Though Nigeria gained its independence from Britain in 1960, the legacies of colonial rule are still with us today, especially in neocolonial patterns of exploitation of Nigeria’s resources. From the late colonial period to the present, writers have developed their anti-colonial aesthetics and politics through engagement with the African natural world – a space of nonhuman-human entanglement ruled by the natural order of things. The pioneers of modern Nigerian literature such as Christopher Okigbo in “Idoto”, J.P. Clark in “Olokun”, Wole Soyinka in “Abiku”, Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart, among others, ushered in this aesthetic of nature and tradition upon their emergence in the Nigerian literary scene. In confronting colonial discourse, these writers, in most cases, resort to deploying nature represented by nonhuman spiritual beings, such as ancestral spirits and sea deities, as embodiment of African natural and cultural identity. This perspective – often dismissed in colonial principles as “primitive animism” – is at the heart of the natural order in that it goes beyond a belief system; it is a way of life, of consciously coexisting and intra-acting with the environment. I argue that the recourse to nature is a decolonial strategy in that the writers deploy the natural world to counter the Western civilisation imposed on their epistemological order. In the end, the natural world remains the forte of the African writer in presenting a civilisation that claims to embrace both humans and their nonhuman others.
