African Worlds Have Been More-than-human Worlds avant la lettre: Relational Ontologies and the Decolonisation of Nature in Africa

Scholarship on the environmental history of Africa largely demonstrates that European colonial rule involved exercising power over nature. Moreover, as many scholars have suggested, power over nature was a key tool in colonial rule.¹ Given that most societies on the continent have been agrarian societies,² developments such as the introduction of new plants, the separation of “nature/culture” and “society/environment” according to European ideas, or the regulation of access to forests, hunting grounds, and fishing waters arguably had a far more drastic impact on the everyday life of most of the population than other domains of colonial rule.

Therefore, the establishment of “nature” as an epistemological category must also be understood as a colonial legacy. This also means that the semantics of decay or destruction of nature, as they had emerged in Europe and North America from romanticism, primitivism, and further intellectual and aesthetic movements, were alien to African societies – irrespective of the fact that the history of art and culture in Africa includes aestheticization of animals and plants that date back to rock paintings from the Stone Age.

The ecological and environmental consequences of colonialism in Africa raise (at least) two key questions: To what extent did anticolonial movements and after-independence policymakers conceive the natural sphere as a domain of decolonisation during the transition from late-colonial to post-colonial conditions? And how a decolonisation of nature can be included in present debates about moving the process of decolonisation forward? As a historian, I am mainly dealing with the first question, but for this contribution to the overarching MIASA discussion on sustainability transformation, I am reflecting on the latter inquiry.

Connections between the decolonisation of knowledge and of nature

Without question, “nature” is just one of many domains in which coloniality has persisted since the end of colonial rule. In Africa, academic debates about how the unfinished decolonisation can and should be continued – and by what criteria it could be considered as completed –, relate strongly to the issue of knowledge production, particularly to colonial legacies in concepts, assumptions, and other epistemic operations, and in academic disciplines and institutions. In 2022, Ugandan scholar and activist Sylvia Tamale gave a talk at MIASA and discussed colonial mechanisms of epistemic power that shape knowledge production in Africa until today.³ In recent years, also the South African anthropologist Nokuthula Hlabangane (2017), the Cameroonian literary scholar Albert Gouaffo (2017), the Zimbabwean philosopher William J. Mpofu (2017), and the South African criminologist Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile (2016), to name just a few, have investigated various facets of a decolonisation of knowledge from different disciplinary perspectives.

Moreover, the Cameroonian historian and philosopher Achille Mbembe has suggested a possible bridging between the decolonisation of knowledge and of nature. In a lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand, Mbembe (2015) discussed the challenges posed by the legacies of colonialism for universities in Africa and how a decolonisation of academia, vehemently demanded at the time by the student movement “Rhodes Must Fall”, could be put into practice. Following Frantz Fanon as well as the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Mbembe outlined his vision of “pluriversities” that would integrate systems of thought from African, European, American, and Asian provenance on an equal footing in terms of epistemic diversity.

Surprisingly for some, Mbembe (2015) explicitly included the power over nature among the colonial power relations in question and attributed a key role to the abandonment of anthropocentrism in overcoming coloniality in knowledge and academia. As Mbembe argues, many in Africa and elsewhere have not yet fully understood the epochal scale of the current environmental and climate changes and do not realise that this pressing issue requires a radical rethinking in all major debates – including the decolonisation debate. In the face of the planetary crisis and the associated risk of extinction of countless species of animals and plants and humanity itself, it is necessary to abandon a human-centred view of the planet and thus also to understand history as an entangled past of human and non-human beings. Coloniality will ultimately only be overcome, according to Mbembe, when humanity, in a democratic spirit of “radical sharing and universal inclusion”, includes non-human beings in shaping the common planet.

Mbembe’s position emphasises that decolonisation cannot work in a restorative way – as a return to a “pre-colonial condition” (however understood)⁴ – but needs to be situated in the here and now. Thus, decolonisation must react to the dynamics of globalisation and deglobalisation as well as to what we might conceptualise as “Anthropocene” (Tanner 2022), “Capitalocene” (Haraway 2015; Moore 2017), “Necrocene” (McBrien 2016), “Petromodernity” (Klose/Steininger 2020), or “Planetary Age” (Chakrabarty 2022a, 2022b) – the irreversible changes in the geophysical parameters of the earth. The decolonisation debate cannot evade the accelerating global warming, the sixth great mass extinction, or the continued overexploitation of natural resources.

Relational ontologies: every living being can only exist in relations with others

The post-humanist perspective that Mbembe (2015) outlines as an answer to this challenge emanates from relational ontologies, as they have developed since the 1980s out of various impulses such as science and technology studies (STS), actor-network theory (ANT), ecofeminist philosophy, ethnoecology, or, more recently, multispecies ethnography and environmental humanities.⁵ Regarding “nature”, relational ontologies emanate from the central assumption that every living being can only exist in relations with others. Accordingly, it is not the individual organism that is the smallest tangible basic unit of all life on Earth, but the relations between organisms that give them their ability to exist.

The argument I would like to suggest here (and which I think is implicitly present in Mbembe’s lecture) is that approaches emanating from relational ontologies such as “more-than-human world” (Abram  1996) or “multispecies world« (Van Dooren/Kirksey/Münster 2016) promise a highly productive potential to operationalise the abstract idea of a decolonisation of nature in Africa because they resonate with African historical systems of thought.

Generally speaking, such systems of thought, as far as scholars from history, anthropology, and further disciplines can reconstruct them,⁶ had assumed an indissoluble unity between material and immaterial, between physical and metaphysical, and between this-worldly and other-worldly realities (Jegede 2010: 313) – a framework in which the distinction of “nature” from another, however defined, was not plausible or even conceivable. Animals, plants, ancestors, spirits, deities, and many other powers, each with their own specific agencies, co-constituted African worlds. The philosophy of ubuntu in South Africa and the concept of ukama, particularly well known in Zimbabwe, are only two of several possible examples of articulation of such otherwise mainly tacit assumptions of ubiquitous interrelatedness (Patel/Moore 2018: 31). African worlds have been more-than-human worlds avant la lettre.

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Author: Felix Schürmann

1. For a detailed study on the colonial exercise of power over nature on the case of German East Africa see Gißibl 2016. [↩]
2. The significance of agrarian structures as a central factor of African history is emphasised by Bley 2021: 267–73. [↩]
3. Sylvia Tamale, “Decolonizing Knowledge Production in Africa”, Anton Wilhelm Amo Lecture at University of Ghana, 23.11.2022”. [↩]
4. For a recent critique of the idea of a pre-colonial past in Africa, see Táíwò 2022 [↩]
5. Lots of references could be named here, of central relevance are the works of Donna Haraway 1985, 1989, 1997, 2003, 2008, and 2016; and Bruno Latour 1984, 1991, 1993, 1999, and 2007. [↩]
6. See for the BaKongo in West Central Africa, to name only one example, the ground-breaking works of Fu-Kiau 1969 and 2001 as well as MacGaffey 1986. [↩]

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