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African Environmental Ethics

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The Palgrave Handbook of African Social Ethics

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Abstract

This chapter explores the metaphysical foundations of classical African environmental ethics, highlighting the logic of this metaphysics, developing a speculative description of the reflective processes through which it was constructed, examining its capacity for adaptation beyond its temporal and cultural origins and the possibility of its internalization by individuals, facilitating commitment to the holistic environmental culture it represents. The chaper is consummated by an account suggesting the practical experience of such an adaptive process. The dialogical form is used in order to simulate and encourage the reflective processes the chapter foregrounds. The discussion between two interlocutors suggests the dialectical method through which knowledge is developed by the individual in dialogue with themselves or by a person in discourse with others, either through direct contact or through the medium of texts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975).

  2. 2.

    This summation is a response to three major recent summations of the field of African environmental ethics, Chinedu Stephen Ifeakor and Andrew Otteh’s “African Environmental Ethics: A Non–Anthropocentric African Environmentalism. The Journey So Far” in IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities, 3, no. 6 (September 2017): 67–97, Michael Onyebuchi Eze’s “Humanitatis-Eco (Eco-Humanism): An African Environmental Theory” in The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy, ed. Adeshina Afolayan and Toyin Falola (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 621–632, and Edwin Etieyibo’s “Ubuntu and the Environment” in The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy. 2017: 633–657.

  3. 3.

    This conception of creative process may be understood in response to such accounts of non-Western and non-Asian philosophy of mind and of nature that present it as inadequately logical, such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy essay on panpsychism, “the doctrine that mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe” as defined by the encyclopedia at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/panpsychism/ Accessed 19 February 2019. The idea of adaptation is correlative with the school of thought that holds that it is vital to complement ecological theorizing with systematic ecological education, represented, for example, by the work of Michael Bonnett, who unfolds various aspects of this imperative in such texts as “Environmental Consciousness, Sustainability, and the Character of Philosophy of Education” in Studies in the Philosophy of Education 36 (2017): 333–347, where he argues for the grounding of human existence in the environment, thereby placing “our relationship with nature at the heart of both human being and authentic education”, as summed up in the abstract.

  4. 4.

    The richest summation on Ogboni known to me, particularly in relation to the esoteric group’s adoration of Earth, is Babatunde Lawal’s “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni” in African Arts, 28, no. 1 (Winter, 1995): 36–49+98–100.

  5. 5.

    From a private group email communication.

  6. 6.

    The Venerable Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, AD 731, translated by Leo Sherley-Price as Ecclesiastical History of the English People (London: Penguin, 1990).

  7. 7.

    Abiola Irele, “Tradition and the Yoruba Writer: D.O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka”, in The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (London: Heinemann, 1981): 174–197.

  8. 8.

    Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990): 28.

  9. 9.

    Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers (London: Heinemann, 1979): 79.

  10. 10.

    Armah, The Healers, 80.

  11. 11.

    Armah, The Healers, 81.

  12. 12.

    Armah, The Healers, 82.

  13. 13.

    Ahmadou Hampate Ba, “The Living Tradition” in UNESCO General History of Africa. Vol. 1: Methodology and African Prehistory, ed. J. Ki Zerbo. (London: Heinemann, 1981): 166–203. 179.

  14. 14.

    Toyin Falola, In Praise of Greatness: The Poetics of African Adulation (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2019): 121.

  15. 15.

    E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1956): 2.

  16. 16.

    Owen Burnham, African Wisdom: A Practical and Inspirational Guide (London: Judy Piatkus, 2000): 43–44.

  17. 17.

    John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1976): 181.

  18. 18.

    As described by Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton, Rowland Abiodun and Allen Wardwell in Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989): 16.

  19. 19.

    “If someone did not have his Esu in his body, he could not exist, he would not know that he is alive; therefore everybody must have his individual Esu” as stated by Juan Elbein and Deoscoredes Dos Santos in “Esu Bara: Principle of Individual Life in the Nago System” in Colloque International sur la Notion de Personne en Afrique Noire, quoted by Ayodele Ogundipe in “Retention and Survival of Yoruba Traditional Religion in the Diaspora: Esu in Brazil and Benin Republic” in Ivie: Nigerian Journal of Arts and Culture. 1. no. 3, 1986: 56–68. 62. Toyin Falola complements this, asserting Esu is “a constant traveller” “with the enormous capacity to know the truth and reveal it…” “ubiquitous and invisible, so much so that his ‘temple’ can also be within the individual self” in “Esu: The God Without Boundaries” from Esu: Yoruba God of Power and the Imaginative Frontiers, ed. Toyin Falola (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2013): 4.

  20. 20.

    From “Eshu, God of Fate” in Jack Mapanje and Landeg White, Oral Poetry from Africa (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1984): 110.

  21. 21.

    Rowland Abiodun, “The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective” in African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline (Washington: The Smithsonian, 1987): 63–89. Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014): 245–283.253.

  22. 22.

    Mazisi Kunene, Anthem of the Decades (London: Heinemann, 1981) XXIII.

  23. 23.

    John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy. The richest expositions of Negritude known to me are by Abiola Irele, particularly his account of Negritude metaphysics in “What is Negritude” in The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (London: Heinemann, 1981): 67–88. His “The African Scholar” in Transition, No. 51 (1991): 56–69, takes further similar ideas in relation to classical Yoruba philosophy.

  24. 24.

    Awo Fa’lokun Fatunmbi, “Obatala: Ifa and the Chief of the Spirit of the White Cloth”. 2. Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/document/47061087/OBATALA-Ifa-and-the-Chief-of-the-Spirit-of-the-White-Cloth-EDITED-AND-FORMATTED Accessed 2/22/2019.

  25. 25.

    Olabiyi Babalola Yai, Review of Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought by Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton, Rowland Abiodun and Allen Wardwell in African Arts, 25, no. 1 (Jan., 1992): 20+22+24+26+29.22.

  26. 26.

    Chinua Achebe, “The Igbo World and Its Art”, in African Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997): 435–437.

  27. 27.

    Rolf Brockmann and Gerd Hötter, Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger (München: Trickster Verlag, 1994). Back cover.

  28. 28.

    John McCall, “Making Peace with Agwu” in Anthropology & Humanism 18. 2 (December 1993): 56–66. 63-64.

  29. 29.

    As impressively described, among other texts, in Ronald Hutton’s Bringing Down the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999).

  30. 30.

    Germaine Dieterlen, “Initiation among the Peul Pastoral Tribes” in African Systems of Thought. Preface by Meyer Fortes and Germaine Dieterlen (London: Oxford UP, 1966): 314–327.

  31. 31.

    Marcel Griaule, “The Dogon of the French Sudan” in African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples. Ed. Daryll Forde (London: Oxford UP, 1970): 83–110.

  32. 32.

    “The Fulani Creation Story” in A Selection of African Poetry, ed. K.E. Senanu and T.E. Vincent (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1988): 24–25.

  33. 33.

    Dieterlen, 314–327.

  34. 34.

    Dieterlen, 314–327.

  35. 35.

    Wole Soyinka, A Shuttle in the Crypt (London: Rex Collings, 1972): 4.

  36. 36.

    Wole Soyinka, A Shuttle in the Crypt, 19.

  37. 37.

    William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey” in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1973): 146–150.

  38. 38.

    Dion Fortune, The Training and Work of an Initiate (London: Aquarian, 1955) 65.

  39. 39.

    From Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, trans J. W. Harvey (New York: Oxford UP, 1923) as presented in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged. 1966.

  40. 40.

    The concept of ori as understood in Yoruba philosophy and defined by Yai and of chi in Igbo thought as depicted by John Umeh in After God Is Dibia: Igbo Cosmology, Divination and Sacred Science in Nigeria (London: Karnak House [1999]): 71–81.

  41. 41.

    As described by Babatunde Lawal for Yoruba philosophy in “Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art” in The Art Bulletin, 83, no. 3. (Sep., 2001): 498–526. 516 and by John Umeh of Igbo thought in After God Is Dibia: Igbo Cosmology, Divination and Sacred Science in Nigeria (London: Karnak House [1999]): 71–81.

  42. 42.

    Nimi Wariboko, The Charismatic City and the Public Resurgence of Religion: A Pentecostal Social Ethics of Cosmopolitan Urban Life (New York: Palgrave, 2014).

  43. 43.

    Ideas evident in Paula Ben-Amos, “Symbolism in Olokun Mud Art” in African Arts, 6, no. 4 (Summer 1973): 28–31+95.30 and Ndubuisi Ezeluomba, “The Explanation of a Text with Reference to the Mud Sculptures of Benin” in Black Arts Quarterly, 33, vol. 12, Issue 1 (Winter 2007): 33–35. www.stanford.edu/group/CBPA/BAQWinter2007.pdf. Accessed 2/25/2019.

  44. 44.

    Norma Rosen, “Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship” in African Arts, 22, no. 3 (May 1989): 44–53+88.

  45. 45.

    Christopher Okigbo, Labyrinths with Path of Thunder (London: Heinemann, 1971).

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  1. Lagos, Nigeria

    Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

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  1. Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
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  1. Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Nimi Wariboko

  2. Department of History, University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA

    Toyin Falola

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Adepoju, O.V. (2020). African Environmental Ethics. In: Wariboko, N., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Social Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36490-8_31

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