I am humbled by the engagement with my book by distinguished scholars, many of whose ideas were formative as I wrote Naturalizing Africa. I am grateful to my interlocutors for their critical labors and to the editor of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (PLI) for hosting this forum.

In writing Naturalizing Africa, I wanted to complicate the uber-anthropocentric appreciation of African literary works. Even when ecocriticism was becoming a central theoretical framework for African literary hermeneutics, it was clear to me that the basis of most critical readings was the world of humans. This makes sense when we consider the world brought about by the Enlightenment, where “rationality” sought to exterminate whatever was left of enchantment. In the case of Africa, however, rationality had to cohabit with enchanted worlds of animals, plants, spirits, and ghosts, worlds beyond humans, so to speak. In On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe refers to this heterogeneity of Africa’s life-worlds as “entanglement”Footnote ¹ and Dipesh Chakrabarty calls it “heterotemporalities” in the Indian context of his Provincializing Europe.Footnote ²

Naturalizing Africa was conceived as an accounting ledger for the entanglements and heterotemporalities that African literary criticism had yet to pay sufficient attention. In the African critical landscape that my book entered, questions of environmental justice for humans predominated the conversation even when the textual horizons were broad enough to accommodate the interactions and relationality among humans and nonhumans. My concern arose not only because these nonhuman presences constitute an integral aspect of African literary narratives, but also because they are paramount to the discourses and practices of various African communities.

Therefore, in my discussion of the “belatedness” of addressing ecological concerns in African writings, I was trying to highlight the anthropocentric conceptualizations of anticolonial thought and praxis. My grounding questions in that section of the book are: “If human imbrication with nonhumans has always been a feature of African societies and the literary expressions that emerge from them, why then has African literary criticism not paid much attention to the interlinkages and their ecological significance? Why have human concerns remained at the heart of literary criticism in Africa?”Footnote ³ Fanon and the others cited in Jennifer Wenzel’s piece may have raised questions that can be considered environmental, but none of these interventions was decidedly ecological or took cognizance of human-nonhuman entanglements. In fact, Fanon, due to his suspicion of irrationality and religion, would dismiss some of the animist characteristics of African societies as regressive and obstructionist for the task of anticolonial resistance in spite of their support of coexistence of various life-forms.Footnote ⁴ Moreover, his endorsement of anticolonial violence, although understandable, legitimizes the devastation that oil bunkering, bombing oil infrastructure, and similar forms of resistance inflict on the Delta ecosphere.

Given the anthropocentric sensibilities of much anticolonial thought that I have already mentioned, I had to seek elsewhere some critical models for reading beyond the human. I turned partly to African indigenous cosmologies for the ecophilosophy of entanglement that they contain. I also found inspiration in recent theoretical interventions in new materialisms. Yet I did not accept the tenets of these theories wholeheartedly, as Graham Huggan suggests in his response; rather, as my note on method in the book outlines, I find useful for my critical undertaking an interdisciplinary approach that raids various theoretical paradigms for their most valuable offerings. In my case the attractive aspects provide a theoretical template for extending the lineaments of African literary criticism to embrace nonhumans as an integral aspect of what I call in the book an “aesthetics of proximity.” As such, the deployment of Stacy Alaimo’s work and that of Jane Bennett and Tim Morton, among othersFootnote ⁵ —the “hodgepodge of theoretical sources and frameworks,” as Madhu Krishnan describes it—is motivated by this desire to read beyond the conceptual limits of anticolonial and postcolonial thought.

But even as I cite these thinkers in Naturalizing Africa, it is clear to me that their works are insufficiently attentive to the peculiar issues plaguing the humans in formerly colonized societies. Hence, I bring in insights from the environmental justice-inclined works of Rob Nixon, Byron Caminero-Santangelo, and others.Footnote ⁶ Unsatisfied with the preexisting condition wherein the fact of colonialism justifies the elision or marginalization of the nonhuman world in the articulation of the climate crisis in Africa, I have used these disparate theories and frameworks together so that they remedy the pitfalls of one another. The book’s third chapter provides one example of this eclecticism. As I stated early in that chapter, “the conflict between Morton’s ecocentric position and the human-centered visions of Nixon and Said notwithstanding, the need to complement Morton’s theory with the formulations of the latter scholars arises due to Morton’s silence on the sociopolitical dynamics of developing societies disproportionately affected by the deleterious environmental consequences of globalization.”Footnote ⁷ Although Nixon and Said foreground the sociopolitical consequences of colonialism and globalization in ways that Morton does not, the latter’s work sharpens the focus on the broader ecosystem peopled by humans and more-than-humans, therefore supplying the missing link in the enunciations of the postcolonial thinkers and critics. In the latter part of the chapter, Said’s work is especially useful for extending Morton’s work by demonstrating how the Delta novels envision moving the ecological thought into practice in a postcolonial society.Footnote ⁸

A critical engagement with posthumanism comes in my epilogue where I dispute its celebration of the transcendence of the human. Graham Huggan sees a potential contradiction here because I endorse Rosi Braidotti’s work on the previous page. Where Huggan sees contradiction, I see a productive tension. My book would be incomplete if it ended without engaging the currents of ideas encompassing the posthuman question. Therefore, I noted on page 159 of the book that “on many counts,” the “book occupies the same jurisdictional arena with the posthuman intellectual tradition.” I went on to note that my project shares with that tradition the “decentering of Man.”Footnote ⁹ In spite of these similarities, I also noted how my insistence on the redemptive possibility of the human marks my departure from the posthuman ways of seeing. This is no contradiction, but a statement of the convergence and divergence from that theoretical mode.

One implication of this clarification is that a reader who opens Naturalizing Africa with the intention of identifying a unified framework will be disappointed. Rather than abstract theories, I have emphasized the different modalities of reading that make possible the recuperation of nonhuman presences in the book and their imbrications with humans. Accordingly, chapter 4’s focus on agricultural economies may be different from chapter 2’s on Somali war ecologies, but they are united by an attentiveness to human-nonhuman interrelationships and the implication of their interactions for planetary well-being. One more note is necessary here: It seems to me that some of the responses to my use of theories stem from an anxiety about using them in the first place more than the extent to which they are engaged. I want to reaffirm my commitment to using whatever tools are available in deciphering African texts in as much as they illuminate the intellectual and ethical stakes of my research. The exceptionality implied when we query the use of Western theories for the study of Africa does not bode well for the continent, nor for understanding the continent’s cultural productions. I would hope that African ideas and knowledge would circulate more easily, and vice versa, in the spirit of the ecological and planetary ethos articulated in Naturalizing Africa.

In her response, Wenzel asks: “How do we calibrate the environmental harm of resistance with the foundational violence perpetrated by companies and the petro-state against land, water, and people?” Part of the answer to that question can be found in the latter part of chapter 3, where I posit the various forms of collectivities and activities against the violence of the petro-state and oil multinationals, some of which do not repeat the violence of oil bunkering and other forms of resistance in the delta. Departing from the reflective role of representation that is evident in its earlier part, the latter section highlights the constitutive function of literary imaginaries in keeping with ecocriticism’s goal of envisioning alternative life-worlds. As already indicated earlier, moving beyond the contours of ecological thought to its working in practice, as imagined in the texts in this section, also makes for extending and refining Morton’s work for the postcolony.

The third chapter is also the place to address some of the concerns raised in Krishnan’s piece, including the question of gender and the materiality of African literature. Krishnan identifies chapter 4 as the only one addressing gender explicitly, and even here she asks: “Why, for instance, is gender largely read through an engagement with the land and cultivation, analogies which run the risk of reifying the woman-as-first-nature mythos.” While foregrounding intellectual labor in the previous chapter, I turn to agriculture in chapter 4 to adumbrate manual labor and forms of resistance that may be less complicit in ecological degradation. I am cognizant of the risk of reifying woman as nature and as such sought to demonstrate the co-implication of men and women in agricultural practices in that chapter, especially in my reading of Bessie Head’s When the Rain Clouds Gather,Footnote ¹⁰ where the agricultural cooperative deprovincialized farming and positioned men and women working side by side as partners. This form of collectivity, inclusive of women, emerges in chapter 3 as well, where Ebi, the Activist’s colleague who later becomes his wife, collaborates with other women to protest ecological degradation under the auspices of a women’s group.Footnote ¹¹ The effort of this group is also instrumental to the form of social change that the election of the Activist as governor portends at the end of the novel. It is significant that these women are crucial to the articulation of alternative forms of resistance in Ojaide’s novel. Read together, the women’s group in chapter 3 and the various agricultural enterprises in the following chapter sought to foreground women while avoiding the kind of essentialisms that equate them with nature. Since my book’s publication, I have realized the missed opportunity to engage more with spatial theories and have tried to address the oversight in my ongoing project on African ecomedia. Deciphering Krishnan’s response has made me realize how theories of spatiality could have enriched my discussion of gender as well.

Both Krishnan and Brendon Nicholls also focus on the materialities of literature. Where Krishnan is concerned with the “material circuits” of literature and the fact that the texts studied in my book are by authors who occupy prominent places in the global literary marketplace, Nicholls focuses on literature as an institution and the materiality of the book itself as a nonhuman. I am fascinated by Nicholls’s move here and agree that there is room to extend the discussion of the role of the book as a nonhuman agent more than I did in relation to Farah’s Secrets in the second chapter. I hope that subsequent African ecocritical studies will take this project further. As per Krishnan’s observation of the canonical status of the authors studied in Naturalizing Africa, I would like to point to exceptions. The reader of chapter 3 will notice that all three texts have not enjoyed the same circulation as say that of Farah, Tutuola, or Coetzee. In fact, I decided to study narratives of Okara, Okpewho, and OjaideFootnote ¹² in order to move away from the centrality of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s oeuvre and most recently Helon Habila’s in Niger delta literature.Footnote ¹³ In fact, I have just learned from an Africanist interested in teaching Okpewho’s understudied novel, Tides, that it is out of print. Ojaide’s reputation is growing in African literary circles, but the focus has largely been on his poetry and not on The Activist, published by a Nigerian publisher.

It is the ethical core of Chielozona Eze’s reading of Naturalizing Africa in relation to other texts underscoring human responsibility that accentuates my commitment to African literary criticism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities. Although I disagree with Eze that a sense of distributed agency obviates human responsibility, and with his rejection of African indigenous cosmologies as sites of planetary ideals, I concur with his conclusion that care for the self, others, and the environment is crucial for attaining the common good. Although aspects of indigenous cosmologies can be conservative and aggressive, such as the Osu caste system that Eze mentions, that is not adequate grounds to dismiss their viability for an ecological politics. It is possible to deploy their valuable aspects, while being mindful of their blind spots, just as I have tried to do for the other conceptual nodes deployed in the book.Footnote ¹⁴

Ecological systems are nonlinear, chaotic, and demand the pluralistic, divergent approaches and styles brought together in my reading of African literary artifacts ecologically. My interlocutors evince divergences of their own too. Where Eze disagrees with my endorsement of indigenous knowledge systems as repositories of planetary ethics, Nicholls wishes that I had dug deeper into these cosmologies for examples of indistinctions between humans and nonhumans with the potential to generate templates for fuller humanity. I consider these conflicting perspectives as validation of the complex terrain of African critical thought Naturalizing Africa seeks to open. Let the intellectual and ethical search for alternative modalities of being-in-the-world continue.