Mother Earth, Mother Africa &amp; African Indigenous Religions

In contemporary Nigerian literature, ecological writings are dominated by the literature of the Nigerian Niger Delta. The literature is popularly critiqued from a postcolonial perspective of environmental injustice and economic marginalization of the people. This article engages Ojaide’s Songs of Myself and Yeibo’s A Song for Tomorrow to evaluate the relationship between the environment and its inhabitants from a gender perspective. It investigates patriarchy and capitalism as ideologies of human self-sufficiency and male superiority that encourage environmental exploitation of the textual Niger Delta. My investigation explores images of ecological circumstances bedeviling the environment and its occupants with a particular focus on women. Following Gaard’s integral ecofeminism, the study takes a post-humanist approach to demonstrate life interconnectedness in the face of oil pollution. My argument is that the ecological proximity of the pristine Niger Delta revitalizes the environment and envisions ecological sustainability through an Indigenous consciousness of motherhood as the centrality of life.

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Journeying with the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians on Contextuality (1989–2021)

Landman

2022

SHE

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The author describes her journey with the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians (the Circle) in the 25 years between 1996 and 2021. This is done in terms of the methodological values of autoethnography, a method to describe and critique cultural phenomena through the author’s own experiences; “cultural” referring here to the culture of doing theology from African women’s perspectives. The author describes her participation in five of the six Pan-African conferences of the Circle (the first in Accra, Ghana, 1989, is included in the discussion, but was not attended by the author). The article specifically notes developments in the foci of the conferences in general. The author’s journeys with the conferences in Nairobi, Kenya (1996); Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2002); Yaoundé, Cameroon (2006); Kempton Park, South Africa (2013); and Gaborone, Botswana (2019) are presented. The author evaluates the Circle’s ability to contextualise its theologies in terms of five questions, namely: 1) whether the Circle has been non-reductionist in establishing the causes of contextual patriarchy; 2) whether the Circle has been able to establish a multi-dimensional contra-culture vis-à-vis patriarchy; 3) whether the Circle has placed the binaries of male and female in dialogue with one another; 4) whether the Circle and its theologies have brought healing to a gendered society; and 5) whether the Circle has established partnerships outside its epistemological and social borders.

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Mother Earth, Mother Africa & African Indigenous Religions

Cited by 4 publications

References 38 publications

African Women, Religion, Climate Change and Food Security in the Context of Pandemics

African Women, Religion, Climate Change and Food Security in the Context of Pandemics

Indigenous consciousness and life interconnections: an ecofeminist study of Tanure Ojaide’s Songs of Myself and Ebi Yeibo’s A Song for Tomorrow

Journeying with the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians on Contextuality (1989–2021)

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