This paper validates Odera Oruka’s assertion that Philosophic Sagacity is a pervasive phenomenon among African peoples. It argues that whereas Oruka mostly focused on the Kenyan social environment in defense of his thesis, his observations are also applicable to African communities outside Kenya’s borders, especially in their precolonial settings, where there were people who interrogated the rationale of their cultures’ beliefs and practices. Towards this end, the paper deploys textual exegesis on Chinua Achebe’s epic novel, Things Fall Apart, set among (...) the Igbo of South-Eastern Nigeria. (shrink)

Igbo metaphysics places emphasis on accommodation and respect for all entities in nature irrespective of their ontological placement or status. The belief is that all that is or exists must be accorded their due. It is this consciousness that defines their relationship with the environment, which is basically holistic (ecocentric) to such an extent that environment in all its nature, either as animate (sentient or less sentient) or inanimate, are intricately accommodated in the scheme of things. Human beings are at (...) times prefixed with the attributes of these metaphysical entities. Thus, although there is the inevitable metaphysical duality found in reality, the relationships, for the Igbo, are complimentary, friendly, and non-competitive. (shrink)

In three parts, this article sketches the version of African environmental ethics that was developed and promoted by Chigbo Ekwealo who was a renowned environmental philosopher in Africa. The first part is a sketch of the principles and doctrine of his environmental ethics. The second part traces the intellectual history of his environmental ethics, the influences on it and its influence on the global environmental ethics movement. The third part is a critique of his environmental ethics based on (...) contemporary and global circumstances. It is demonstrated how Ekwealo’s environmental ethics attempted to consciously depart from earlier versions of African environmental ethics in terms of its rejection of the neo-materialist, polemical, and supernatural features of other views. This article contributes to a reconstruction of the environmental thought of one of the founders of the African environmental movement whose thoughts are not accessible to most contemporary environmental philosophers today. (shrink)