Filming Mother Nature’s slow death: Representational pitfalls in African ecodocumentaries

Abstract

This article uses ecocriticism and postcolonial theories to investigate the documentary topographies and politics of African ecosystem. Anger in the Wind (Weira), Breaking the Silence: Cleaning the Liquid Waste (Niyel) and The Day of the Great Blaze (Kadry Kodo) illustrate how African documentarians shape their narratives to interrogate some pressing environmental challenges. This article looks at the ways in which the advent of global capitalism has transformed African ecosystems into sites for violent and irreversible destruction and exploitation, leaving postcolonial subjects in situations of deplorable precarity.