Zulu Poems of (and for) nature: Bhekinkosi Ntuli’s environmental imagination in Imvunge Yemvelo (1972)
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Date
2021
Authors
Nyambi, Oliver
Otomo, Patricks Voua
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Abstract
Nature, climate crisis, and the Anthropocene have carved space in recent inter-, cross-, and multi-disciplinary humanities studies. In South Africa, such studies have barely touched literature in African languages. Nyambi and Otomo focus on the tropes of “lady nature,” nostalgia, and dystopia in Zulu writer Bhekinkosi Ntuli’s Imvunge Yemvelo to explore the complex ways in which these tropes test the normative epistemes of ecological crises. Beyond rejecting imperial distortions of indigenous environmentalism, Ntuli’s poems re-center local knowledge of nature in understanding its relationship with humans. That knowledge subverts epistemic structures of colonial conservation, revising and re-visioning racially geo-politicized knowledge hierarchies.
Description
Keywords
Zulu culture, Anthropocene, Anthropogenic crisis, Indigenous languages, Green imperialism, Postcolonialism
Citation
Nyambi, O., & Otomo, P.V. (2021). Zulu Poems of (and for) nature: Bhekinkosi Ntuli’s environmental imagination in Imvunge Yemvelo (1972). African Studies Review, 64(3), 547-568. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2020.135