Cultural Environmentalism in Ogunyemi’s Langbodo and Osofisan’s Many Colours Make The Thunder-King

Abstract

Theories of contextualization foreground the unviability of universalizing epistemologies that are based on a particular system or drawn from a particular culture. This unviability reveals itself in the presumed “ecohesitation” in African criticism and literatures in the early years of Ecocriticism’s prominence. This chapter is premised on the position that the unique features of African cultures are revealed in African literatures and foregrounds that Africans and their literatures have always been environmentally aware. This study therefore explicates the environmental perspective of the Yoruba people as exemplified in Wale Ogunyemi’s Langbodo (1979) and Femi Osofisan’s Many Colours Make the Thunder-King (2015). It also highlights how the cultural and religious ethos of the people inflects upon the environmentalism that emerges. This study reveals an environmentalism that straddles multiple theories of human interaction with nature identified in recent environmental scholarship—anthropocentrism, ecophobia, and animism. The chapter concludes that as a people’s culture determines the attitude towards the environment such culture should be utilized to formulate paradigms that will encourage sustainable environments.