African fictions, animal figures and anthropocentric frameworks

This chapter considers how animal figures emerge as concerns within African fictions, and discusses several texts for the different tropes of animal and human–animal relations they engender, varied in their geopolitical context and thematic content precisely to give a broad survey of these concerns. Any attention to nonhuman lives in African literature will find precedence in its long history of orature. Set in Nigeria and post-war Britain, Buchi Emecheta’s 1974 novel Second-Class Citizen follows the Obi family’s move from Lagos to London. It chronicles primarily the life of Adah Obi, a young Igbo woman ‘born during the second World War’, for whom moving to England represents ‘the pinnacle of her ambition’. If Emecheta’s text subtly carves out a place for animality and Blackness to mean something other than their subhuman figurations, Njabulo’s Ndebele’s journalistic essay, ‘The Year of the Dog,’ takes up that project in a more direct fashion

Anthropocentrism · Environmental ethics · Geography · Sociology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies