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Professor Sylvia Tamale is a leading African feminist, multidisciplinary scholar and Coordinator of the Law, Gender and Sexuality Research Centre based at the School of Law, Makerere University in Uganda. Prof Tamale was the first female Dean of Law in Uganda and has been a visiting professor at several universities including Oxford, Pretoria and Zimbabwe. 

For issue #92 of The Internationalist, we draw from Prof Tamale's book, Decolonization and Afrofeminism (2020, Daraja Press) where she examines how afro-ecofeminism, rooted in Indigenous African wisdom, challenges colonial and capitalist exploitation by integrating gender and ecological justice, emphasizing interconnectivity between humans and nature.

Afro-ecofeminism is an important pillar of a decolonial feminist approach to reconstructing Africa. Naomi Maina-Okori et al. are right when they argue that Indigenous conceptions of interconnectivities go beyond human relations to include nature; they disrupt the nature/culture divide. Based on this understanding, the authors seek to expand the concept of intersectionality by viewing it “as a coalescing and/or a fusing process and as an interconnected multi-directional crossroads.” Writing about Afro-ecofeminism, Nigerian leftist feminist Fatimah Kelleher further explains: “Intersectional ecofeminism also underscores the importance of gender, race, and class, interlinking feminist concerns with human oppressions within patriarchy and the exploitations of a natural environment that women are often more reliant upon but also its guardians in many cultural contexts.”  The link between gender and ecological justice is therefore brought to the fore, providing a different framework for analyzing coloniality as it relates to both social and environmental issues. Indigenous knowledge systems, which are usually in tune with nature, can be deployed to address environmental injustices using an integrative view of nature and people.

One of the most pressing issues facing the world today is environmental degradation and climate change. The global “ecological footprint” (i.e., demand on the world’s resources) has overshot the planet’s regenerative capacity by approximately 50 percent. Human beings are the primary actors in shaping the ecological and biophysical systems which threaten the very health of our planet. Most of this can be traced to neoliberal global capitalism with its fundamentally extractive and predatory mindset that is wreaking havoc on the entire world ecosystem. The socioeconomic and political implications of environmental destruction were addressed by the UN, which culminated in its landmark Paris Agreement of 2016. The agreement—to date ratified by 189 countries—was designed “to combat climate change and to accelerate and intensify the actions and investments needed for a sustainable low-carbon future.” At the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit, Secretary-General António Guterres underscored the urgency of the matter: “This is not a climate talk summit. We have had enough talk… This is not a climate negotiation summit. You don’t negotiate with nature. This is a climate action summit.”

Needless to say, questions abound as to whether the approach of the UN can actually address the diverse magnitude of the crisis. Indeed, the current wave of global, youth-led protests for climate justice can in many ways be contextualized as an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist movement. Saskia Sassen insists that “the tame language of climate change does not quite capture the fact, at ground level, of vast expanses of dead land and dead water. My argument is that this massive and very diverse set of expulsions is actually signaling a deeper systemic transformation, one documented in bits and pieces in multiple specialized studies but not quite narrated as an overarching dynamic that is taking us into a new phase of global capitalism – and global destruction.” In order to fully appreciate the connection between climate change and global capitalism, we should turn to the analysis of economic geographer David Harvey. Harvey argues that after 1970, we experienced a “new” imperial and hegemonic form of capitalist transformation. He explains that one of the effective ways for capitalism to absorb excess capital today is by tearing down all global barriers to its movement—spatial and temporal (e.g., through ICT advances that enhance the credit system and state debt-financed expenditures), artificial (e.g., removal of state tariffs) and cultural (e.g., crashing popular resistance to commodification of goods and labour power). One mechanism employed by capitalism in its bid to address its problem of over-accumulation in this era of “new imperialism” is through “the deepening and widening of colonial, imperial and neocolonial practices.” Hence, the twenty-first century has witnessed a renewed interest in Africa in order to compel such economies to serve the interests of the imperial hegemon and global capital.

The new scramble for Africa, manifested in a repeat of land-grabbing largely through “private investor acquisitions” for profit, is a strategy to absorb this surplus capital. Huge chunks of land in Madagascar, Uganda, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Congo, etc., have been sold off or leased to countries such as China, South Korea, Japan, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Maina-Okori et al. remind us that “From a colonial perspective, land and the colonized (mostly Indigenous peoples) are considered part of nature and consequently objects and commodities of capitalism.” In 2009, the South Korean Daewoo conglomerate, for example, acquired 1.3 million hectares of land in Madagascar, representing half of the island’s total arable land. An Israeli pharmaceutical company is growing cannabis on land acquired in Uganda, even though marijuana is illegal in that country, even for medical purposes. New demands for water and sand as well as metals and minerals used in latest electronics have also contributed to the latest scramble for Africa. These emerging patterns are thanks to the growing demand for industrial crops such as palm for biofuels and the global rising food prices. Not only are such practices leading to a sharp increase in mass displacements of local communities, but they are also intensifying land degradation and inevitably altering biodiversity.

Importantly, Africa has the lowest per capita ecological footprint in the world, and yet it is the most vulnerable continent to the impacts of climate change.

This paradox lies in the continent’s beleaguered legacies of slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism.

We have already seen that the colonial worldview, which is hegemonic and reductionist, is structured through dualisms. In other words, Western cultures conceptualize the world through opposing dichotomies. Hence, humans are categorized in direct opposition to non-humans. For analytical convenience, I use the generic term “nature” to refer to the category of non-humans, which covers flora, fauna, air, water bodies and inanimate entities.Western logic further hierarchizes dualisms, with one category always considered to be superior or dominant over the other. Thus, Whites are privileged over non-Whites, men over women and humans over nature. The last of these examples is oriented in a philosophical worldview that is deeply rooted in the arrogant principle of anthropocentrism (derived from the Greek ánthropos for “human” and kéntron for “centre”), that emphasizes human supremacy. This notion can be traced back to ancient Greece with the famous dictum declared by the philosopher Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.” It is this principle that undergirds the mass degradation of nature we are witnessing today in the modern world.

Such worldview and logic is distinctly different from that shared by many non- Western societies which construct the world, not in dualisms, but in continuities. Under the nondualistic logic, which is also biocentric, humans are understood to be linked to nature, not in opposition to it. As observed by Mekada Graham, “Within the cosmological perspective of the African-centred worldviews, all elements of the universe—people, animals and inanimate objects—are viewed as interconnected. Since they are dependent upon each other, they are, in essence, considered as one.”

The continuity in African traditional ontology is provocatively encapsulated in the Zulu expression: “I am river, I am mountain, I am tree, I am love, I am emotion, I am beauty, I am lake, I am cloud, I am sun, I am mind, I am one with one.” On his part, Na’im Akbar metaphorically likened the African cosmos to a spider web, explaining that: “its least element cannot be touched without making the whole vibrate. Everything is connected, interdependent.” Indeed, anthropocentric interventions on nature disrupt the healthy web of life in ways that threaten the very foundation of life itself. The underlying philosophy that informs such wisdom, one that is shared by many communities around the continent, is Ubuntu. For centuries, Africans have celebrated the values which connect past and present as well as humans and nature. Indeed, women in the global South may not have self-identified as “ecofeminists,” but they have a long history of ecological consciousness and moral obligation towards future generations. The more recent and famous examples can be seen in the women-led Chipko (Hindi for embrace ‘the tree’) movement in India of the early 1970s and the women-led Green Belt Movement founded in Kenya in 1977.

In the global North, French feminists were the first to coin the term l’eco-féminisme, (ecofeminism), linking issues of gender oppression to the phenomenon of men’s domination of nature. But the term essentially described “a new name for an ancient wisdom.” Ecofeminism mimics and recycles ancient African wisdom. It highlighted the commonalities between anthropocentrism and male-supremacist thinking and revealed how capitalist-patriarchal domination reduces both women and nature to “commodities.” Today, there exist several strands of ecological feminist thought, but all believe that “patriarchal domination” is something that women share with nature. In other words, they see an interconnection between the exploitation of women and the degradation of the environment. As feminist scholar Patricia Kameri-Mbote states, “Ecofeminists explore gender oppression and environmental degradation, mainly caused by men, and hold that women have a responsibility to stop this male domination over both.” Hence, ecofeminists argue that analyses of gender are critical in addressing environmental problems. “The central theme of most versions of ecofeminism,” argues Stephanie Lahar, “is the interrelationship and integration of personal, social, and environmental issues and the development of multidirectional political agendas and action.” However, ecofeminism has been criticized for homogenizing and essentializing women, arguing, for instance, that legacies of colonialism on land policies and cultures impact African women differently from women in the global North.

In today’s world, there has been a convergence, if somewhat unwittingly, of three separate movements: the anti-neoliberal movement (represented by climate change activists), the anti-imperialist movement (the decolonialists) and the antipatriarchal movement (by feminists). At the confluence of the three movements is the praxis to challenge and transform power structures and hierarchies. The same imperialist ideologies and institutions that disrupted and displaced Indigenous institutions work to subjugate women and to exploit nature. Ecofeminist theories had a lot to draw from Indigenous African ontologies and epistemologies, whose basic tenets overlap with green politics. In other words, the underlying features of ecofeminism very much resembled those traditionally practised in non-Western Indigenous cultures. In what Godfrey Tanga refers to as “eco-bio-communitarianism” and Segun Ogungbemi as the “ethics of naturerelatedness”, the idea is that the complexities and slippages between the main principles of the three movements call for closer analyses. It is from such pluralistic responses that we can synthesize and construct counter-hegemonic narratives for ecological sustainability and a transformational force for existing gender/ power relations.

Excerpted from Decolonization and Afro-feminism by Sylvia Tamale, published by Daraja Press. Copyright © 2020 by Sylvia Tamale. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

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