Udje, Ecosystem, and Sustainability

ABSTRACT: Recent scholarly publications on African literature discuss the African environment and the need to “naturalize” it as if the continent’s environment is not or has not been “natural.” By looking at only recent written African literature and not studying African oral literatures, the works on environmentalism have missed important parts of what the African creative mind has done before later postcolonial writers started. It is this gap that this essay on udje, an African oral poetic genre, is used to fill. This essay looks at how African oral poets made use of land that embraces bush/forests and water with its resources to express the congenial relationship between human and nonhuman beings. The physical environment becomes a repository of tropes to express human relationships and existential ideas. Oral literatures such as udje expressed a complementarity that newer literary works lack and so should be studied for a holistic environmental condition and solution.