African ethics and the environmental question: towards a relational ecological praxis

Abstract

For millennia, African moral traditions have shaped how human beings relate to the non-human world. This article engages relational ontologies, communitarian ethics and Achille Mbembe’s notion of the ‘Earthly Community’ to argue that African environmental ethics is not a cultural alternative to Western frameworks but a conceptually generative challenge to the nature–culture dualism driving planetary destruction. The article shows how African metaphysical categories resist the subject–object split embedded in Western environmental thought. It then examines, in turn, Thaddeus Metz’s modal-relational theory of moral status, Kwame Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism and Amara Esther Chimakonam’s personhood-based ethics to demonstrate how African thought extends moral consideration beyond anthropocentric property models without collapsing into anti-humanist mystification. The article insists that any credible African environmental ethics must confront its own imbrication with racial capitalism, which produces ecological crisis not as a policy failure but as a structural feature of the global order. It therefore turns to praxis and asks what relational ethics looks like on the ground, from conservation reimagined beyond fortress models to urban environmental justice built through relational networks and agroecology grounded in an ontologically attuned relationship to soil, seed and community.