Nature vs Concrete: Scholars, artists sound alarm on Nigeria’s environmental future

Participants at a roundtable highlight the necessity of protecting ecosystems and addressing environmental violations, noting they are essential for the survival of humanity.

 AS climate change sceptics continue to dismiss conservationists and policymakers dismantle crucial environmental protections, a recent event at the University of Ibadan’s Institute of African Studies brought the urgent issue of environmental degradation into sharp focus.

The Thursday Film Series’ (TFS) Environmental Degradation and Sustainable Futures Round Table, held on February 6, highlighted the need to preserve ecosystems and combat environmental abuses to save humanity.

TFS crew member and president of the African Studies Students’ Association, UI, Michael Awoyemi, moderated the insightful panel discussion, which featured poet and academic Professor Niyi Osundare, the writer Molara Wood and curator and filmmaker Adeola Aderemi.

A screening of Chivas Devinck’s ‘The Poets’, a documentary film featuring Osundare and his friend, the Sierra Leonean poet Professor Syl Cheney-Coker, preceded the discussion. There was also a news reportpublished by the National Association of the Students of English and Literary Studies (NASELS), UI, on the demolition of the Institution’s Heritage Park for a new senate building and a three-minute documentary on the history of tree felling on the UI campus. These provided the backdrop for a rich and crucial discussion on the importance of preservation and poor knowledge production in Nigeria.

 

The power of nature and creativity

Responding to a question from the moderator about when she became critical of environmental degradation as a creative, Wood said she had always been aware of the importance of the environment from an early age. Reading works by the late D.O. Fagunwa at that young age further increased her appreciation of nature.

“I was conscious of the imaginative power of the natural environment. When you read ‘Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmole’, a narrator always goes to a leafy environment. It’s not just the adventure you read about; the narrator goes to a place like the Botanical Gardens of the University of Ibadan. The narrator goes there and appreciates the need to be in a beautiful and contemplative space that nurtures the mind and is where you can think and make yourself think. Akara-Ogun, the story’s hero, materialises when that person is there and starts to tell his story. That, for me, has always been the story of the power of nature and the connection to creativity,” she said.

Responding to the same question, Aderemi said that although she also became aware of nature from childhood, taking a break from living in Brussels and seeing West Africa’s shores littered with recycled materials from the West sharpened her focus on environmental degradation.  She explained: “I switched from being a public health scientist that technically spoke only about health to say, well, we can’t talk about health without the planet’s impact. So, I became what we call in Brussels very radical because when you talk about the impact of the planet, the impact of imperialism and ongoing neocolonialism, then you’re too radical. But I love being radical; it’s fine. Having been mentored by people who are troublemakers across different coasts of the continent, I am born to be a troublemaker, so I have no choice.”

 

The poet, protest and politics

Professor Osundare offered an impassioned reflection on the intersection of literature, protest, and environmental crisis. He noted that Nigerians like outsourcing solutions to their issues to the West.  The author of the 1986 award-winning ‘The Eye of the Earth’, inspired by a visit to UI’s Botanical Garden, also lamented the loss of values in Nigerian universities while reiterating his stance on protest literature.

He wondered why it took eight years for ‘The Poets’ to be shown in Ibadan, noting that it fits the pattern of Nigerians waiting for the West to take the initiative on issues concerning the country. “Why did it take us eight years to bring this film here? It appears to me, and this has always been, that you don’t act until somebody takes the initiative. That documentary is not about me. It’s about us, about this university. No other university in any developed part of the world behaves this way. We sit down too much, waiting for others to do our work.”

On protest art, he explained that “African epistemology sees the beautiful in the useful, and the useful in the beautiful.  The more you try to avoid protesting, the more protestant you become. No, art is such a thing that you cannot just put it up. No writer can be more political than Shakespeare. I think it was Ngugi [wa Thiong’o]  who said, ‘Every work is a work in politics.’ The question is, what and whose politics? The great French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said earlier in the 1940s that the writer’s function is to ensure that after reading their work, nobody can say again that I’m innocent or do not know where the world is. It doesn’t mean you are going to preach. No, there must be something there that lifts the veil. We have a lot of work to do. I have been shouting this for over 35 years: our universities are not what they should be. The standard has come down drastically.  Nigeria has about 274 universities now, but the more universities we have, the more illiterate we become. This country is not doing well. Our educational system is not doing well. We have a great country but let us prevent it from dying.”

 

Mindless battle scene

Commenting on the Heritage Park news clip showing the fallen trees, Wood said the sound of that “chainsaw was invasive, insistent, violent, and hard to take. Just see the carnage left! It looked like the aftermath of some mindless battle scene where something mindless and thoughtless had happened.”

Aligning with her, Aderemi lamented Nigerians embracing everything ‘Western’ without critical thinking. “They’re building a fake city that should not be built on the Atlantic Ocean. You’re fighting with the Atlantic Ocean to build a giant, useless, fake city. Was that ever a good thing?”

She also swiped at Nigerian universities, saying students have been silenced by their lecturers.  “I was doing my master’s in public health at a university in the UK, Birmingham, and I had some fellow Nigerian international students. And they are afraid of asking their professors questions. You’re in a class of social determinants of health; it needs you to be a bit Socratic. You need to have ideas that are very different from your professor’s. But they’re like, I don’t want to ask. Can you ask him for me? You need to challenge knowledge production. You need also to remember the things that exist. They keep saying African epistemology is not recorded. That’s not true. Listen to your family’s Oriki. Your epistemology is right there in front of you.”

On recording African epistemology, the moderator disclosed that the Institute of African Studies has a rich sound and vision archive. He described the collection as “one of the most robust that Africa can be proud of” and that there was another in Accra, Ghana.

Professor Osundare, visibly moved, asked: “How can we be hiding such a treasure trove?”

 

Degradation Vs ‘Re-gradation’

Offering a divergent view on environmental degradation, particularly the destruction of Heritage Park, the Head of UI’s Department of English, Professor Nelson Fashina, attracted a noisy reaction from the audience, who disagreed with his stance.

The former student of Professor Osundare, who said the poet taught him never to accept things at face value, supported the destruction of the Heritage Park. He submitted that change was necessary, and the senate building would further beautify the campus.

“That word degradation is an invention that premeditates something bad. Why degradation? I would rather call it environmental ‘regradation’. The environment cannot remain the same for a thousand years. It must change.”

Using the haircut metaphor, Fashina likened environmental change to grooming: “The Heritage Park cannot remain like that for life. A gigantic seven-story senate building is going to be erected on that ground. It is positioned to give environmental beauty to the UI landscape. That cannot be degradation; it is environmental ‘re-gradation’.”

 

‘Professor Shapeshifter?

The response was swift and passionate.  The co-founder of Save Our Green Spaces Group and Save Ogunpa Forest Reserve Team member, Rosalie Ann Modder-Oyefeso, said: “Cutting down a tree does not amount to change that we must embrace. Those are two very different things. You cannot live without a tree. What they did at Heritage Park was a massacre. If you cut down a tree, you’re removing the oxygen, soil stability, water table and the capacity to remove pollutants from the air. Cutting down a tree is not a change. It can never be.

“The Americans, Europeans, they have made mistakes. Now, they’re frantically trying to change them. Climate change is coming. Global warming is coming. They know what they’ve done. But Africans are still following them behind in the Victorian age. They’re not even connected enough to understand what is going on. They don’t understand that Ogunpa  Forest Reserve, where they removed over 5,000 trees, protects your wetlands. This is an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen.”

Aderemi agreed, decrying the obsession with ‘Westernised’ development. “When we focus on critiquing the language used to discuss an urgent and pertinent problem, we digress. The main problem is we are destroying our environment. We are cutting down the trees that allow us to live. It’s human arrogance to think that nature is just a passive part of our existence, that we can tame nature, and that we can decide what we do with our trees, waters and land. Nature will always remind you that she’s the mother, that she’s the powerful one, and that we are the ones who cannot survive on a planet where we can’t breathe. The planet will be fine. It’s humans that will not survive the degradation and destruction we have wrought because we want to build ugly concrete buildings.”

Wood questioned the inconsistency in Fashina’s comments, contrasting them with his previous appearance in ‘Ebrohimie Road’, a documentary about the house Professor Wole Soyinka lived in UI and which he [Fashina] currently occupies.

“The film is a lament for what has been done to the original Arcadian paradise Soyinka envisioned when he lived and loved that house. And you speak very much in line with that film’s ethos and tone. Your submission today opposes your starring role in that film. In that film, Soyinka talks about leaving the University of Lagos (Unilag) to attend the University of Ibadan. He said he left Unilag because it was not sufficiently wooded. He came to Ibadan. That sufficiently wooded Ibadan is now having trees felled in droves without consultation.

“I lived in London for over two decades. And we’re very proud of the fact that London is a forest. There are more than 8 million trees. I always say to Nigerians: you relocate to societies that you believe are beautiful, you start putting it on Instagram. You go to Europe and America for environmental conditions you do not want to preserve and nurture in your country. You say it’s ugly; you make it ugly.”

Osundare suggested Fashina was playing the devil’s advocate but returned to a larger point: the university must again become a space that encourages deep thought and bold questioning. “A university has a universe in it when it makes people think. We act first and think later. We are a country of foolish people. How can we have a university that cannot teach students how to ask questions? Critical thinking is what it is called in America. It’s important. It’s not enough for you to know the books of Shakespeare or Soyinka. No! Ask questions. W-H-Y. That is the most important question in logic and philosophy. W-H-Y. We don’t ask in Nigeria

“All things in the world grow, mature, fruit, age, and die. I take it as a line. We want to say nature is one of them. Nature doesn’t do that because nature has its way of regenerating itself. And we are having problems because humans stand in the way of nature.”

The session was organised by the Thursday Film Club, Institute of African Studies, and Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique (IFRA).

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