Earth Jurisprudence and the Politics of African Eco-Humanism

• In Event: Climate Wreckage and Indigenous Philosophies

Abstract

This paper explores neglected traditions of earth jurisprudence in West Africa, anchored in indigenous concepts of multigenerational and multispecies trusteeship of land such as the Gurene notion of Tiƞa. These traditions have endured European colonialism and have developed ways of coexisting with state-making and capital accumulation processes within Africa’s plural legal and political systems. They view human jurisprudence and political authority as derived from the “great jurisprudence” of ancestral spirits and the earth, highlighting the material world of vital forces of nature as an active domain of politico-legal governance. They also enlarge our understanding of what it means to be human. Here I borrow the term “eco-humanism” from the work of Eze to highlight a widespread African notion of humanity articulated in terms of the relational becoming of humans in interdependence with land, plants, animals, spirits, and ancestors. This is a notion of legal personhood that extends ethical considerability to the future generations and the environment. The paper challenges Eurocentric traditions of political theory that erase African ecology-based sovereignty and reproduce the fiction that sovereignty is a singular, exclusively human authority linked to a state or other forms of centralized power. It argues that these resilient traditions of earth jurisprudence offer a time-tested model for how to resist the ascendance of anthropocentric forms of land ownership and the climate wreckage wrought by neoliberal capitalism in the Anthropocene.

Author

• Anatoli Ignatov, Appalachian State University