TY - JOUR
AU - Nkengasong, Nkemngong
AB - Introduction Cameroon is a postcolony which is often referred to as “Africa in miniature” because it is host to many aspects of the ecosystem and cultural life found elsewhere on the continent. However, the country faces one of Africa’s deep-rooted problems of environmental degradation perpetrated by the colonial legacy and the multinational capitalist consumerist ideology. The situation is even more precarious because the country’s governance in dealing with multinational corporations, hardly understands the deeper undercurrents between the environment and the Indigenous cultures. As a result, Cameroon’s rich ecological diversity, which the Indigenous peoples considered sacred and to which they attached a high cultural value, is facing rapid degradation. The rapid degradation of the environment and its impact on the Indigenous ecocultural relations has been of significant concern to several Cameroonian writers (Sankaran and Nkengasong 9). Bole Butake, for example, wrote Lake God and The Survivors after the explosion of Lake Nyos in 1986. A controversy opposing both the myth-oriented and scientific-vested opinions to determine the cause of the disaster is still unsettled. From another perspective, Linus Asong wrote The Crown of Thorns to decry the abusive exploitation of the Indigenous land through the neo-colonial agency. Other writers, including Epke Inyang in The Sacred Forest, The Hill Barbers, and The Swamps, Nol Alembong in Forests Echoes and Green Call, and Ayang Frederick Enoh in Green Hills have reacted variously to the unchecked deterioration of the ecology and its impact on sustainable management of the resources and the cultural life of the people. Concerned about the daunting ecological crises, Cameroonian writing resonates with the following questions: Was there anything wrong with worshipping green gods? Why and how did colonization and the multinational corporations set out to annihilate Indigenous knowledge systems that favoured environmental protection and conservation? What are the potentials for adapting the Indigenous knowledge systems and practices to the current dialogues to provide additional solutions to the current environmental problems that the country and other postcolonial contexts face? For the most part, ecocritical discourses on Africa have focused on the destruction of the continent’s ecology by the activities of multinational corporations. Rob Nixon, for example, and, more especially, Byron Caminero-Santangelo, have dwelt on acclaimed environmental activists like Wangarii Maathai and Ken Saro-Wiwa, whose works they read as a protest against what Nixon refers to as the slow violence on the environmentalism of the poor (3–4). Cajetan Iheka outlines a postcolonial ecocritical approach that argues for deep a ecological interconnectedness “of human lives with others in the environment” (23) using the works of some major African writers including Amos Tutuola, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Bessie Head, and Ben Okri. In dealing with these writers, ecocritics highlight ecologically disparaging forms of destruction, including deforestation, the abusive use of fertilizers and insecticides, oil spills, and toxin release during industrial activities. While such ecocritical studies have concentrated on the physical damage to the environment, at the heart of the matter is a need for considerable attention to the destruction of Indigenous cultural relations to the environment. These are relations built on Indigenous knowledge systems, which permitted the people to live in harmony with nature. Indigenous environmental ethics grounded in sacred ecology enabled the people to live sustainable lives. Their cultural response to that ecology is at the core of their existence, enshrined in a practice which will here be referred to as “worshipping green gods.” With reference to two illustrative plays: Bole Butake’s Lake God and Ekpe Inyang’s The Sacred Forest, this article investigates how Cameroonian writing defines Indigenous people’s cultural interaction with the world of nature and the disruption of such ecocultural relations by the colonial prejudice and the unrestricted exploitation of the ecology by multinational corporations. Bole Butake’s Lake God is a dramatization of the conflict between Fon Joseph, a traditional ruler and the custodian of the spiritual life of the community, and the village folk. Converted into Christianity by his resilient mentor, Father Leo, Fon Joseph “forbid[s] the offering of sacrifices to heathen gods” (Lake God 17). Thus the entente between man, culture, and nature sustained by a yearly ritual is ruptured, leading to an explosion in the lake that destroys all life in that community. There is a political dimension of the cause of the explosion, but the tragedy can further be interpreted culturally as an expression of the gods’ wrath against humanity that has failed to comply with the laws governing nature. Similarly, the community in Inyang’s The Sacred Forest is confronted with the abusive exploitation of the forest resources by a logging company that encroaches into and destroys sacred forests that the villagers consider to be the abode of their ancestors and the real source of their sustenance. The village head is at first complacent with the logging company when he is pushed by the villagers to chase away the intruders, but he comes to consciousness when the community begins to face acute environmental crisis caused by deforestation. Although The Sacred Forest is less substantial than Lake God in terms of structure, content, and the overall dramatic appeal, both plays highlight the deepening postcolonial ecological disorders ravaging their society. The plays reveal that the entente between the Indigenous people, their culture, and the natural environment has been compromised by colonial prejudice and inconsiderate exploitation of the environment by the new colonizer that has emerged—the multinational corporations. Like other African writers and environmental activists (including Wangarii Maathai and Ken Saro-Wiwa), Butake and Inyang challenge neo-colonial practices that cause the degradation of the African earth and appeal for environmental justice. The destruction of the Indigenous people’s sacred sites to serve the colonial and neo-colonial interests, therefore, certainly inspired the writing of Lake God and The Sacred Forest, respectively. First, the playwrights highlight sacred ecology in their presentation of the sacred natural sites to reveal living cultures, institutions, and spiritual mores relevant for conserving nature, culture, and the future. Second, they raise concerns about postcolonial ecological disorders, which have significantly impacted the Indigenous people’s sacred ecology. Third, they foreground the potentials of the knowledge of the Indigenous cultural relations to the environment in reshaping and fostering environmental education. Perspectives on cultural ecology informed by Hubert Zapf’s culture-critical metadiscourse, supported by the postcolonial ecocritical paradigm, provide useful insights into discussing the Indigenous environmental ethics and practices that are grounded in the texts’ sacred ecologies. Zapf’s perspective conforms to Chengy Coral Wu’s thesis that “an African focused ecocriticism can remind Anglo-American ecocriticism that environments are historically and culturally situated” (136) and Huggan’s pluridisciplinary position that postcolonial and ecologically orientated literary and cultural criticism might have to support one another in times of environmental crisis (702). Sacred Ecology: Conserving Nature, Culture, and the Future Butake’s Lake God and Inyang’s The Sacred Forest fit convincingly in the medium of cultural ecology, which draws its cognitive and creative potentials from human interaction with nature as defined by Zapf. Applied to the works of Butake and Inyang, cultural ecology is primarily a more profound way of examining how the environment influences the imagination of Indigenous communities in the texts. The approach considers Zapf’s culture-critical metadiscourse, which specifies the “radical self-examination of the prevailing cultural systems from each overarching ecological perspective of the individual and collective survival and sustainability” (103). Zapf reconfigures disciplines like ecology, cultural studies, and literary theory to offer a promising new direction in ecocriticism with the concept of cultural ecology. For Zapf, cultural ecology deals with the interrelationships between culture and nature without reducing one to the other. Zapf explains further: Literature as a medium of cultural ecology thus specifically focuses on this interactivity of mind and life which is staged in literary texts as a liminal phenomenon on the boundary between culture and nature, self and other, anthropocentric and biocentric dimensions of existence. (91) Literature is, therefore, viewed from Zapf’s perspective as a medium for deconstructing cultural and ecological knowledge. Without plunging deep into Zapf’s very scholarly triadic functional model of literature as cultural ecology, his premise on the analysis of literary culture and cultural knowledge, which literary works produce, is a suitable paradigm for discussing environmental texts. However, Zapf’s ecocritical thought limits itself to Euro-American models of cultural ecology in the same way that mainstream ecocriticism often occludes conversations on Africa’s ecological crisis. Every society has a cosmological understanding and relationship with the ecology. Nevertheless, the distinctive feature of African cultural ecology is sacred and differs immensely from Euro-American eco-cultural worldview. The Western cultural response to the environment is scientifically consumerist and materialistic. Ben Bunting confirms this when he writes that “we [the West] have chosen to worship – in a secular sense – progress instead of ecology” (6). Christianity, a religion that has influenced the Western culture for over two thousand years, adopts a worldview that supports Bunting’s insinuations of the scientific ideology, which pays more attention to scientific progress rather than to the spirituality surrounding the ecology. Its presence in Africa, as it is often claimed, is a “civilising mission.” That is why upholders of Christian values and stereotypical vanguards of cultural imperialism like Father Leo in Butake’s Lake God radically condemn the Indigenous attitudes toward nature as “primitive” and “paganic” since, contrary to the Christian worldview, the African traditional belief patterns and practices acquiesce to nature, in which the ancestors and the spiritual forces—themselves ecological presences—reside. While admitting that the Christian attitude toward nature supports the modern effort toward providing solutions to the environmental crisis affecting humankind, it proves to be ecologically problematic because it excludes the ideology that African Indigenous religions are highly structured in the realm of the environment and culture. Christian belief patterns look elsewhere for spiritual attainment, whereas with Butake’s and Inyang’s cosmological vision, spiritual life is interconnected to both the visible and invisible beings in nature. The playwrights demonstrate that cultural and specifically religious practices in Indigenous Cameroonian societies aim to endow ecological features like the forests, the lakes, rivers, and the seas with the closest tangible evidence of divine presence. They believe that the earth which provides their immediate needs is sacred and should be appeased through the veneration of specific topographical features like the sacred forests, rivers, lakes, rocks, and certain animal and tree species. Reading Cameroonian environmental Literature from the Zapfian orientation is particularly enriching. At the core of the interrelations between Indigenous Cameroonian people, their cultures, and nature, is the sacred located within the “green,” in a more overt sense, within specific sites on the ecological landscapes where the gods are said to reside. The Indigenous communities in both works adhere to the dogma that, by respecting nature, they are honoring God’s wondrous works, since the bedrock of their belief patterns are ecological spaces including the lake god and the sacred forest. Their myths express a nature–culture interaction, treating nature as a divine presence and as the ultimate source of their survival. Thus, Butake’s Lake God and Inyang’s The Sacred Forest are two plays that unpack the knowledge of sacred ecology, the basis for Indigenous cultural relations to the environment. The two sites upon which the well-being of the communities in the texts revolves symbolically illustrate the concept of cultural ecology. These sites—the “lake god” in Butake and the “sacred forest” in Inyang suggested by the titles of both texts foreground mythical implications achieved through the medium of ritual drama. In other words, the concept of God is expressed through the worship of ecological features like the lake and forest. The communion with the gods is achieved within the ecological structures through ritual enactment. Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator explains that Indigenous African communities revere the sacred by celebrating … in ritual and worship, where the living and the world of the spirit intertwine and interact for the common good of the members of the community. To deprive the community of this vital interaction is to bring about its potential destruction because the spirit world and the natural environment are part of a vital ecological pact. (119) In light of Orobator’s explanation, Butake and Inyang consider that the ecology is sacred because their ancestors, spirits, and the gods “intertwine” in the ecosphere. The “ecological” pact between the spirit world and nature is achieved through ritual enactment within the specific features of the earth’s surface, including the sacred forests, sacred groves, lakes, and rivers. In this realm, humans are not masters over nature and do not exploit it without feeling or respect, as the fear of the acrimony of not respecting the ecology in Butake’s Lake God and Inyang’s The Sacred Forest is the main thread that binds actions in both plays. In Lake God, the ecological pact is the annual ritual which the Fibuen (the women’s cult which speaks in a chorus) urges Fon Joseph, the custodian of the land, to perform as revealed in the following dialogue: Chorus: Harvest is near. The Fon will lead the people in sacrifice to the Lake God and consummate our love and kinship by sharing the royal bed with the Queen. And we have children and a good harvest. Fon: Enough I have told you, I am a Christian king. The Church of Christ forbids the taking of a second woman. And I forbid the offering of sacrifices to heathen gods. (Lake God 17) In compliance with his master’s (Father Leo’s) instructions, Fon Joseph ignores the will of the people. Similarly, in The Sacred Forest, the fear of the calamity that befalls the land as a result of the logging company not respecting the people’s bond with nature necessitates the call for a ritual to pacify the gods of the clan. Thus, the two plays illustrate John Smith Mbiti’s views that humans tend to have an inseparable bond with nature, and it is responsible for their existential, spiritual, and cultural sustenance which permits them to behave responsibly toward it and be able to communicate with it through a chief priest (11). In the plays, therefore, the sacred becomes what Zapf refers to as an “overarching ecological perspective” in his explication of literary texts as cultural ecology. Butake’s Lake God and Inyang’s The Sacred Forest, specifically, recreate an ecological universe that is sacred, the primary guiding principle governing Indigenous peoples’ attitude toward the natural environment. The works demonstrate the desperate quest for a spiritual vision attained through ritual enactment, which articulates the African’s origin, his being, the defining forces of history, and what they hope and expect for the future. In both plays, one finds examples of ritual drama which involves the commingling of the spiritual universe, its symbols and myths, with the physical by which means the pragmatic and the utilitarian functions of its spirituality which determine the pulse and the pattern of everyday life are attainable. Through ritual drama, the link between the Cameroonian ecology and the sacred is perfected; it specifies the principles of Indigenous environmental ethics which assure a moral and ethical attitude toward the environment. As writes Fikret Berkes, Traditional knowledge systems tend to have a significant moral and ethical context; there is no separation between nature and culture. In many cultures, nature is imbued with sacredness… . This is “sacred ecology” in the most expansive, rather than in the scientifically restrictive, sense of the word ecology. (11) Berkes’ treatise is very relevant to the African setting in the sense that the interaction of the human and the nonhuman in the African ecology is unique in its sense. In African cultures, the world of nature is sacred, and through human interaction with the spiritual forces of nature, there is respect for ecological harmony, what Franz Fanon has described as the “magical superstructure that permeates the Indigenous society” (18). Butake and Inyang concern themselves with propagating the values and the role of the cultures of Indigenous African people in providing additional solutions in shaping the earth’s future. What links their two plays is the importance the two communities attach to the environment. They consider environmental features as a sacred link between the people, the gods that govern their universe, and their future. The cosmos, flora, and fauna, which make up the environment, commingle with society’s life processes, which have been called the culture of the people. The communion is attainable through ritual, and the rift between belief patterns and social order results in natural and human-made disasters as it is evident in the texts. The lake in Butake’s Lake God is the ultimate life-giver that assures the community of “more children and a good harvest.” Rituals in honor of the lake god are performed in a grove close by the lake called “the sacred grove of the lake god” (39). The sacred grove, therefore, becomes the matrix of holiness wherein man, nature, and the spiritual converge. It is considered to govern human activities through a cultural prism engaging man, nature, and culture and attainable through ritual, cult worship, initiations, and rites. Like the sacred grove, which hosts the lake god in Butake’s drama, Inyang’s sacred forest is responsible for the collective life of the community. Oroka, a key proponent of Indigenous religious beliefs and custodian of the sacred forests, expresses his consternation at the looming catastrophe in a series of searching questions: “Oh, no! Our sacred forest? Is that what will happen to it? The fountain of our lives? The roof that shelters us from sun and rain? The home of our ancestors?” (54). The underlying praxis of African traditional beliefs expressed in Inyang’s work is the intrinsic value of the forest, which has its roots in its “pantheistic-psychic foundation” (Ikeke 345). By implication, the forest is the life force of the community which hosts intrinsic spiritual values that govern and ensure the survival of the community. It is the core of the traditional environment because it is considered the home of the ancestors; it hosts spiritual and totemic forces and provides the space for ritual performances that seek to unite humans with the external forces of the universe. The community in The Sacred Forest later understands that the suffering it undergoes results from the anger of the gods “because we allowed the timber men to destroy our forest” (72). Therefore, the link between the forest and the community’s livelihood can only be established through sacrifice to ensure the provision for food, water, shelter, and the joy of living in harmony with nature. Inyang endorses the significance of ritual in the re-establishing the link between the community and the spiritual forces which govern nature as Butake does, explicit in the following dialogue: Chief Osere: What must we do? Arera: Appease the gods. Restore the home of our ancestors. Chief Osere: How on earth can we do that? Create a new forest? Repair the mountains? How can these be done? Elder: Offer a big sacrifice, to appease the gods. (The Sacred Forest, 72) Ancestor cults have an essential place in the mythology of the people. Conscious of this importance and the fact that the ancestors reside in the sacred forest, which is the source of life, the community insists that a “Big sacrifice” is the only way to appease the ancestors and to reconnect with the spiritual forces that govern their environment. The forest setting as a sacred habitat in Inyang is more elaborate than the grove setting in Butake’s work. However, in Lake God, the ritualistic symbols and the performances are significant enough for understanding the community’s cosmological union between the living, the dead, and the spirits that control the community’s universe. The grove is located by the lake where the seven pillars of Kwifon meet to brainstorm on the looming calamity. The chief priest’s dismal incantation in the sacred grove is expedient for atonement with the spiritual order in the land: Shey Tanto:Hiii Wong! Hiii Bo-Nyo! Hiii Kwifon! Here is drink for you gods! Here is drink for you ancestors! Give us patience, Give us peace of mind, show us the right path That we may bring peace again To this land which you gave us. (Lake God 39) In other words, the sacred grove or the forest is very significant in the African cosmic structure as a place for atonement, reconciliation, and the procuring of harmonious existence between the humans and the ecological and spiritual universe. It is within the forest or the grove set-up that rituals in the plays are enacted. Sacrifices, libations, invocations, and spirit possession create a communication link with the ancestors and spirits in the ecological world who act as guardians of the living. Because the forests and the groves are sacred, exploitation is restricted, and this consciously or unconsciously promotes environmental conservation and protection of both plant and animal species with limitations to the fact that only particular forests and animal species are protected. Butake and Inyang invest the natural environment with psychic powers. For the dramatists, there is an ethical and moral obligation to sacredness if humans have to survive and consider themselves as inseparable from nature and which Western science cannot simply dismiss as superstition. The natural environment is the abode of the gods and the spiritual forces that govern human life and culture, and they can be accessed through the medium of ritual. Ritual enactment, thus, determines the rhythm of human life, of the African spiritual ecology, and of its symbols and myths bringing to being an inevitable reality (Enekwe 25). The texts’ ecology and culture, their sacred forests, lake, and grove settings are well-suited to the rituals, a medium through which the ancestors and the spirits and the gods that inhabit the entire realm of the natural environment are appeased and upon whose benevolence the community’s survival is sustained and the future is ascertained. Postcolonial Ecological Disorders Reading Butake’s Lake God and Inyang’s The Sacred Forest in a postcolonial ecocritical context, there is considerable evidence of ecological disorders exerted on the Cameroonian environment by colonial prejudice and multinational corporations, what Nixon (as already stated) has referred to as the violence on the environmentalism of the poor. While examining the overall postcolonial environmentalism, Nixon addresses writers on the African continent like Njabulo-Ndebele and Ken Saro-Wiwa, whom he considers as advocates for environmental justice because they expose the violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples’ environment across time and space. Caminero-Santangelo’s authoritative work: Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology emboldens Nixon’s perspective by focusing exclusively on African environmentalism under the burdens of colonialism and neo-imperialism. Colonial powers justified their taking over African lands with the claim that their presence in Africa was a “civilising mission” liberating the African people from “jungle primitivism,” spiritual barrenness, and intellectual “inferiority” (Wright, Wilderness into Civilized Shapes 20). Indigenous peoples’ cultural relation to their environment was considered primitive and, for a long time after independence, colonial prejudice and neo-imperialist interests have continued to disregard the cultural practices that the Indigenous people used to adapt to their environment. As a consequence, it has become difficult to define and shape Indigenous cultural practices that are beneficial to the sustenance of the ecology (Poddar 208), thus creating ecological disorders, intensely disruptive of the correlation between Indigenous people, their natural environment, and their culture. The consequent disruption of African cultures, belief systems, and the ecology is of primary concern in Butake's Lake God and Inyang's The Sacred Forest. The verisimilitude with which Indigenous environmental ethics is enacted in the plays provides a convincing rationale for discussing them from the perspectives of postcolonial ecocriticism. Ebolaji Idowu states that … the basic obstacles to any study of Africa with reference to cultures and beliefs are the size of the continent, her historical rape and her consequent disruption, racial, social and spiritual. There is also the important fact of the complexity of her cultures and systems of belief. (103) Idowu’s hard-fact statement on the “historical rape” and the consequent disruption of the cultural and spiritual life of Africa are illustrative of the extremes of the colonial prejudice and the schema of the present-day incarnation of colonialism—the multinational corporations. The colonial agenda included cultural imperialism and discrimination of values, which led to the destruction of Indigenous religions and, therefore, cultural relations to the environment. In Butake’s Lake God, the destruction of the Indigenous cultural relations to the environment takes two forms: cultural imperialism and outright destruction of the sacred site, the lake god. The standard-bearer for colonial prejudice and cultural imperialism in Lake God is Father Leo, whose mission is to completely eradicate the Indigenous beliefs, which helped the people to live in harmony with their environment: “I have converted most of the pagans in this village except the mad Shey. He is always talking about sacrificing to his lake god” (10). Shey Bo-Nyo is the pillar of the community’s spiritual cult, the steadfast diviner and priest of the lake god whom Father Leo refers to as the only pagan who has refused to be converted. Paganism, a term which is tagged with the Indigenous African traditions as expressed in this context, illustrates the hostile condemnation of African beliefs by the colonial agents like Father Leo. Again, Father Leo’s pronouncements in church during a doctrine class for women are very revealing of colonial prejudice: The Fon, your Fon, has told me that there is a group of five rebellious women in this village who are pulling you away from the steep and narrow road that leads to everlasting life and taking you along the big motor road that leads directly to hell, where Satan reigns supreme, and where you will burn in everlasting fire. Yensi, Kimaa and the other devils … are taking you on a fast and easy ride on the big motor road to Lucifer’s kingdom. (Lake God 32) Colonial prejudice against Indigenous Cameroonian belief systems as expressed here is very intense, illustrated by a plethora of nihilistic images including “rebellious,” “hell,” “Satan,” “everlasting fire,” devils,” and “Lucifer;” images that not only border on nihilism but suggest utter damnation for the women who advocate spiritual attainment with nature. Women in the African cosmology have a close entente with the earth because, as the mothers of the universe, they cultivate crops to feed the family. They understand better than the men what it means to lose contact with the soil. As a result of the broken link binding the people and the lake god, the Fibuen urges the Fon to lead the community in a ritual of atonement. Fon Joseph, the anointed custodian of the ritual enactment and, therefore, the link between the community and the world of the spirit, has been enticed into Christianity, and he no longer listens to the people whom he rules. It is this plea to the Fon by the women that Father Leo describes as leading them to “hell,” “everlasting fire,” and “Lucifer’s kingdom;” a forceful rejection of belief patterns that revere the ecology and a blazing portrayal of colonial prejudice in favor of Judeo-Christian ideology. Butake’s Lake God is perhaps one of the most revealing texts in which Christianity and the African Traditional Religions challenge each other. The attitude projected in the text adopts what Nisbert Taisekwa Taringa has described in another context as being “coterminous with attitudes to nature found in Christianity and its scientific ideology” (14). Such an attitude, as revealed by Father Leo’s strategy in Lake God, may be understood to be materialistic, mechanical, and deprived of spiritual life. For instance, Father Leo provides funds to Fon Joseph to buy and rear cattle as a way of keeping faith with Christianity. He further insinuates that the visit of the two Europeans to the lake prior to the explosion will bring development to the village. Apart from the cultural imperialism masterminded by Father Leo in Butake’s Lake God is the outright attack on religious and cultural sites and institutions that the Indigenous communities put in place to safeguard the environment. Neo-imperialism emerged and continues to be a major threat to the environment. Tsenay Serequeberhan suggests that the neo-colonialist approach to Africa unveils itself through the guise of developmental aids and technological and scientific assistance, whereby the imperialist strategy imposes itself on the country (13). The result usually is the uncontrolled exploitation of the resources, including mining, logging, damming, and carrying out experiments leading to deforestation and the destruction of the ecology. The Lake Nyos disaster that happened in 1986 is an overt illustration of the neo-colonial practices that Butake simulates imaginatively in Lake God. Akin to Serequeberhan’s viewpoint, the cause of the explosion in Lake Nyos, as controversial as it may seem, is more evidently linked historically to neo-imperialist conspiracy. Two references suffice to establish the point. First is Eugenia Shanklin’s opinion that the controversy was pitched between the traditional or modern explanations, the most popular explanation being the “modern” one, whereby a foreign country exploded a neutron bomb in the lake area for strategic reasons (13). Second, according to Henry Ngenyam Bang, the real cause of the explosion of Lake Nyos in 1986 that killed 1746 people has hardly been established (19). A statement from a research survey carried out with the survivors of the Lake Nyos disaster by Henry Ngenyam Bang shows that the survivors expressed doubt about the nature of the disaster as “natural” as they have been told by the government and scientists. They believe the source of the gas was from the testing of a lethal weapon by a foreign government with the complicity of the Cameroonian government. (223) Undoubtedly inspired by the explosion in Lake Nyos, Butake wrote Lake God to evoke a similar controversy as in the opinions cited above. The prologue to the play rendered by the madman raises suspicion surrounding the cause of the disaster, which corroborates with the doubts of the survivors in Bang’s report: I have heard some foolish talk about toxic gas. Beware of words that are likely to arouse again The anger of an already vengeful god. Beware! I say, for my god is the god of terror! (Lake God 7) The excerpt from the madman’s monologue suggests that the calamity is, after all, not caused by the accumulation of the toxic gas as the government and the scientists advanced. The seeming madman who makes the pronouncements in the prologue sets a controversial tone between myth and science in the play. Although he focuses more on myth, one may not completely rule out the possibility of the lethal test. The madman’s suspicion of some conspiracy beyond the considerations of toxic gas explosion in the lake collaborates with Father Leo’s revelation of the arrival of some Europeans, a few days before the disaster occurs. In a conversation with Fon Joseph, Father Leo reveals that the Europeans paid a visit to the lake guided by his steward boy. The mission of the Europeans to the lake is not known, although the reverend fellow quickly covers up with an explanation which remains questionable: “You know, we Europeans are always looking for knowledge” (11) and one wonders whether the quest for knowledge should be conducted at such a tremendous cost. While the real causes of the explosion of the lake in Butake’s Lake God are difficult to parse, in Inyang’s The Sacred forest, there is a more direct disruption of the ecosystem by logging companies. More specifically, the logging company destroys the sacred forests, the impact of which is severely felt by the Indigenous community. The logging company does not consult the community before exploiting the forests upon which their livelihood depends because the company has a license from the neo-colonial watchdogs to exploit the forest: ARERA:They have a licence, a very powerful paper. OROKA:Licence to destroy our ancestors’ home? ARERA:Does that mean anything to them? The men are out for real business, Mammy Boy. They have b[r]ought a whole village of powerful machines. (The Sacred Forest 53–54). The “powerful paper” or the license and the “powerful machines” heighten the play’s symbolism. They represent hegemony in terms of economic power and cultural influence over Indigenous societies. They suggest clues to the audacity for ruthless exploitation in which the Indigenous peoples are not aware of and are victims of such human-made ecological disasters. Their habitat, “our ancestors’ home,” is destroyed and their survival in the locality after deforestation is threatened by different kinds of misfortunes including the destruction of homes by the winds, poor harvest, and famine. The neo-colonialist exploitation of the land of the Indigenous peoples sometimes takes the subtle form of promises of “development” including road constructions, the building of schools and hospitals, and the provision of electricity and pipe-borne water. However, Huggan and Tiffin consider recent ecological dialogues of “development” in Africa to be a form of cloaked neo-colonialism and “a vast technocratic apparatus designed primarily to serve the economic and political interest of the West,” resulting in environmental degradation in the postcolony (27). Butake’s Lake God and Inyang’s The Sacred Forest present neo-imperialist practices that have affected the relationship between the ecology and the Indigenous Cameroonian cultures under the guise of developing the communities. For Father Leo, the visit of the Europeans to the lake will bring more development: “There is more development coming if they find what they want” (Lake God 11). The Manager of the logging company’s assertive promise in The Sacred Forest, “Count on me, I am here to promote your development” (69) certifies what the community has been made to expect in an antecedent dialogue—“not only good roads but also a school and a health centre” (61). The antithesis of the promises offered in the two drama texts is disaster, pain, and disillusionment. The logical claim of development promises in Lake God incongruously foreshadows the lake disaster that claims almost two thousand human lives and that of other living beings around the lake. Inyang’s The Sacred Forest presents the villagers as disillusioned by the fact that the road promised them is constructed into the forest to facilitate the exportation of timber rather than link the villages with the outside world. Moreover, after the logging company leaves, the wooden bridges start collapsing, their sacred forests are destroyed, and there is calamity in the land. The question one keeps asking is: is the “development” promised the people worth the entire ecological crisis in the country today? Despite the much talked about foreign aid and developmental assistance from the multinational corporations, Cameroon, like many parts of Africa, is today plagued by civil violence, ecological disorders, and economic hardships. This is not to say that modernization is awful, but to ask whether it is worth it, or worsened, when the promises made are not respected. Butake and Inyang question whether the destruction of Indigenous sacred sites that permitted Indigenous communities to protect and conserve their environment, as well as dialogues of “development,” have left Cameroonians happier than they were before. According to the authors, the colonial prejudice, the destruction of the sacred sites by multinational corporations, and dialogues of development have not only brought disorder and disaster to the local communities. They have also caused conflict, warfare, hate, pollution, loss of resources, and above all, the rift in the relationship between the IIndigenous people and nature. Potentials for Environmental Education Understanding the centrality of the sacred link between humans, culture, and nature in Indigenous communities is a significant step toward contributing to the universal concern for the environment that colonial agency, through Christianity and multinational corporations, rejects rather than promotes. Once a forest, as in Inyang’s The Sacred Forest, or a grove and lake, as in in Butake’s Lake God, were designated sacred, customary laws served as taboos preventing the communities from exploiting the resources, thus contributing to the conservation of biodiversity. Such taboos restricted the exploitation of the forests for certain plants, trees, and animal species, as well as those out of the sacred forests. This protection of the environment by Indigenous people through a sacred understanding of the intrinsic value of the forests and groves, as well as of the water bodies and other ecological features, can contribute to further dialogues of ecological protection. Valorizing the sacred is, therefore, essential for raising environmental awareness and nature conservation in Indigenous communities. Butake and Inyang sought to endorse restrictions on the sacred forests, the groves, and other sacred sites like the lakes because such restrictions ensure effective biodiversity conservation strategies. The plays aver that Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of environmental conservation is vast and includes belief patterns, taboos, cultivation practices, control of non-native exploiters amongst others, all of which current environmental protection strategies could incorporate in environmental education. Many of these methods were enshrined in cultural practices, worldviews, and values, and especially in belief systems that underscored the equilibrium between the environment, people, and the spiritual universe, handed down to the younger generation by a committee of elders (Wane and Chandler 93). Such knowledge was embedded in the conservative and protective strategies with which Indigenous people understood and conceptualized ecosystems to make them vital for sustainable existence. Communality is a powerful uniting force for conservative and protective strategies. In Lake God and The Sacred Forest, it involves not only the sharing of communal interest among the people but also considers that the sacred groves and forests, the lake, and all the elements of the land are one with the people, their ancestors, and the spirits that govern the universe. The concern over the non-appeasement of a lake god in Butake’s Lake God is communal, especially reinforced by the fear of looming catastrophe, in a similar way that the destruction of the sacred forest by the logging company is a major cause for concern for the whole community in Inyang’s The Sacred Forest. Thus, the spirit of communality is a great lesson to be integrated into environmental education because it sees the ecology as not belonging to an individual but to the community. For this to be achieved, Indigenous communities entrusted the running of the common good like the sacred grove to a chief who was controlled indirectly by a chief priest with the role of performing rituals to ensure interconnections of the sacred and the ecology. The communal responsibility toward the environment can be expanded to include the complementarity of Indigenous ecological knowledge systems with Western ecologies. In his exploration of the non-Western knowledge systems, Berkes recognizes the resilience of the sacred in Indigenous cultural relations with nature while at the same time suggesting that the complementarity of Indigenous knowledge systems and Western ecologies can merge into a sacred ecology. While this is a laudable project, complementarity can be mutually beneficial only if the cultural mechanisms in the different cultures and their relations to the environment, which contradict each other in Butake’s Lake God and Inyang’s The Sacred Forest, are clearly understood and considered valuable for saving the earth without one undermining the peculiarities of the other. In response to the need for intensive environmental activism, Cameroonian writers like Bole Butake and Ekpe Inyang also aim to idealize cosmic harmony in communities whose relation to the world of nature is affected by colonization and neo-colonialism. They do this by revoking the consciousness of Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of environmental conservation through literature. For these writers, environmental activism is expedient to re-educate the Indigenous communities so that they act according to the laws of sacred ecology. Therefore, environmental activism through the medium of imaginative literature promises to be an effective and influential strategy toward environmental education, especially in reaching out to a broader audience. In other words, more and more, literary and cultural criticism should challenge the unjust and ecologically destructive forms of neo-colonial development and resource extraction impacting the country’s environment. Criticism should highlight the relevance of Indigenous cultural practices and how such practices can raise awareness and provide additional solutions for shaping the earth’s future, given the swelling ecological crisis. Therefore, introducing literature as cultural ecology, that is by providing an innovative strategy, a methodology, and a critical approach for investigating, appreciating, and disseminating ideas on environmental ethics and sustainability, should certainly contribute to the dialogue. The benefits of studying literature and stressing its functions, which, according to Handel Kashope Wright, is a shift from the aesthetic-based literary studies to cultural and political concerns (3), certainly provides a meaningful strategy for educating communities about the environment. Conclusion Examining Bole Butake’s Lake God and Epke Inyang’s The Sacred Forest as sacred ecology aimed to illustrate that Cameroonian writing plays a fundamental role in investigating, appreciating, and disseminating ideas on environmental ethics and sustainability. It is evident in their works that Indigenous cultural relations to the environment can help reshape and foster environmental education as a contribution to discourses on the current world environmental crisis. Indigenous people’s spiritual relations to the environment must not be seen in terms of what Roger S. Gottlieb calls religious environmentalism (9), a more conscious strategy by Western science to apply environmental protection worldwide but as an inherent and harmonious co-existence of humans, nature, and culture sustained by the natural principle of mutual respect. Certainly, however, Indigenous communities today cannot revert to all prehistoric metaphysical methods of valuing nature, some of which are unacceptable, like burning of the bushes and the forests and other cultural practices that endanger the environment. However, many other practices are tenable today and can be exploited as a contribution to the strategies for formulating environmental ethics and education necessary for resolving the ecological inequity in Cameroon and other postcolonial contexts. Therefore, there was hardly anything wrong with worshipping green gods. There is, indeed, an inextricable link between African ecology and traditional religion, which emphasizes the protection of the ecology as the primary responsibility of the ancestors, the spirits, and the gods who reside in the natural world and with whom humans must connect for a more meaningful and sustainable existence. Ecocultural equilibrium is sustained by the threefold pillar of nature, culture, and the sacred. In this opinion, treating the environment as sacred is a veritable strategy for liaising with the creator, for honoring God and saving the ecology, culture, and the future. And so, apotheosizing nature has tremendous benefits to the people, the ecology, and culture, and one can add, to the scientific schema of environmentalism. There is, consequently, a need for environmentalists to turn toward Indigenous religions to encourage an ethical response to nature. Current efforts in the global environmental protection and sustainability should adopt the Indigenous cultural practices which valorized the sacred ecology and sustained environmental viability to enhance perceptions about nature. Such efforts should advocate for new ecological ethics based in part on Indigenous wisdom, which, as Butake and Inyang suggest, can help reshape and foster environmental education as a contribution to discourses on the current world environmental crisis. Acknowledgements This work was supported by The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency Program from February 13 to March 13, 2018. 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TI - Was Anything Wrong with Worshipping Green Gods?: Sacred Ecology and Indigenous Environmental Ethics in Cameroonian Writing
JO - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isaa183
DA - 2020-11-30
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/was-anything-wrong-with-worshipping-green-gods-sacred-ecology-and-a00AeoPABw
SP - 706
EP - 725
VL - 29
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -