Global Coloniality and Ecological Injustice in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021)

Introduction: Conceptualizing Decolonial Environmentalism

This study uses what decolonial scholars such as Grosfoguel (2011, 2013) and Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013) call global coloniality, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s (2013) idea of dispossession, and Mbembe’s (2019) concept of corporate necropolitics, to analyze postcolonial environmentalism and relations of extractivism, exploitation and subjection of African land and its people in Mbue’s novel How Beautiful We Were (2021). Global coloniality identifies the universal logics encoded in racialised power relations (what Mignolo, 2007 has called “colonial matrix of power”) that were imposed and entrenched by Eurocentric epistemologies in the global empire. Quijano (2000, 2010), Mignolo (2007, 2021) and Maldonado-Torres (2007, 2008) argue that colonial modernity inoculated a human-centered hubris in the social, material and spatial universes of previously colonized populations which is contributing to the ongoing global environmental crisis. This study appropriates Butler and Athanasiou’s (2013) notion of dispossession, which describes the existential and performative aspects of human populations and political relations that generate vulnerable and co-dependent beings, to explore relations of victors and victims in Mbue’s novel. We also incorporate Mbembe’s (2001, 2019) idea of corporate necropolitics which designates how wealth is extracted from populations who are ruled by the sovereign power of the “commandement.” In Mbembe’s (2001) formulation, the commandement designates a government’s or a private corporation’s monopoly on violence in the postcolony. Mbembe’s theorization of how state institutions produce “specific relations of subjection” is useful in analyzing the neo-colonial ecological violence and dynamics of capital extractions as depicted in How Beautiful We Were (Mbembe, 2001, p. 24). The dispossessing infrastructure of wealth accumulation in Africa is enabled by a distorted global power hierarchy and local regimes that perpetuate the coloniality of corporate extraction. Mbue’s novel dramatizes the environmental problems affecting a fictional African oil-state. The novel portrays land degradation, greed, the violation of indigenous people’s rights, poverty and damaging neocolonial practices related to an American oil conglomerate named Pexton. This brings the question of how, in the novel, both marginal populations and environmental landscapes face the ecological violence of global coloniality that entrenches dispossession, exploitation, ecocides, genocide and death as modes of extracting capital in postcolonial African landscape. Under consideration in this study is the individual and collective experiences of Mbue’s characters such as Thula, Sahel, Yaya, and Bongo who demonstrate the ways that the violence of colonial modernity generates genocidal, ecocidal and biocidal ways of being in relation to environmental cartographies in postcolonial Cameroon.

It is worth noting that Mbue is a highly visible literary novelist whose work has been reviewed in book sections of widely known news outlets such as the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, among others. Her debut novel Behold the Dreamers won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2017. With its focus on environmental tragedy in an imaginary African community of Kosawa, How Beautiful We Were represents a dramatic shift in Mbue’s previous themes of marriage, class and race in her first novel. As Karmakar and Chetty (2023a, p. 127) have noted, How Beautiful We Were “assumes significance in the context of . . . modes of neoliberal capitalist encroachment and governance that insidiously favor a select few countries and social groups, while forcing others to endure the tragedies of ecological and economic dispossessions.” This study deploys the lens of global coloniality to unpack Mbue’s treatment of the connected themes of environmental conflict, ecological violence and injustice in How Beautiful We Were.

Global coloniality describes uneven power relations throughout the world that are configured by the enduring legacy of colonialism and imperial infrastructures of domination (Grosfoguel, 2011, 2013). In Africa, global coloniality is propelled by the global engine of corporate necropolitics, which dispossess human populations and natural environments as an institutional strategy of extracting economic capital for a selected few political beneficiaries and international private capitalists. Maldonado-Torres (2008) posits that the peripheral condition of former colonies throughout the modern world today where people of color reside is a consequence of the dispossessive hand of coloniality. In other words, the colonial relationship constitutes the method of a Western philosophical pathology, which establishes the “order of things [. . .] within the murderous and rapist view of a vigilant ego,” primarily targeting men and women of color as penetrable beings (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, p. 218). In Africa, colonial cultures from Western Europe violently reorganize the material, spatial and social landscapes of the former colonized nations through co-opting the social and physical death of colonized people as a mode of extracting economic resources and cheap labor from the periphery of imperial empires. The persistence of the Eurocentric economic and geo-political dominance in the Global South is reinforced by endless epistemic constructions, which are based on veiled racism and the naturalization of neocolonialism. Mbembe’s (2019, p. 1) notion of “corporate necropolitics” designates how global coloniality operates in the local economic, political and metaphysical institutions of postcolonial societies emerging from the violence that came with colonialism. Corporate necropolitics is one aspect of the sovereign power wielded by governing institutions that can intervene in the life and death of populations, life cycles and natural ecosystems under conditions of quasi-colonial capitalist relations. Mbembe (2019) argues that post-independence tyrants, corporations and concessionary companies in Africa continuously wage war and wanton violence on populations and ecosystems in the postcolony because of the stubborn resiliency of coloniality which reproduces violence as a mode of governance and resource extraction. Similarly, Butler and Athanasiou (2013) notes that freedom and democracies often erode under specific economic and political conditions where the production of a shared horizon of dispossession in co-vulnerable populations benefits certain hegemonic forces and power structures. The notions of corporate necropolitics and dispossession as theoretical concepts allow us to explore how the self-sufficiency of individuals and communities is systematically battered by the invisible hand of extractivism and volatile markets that are operated by global actors, financial institutions and governments who extract capital and natural resources with the use of military and extra-legal violence. Leaning on these ideas, this study analyses Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021) focusing on how global coloniality enables dispossession, extra-legal, ecological violence and marginality in the Cameroonian postcolony.

Firstly, this study discusses Mbue’s depiction of global coloniality as an apparatus of neo-Western modernity related to the various ways in which violence and “sacrificial” death are exported to countries on the periphery of the global capitalist order. This study explores how Mbue portrays the extractive violence which keeps human life and natural environments in the Global South as inferior and exposes them to capitalist expropriation and accumulation. In doing this, the study considers how global coloniality is spread by corporations such as Pexton oil company which decolonial scholars such as Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015, p. 427) have termed the “missionaries of coloniality.” The missionaries of coloniality are, as Gomo’s (2010, p. 71) narrator in A Fine Madness reminds us, the “white tourists who [are] not tourists at all but terrorists” (p. 71). The question now concerns how conquest, violence and extractivism are normalized in the ecological and material spaces portrayed in How Beautiful We Were (2021). Further to this, how does global coloniality as embodied in the figure of Pexton normalize racial and economic differences in a postcolonial context where “relations of enmity” (Mbembe, 2019, p. 23) aggravate social taxonomies of predation, human disposability, black-on-black violence and the appropriation and degradation of environmental ecosystems. We consider this state of postcolonial being, tracing its roots and phenomenology in Mbue’s motif of dispossession, land, cultural, and epistemic dispossession experienced by marginalized communities dramatize recurring ecological themes in the novel such as the loss of natural beauty of landscapes, local traditions of symbiotic relations between humans and nature, as well as the celebration of natural cycles of death and rebirth. In what follows, the discussion turns to how Mbue uses the symbiotic and harmonious relations between Africans and nature as decolonial environmental motifs transgressing the injustice of Eurocentric extractive power.

Narrativising the Cultural Politics of Oil-Extraction in the Cameroonian Postcolony: An Outline of How Beautiful We Were

How Beautiful We Were (2021) depicts how a fictional oil rich state in Africa is exposed to ecological devastation, genocide, displacement and dispossession in a decade long “David-and-Goliath battle” ¹ between an African village named Kosawa and an American oil conglomerate called Pexton. Rather than using the actual names of existing oil producing nations in Africa such as Angola, Cameroon, the Republic of Congo and the Niger Delta to set her novel, Mbue, instead chooses to name her imaginary oil nation Bézam. Mbue deploys Bézam and the village of Kosawa as sites of grotesque social ills, marginality, dysfunctionality, and ecological devastation unfolding in former colonies across Africa that are endowed with vast natural resources. The destabilization of social life in many rural communities across Africa that are close to sites of resource extraction and environmental degradation is shown in the way Mbue fictionalizes the collusion between private international corporations with elites governing dysfunctional postcolonial states. The synergetic relationship between private capitalists and despots in the post-colonial exploitation of Bézam heightens what Mbembe (2019, p. 77) observes as a form of neo-colonialism which is being waged by corporations and concessionary companies which unleash war and death on populations to protect their financial interests. Thus, through corporate neo-colonialism, the relations of violence and dispossession characterizing Pexton’s relationship with post-independence rulers like the character called His Excellency, results in the apocalyptic devastation of Kosawa’s environment and the precarity of communal health and livelihoods. The government of His Excellency normalizes brazen atrocities and wanton acts of violence against the people of Kosawa and in many other villages in the country. The ruthless tyrant annihilates citizens and entire villages who would dare threaten the supreme authority of the ruling elite thus creating a safe passage for corporate extractions. Pexton’s collusion with the local dictatorship of His Excellency presents a mirage of “smart” partnership and mutual benefit whose not-so-underlying intention is to mystify and sanitize the plunder and death unfolding in Kosawa. The quasi-colonial relations of domination characterizing the extraction of oil in Mbue’s novel reveal how global coloniality structures the hierarchy of agency and urgencies in ways that systematically and strategically dispenses with the ordinary citizen’s power over local resources. Starks (2021, p. 54) describes How Beautiful We Were as a “great climate novel,” noting how Mbue’s presentation of collective experiences and viewpoints of multiple characters expose the attendant consequences of a “Western colonial extractive mindset.” The Western colonial extractive mindset in the context of this study describes global coloniality which is underscored by plunder, extraction and exploitation of human and natural resources in Africa. While Junejo and Tania’s (2022) study examines how Mbue portrays the ways in which western companies cause land deterioration by poisoning environmental landscapes with toxic oil spills, Biama et al. (2022, p. 317) explore how Mbue uses the “beliefs and traditions of Kosawa’s people to actively resist the ecological violence affecting their land.” Similarly, Xausa (2023, p. 199) reads Mbue’s novel using postcolonial perspectives and notes that the novel tells “a story of corporate greed and inequality: it reveals the colonial origins of ecological devastation and its dramatic consequences for the Global South, foregrounding the entanglement between colonialism and environmental exploitation.” This study intervenes in these discussions by reading Mbue’s novel from a decolonial theoretical standpoint. This study views the ecological degradation in Mbue’s novel as a metaphor of interlocking political, material and social issues entrenching precarity in being post-colonial Africa. As Karmakar and Chetty (2023a, p. 125) also note, Mbue’s novel “offers a powerful depiction of the exacerbating repercussions of capitalism through a story of environmental degradation wrought by oil extraction in the fictional tropical African village of Kosawa.” In the same vein, Ehanire (2022, p. 167) conceptualizes the post-colonial environmental, economic and political precarity in How Beautiful We Were as a product of neocolonial “weapons of subjugation” which she characterizes as naturally operating with “insensitivity, intimidation, and divide and rule mechanism[s to] facilitate the oppressors.” These “weapons of subjugation” are markers of injustice which reflect what is (dis)continuing in shapeshifting processes and methods of extractive neocolonial capital.

Global Coloniality, Dispossession and Ecocide

In How Beautiful We Were (2021), Western oil corporations entrench the logic of coloniality through globalized hierarchies of rights to land exploration. The novel retraces the circumstances that leads to the conflict between Kosawa and Pexton from the perspective of the Nangi family who retell the tragic calamities that befall their tranquility as their village’s fertile farmlands are poisoned by toxic oil-spills caused by Pexton’s oil extraction. Besides Nangi’s narrative, Mbue uses multiple intergenerational voices of Kosawa’s populace including children to produce a polyphonic narrative of collective loss where village life degrades alongside a despoiling landscape. The intergeneration voices are not only symbolic metaphors of perpetuation of oppression. Rather, as shall become clearer where we unpack the prominent motifs in the intergeneration voices, the voices also symbolize the continuity of resilience, protest and struggle against corporate extraction. Xausa (2023, p. 198), for example, notes that “the young protagonists of the novel are not the helpless inheritors of the catastrophic future that has been created for them, but fight for their own place in the global climate action.” For Xausa, the intergenerational nature of the voices in the novel esthetically and politically echo the “. . . moment when young people have been mobilizing to force the issue of justice onto the climate agenda. . ..” The prominence of the young narrator Thula in the novel and the combative disposition of young people of Kosawa in their fight against Pexton highlights the struggle for futures much in the same manner as various youth protests movements in Africa led by young activists such as Elizabeth Wathuti and Vanessa Nakate. This dimension to the narrative situates How Beautiful We Were – not only in a historical, political and moral context of local inequalities fueled by global corporate extraction but perhaps more importantly, in a context in which local young people actively resist their alienation from their future.

We can also read the polyphonic nature of Mbue’s novel as symbolically reflecting the ways in which the effects of extraction are at once personal but also communal. However, personal experiences of Pexton’s ecological violence define group vulnerability. Gasztold (2022) views the communal exposure to Pexton’s petroviolence as microcosmic of the neo-colonial violence of global capital on post-colonial nations. Gasztold (2022, p. 196) sees, in Pexton’s transnational ecological violence on Kosawa, “the persistence of colonial structures and their detrimental effect on the nation’s development.” This communalization of “victimhood” is captured in the nostalgia of the title “How Beautiful We Were” which effectively mourns the “ugly” present by reminiscing the good old days of untainted nature. Furthermore, the title of the novel “How Beautiful We Were,” reflects the communal traditional belief systems underpinning African environmentalism where human life is interconnected to natural life-systems. This notion of nature and its relationship to humanity and humanness stands opposed to Pexton’s Western capitalist avarice which commodifies the natural environment. Much of the events occurring in the narrative are told from the perspective of the main character Thula Nangi. Thula is a young girl who is born and raised in Kosawa until her departure for tertiary education in the United States of America. Thula and other villagers in Kosawa grow up bearing the brunt of Pexton’s capitalistic extractions while the quixotic and brutal dictatorship of His Excellency lend itself as an accessory to the systemic killing of villagers such as the Nangis by petroleum toxins, contaminated farmlands, terror, nepotism and tribal politics. In the novel, the dispossessive power of corporate colonialism and oil extraction is evoked through the trope of nostalgia. Nostalgia reflects, in an affective way, what Africa and Africans lose beyond the extracted product. The story shifts readers between multiple historical eras in a way that illustrates the negative change caused by oil extraction. Mbue uses the voices of various characters inhabiting these eras to reveal the progression of environmental degradation and the various forms of losses the villagers incur which make them recall fondly the beauty of previous lives in Kosawa without Pexton. The novel’s main action begins when many children in Kosawa, including those of the Nangi family, start dying from Pexton’s pollution of the village’s drinking water and farmland. Mbue uses the child figure to portray the vulnerability and innocence of the Kosawa community and the subsequent disposability of human life and natural environment at the hands of the mighty Pexton corporation. Thula describes how the first victims of Pexton’s pollution were young infants and children who drank water that was contaminated by leaking pipelines and constant gas flares from the extracted oil from deep underground wells. She mourns while remembering those:

who had died from diseases with neither names nor cures—our siblings and cousins and friends who had perished from the poison in the water and the poison in the air and the poisoned food growing from the land that lost its purity the day Pexton came drilling. We hoped the men would look into our eyes and feel something for us. We were children, like their children, and we wanted them to recognise that. (p. 7)

The death of many children because of contaminated water and air pollution in Kosawa underlines how corporations like Pexton satisfy capitalism’s trademark impulses to destroy anything in its path to profits. Through the metaphorical depiction of Kosawa as a victimized child figure, the novel subtly evokes the exploitative agency of capitalist extraction which is simultaneously heightened by and causes the powerlessness of the Kosawa community. The contaminated water, food and land are symbols of Kosawa people’s disposability as they get entanglement in extractive matrices of foreign capital. Read in the context of the novel’s overarching anti-capitalist discourse, Kosawa as the metaphorical contaminated “child” comes to symbolize a lost way of life. The grief that accompanies Thula’s nostalgic experience of and reflection on loss is juxtaposed with Pexton’s indifference to human suffering in ways that depict the unequal power relations between the winners and losers of capitalist extraction. Pexton’s contempt for the wellbeing of the locals is shown in how the company’s laborers scoff at the suggestion that the company should invest in better pipelines to avoid constant oil-spills and contamination. Thula describes how, when oil spills damage local farmlands, the villagers are condescendingly told that all they needed to do to reclaim their farmlands was to remove the [contaminated] topsoil and toss it aside” (p. 67). The disposability of productive soil is thus symbolically metaphorised to illustrate the disposability of both the local ecosystem and populations that depend on it.

Beyond reflecting on the nature of the devastation of local livelihoods and natural environments, the metaphor of soil contamination is also linked to capitalist power structures in the postcolony. Capitalist power structures manifest in Kosawa people’s incapacity to protect their soil from Pexton’s contaminations are responsible for the precarious environment that Mbembe (2019, p. 10), in another context, describes as “human predation.” Kosawa people’s relations with nature is integral to their communal and spiritual life. How this symbiotic connection is destroyed by Pexton’s environmentally destructive practices is telling of the nature of threats faced by the villagers beyond livelihoods. Besides the chemical condemnation of the soil, alienation from livelihood involves the villagers’ loss of land they can identify with various aspects of their lives. Pexton is allotted huge swathes of land by the beneficiaries of state capture such as His Excellency and Woja Beki who gift the oil company virgin forests and tributary rivers as a concession. The oil company constructs an oilfield for the purposes of oil extraction which they name “The Gardens,” despite the irony of oil pipelines despoiling the once thriving eco-system in the region. The Gardens ironically symbolize the deep contradictions in African oil-states where economic disparities are rife despite the immense natural wealth that only benefits a small minority at the expense of disenfranchised citizens. In fact, Pexton’s naming of their new headquarters as The Gardens highlights the corporation’s attempts to onomastically “green” its otherwise extractive presence in Kosawa. In this commercial logic, the imagery of “gardens” would “assimilate” Pexton into the nature of Kosawa to create a false sense of social responsibility. Gasztold (2022, p. 198) observes that The Gardens is a “gated community, and intended only for the employees and their families. The local people do not benefit from such enterprises, which are strictly exploitative and fail to bring any social investment.” Besides its “green” symbolism (as “The Gardens”) which appears in name only, The Gardens function as a “divide and rule” mechanism where Kosawa employees are empowered and “privileged” out of the group consciousness.

The façade of environmental responsibility in the onomastic mask of “The Gardens” is betrayed by the personification of Pexton as a gardener who prizes “oil [as] their flower” (p. 27). The aporia of oil as the “flower” of The Gardens clearly reveals the commercial interests of Pexton. In a conversation with Lusaka, a father whose child is the first to die from Pexton’s water poisoning, Thula notes that while “children die on, the gas flares rage on, the pipelines spill on, [they are] in danger of annihilation and [they are] fully capable of freeing themselves” (p. 89). The contradiction of a “garden” that is effectively a death zone unveils Pexton’s duplicity. The images of dying children, flaring gas and oil spills overwhelm and disambiguate Pexton’s extractive business. These experiences are not only felt. They are also expressed in ways that reveal the local sentiment against exploitation. When Lusaka suggests that Kosawa villagers need to free themselves by telling their story to the people in America, Thula asks, “They came from America and destroyed us, and now you want to go to them and beg them to save us?” (p. 89). The motif of destruction is sustained in the narrative where it is linked to capitalism’s geopolitics of mattering life. Effectively synonymized with America, Pexton’s capitalist pursuits in Kosawa inherit historical layers of international domination and exploitation attached to Americanism.

As acutely felt by the dispossessed population, Pexton’s devastation of Kosawa carries symbolic innuendos of destructive American extractivism in oil-rich places such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia. This manifestation of global coloniality is portrayed as a cancerous affliction wasting every part of Kosawa life. Thula describes how Pexton’s drilling at The Gardens eventually snowballed into an environmental disaster that evokes an apocalypse because:

It was then, with the increased wastes dumped into it, that whatever life was left in the big river disappeared. Within a year, fishermen broke down their canoes and found new uses for the wood. Children began to forget the taste of fish. The smell of Kosawa became the smell of crude. The noise from the oil field multiplied; day and night we heard it in our bedrooms, in our classroom, in the forest. Our air turned heavy. (p. 30)

This quotation depicts the ways in which Pexton’s oil extraction toxically pervades every facet of the economic, reproductive and natural ecosystems. Pexton’s drilling is evoked as a double homicide against the natural environment and livelihoods in Kosawa as shown by the disappearance of aquatic life which once thrived in the big river and the subsequent loss of jobs for the fishermen. Bacon (2019, p. 59) has noted that the “[neo]colonial ecological violence disrupts indigenous eco-social relations.” Mbue metaphorically depicts death at literal and figurative levels; on one hand, death literally stalks the village as the poisoning of the river annihilates Kosawa’s dependence on the river for food and water. On the other hand, the contamination of the river represents the disruption of the economic and social lifeblood of Kosawa as shown by the symbolism of fishermen breaking their canoes and children forgetting the taste of fish. The way the children forget the taste of fish is symbolically symptomatic of the consequent hunger that befalls the Kosawa community. Similarly, the smell of crude is symbolically evoked to portray how Kosawa became inhabitable to its populace which suffocates under the intense air and noise pollution generated by Pexton. The air that turns heavy with pollutants suggests the way Kosawa people literally “breathe coloniality” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243). In Illegitimate Authority: Facing the Challenges of Our time (2023), Chomsky and Polychroniou point out that the global corporations and political leaders in the world particularly in USA wield an “illegitimate authority” over much of the world’s political and economic landscapes:

There is, naturally, great joy in the executive offices of the corporations dedicated to destroying human life on Earth [. . .] Arms producers share their euphoria about the opportunities offered by the continuing conflict. They are now encouraged to waste scarce resources that are desperately needed for humane and constructive purposes. And like their partners in mass destruction, the fossil fuels corporations, they are raking in taxpayer dollars. (Chomsky & Polychroniou, 2023, p. 271)

Indeed, Pexton serves as a symbol of an illegal authority who is “dedicated to destroying human life” and raking in resources and capital from Kosawa. It is indicated in the novel that although Mr. Fish, a public relations officer at Pexton, “truly wanted Kosawa and Pexton to reconcile,” the people in Kosawa “all wished he could do more than say that the decision about the cleanup of [their] land and waters rested with headquarters in New York” (p. 294). The fact that Pexton’s headquarters are in New York illustrates the presence of global coloniality in the local landscapes such as Kosawa. This also indicates the asymmetrical power relations that punctuate the relations between the Global North and the Global South which are based on the former using the latter as an economic lifeline. Mr. Fish demonstrates how the source of environmental destruction in Kosawa is a result of the ways in which global coloniality operates through the machinations of neoliberalism and this includes the collusion of corporate power with local state authorities within capitalist structures of accumulation. Mbue foregrounds how global coloniality perpetuates the rhetoric of modernity which preaches the gospel of future economic prosperities and social utopias and hides the violence trailing it.

Beyond the soil, the rivers and the air, Pexton’s extraction produces corrupt systems that have a bearing on the wellbeing and quality of lives in Kosawa, particularly the politics and economics governing resource ownership. Using its capital influence, the company triggers and fuels local political conflicts through divide and rule tactics that allow it access to oil resources. The Kosawa environment is characterized by recurring political hostility, bribery, deception, violence, and class conflict. Financially-captured political rulers such as His Excellency not only force their citizens to continuously relive the violence of Pexton’s coloniality but they also frustrate the building of sustainable futures and harmonious human-nature relations. Indeed, the collusion between Kosawan leaders and Pexton embodies the moral decadence of “neocolonialism” where the postcolony is entangled in matrices of global finance. Pexton relies on the political clout of His Excellency and other self-interested local leaders such as the chief Woja Beki who is the paramount ruler of Kosawa. His Excellency and Beki ensure Pexton’s hegemony over Kosawa’s natural resources is unchallenged by disgruntled citizens as they accept bribes and use violence to secure Pexton’s rights to extract. The nature of Pexton’s state capture and its implications for local peace and shared progress in Kosawa is revealed in a meeting between Chief Beki, Pexton’s representatives and Kosawa villagers. Thula’s reflections on what the villagers thought of Chief Beki’s role in their exploitation is revealing of the effects of the divide and rule tactic of American capital:

We did not respond; we cared nothing for what he had to say. We knew he was one of them. We’d known for years that though he was our leader, descended from the same ancestors as us, we no longer meant anything to him. Pexton had bought his cooperation and he had, in turn, sold our future to them. We’d seen with our own eyes, heard with our own ears, how Pexton was fattening his wives and giving his sons jobs in the capital and handing him envelopes of cash. Our fathers and grandfathers had confronted him, after the evidence had become impossible to dismiss, but he had beseeched them to trust him, telling them he had a plan: everything he was doing was to help us reclaim our land. He had shed two cups of tears and swore by the Spirit that he hated Pexton as much as we did, wasn’t it obvious? Our young men had conspired to kill him, but our old men found out about the plan and pleaded with them to spare him. We’ve already had too many deaths, our old men said; we’ve used up too many burial plots. (p. 5)

In this passage, the collective is assigned a category of moral justice whose validity stems from its victim status. Part of the rationality of the villagers’ claims concerns their collectivization through the collective voice marked by the constant use of the possessive pronouns “we” and “our.” United in their sense of loss, the villagers disidentify with and ostracize their Chief at multiple levels of relations. Thula’s describes Chief Beki as “one of them.” Beki is thus corrupt because his wives are “fattened” by Pexton. The imagery of “fattening” not only reflects the excesses of the political elite but more importantly, the attitude of the villagers to it. Fat in this context is a symbolic manifestation of a toxic materialism whose toxicity emanates from its connection to Pexton and its collusive relationship with Chief Beki. Similarly, another political figure, His Excellency, is known and identified for his corruption, excesses and consumptive behavior which are linked to his political power. His character personifies what Fanon (1963, p. 98) has described as the “psychology of a businessman” which is ingrained in the ruling elite in the postcolony. Yaya describes how His Excellency and his small clique of political cronies plunder and “[destroys] whatever pleases him and destroys whoever displeases him. With our sweat and blood paid as taxes, he has built houses in Europe grander than we can fathom” (p. 191). Yaya thus identifies, in His Excellency’s excesses, a materialistic mindset and dependence syndrome which can be connected to Fanon’s argument about how, following the native’s long years of colonial alienation from resources, his “envy” makes him, in the post-colonial period, susceptible to neo-colonial inducements by global capitalists.

Part of the psychological method of extractive global coloniality reflected in Pexton’s collusive relationship with His Excellency and Pexton employees opens another layer of the capitalist conglomerate’s “divide and rule” strategy that breeds black-on-black violence among Kosawa people. Ehanire (2022, p. 109) uses the trope of “insensitivity” to foreground Pexton’s institutionalization of cruelty as a natural process of its extractive business. For Ehanire (2022, p. 109), “[w]hen viewed as a weapon, insensitivity assumes a psychological dimension and the results are far-reaching even though not physical.” Besides political and economic means, Pexton maintains its power over resources through its strategic exclusion of the majority of Kosawa villagers and partial “inclusion” of the few employees and political leaders in the company’s profits. Thula notes how she and many other villagers grow increasingly disillusioned with how Pexton offers their laborers decent housing, clean water, professional medical care and free education to their children whilst Kosawa villagers endure poverty, hunger and various forms of social ills. Kosawa villagers begin to hate and despise Pexton’s black working-class who, according to the villagers, benefit at the expense of Kosawa, its people and environment. As the conflict turns physical, the worsening inter-personal relationship between the villagers and Pexton reveals the connection between the extractive industry and local conflict. Thula describes this animosity as follows:

In the months after we escalated our attacks, we saw in these men’s eyes how acutely they feared us. They might not have recognized our faces, which we always masked during our incursions and ambushes, but they had to know it was us—no one else in the eight villages hated them as much as we did. If our eyes caught theirs—say, at the bus stop—we looked downward and pretended to examine our fingers. Yet they struggled to breathe around us. How could they not? Their woes were many: they had Pexton standing above them, barking at them to drill to the last drop or go home; we stood in front of them, hiding nothing of our detestation; toxins swam within them, preparing them for a death they could only hope wouldn’t soon arrive. Their wives and children were afar, waiting for money for sustenance, praying to their ancestors to make the men as prosperous as those who had worked at the oil field decades before and returned to build brick houses. Until then, though, their wives lived husbandless lives, their offspring grew up like fatherless children, their parents died without a farewell. (p. 220)

Beyond depicting how the intense conflict between Kosawa villagers and Pexton laborers is a consequence of Pexton’s socio-economic compartmentalization of society, this quotation also reflects on how the exploitation of Kosawa oil refracts that of Kosawa . The laborers live entangled lives characterized by the constant fear of being attacked by the villagers who perceive them as accessories of capital and losing their jobs if they do not extract enough as prescribed by the company. Pexton’s laborers live in a liminal space (Bhabha, 1994) where their identities, loyalties and being are entangled by their ambivalent affiliations to Kosawa and Pexton. According to Bhabha (1994), a liminal space or the “third space of enunciation” describes the sense of un-belonging where cultural meaning has no more primitive fixity. This idea best describes the laborers’ ambivalent existence wherein Pexton owns their lives and, demanding them to drill for oil while the villagers, on the other hand, threaten and attack them. Similarly, Davies (2018, p. 1538) notes that “Toxic materials are able to defer their harmful consequences across time and space, putting distance and uncertainty between a toxic hazard and the people it affects.” The implication is that Pexton’s oil extraction exposes the workers to a perpetual state of ambivalence marked by detachment and ambiguity between a toxic pollution and its victims. The coloniality of capital, particularly its capacity for displacing the majority from political decisions on Kosawa resources, creates and sustains hierarchies of access amongst the locals leading to fear, hatred and ultimately black-on-black violence.

Markedly, the laborers’ existence in the liminal space between their locality and capitalist instrumentality spells their disposability. At this space, the workers, just like the oil, are commodified and at the disposal of Pexton. In both cases, Pexton profits leave a trail of environmental and human destruction symbolized, in the quotation above, by how oil toxins ravage the employees’ bodies, preparing them for inevitable demise. The ambiguity of the local employees’ lives stems from the fact that Pexton capital has restructured the local economy and alienated the locals from their resources. This forces the workers to work for livelihood which, as shown in the quotation above, is, in fact ironically working to their deaths. In fact, the workers in Kosawa suffer what Davies (2018, p. 1537) has termed “slow violence,” which describes the dialectical link between time and toxins. Davies (2018, p. 1538) notes that “time is an important factor that determines the level of bodily damage that a toxic substance can enact.” In other words, the longer the workers at Pexton are exposed to oil toxins, the severe the level of bodily damage they will incur. Moreover, the tension between Pexton, the villagers and the laborers destroys the Kosawa community’s sense of family. The laborers’ wives and children are forced to run away from both the oil toxins and the villagers’ threats. The destruction of the laborers’ families symbolizes the decimation of Kosawa’s social fabric as the villagers end up nostalgically recalling “how beautiful [they] were.” The cultural lamentation in the title of the novel “How Beautiful We Were” collectivizes the sense of victimhood. It suggests the collective experience and imagining of the dystopic present in light of the loss of a cherished past existence. Ultimately, the symbolic imagery of a lost collective beauty projects a social and moral question about how the effects of extractive global systems in Africa go beyond environmental devastation to threaten human existentiality.

Decolonial Epistemic and Environmental Motifs

One of the major motifs that characterizes what is lost and mourned in the nostalgic title How Beautiful We Were is nature, particularly how it is deflowered through Pexton’s profit-seeking ventures in Kosawa. Beyond the dystopic portrayal of the social, economic and moral injustice of extraction through motifs of toxins, death, fat, conflict and (soil) contamination, the negative effects of Pexton’s oil business in Kosawa are evoked in the novel’s sentimental and nostalgic celebration of the beauty of indigenous African societies, nature and spirituality. We can infer, from Mbue’s cultural discourse, characterization, symbolism and setting in representations of Kosawa’s loss of beauty, what Goutam Karmakar and Rajendra Karmakar and Chetty (2023b, p. 31) have called “the decolonial ecological turn.” What is cause and effect in the environmental defilement of Kosawa by Pexton is morally judged through a subtle invocation of nostalgic reminiscences of Kosawa’s former beauty. Karmakar and Chetty (2023a, p. 31) define “decolonial ecological turn” as encapsulating acts of debunking colonial and capitalist conceptions of ecology and related knowledge systems and replacing them with a model of a local and indigenous ecosystem. In Mbue’s novel, besides characterizing the dystopia of the present, the title of the novel How Beautiful We Were allegorically portrays African indigenous societies and their epistemologies as beautiful. To imagine African epistemologies of nature and its “uses” as beautiful is to rebut old age Eurocentric ideals about the African continent and its people. The imagery of beauty values the African environmental systems and, in the process, deconstructs the stereotypes of African ecological illiteracy and the colonial imagining of Africa as but a mass of raw materials awaiting Western exploitation. In contesting the intrusions of Eurocentric and capitalistic notions of “resource,” “economy” and “trade,” the novel depicts Kosawa people’s original concept of beauty as linked to the culture, myths and spirituality that form part of a human/nature relationship. Toward the end of the novel, Thula’s friend Sonni and a member of the guerilla movement against Pexton, recalls Kosawa’s cultural anchorage before the arrival of Pexton and she reveals,

It may be long dead, Kosawa, but we never forget it, the splendid piece of the earth it was. We can never forget it, for there our spirits were whole. Amid oil spills and gas flares, we looked behind us and saw green hills where twin mambas hissed in gaiety, where robust moles and porcupines zigzagged before falling prey to the hunter’s precision. We lived in a place where caterpillars took twice as long to renovate into heavy butterflies. Ours was a village where the sky sang thunderous songs in the dry season, songs that made us wrap our legs around our siblings in fright and in delight. There were dire rainy days, when the rivers threatened to take our possessions to their resting place, and parched days, when the ground in the hills cracked from thirst and the palm trees rejoiced. Through it all, Kosawa remained a singular place—if not for the beauty of our surroundings, then for the people who called it home. How could we not want to return to those full-moon nights when we danced in the square? Even as we began leaving childhood and started realizing how determined death was to never let us see our old age, we still laughed on verandas, and skipped over pipelines. We sat under the mango tree, lazed and gossiped as if tomorrow would always be ours, a luminous tomorrow. We hoped, we believed, that we would die where we were born. (p. 305)

The dystopian imagery portraying the environmental apocalypse of oil spills and gas flares is essentially post-anthropocentric in the way in which it reclaims Kosawa’s agency to self-reconstitute. Kosawa is depicted as a resilient place where, though decimated by Pexton extraction, the beauty of the land, its people and traditions find new forms and manifestations. This defiance, inferable from the villagers’ strategies of negotiating loss and finding new pleasures, for instance in jumping oil pipelines, suggests a resilient spirit. This spirit is linked to the symbiotic relationship between the Kosawa people, non-human lives and the natural cosmos. Amidst the discomforts of Kosawa caused by Pexton, the villagers look to their past to find new strategies of negotiating the apocalyptic adversity. Kosawa is where their spirits “become whole.” This concept of wholeness as connected to the land reinforces the interconnectedness between humans and nature in a way that reveals how both mutually reinforce one another. Likewise, the symbolism of hissing “twin mambas” suggests the ambivalence of nature which is underscored by the dual inhabitation of beauty and danger in the Kosawa landscape. Indeed, it is the resilience of beauty in the wasteland of Kosawa that gives main characters in the novel a sense of being and wholeness. This interconnectedness of land and wholeness serve as the novel’s counter discursive motif against Western epistemes of profit, trade and economy which separate man from nature. Moreover, this interconnectedness of land and wholeness “serve to disenfranchise the colonial and capitalist legacy and restore the African indigenous worldview in which ecology has never been a profit-making source of commodities, but a place where humans and nature live in mutual reciprocation with each other” (Karmakar & Chetty, 2023a, p. 140). Nature and humanity are re-connected through symbolic motifs that echo past utopian existence. The symbolic description of Kosawa as a place surrounded by “green hills,” “robust moles” and “porcupines” underscores how beauty is imagined by the villagers in terms of a thriving and fertile ecosystem.

Human and non-human relations in Mbue’s novel reveal the ethics and cultural beliefs sustaining the Kosawa villagers’ environmentalism in the face of global extractive violence. Mbue deploys animal symbolism to esthetically evoke the moral justice of collective identities steeped in care for nature. In the book Poetic Justice (1995), Martha Nussbaum argues that the notion of justice goes beyond the following of prescriptive rules or principles because justice is based on understanding and responding to the human experiences of suffering and loss. Nussbaum’s (1995) theorization of injustice stresses the importance of processes constituting injustice to understanding its ontology. Injustice in Mbue’s novel does not occur as individual suffering and/or loss. Mbue adopts the indigenous notion of environmental justice steeped in the belief that human life is fairly lived when humanity and nature sustain each other. Elsewhere in southern Africa, the value of indigenous knowledge systems to environmental conversation can be seen in clan totemic identities that are based on certain animal species. For example, there are Basotho and Batswana clan names such as Batloung (Elephants), Bakwena (Crocodiles), Bataung (Lions), and Banareng (Buffaloes). Members of such clans symbolically “become” their totemic animals in an ontological process that essentially makes environmental conservation a part of being human.

In Mbue’s novel, Pexton’s extraction becomes environmental injustice by the sheer effect of estranging the human and the environment. Kosawa villagers deploy cosmological myths and folktales to explain the ancient relationship between humans and animal and plant kingdoms. Many in Kosawa revere the leopard as a cultural symbol from which they draw their sense of unity and strength. Thula recounts the story of the three brothers who once went to the forest to check on their traps and found the leopard caught in one of them. The excerpt from the folktale on the origins of Kosawa below reveals how, in the Kosawa mythic cosmology, humanity acquires strength when it maintains good relations with the wild animals:

Please, free me, the leopard cried to the brothers; I need to return home to my children, I’ve been in this trap for days and they have no one to protect them. The brothers debated at length what to do—leopards were rare, and taking one back to their village would have brought them great fortune, but the leopard’s pain was evident in her tears. Ultimately, the brothers decided to let her go home to her children. In gratitude, the leopard made a cut on her paw and asked the brothers to use their spears and make cuts on their fingers too. On this day, the leopard said as she forged a blood pact with each brother, I give you my blood: it will flow in your veins and the veins of your descendants until the sun ceases to rise. All who seek to destroy you will fail, for my power in you will cause you to prevail. Go forth now and live as indomitable men. (p. 28)

In this quotation, the brothers’ decision to let go of the leopard even though it would have brought them great fortune, represents their reverence for non-human lives. This symbiotic relationship between the brothers and the leopard is further reinforced by the symbolic significance of the blood sharing ritual between the brothers and the leopard where the leopard gives back to humanity the generosity it received from the brothers. The blood-sharing act establishes an eternal relational bond between human and the animal worlds. In fact, Mbue’s novel exhibits what Thiyagarajan (2017, p. 35) describes as “the diverse ways that authors listen to and represent literary animals, at times acting as a reflection of the desire and efforts to fortify the human-animal boundary, and at other times significantly challenging human exceptionalism by advocating for compassion and interdependence between humans and animals. In other words, this bond between the leopard and the three brothers inspires a totemic reidentification of the brothers which gives them courage to leave their old village and start their own village which they name “Kosawa.” As the legend goes, “They founded Kosawa and anointed the eldest of the brothers to be their woja” (p. 29). The eldest brother became woja, the paramount king, because “the blood of the leopard was most apparent in the strength that allowed him to tread upon snakes and scorpions” (p. 29). Thiyagarajan (2017) has noted that “literary animals are significant in their own right because they bring their own histories and stories onto the page with them.” Metaphorically, the leopard functions as the spiritual alter-ego of the Kosawa community from whence they derive their collective identity as fearless people. Moreover, the bond inspires the local anthem of the Kosawa community, “Sons of the leopard, daughters of the leopard, beware all who dare wrong us, never will our roar be silenced” (p. 29). The leopard becomes the people’s symbol of resistance which inspires their collective strength to fight Pexton.

Myths have long served humanity as instruments of collective meaning-making (see Jones, 2014; Mda, 1994; Nomishan, 2021). Mda (1994) suggests myths, fables and allegories are powerful tools in traditional African cosmology which are used as a prism for understanding ourselves and the world around us. Similarly, Hasan (2023, p. 294) concurs that “although the use of myths and legends in literature has been transformed contextually over the different literary periods, modern writers extensively reappropriated and used them to portray the complexity of the theme and narrative structure of a text.” This is to say, myths and fables provide lessons about human nature, their connection to the natural world and their place in the cosmos. In Mbue’s novel, myths are functionally an epistemological model of knowing human nature that pins its value on humanity’s relational interaction with non-human objects. This epistemology is connected to local spirituality where we see the concept of reincarnation being used as part of a resistance mechanism against Pexton and its local functionaries. The metaphysical world of the dead not only overlaps with that of the living but reinforces supernatural structures securing their lives. The twins, Jakani, the village spirit medium/soothsayer, and Sakani, the herbal healer die at the hands of His Excellency’s soldiers and spiritually reincarnate through the twin boys Bamako and Cotonou. The spiritual re-emergence of the traditional healers portrays the interconnection of the physical world and the afterlife. This emphasizes how, in Kosawan environmental philosophy, death is not a finality but rather a shape-shifting process that allows the spirit of the dead healer to avail his knowledge of plant medicines through a living human medium.

Besides the subversive symbolic act of “refusing” death, the spiritual reincarnation of Sakani and Jacani in Bamako and Cotonou suggests the continuity of a tradition and knowledge system that, unlike Pexton’s precarious wages, interrelates wellbeing with nature. Jakani’s role as the shaman of a deity named The Spirit is tethered to Sakani’s mystical and life-sustaining healing powers which are both intimately entangled with the well-being of the Kosawan people, ecology and land. Thula describes how, from a young-age Jakani possessed the power to see “playmates no one else could see and to find things no one had hidden” (p. 60). Similarly, Sakani’s capacity to heal his playmates from “cuts and scrapes with leaves he dashes into the forest to find” (p. 60) results from his knowledge of medicinal plants which he derives from his unique connection to the metaphysical world. Through these characters, Mbue re-centers the violently peripheralized epistemologies of the indigenous community. In an interview with Rachel Barenbaum (2021), Mbue reveals that the twins, Jakani and Sakani are, among other things, “a celebration of life in a world where there is a thin line between the natural and supernatural realms.” Indeed, the supernaturality of the twins in the novel reveal how the natural world, the supernatural and Kosawa culture are connected to and affected by one another. The twins operate as a rebellious motif because their physical death and spiritual reincarnation challenges colonial notions of human dualism which divide the universe between good and evil/life and death.

In conclusion, this study discussed, by way of a textual analysis, how the interplay of global coloniality and corporate necropolitics in Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021) reflects the ways in which dispossession, extra-legal and ecological violence unfold in post-colonial African settings. The study argued that How Beautiful We Were raises essential questions of moral justice in the processes through which the natural resources of invisible and disenfranchised communities in the African continent serve as the central extractive lifeline of economies in the Global North/industrialized West. Deploying the notion of global coloniality to frame the “slow and ‘fast’ violence of Pexton’s extractive project, the article reflected on the ways in which Mbue esthetically portrays, in ways that subtly critiques, the environmental impacts of oil exploration, particularly the consequent unfair economic relations of production and inter-personal violence and death it visits on local communities. The heterotopias of petroleum violence generated by global capital are prise open by Mbue to reveal the collateral damage and needless human losses accumulated in Kosawa’s decades long battle against the American oil corporation. The violence and other injustices of corporate extractivism in How Beautiful We Were are juxtaposed with relations of care, mutual benefit and supernaturality characterizing Kosawa villagers” relationship with nature. Where nature is commodified and seen as nothing more than idling profits to be exploited by Pexton and its local proxies, traditional environmental knowledge is invoked through mythology and spiritual beliefs to evoke the moral justice of mutual care and sustainability between humans and nature.