Extractive capitalism and neoliberal politics have for years plundered Africa, causing extended ecological devastation and disavowing indigenous epistemologies that did not abide with Western anthropocentric thought. Literary production, however, has not failed to document life in the ruins of structural racism, amid the gradual effacement of local livelihoods, and native knowledges and belief systems founded on politics of living-with, as part of, instead of dominating over animal, plant, and Other. In Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010) and Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) representations of the ongoing destruction of ecologies and ontologies under the weight of neoliberal practices and the impositions of overriding neocolonial ideologies are entangled with and moulded by the depictions of those marginal but often resilient social assemblages and their quotidian communal practices that resist being reduced to relics of a used-to-be. This article explores the ways in which the two novels unravel their protagonists’ stories while revealing the immense pressure neoliberal politics exercise over native land and indigenous epistemologies in modern-day Nigeria, all while offering glimpses into the multiple ways these assemblages resist and challenge despotic formations that dominate their ecologies.