The Weeping Earth: Entangled Humanism, Precarity, and Imaginaries in African Eco-Poetry

The ecological visions of two African poets and their portrayal of the precarious condition of the environment in Africa are discussed in this article. Their nostalgic reflections on the idyllic image of the continent before anthropogenic activities degraded its fertile greenery also received major attention. Zakari Musa’s Elegy for the Earth (2020) and John Ngong’s The Tears of the Earth (2019) are critically analysed to expound the poets’ temporal triangulation of ecological discourse in Africa. I adopt Nigeria and Cameroon as models of African ecological space to interrogate the poetic contemplation of eco-precarity, temporality, and a vision of a new Africa built on human-nature interdependency and the green economy imaginary. Drawing on insights from ecofeminism and other relevant conceptual perspectives in environmental humanities, I examine sundry ecological topoi, including the politics of gendering and anthropomorphising the environment, the effects of the politics on nature, and the possibility of educating the African mind through the focalisation of precarity in African ecological poetry. I argue that the poets’ romanticisation of nature offers them an opportunity to intensify their education project by emphasising nature's contributions to life sustenance, while warning that human beings are self-destructing because of their insensitivity to climate change.