Global Coloniality and Ecological Injustice in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021)

Abstract

Postcolonial environmentalism in Africa explores interactions between humans and nature in the context of intensifying ecological violence in the aftermath of formal colonialism and its trademark violence of extractive power. As a critical approach that stresses the influence of colonial remains in everyday socio-political processes and relations, postcolonial environmentalism has been widely deployed to examine the interconnected relationship between the environment, materiality, and humans, with a focus on how one impacts and define the others. This study invokes, in a broad sense, African postcolonial ecocriticism to explore how creative literature is being used as a strategy of negotiating ecological violence in the era of global multi-national corporatism. The study adopts Grosfoguel’s idea of global coloniality as a conceptual framework to examine how Imbolo Mbue’s novel How Beautiful We Were (2021) portrays a Cameroonian postcolony where transnational corporations and corrupt governments perpetuate colonial machineries of extraction, ecological devastation, improvisation, dehumanization and violence. The article argues that Mbue symbolically uses decolonial environmental motifs to illustrate what is lost when symbiotic bonds between communal African societies and their natural environments are sacrificed for corporate profits that leave exploitation, environmental degradation and moral debauchery in their trails.