translate to german: Nevertheless, the important studies done by postcolonial scholars in the
last decade conceive of the human in nature generatively in ecocriticism,
thereby bringing both disciplines into conversation and foregrounding
areas of important convergence. The strong version of these critics’
arguments is that both disciplines are mutually coextensive and thus
unified in their critique against human hubris, evident mostly in imperialism
and anthropocentric modernity – two of the most impactful vectors
that index human activity and its footprint on the earth. More specifically,
Euro-American imperialism and its attendant capitalist modernity have
exacted much violence on the environment and peoples of the colonized
world, whose resources have fed the engines of contemporary consumer
capitalism. The form of globalism that this combination unleashes registers
the impulse to extract from the people and environments deemed inferior
or inconsequential to the ontological constitution of imperialism (read
Euro-American) as the universalizing, and therefore normative, condition
of being. Thus, postcolonial ecocriticism in Africa is largely a critique
of the combination of modernization, globalization, and capitalism
(including the collusion of some crass African leadership) that have opened
African peoples and environments to rampant exploitation and trauma.
Rob Nixon, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
(), provides an innovative way of conceiving these issues under the
ken of postcolonial ecocriticism. His concept of “slow violence,” which
complicates conventional notions of violence as visible acts of confrontation,
continues to open up new channels of inquiry in postcolonial
studies. The book has made possible, for instance, the framing of environmental
pollution by extractive capitalism in the Global South as a form
of violence that is possibly more insidious in its impact than conventional
violence. “Slow violence” allows us to see the human and nonhuman
casualties of environmental pollution as indistinguishable in their mutual
experience of degradation by imperialism and capitalist exaction. Byron
Caminero-Santangelo’s questions regarding place in Africa in Different
Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political
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Ecology () are similarly illuminating. For him, postcolonial ecocriticism
needs to pay attention to how environmental issues inextricably link
to other axes of power that affect the previously colonized both historically
and ontologically. The “unjust forms of imperial development and extraction
that . . . position Africa as a certain kind of place in the world” are, for
Caminero-Santangelo, what stimulate African environmental literature in
the struggle for justice, thus bringing into dialogue the sociopolitical
commitment to place and the ethical imagination of ecology, resulting in
“an open-ended conception of resistance.” The instances I discuss as
vectors of postcolonial nature in this chapter are illustrative of this assessment,
and so are the literary texts that I briefly reflect on; they instantiate
ecological responses of resistance to resource extraction in indigenous
landscapes. In staging protests against the ecological and social degradation
of their local environments, the texts stop short of prescribing what form of
justice, or what strategy of resistance, is appropriate to the conditions
foregrounded. Rather, they trope on various forms of violence, metaphoric
and metonymic, as representative strategies that lay bare the true cost of
extraction to the ecological well-being of their environments.
Cajetan Iheka’s Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and
Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature () is another text whose
theorizing of the “aesthetics of proximity” in African literature considers
the intersection of humans with their environments in instances of oppression,
resistance, and agency. For Iheka, this aesthetics consists of “a
spatial sense of nearness” and similarity by which African environments
are constituted as spaces of shared existence for humans alongside other
forms of life, as well as sites of entanglement in which human life is
nonhierarchically enmeshed with nonhuman lives in the postcolonial
context of ecological justice. Moreover, as Iheka cautions, “postcolonialism
needs to be attuned to the ecological implications of colonial and
neo-colonial oppression and ensure that its responses are not complicit
in the problems it seeks to address.” This is because the dimensions of
closeness and similarity are ontological and ethical, conferring, among
other qualities, “distributed agency” and “indistinction between human
and nonhuman entities.” One of the effective ways of attuning postcolonialism
to the imperatives of ecology is to read for the fluid manner in
which the idea of “people” limns beyond its semantic meaning to encompass
the nonhuman. Iheka draws on Morton’s call to “treat many more beings
as people while deconstructing our ideas of what counts as people.” This
deconstruction entails an ecological reading of “people” that “intertwines the
human with the birds, fish, wild animals, and their surroundings.” To be
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sure, Iheka does not privilege the nonhuman over the human nor does he
relativize the tremendous deprivations that characterize human life in the
marginal spaces of the postcolonial world, such as Nigeria’s Niger Delta.
Rather, he argues that an ecological reading that focuses on human
suffering and corollary acts of resistance needs also to take into account
the ecological impacts of resistance; the agency of the oppressed must
be cognizant of nonhuman interests. In my reading of Etienne van
Heerden’s short story “Poison Karoo” (see Section .), I show how
Iheka’s idea of the cognizance of nonhuman interests bears out. van
Heerden’s depiction of water limns in excess of human needs, encompassing
the ethos of spirituality and shared value in which nature’s agency is
privileged outside of human action.
The scholars whose work I have so far explored offer ways of understanding
nature as a concept steeped in postcolonialism and environmental
concerns, interlinking the agency of the oppressed with the fate of the
exploited environment in Africa. I want now to turn to three specific
vectors (see Sections .–.) that inscribe this postcolonial nature as the
articulation of a certain kind of lived experience. I will then conclude with
a brief reflection using the trope of water to explore how nature in the
postcolonial context can be reconceptualized and in the process possibly
readmitted from Morton’s banishment.
. Land Grabbing
In what she calls “the nature industry” (), echoing Adorno and
Horkheimer’s s treatise on America “The Culture Industry,” Louise
Green examines how “nature in the postcolony” is subsumed in the
instrumental logic of capitalist production “while at the same time subject
to certain haunting” in the light of global environmental crisis.
Postcolonial nature thus inhabits an aporia, its peculiarly complex history
becoming its commodification: “its precise value as an object of commerce
being its precarious evanescence.” Land grabbing is one such practice
that indexes the nature industry, pace Green, in Africa. Land grabbing in
Africa is of course as old as the colonial encounter on the continent, dating
back to the seventeenth century when the earliest European seafarers
landed on the shores of the African coasts.
For the purpose of this chapter, I will focus on recent trends as they
relate to the commodification of nature in the light of globalization’s
overreach for endless economic growth, profligate consumption, and the
environmental crisis that follows in their wake. “Land grabbing” is an
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informal pejorative term used to name and describe the accelerated processes
of large-scale acquisition of productive agricultural land by private
corporations and other foreign entities to secure arable land for biofuel
production and growing food (often monocrops) commercially for export
to richer consumers elsewhere. These practices have adversely affected the
food sovereignty of Africa. Here are a set of mindboggling statistics on
land acquisitions in Africa by multinational corporations, according to a
recent edition of The Voice magazine:
The American investor Philippe Heilberg signed a farmland deal with
Paulino Matip, a Sudanese warlord, to lease , hectares of land (an
area the size of Dubai) in South Sudan in July . South Korean
conglomerate Daewoo announced it was leasing . million hectares (.
million acres) of Madagascar for  years for about $ an acre in .
In Southern Uganda about , villagers were evicted from their land
when the Ugandan government leased , hectares of land to a
Norwegian timber company (Green Resources) in the forest area of
Bukaleba. British’s [sic] Tullow acquired , hectares in Lake Albert
Rift basin to explore oil.
Africa is the quintessential frontier of this rush. In the calculus of this
exchange with the agents of globalization and Big Money, the incentive is
to venture into largescale farming in order to sustain lifestyles that are
dependent on massive consumption of electricity/power and the demand
for fresh produce in all seasons. Often, this venture does not contribute to
easing the economic pressures Africa continues to face but rather uses
African fertile land as background for the expansion of global capital for
the world’s wealthy and for the sustenance of their excessive consumption.
The continent accounts for  percent of the world’s remaining arable
land. Yet the “basis for Africa’s livelihoods is smallholder farming,”
which is increasingly squeezed out of the fray. As is well documented,
colonial land grabbing in the previous centuries compelled Africans into
forced and, sometimes, enslaved labor on their ancestral lands at the hands
of European colonizers. The recent land grab by big corporations and
aggressive foreign governments is creating a new wave of servitude as well
as forced migration, for the vast majority of the population is stripped of
land as a result, on a continent where agriculture remains the key sector
that holds the potential of achieving sustainable and inclusive growth.
What is peculiar about the phenomenon of land grabbing is that the
new “gold rush” is driven largely by external entities whose motive is to
grow agricultural products and export the harvest to the countries where
the investments originate or to richer foreign markets overseas for
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maximum profit. Even when domestic interests are involved, it is often
in the form of collusion or minor partnership that renders them mere
compradors. The recent wave of land grabbing has been around for more
than a decade now. Moreover, one wonders why literary imagining is yet
to notice it, even when there is strong evidence of a link between the effects
of land grabbing and the economic factors that force young people to
migrate to Europe in search of, well, greener pastures.
The body of writing on African migration is rich, especially literature on
the trans-Mediterranean migration of African youth to Europe, of which
Helon Habila’s fourth novel, Travelers (), is a recent addition. The
focus of this novel is the recent tragedy of African migrants and refugees in
Europe. While the author pays sensitive attention to the struggles of each
of the characters whose individual stories form an important strand of the
six-part narrative, the novel neglects to trace back to Africa, for instance,
some of the possible conditions that might have forced these travelers out
of Africa, one of which, one might imagine, would be the loss of land or
hunger resulting from the failed harvest due to unavailable arable land. In a
sense, the adverse effects of land grabbing have yet to capture the literary
imagination of African writers. Of course, the issue is more complicated
than I suggest here. Corporations buying land appears to be business as
usual for capitalism. The United States for instance has more individual
private mega-landowners than anywhere else. Moreover, growing plants
for biofuels or crops does not appear overtly to be damaging the environment.
These practices do not evince spectacular violence, and even the
impact on the poor individual might be indirect. But the crux of the
matter is the indirectness of the effect on the individual postcolonial
subject. Indeed, it is one of those cases where the costs of progress
(in terms of business) are hidden or displaced by the more visible phenomenon
many times removed from what causes it. Perhaps this explains
why it is hard to represent.
. Conservation
The second vector through which to think about postcolonial nature is
conservation. It is not that conservation is inherently bad, but the manner
of its practice historically and constitutively in the landscapes inhabited
by the previously colonized has profoundly undermined the interests
and even threatened the very existence of the local populations. Africa,
for instance, often gets feted for its natural landscape, conceived as a vast
plain of rich and diverse plants and wildlife. However, this facticity often
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articulates in a conservationist register, mostly by Western conservationists,
in a manner that presents the local human presence and cultures there
as nuisances, even when they inextricably interlink with the natural
environment. In his essay on the Indian context, titled “The Authoritarian
Biologist and the Arrogance of Anti-Humanism,” the Indian historian
Ramachandra Guha discusses how wildlife conservation and the propagandistic
rhetoric with which nature preservation practices are justified
tend to privilege wildlife and other protected species over the human
populations in such natural habitats. Guha provides instances of how the
practices of and arguments by conservationists and park administrators
have created a dangerous antagonism between “poor tribal people who
have lived in the areas for generations against those of wilderness lovers and
urban pleasure seekers who wish to keep parks free of human interference –
that is, free of other humans.” In pointing out the prejudices that define
wildlife conservation in these zones, Guha argues that biologists, international
agencies, and government functionaries “who believe in wilderness
and species preservation for the sake of ‘science’ tend to be united in their
hostility to the human population who inhabit these landscapes of wild
parks and sanctuaries.” Guha notes that these conservationists consistently
embark on campaigns that cast local human communities in these
locations “as having a destructive effect on the environment, their forms of
livelihood aiding the disappearance of species and contributing to soil
erosion, habitat simplification, and worse.” He cautions against the
strong pejorative language used by conservationists and biologists when
describing human practices in these demarcated wild reserves. This rhetoric
has further informed “numerous projects across the world to constitute
nature parks by throwing out the human inhabitants of these areas,
with scant regard for their past or future in the name of the global heritage
of biological diversity.” Guha says that scientific and aesthetic interests
“in other species, however, sometimes blind them to the legitimate interest
of the less fortunate members of their own – that is, the local human
inhabitants.” Conservation, because of the mode and consequences of
its practice, becomes therefore a vestige of colonialism constituting the
present stage of the “Cs” projects that make up the colonizing mission
of imperial expedition – the others, Raymond Bonner suggests, are
“Christianity, Commerce and Civilizing.” Using the term “Green
Missionaries,” Guha declares conservation biologists “possibly more dangerous
and certainly more hypocritical than their economic and religious
counterparts,” and notes that conservationists tend to be less tolerant of
the less fortunate who do not accept the salvaging project of nature
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preservation. Hence they want, for instance, to “protect the tiger or whale
for posterity, yet expect other people [who must live with the direct
consequences] to make the sacrifice” of being dispossessed and dislocated,
and of having to relocate to other less arable, less inhabitable places.
In comparing the consequence of this form of colonial “nature” conservation
and practices on local landscapes to other less dangerous colonial incursions,
Guha says:
[T]he processes unleashed by the green imperialism are well-nigh irreversible.
The consumer, titillated into trying out Kentucky Fried Chicken, can
always say, “once is enough,” while the Hindu, converted by baptism to
Christianity, can decide later on to revert to his or her original faith. But
tribal people, thrown out of their homes by the propaganda of the conservationist,
are condemned to the life of an ecological refugee, a fate for many
forest people which is next only to death.
In what elsewhere he calls a distinctively North Atlantic antihuman “fullstomach
environmentalism,” Guha concludes that scientists and conservationists
who operate in “protected areas in the countries of the South
must take full cognizance of the rights of the people who have lived in (and
oftentimes cared for) [the landscape] long before it became a national park
or a world heritage site.” This palpable antihuman tendency evident in
the practices of conservationists and scientists thus provokes and shapes
the politically charged topos of nature and ecology in postcolonial African
imaginaries.
Take for instance the documentary film Elephant People () by the
Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga, an interesting text that bears out
some of the conservation dilemmas that Guha enumerates. The film
project was commissioned by the Ford Foundation in collaboration with
the National Park Commission of Zimbabwe in order to document the
reality of elephant conservation and the challenges and prospects it presents
for the local economy and daily life of the local habitat. In the
opening sequences of the film, we see an obviously impoverished and
distraught family mourning the passing of their thirteen-year-old child, a
cattle herder who had been killed by an elephant in the locality. Two
interlocutors voice similar accounts of this misfortune that merit reflecting
upon here. There is the Caucasian conservationist, evidently sympathetic
to the grieving family, who describes in gruesome detail the manner of the
lad’s death by the elephant. According to him, the elephant is said to have
pinned the boy to the ground, pierced his body with her tusk, and
remained on the lifeless body for hours to the excruciating terror of the
community. The other respondent, ostensibly related to the grieving
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family or just a member of the local community, relates a more intimate
account. He says:
Proud Tsovele [the name of the victim] was killed while on an honest
errand for his father . . . looking after the father’s cattle . . . . The devil is
working against us. For three months, elephants were reported coming to
the village. They come from the Gonarezhou National Park. But no action
was taken until this boy was killed.
What I want to draw attention to in this narrator’s positioning is the fact
that he has not put the blame on the park authorities, nor has he
particularly blamed the offending elephant. Rather, he considers the lad’s
death, and the fate of his community, the machinations of the devil. This
is one instance in which, stripped of agency, the victims of conservation
have nowhere to turn for succor or actual recompense for their loss; nor are
they able to remove themselves from the terrible situation in which they
are trapped.
. Resource Extraction
The third node from which I reflect on postcolonial nature is resource
extraction. What constitutes environmental concerns in the context of
Africa (and elsewhere in the postcolonial world, as Guha shows) is indeed
of global concern, for it is the unrestrained reach of global capital and its
forces into the far corners of the planet, transforming rural communities
into fields of resource extraction without accounting for the disruptions
inflicted. In the economic calculus of resource extraction, what is considered
to be of economic benefit is often at odds with the kind of value
that local communities place on their habitats. In To Cook a Continent:
Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa (), the Nigerian
writer and activist Nnimmo Bassey provides a scathing critique of how the
extraction of raw materials from Africa continues to impoverish the
continent while swelling the coffers of the metropolitan West. Bassey
shows how the climate crisis in Africa is not just about the environment
but also the imperiled economy, the combination of which has dealt a
devastating blow to the very fabric of African societies, including governments’
inability to introduce fiscal policies around natural resources that
stimulate inclusive growth. The consequences are widespread poverty and
youth unemployment that ensue amidst high economic activities in the
extraction industry. He notes for instance how “[t]he extractive sector in
Africa has succeeded in making itself seen as the answer to the economic
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travails of the continent.” However, this has never charted a clear path
toward development or prosperity; it has rather proven counterproductive
because local communities in proximity to the particular natural resource
are often presented with the dubious choice between ephemeral jobs and
ecological well-being. According to Bassey, in a given community nature
has an intrinsic value based on certain ethical values and practices, “which
can never be reduced to the functionality” of neoliberal economics. This
mode of reasoning is of course not particular to Bassey: Critiques against
extractive capitalism often articulate from the position of ecological and
cultural grounding, providing a form of environmental consciousness that
is shot through with the material textures of the lived realities of local
cultural life.
Despite the clear moral insight demonstrated by Bassey in identifying
the challenges of resource extraction in local landscapes and economies, the
writer-activist has tended to be measured in his articulation of resistance
and ultimately of justice. For him, the task of rebuilding from the rubble of
capitalist exaction from local ecologies lies with the collective, for in the
process we not only protect the natural environment but also the economy
that it sustains. Take for instance his poem titled “Polluted Throats,”
which signifies two unusual collocates – “pollution,” associated with the
contamination of a natural environment, and “throat,” which is metonymic
of human basic needs associated with eating and drinking. Both
items are in juxtaposition here to point to the twinned interest of ecology
and economics at the heart of Bassey’s environmentalism. The poet
intimates:
At the yellow fields
Of Jacinto
Zambrano drinks polluted streams
Sees his rice field die
Stands back and waits
He wails: it may kill us but what can we do?
The question that won’t run away
But what can we do?
Something
That’s what we can do
And must
The poet employs a farmer figure, Zambrano, to stand in for those whose
means of existence alongside the local environment is doubly decimated by
the effects of resource extraction. The poem expresses how urgent and
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decisive action can infuse ecological awareness with productive agency and
inspire courage even in a dispiriting situation where oppressed people
throw up their hands in a defeatist relinquishment. Hence in response to
Zambrano’s hopeless declaration – “it may kill us but what can we do?” –
the poet persona inspires hope in the following stanza: “Something / that’s
what we can do /And must.” Here the poet is suggesting that even when
the odds are overwhelmingly against the oppressed, collective action can be
a counterpoint to the powerful ambivalence of capitalism’s business-asusual
stance, in order to challenge the double decimation inflicted on local
existence in the throes of resource extraction. The reticence (or perhaps
modesty) intimated in the last stanza is too obvious to ignore. It works
powerfully to involve the reader, to implicate the collective in the need to
act. Nevertheless, the modality of the action is open to interpretation; but
the reader can see that passivity and dejection are not a choice as they come
at a double cost to the environment and the local economy. This openended
conception of resistance, as Caminero-Santangelo has noted, indicates
that the solution and even the will to act reside squarely with the
reader and, therefore, the collective. There is a sense of ambiguity about
the metaphor “something,” a fascinating referent through which the
political affect – interlinking ecology and economics – of postcolonial
environmentalism is articulated in the poem. The “thing” evokes a sense
of the concrete, but when taken together, “something” suggests vagueness,
indeterminacy. However, the tension generated here is a productive one
useful for unpacking the poem further. The “thing” points to the transformative
force palpable at the site where the agency of the oppressed
meets with the political will of the collective; the vague aspect that
“something” elicits points to the open-ended possibilities, the potentially
infinite range of action that it is possible to take to curb the excesses of
petro-capitalism. Bassey uses this term to indicate the primacy of a timely
and decisive action geared toward achieving a condition that will bring
about the discontinuation of fossil fuel extraction, not only in the interest
of nature because of the ecological catastrophe but also because of its
unsustainability for local economies. I would argue that, indeed, the
unsaid possibility of “something” in this poem infuses the political with
a possibility so powerful as to seem liberating – a gesture to the historical
awareness of colonial exploitation and the possibility that this particular
instance might just be a vestige of it. Hence, the poem concludes with a
more compelling verb “must,” to add a note of urgency and operate as a
summons to mobilize and push against the limits of our moral imagination,
stimulating the reader into action.
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Postcolonial nature, as shown throughout this chapter, is shot through
with the historicity of colonial imperialism that continues into the present.
However, stating it in this way makes it seem as though one is sublimating
human suffering onto the place of nature in a postcolonial context. This is
not the case. Literary depictions tend to trope on figurations of animism
as a means to evoke an agential nature that works to check the anthropocentric
impulses inhabiting the “agency of the oppressed” in their acts
of resistance and survival, thereby ensuring that nonhuman interests are
taken into account. Indeed, animism provides a powerful platform for
action to advance ecological justice for local communities that otherwise
lack the instruments of science, legality, and sophisticated public relations
to promote and validate their cause. Thanks to the important work
done by the likes of Harry Garuba, animism has recently become the site
of serious intellectual inquiry into a legitimate, and respectable, “way of
knowing and acting in the world.” Garuba acknowledges the work of
environmental movements in the Global South, whose ethical and political
positions lean toward animistic understandings of indigenous communities
and their insistence on the agency of the environment and other
nonhuman entities as the basic conditions of quotidian existence and of
meaning-making. Garuba takes as his point of departure a critique of the
colonial logic that suggests animist understandings of the natural and social
world functioned “as an aberration, the past-in-the-present, to be disciplined
so as to create civilized world and subjects.” But the recent events
of modern implosion – such as global warming, resource depletion, and
other cataclysmic climate events across the planet – show that the human
civilization premised on colonial modernity has reached its end. Hence,
the return to otherworldly ways beyond the limits of the Enlightenment
that animism allows to thrive in order to achieve true meaning and
ecological well-being for all entities, living and nonliving.
One of the natural resources whose depiction exemplifies the manner in
which animism tropes as indexical of postcolonial nature is water. Indeed,
water is increasingly gaining importance in thinking about the ways in
which literature scripts ecology in the context of climate change. In South
Africa, the crisis of water acutely indexes the climate crisis. In fact, water is
such a big issue in this country that it is one of the recurring tropes, similar
to racism or settler colonialism, in the South African literary imaginary.
Figurations of water in South African literature feature within certain
prevailing religious and spiritual convictions. There is the investment
of special powers in the character – mostly religious (as in the prophetess in
Ndebele’s short story) or esoteric and hermetic (as in Mother in Jayes’s
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novel) – whose relation to water drives the plot in whole or in part,
bridging the gap between material and symbolic significations of water.
There is also the imbuing of the particular naturalscape where the water is
located with a hallowed ambience, a sacredness that inspires a mythical
mode of cognition to which the subject returns for meaning, selfdiscovery,
and cultural rehabilitation. In this regard, literary depictions
often construct narratives using water as motif around a specific character,
a protagonist, who – lost, vagrant, or in search of purpose – sets out to
explore or to return to the cultural fountain of their roots, a wellspring
where all their despondencies find relief.
Etienne van Heerden’s “Poison Karoo,” a short story published in ,
exemplifies this topos. The story registers the writer’s protest against the
South African government’s proposal to frack for natural gas in the Karoo
region in the rural country of central South Africa. The author has
employed the genre of the short story – in preference to the novel
(arguably his main preoccupation), which has a longer gestation period –
ostensibly as a means of conveying his own timely intervention in the
then-prevailing debate on fracking. van Heerden has also deployed
the short story to explore the delicate and often fragmentary domain of
culture, which is not often accounted for in the logics of economic metrics
that accompany proposals of fossil fuel extraction. Enter Ludo Loeloeraai,
a moral and, on the surface, eccentric character who considers the possible
threat posed to the groundwater upon which the arid communities depend
an affront to the very soul of that landscape:
He reads of hydro-fracking and how poison water is pumped deep into the
layers of rock and how it breaks and fractures the rock and drives gas
upwards to the surface, to industry, to the people. And he thinks: I must do
something about this, with my last ounce of strength.
Upon arriving in Cape Town where the national protest is taking place,
Ludo is shocked by what he finds – the “sense of gaiety in the air” and the
slogans that carry the protestmessage: “Stop fracking now! Leave our fracking
Karoo Alone!! Frack-off!!!” For Ludo, these slogans are unacceptable for
they do not account for the seriousness of the threat to the underground water
upon which life in the Karoo depends. For Ludo, the carnival atmosphere
does not accommodate the sacredness of water in the arid landscape and
therefore makes light of the actual significance of what is afoot:
He walked right at the back of the parade, in the slipstream of sweat and
noisy chattering, and knew he would never feel at one with the protestors –
there was something in him which always stood to one side, observing
  
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108872263.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press
everything, wondering against what ghosts or masters in their own minds
people fighting this or that cause were actually protesting . . . it was these
thoughts and his uneasiness at activism’s narrow boundaries that made him
decide to drive to the Karoo alone, in silence. He would go and see for
himself and he would make his own quiet protest.
So he walks “away from the raucous crowd,” opting instead for “a more
measured protest marked by solitude and silence, to the fountainhead in
the Karoo where his father once oversaw water distribution” in his community.
 This preference for interiority over the exterior performativity of
the gathering signals a sacred regard for water and its agency as the primary
condition of cultural life in that particular habitat. What we have in this
story therefore is a character going back not to “nature” but to a specific
place with history, a history of common heritage marked by the shared
usage of water and mutual coexistence that Morton talks about, as I have
discussed in the opening part of this chapter. However, what van
Heerden’s text indicates is not the erasure of agential nature, its banishment,
pace Morton, from the site of mutual coexistence and cultural
meaning. Rather than banishment, nature is reconceptualized materially
and symbolically within the cultural and historical matrices of its particular
existence. The word Karoo means “thirst, a place known for its aridity.”
Water therefore signifies in this text as both a material condition of life in
that landscape and a sacred symbol of life’s mystery and depth (since the
available water in the Karoo is subterranean) whose gamut cannot be fully
captured by the logic of human meaning.
. Conclusion
In this chapter, I have discussed three ways in which postcolonial nature is
the articulation of nature’s commodification and the exploitation of both
the environment and the people of Africa. I have examined also how
African literature responds to this, reconceptualizing nature within a
framework of animism as an instance of shared lived experience. If colonial
nature has been a process and practice that removes nature from the realm
of everyday experience in order to commodify and exploit its resources,
including the local human inhabitants, postcolonial nature, as the texts
I have examined show, rehabilitates nature by bringing it back into the
center of cultural life. But in doing so, it also accounts for the ways in
which nature exerts its own agency outside of human action and exterior
performativity as van Heerden’s trope on water shows.