In her introduction, Fiona Moolla suggests that an African ecocriticism must be informed by specific material and cultural conditions on the continent, and not simply draw on a supposedly more universal postcolonial framework. As she notes, there have been regrettably few book-length ecocritical studies focused on Africa and, much of the time, ‘African environment and animals have been considered in monographs and edited volumes in a general postcolonial context together with criticism of other world literatures’. Moolla rightly insists on the need for close consideration of how ‘the natural world and animals have been active agents in African cultural forms’ and ‘fundamentally constitutive of the worldviews and lifeways that have created [African] cultural “texts”’. In this sense, the importance of The Natures of Africa is embedded not just in the individual chapters of the book, but also in how the collection as a whole points to common issues and concerns that can ground productive dialogues about African cultural production in the context of the environmental humanities.

At the same time, the collection is very much connected to postcolonialism through its focus on decolonising knowledge and representation. Such counter-discursive work need not engage directly with the historical experience of colonialism in Africa or even explicitly with what Derek Gregory (2004) terms ‘the colonial present’. However, it does challenge ways of perceiving and conceptualising the world rooted in the perspectives of those empowered by imperial modernity and serving to reproduce forms of domination. This intellectual project has two components. The first is to illuminate how dominant ways of processing the world have been shaped by colonial discourses of identity and geography, how they suppress or render invisible other (unsettling) forms of knowledge and perception, and how they reinforce uneven political relationships. The second path to decolonising knowledge entails the articulation of marginalised cultural perspectives and forms of knowledge that might enable resistance to imperialism and alleviate its violent effects. Although The Natures of Africa is engaged with both aspects of perspectival decolonisation, its links with the second, often more difficult, component are particularly striking.

This book emerged out of a conviction that environment and animals are vital to an all-encompassing flourishing – where the word ‘vital’ suggests more than just ‘important’ but, retrieving its deeper etymological root, where environment and animals are ‘vita’– they are life itself. This book emerged out of a conviction, and not much else: there has been no funding or major conferences behind it. These facts about the coming into existence of the volume have had paradoxical consequences. On the one hand, the individual members of the community that has been established through the volume, for the most part, have never physically met except through the conversations conducted in cyberspace beneath the tree of knowledge of our project site. The conviction that has inspired the volume has therefore not imposed a massive carbon cost on the environment it is moved to respect but, instead, has relied on ‘clean’ technologies. One might say that it has translated theory into praxis. However, the ‘clean’ technology that has allowed the digital cultural communion of the contributors could not have emerged without just over three centuries of dirty industrialisation, and its concomitant global social, cultural and economic cost to people, animals and environment.

This book has been motivated by the instinct that recognition of the life of animals and the significance of the natural world are not foreign to continental Africa, but are deeply constitutive of the cultures that together create a strategically essentialised Africa in the postcolonial period. This intuition could not be verified because the scholarship, with the regional exception of South Africa and its strong focus on literary culture, for the most part does not exist. Mention must be made here, however, of the publication of the papers presented at a conference titled ‘Literature, Nature and the Land: Ethics and Aesthetics of the Environment’, which was convened at the University of Zululand, South Africa, in 1992. The conference proceedings include papers on several African writers, including Ayi Kwei Armah, Kofi Awoonor, Wole Soyinka, Es'kia Mphahlele and Mazisi Kunene, among others.

Cheryll Glotfelty, in the introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996), identifies 1993 as the year in which ecocriticism emerged as a clearly defined critical school in the Anglo- American academy.

What is African environmental literature? What environmental issues are revealed in African literature? How do African authors represent African environments? Chinua Achebe's (1959) Things Fall Apart, a classic of African literature, for example, has been read and studied as an African postcolonial novel that aims to reconstruct precolonial African cultural identity in general and traditional Igbo cultural identity in particular. However, this novel can also be read as an environmental novel. In ‘Things Fall Apart fifty years after: An ecocritical reading’, Nchoujie Augustine (2009) foregrounds Achebe's environmental consciousness by examining ‘the ecological component’ (Augustine 2009: 107) that Achebe integrates into his writing, such as the imageries of the African forest, especially the forest's influence on the sustainability of the Igbo community, as well as its correlation with Igbo customs. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, in their introduction to Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011), argue that the ‘narrative shift’ (DeLoughrey and Handley 2011: 7) of Achebe's novel from an oral, Igbo-centred narrative (as revealed in the first two parts of the novel) to a written, colonial-dominated narrative (as revealed by the district commissioner's book, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of Lower Niger in the last part of the novel) suggests the author's critique of the environmental transformation in Igboland caused by European colonisation.

As DeLoughrey and Handley (2011: 6) state, ‘Chinua Achebe emphasized the radical ontological shift in understanding place that occurred through the process of European colonialism and Christian missionisation in his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart.’ In my essay ‘From cultural hybridization to ecological degradation: The forest in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Ben Okri's The Famished Road’, I argue that Achebe represents the indigenous Igbo relationship with the land and the earth goddess (Ani) – a relationship between ancestral spirits, gods, use of the land, harvest and community sustainability – in order to critique how the advent of British colonialism undermines that relationship. These recent environmental readings of Achebe's novel remind us that to understand environmental issues in the context of the Igbo society represented by Achebe, we need to understand not only the physical environment of Igboland, but also the Igbo people's relationship with it through spiritual and social practices. Achebe's novel therefore represents traditional Igbo cultural life as intertwined with environmental concerns that are also necessarily social.

The Shona expression above is a classic example of how religion has always played a central role in Africa's existence – even when people go to sleep, they talk to their Creator. Every occurrence, no matter how small, has a religious ritual or ceremony attached to it. This expression indicates the depth of African religiosity. Although people may not recite these words as a prayer, they are nevertheless an admission that they leave everything in the hands of their Creator. The statement ‘Renhasi rapfuura …’ captures the belief that the Creator (in Shona, Musiki or Musikavanhu) takes care of each of their living days. These words, even though uttered in an environment that, in the sense of Western Christianity some time ago may not have been considered as religious by most denominations, go a long way to underscoring the reality about Africans – that they are a religious people.

Since early colonial perceptions about Africa as backward and savage, the world has moved on and has embraced the continent. As a result of growing religious dialogue and respect for other people's religious beliefs and practices, hegemonic European cultural practices are on the wane. Most people in Europe and the Americas have come to appreciate that African cultures do not need to be taught to respect nature from Europe.

This chapter examines what Shona indigenous religion says about nature and why it qualifies as a ‘green religion’. I argue that it is a religion based on practice, as opposed to a green religion based on preaching.

The nature of African indigenous religions

African indigenous religions are deliberately given this nomenclature because they are religions that are largely indigenous to Africa and are founded on African soil, although some have been exported to the diaspora through the slave trade. These religions are handed down from one generation to another; they are also part and parcel of African life. They are an amalgamation of religions that pre-date Christianity and Islam. Therefore, they entail religious practices that are founded on millennia of accumulated wisdom and experiences, and act as guides for good moral behaviour and ethical environmental practices – all done for the common good.

Island, stakeholders and location

As development thinking has moved from ‘thing-oriented’ to ‘people-oriented’ paradigm (Chambers 1995), it has thrown up a number of terms such as ‘poor’ (World Bank 1996a), ‘poorest of the poor’ (Harris 1988; Singh 1988), ‘indigenous people’ or ‘communities’ (United Nations 1993), ‘beneficiaries’ (Paul 1987; World Bank 1996b), ‘stakeholders’ (Nelson and Wright 1995; World Bank 1996b; Jeffery and Sundar 1999; Vedeld 2001) and so on to refer to people. The ‘poor’ are defined as people living in remote and impoverished areas (World Bank 1996a, 7). The term ‘stakeholders’ has been further classified into ‘primary stakeholders’ referring to people or direct beneficiaries and ‘secondary stakeholders’ including government agencies and NGOs (Vedeld 2001, 6). A question that arises is who these ‘stakeholders’ or ‘poorest of the poor’ are. How does one understand these meta-categories in a particular context? The chapter is an attempt to answer these questions.

Like other southernmost Sundarbans islands, Kusumpur also has mud quays or embankments encircling and protecting the islands. A part of Kusumpur island is connected with the landmass of Gosaba island that comes under Gosaba block and constitutes a separate village panchayat. A road from Gosaba market leads to Kusumpur and then branches off into two directions, one going in the direction of Jagatpur and the other leading through south Kusumpur towards a van rickshaw stand (where van rickshaws are parked) next to Kusumpur High School. Beyond this van rickshaw stand are the winding embankments serving as pathways connecting Jaipur, Ramnagar and heavily eroded north Kusumpur to south Kusumpur. These embankment paths in most parts of the island are so narrow that van rickshaws cannot ply on them. People mostly walk or use bicycle to travel to their destinations. There are stretches where embankments become so narrow and breached that even cycling proves difficult. People get off their cycles and walk through that particular stretch of embankment path carrying the cycles on their shoulders. Embankments are always higher than the ground level of the inhabited islands to protect them against flooding during high tide when water rises higher than the islands. Embankments, when viewed from inside the villages, look like mud walls with people using the slope of the wall to ascend and descend.

Branching off in horizontal lines from the embankment at regular intervals elevated mud tracks pass through the interior of the island.

Whose heritage site?

The first chapter has already introduced the Sundarbans as a World Heritage Site and described the life of its people as one of perpetual anxiety and uncertainty. What is it that makes people's lives so agonizing and uncertain in a place that is globally famous? The answer partly lies in the question posed. The Sundarbans is the abode of tigers, deer, snakes, crocodiles, dolphins, turtles and innumerable valuable plants and marine resources, whose protection and conservation has attracted considerable global funding in recent years. Such a conservation drive is based on the implicit assumption that the sustainable development of the Sundarbans is possible only if the natural habitat of the region is left to grow without hindrance. In other words, people's settlement and pressure on the unique ecological system is a cause for concern among the conservationists. It is to this representation of the Sundarbans as primarily a place of natural wilderness where humans occupy a position of secondary importance that I turn to in this chapter.

However, this image of the Sundarbans as natural wilderness not quite suitable for human settlement is not a natural fact since time immemorial. The biography of the region has been shaped and reshaped by colonial statemaking (Sivaramakrishnan 1999) involving complex negotiations at various local and trans-local levels. Sivaramakrishnan develops the idea of statemaking and employs it in understanding the emergence and institutionalization of modern forestry in colonial India. I draw on this concept to suggest that colonial statemaking in the Sundarbans proceeded through different phases and each phase produced a particular image of the region. This chapter embarks upon a historical journey revisiting the early period of colonial rule when the Sundarbans emerged as a wasteland over which conflict occurred between the landlords and the colonial state. This chapter goes back to the time when reclamation and human settlement in the Sundarbans was considered an urgent necessity by colonial rule. The chapter also looks at the post-reclamation history of the delta when the formulation of Forest Act and the modalities of gazetteer writing began to portray the region differently. What I attempt here in this chapter is not a chronological history. Instead, I will touch on four significant moments, both in colonial Sundarbans and in post-independent Indian Sundarbans, which played a crucial role in consolidating the image of the region as an abode of wildlife, …

The Sundarbans embankments: Between land and water

While sitting on an embankment, I started a dialogue with Bhagirath Patra, a resident of north Kusumpur, one of the most severely affected parts of Kusumpur island, where the rivers Goira and Matla were eroding banks on the eastern and western sides, respectively (see Maps 3 and 4). Bhagirath, one of the worst victims of land erosion, was now left with less than a bigha of land where he had his house and tiny plot of paddy land. Before I could proceed to interview him, he stopped me and tried to draw my attention to the vast tract of uninhabited landmass of Prakashnagar island right across the river. Pointing towards the opposite bank, Bhagirath told me, ‘You know, we used to stay there. We had our bilan jami where the river is flowing now. You can't make out where our house was, it was far beyond the new land that has surfaced and added to the landmass of Prakashnagar. This is the fourth ring embankment that we have seen during our lifetime. Everything is gone. The river and embankment are eating into our strength’.

It would be misleading to consider Bhagirath's narrative as unusual since he shared his agony with many other Sundarbans islanders. The shape and contour of Kusumpur were changing almost every day. Standing on the embankment, it was difficult for an outsider to visualize what the island looked like in the past when the landmass on its western side extended far beyond where the river Matla was now flowing. It was even more difficult to imagine how the new land or char that had emerged out of the siltation process on the other side of the Matla could once have belonged to the people of Kusumpur. But that was how people in Kusumpur perceived their lost land. They believed that the land they lost due to continuous erosion and multiple ring embankments had contributed to the increasing landmass of Prakashnagar. But they could not call this new land their own; they were denied access to it as it belonged to a different panchayat.

As Bhagirath was talking to me, I saw Adhar Mondal, another resident of north Kusumpur walking towards us. He brought to our notice fresh breaches that had appeared in the embankment there.

Grand development and islanders’ worries

In 1996, the Directorate of Forests of the Government of West Bengal organized in Kolkata a seminar in memory of William Roxburgh who was not only the father of modern botany in India but also the first botanist to have made plant collections from the Sundarbans. In 1999, the proceedings of the seminar were published in the form of a volume called Sundarbans Mangal. Kiranmoy Nanda, the Minister-in-charge of Fisheries, Government of West Bengal, spelt out the purpose of this specialists’ meeting in the following manner:

The seminar provided an opportunity for botanists, zoologists, geologists and ecologists to update their knowledge. The issues debated ranged from ecological balance to sustainable mushroom spawn cultivation. Specialists even dwelt at length on the technicalities of embankment construction and its protection against the tidal waves. This was clearly an attempt by the specialists to make the Sundarbans part of the global discourses of conservation and sustainable development. In 2001, the Sundarbans Biosphere Reserve became part of UNESCO's world network of biosphere reserves and as a result, the state forest department now expects an initial grant of 3 million dollars from the UN Development Programme (UNDP) for the protection of the Sundarbans (The Statesman 2002). Today, the World Heritage Site also attracts funding of Rs. 3 crores from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to conduct research on the development of infrastructure, soil conservation and a livelihood programme for the people in the area. The Sundarban Affairs Department (SAD) will collaborate with the ADB on this. Thus, deals are struck and development agendas are prepared in the government departments.

Eroding embankments, state machinery and vulnerable lives

The embankments are found still lying breached even five years after the cyclone Aila. People's vulnerability to disaster continues unabated (Oliver-Smith 1996, 315) as land continues to erode and people are found to be on the retreat. Hence the question remains is where will all this backtracking lead? In this book, our journey had started with the eroding lives of north Kusumpur where subsequently the cyclone Aila had caused many to leave their home. For those still living in this narrow stretch, the land had become even narrower. As has been discussed in the earlier chapters of the book, people keep negotiating their time with the rivers and with the government machinery meant for flood control.