in contemporary African literature and performance.
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