In February 2024, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed that for the first time heat temperatures between February 2023 to January 2024 averaged the highest ever during that 12-month period, surpassing the 1.5 c degree threshold breach for global warming. Prior to this, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported 2023 as the warmest year on record. Furthermore, 80% of the world’s marine ecosystems experienced extreme heatwaves, compounding problems associated with ocean acidification and carbon dioxide absorption. Record-breaking hurricanes, massive wildfires, and torrential floods scoured the earth, displacing upwards of ten million people, the vast majority in Southern Asia and Northeast Africa. Since 1900, the height of the second industrial revolution, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish have died 72 times faster than the specific extinction rates for “normal” species.

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Comparable to the rapid degradation of the earth’s biosphere, social crises within the African world have intensified and remain unabated. A decade of water challenges in Flint, Michigan; police and intercommunal violence; health disparities exacerbated by the COVID-19 epidemic; increasing socioeconomic inequality; mass incarceration; and penetrated and failed states in Africa and the Caribbean beholden to western interests, all speak to the reality that we are in perpetual conflict, both with ourselves, and others. 

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Despite the parallel developments of species extinction and climate disruption, with the social, political, and economic crises facing our communities, many social movement activists, academics, institution builders, elders, and spiritual leaders, among others, have yet to consider deeply the linkages that exist between the degradation and instability of the earth’s biosphere and the historical and contemporary problems of African people. This leads one to ask: What are we misinterpreting in the absence of wedding an awareness of social justice and community development to an environmental/land-based consciousness? Why are “earth-based” cultural realities noticeably absent and/or pushed to the periphery within our communities? What are the implications? 

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This Siyabonana special issue seeks submissions rooted in African-centered theory and practice that explore epistemological issues, conceptual models, historical studies, and critical analyses useful for understanding the socioecological realities of the African world in the age of the so-called “Anthropocene”. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• African-centered approaches to land reform and the African world; 

• Linkages between African spirituality/cosmogony, land, and lifeways in the African world; 

• Science, technology, society, and the African world;

• African-centered epistemological approaches to “Black geographies”; 

• African-centered critiques of extractive industries, modern industrial economies, and their impact on the African world; 

• African indigenous knowledge and models of “development”; 

• African-centered approaches to environmental racism and environmental justice;

• Contemporary land-based social movements and the African world; 

• African-centered approaches to animal and non-human relations;

• African-centered approaches to political ecology; 

• Climate justice and the African world; 

• Water issues and the African world; 

• Food sovereignty and the African world; 

• Urbanization, modernity, and the African world; 

• The built environment and the African world; 

• Appropriate technology and the African world; 

• African and African Diaspora indigenous medicine, public health, and wellness;

• Storytelling, ecoliteracy, and the African world; and 

• Sustainable development and the African world. 

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Special Issue Editors 

Dr. Kwasi Densu is an Associate Professor of Political Science, Coordinator of African American Studies, and Co-Director of the Lola Hampton Frank Pinder Center for Agroecology at Florida A&M University. In addition, he is a farmer and a local community organizer. 

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Dr. Afia Zakiya is an independent global activist. She centers Africana Studies and political ecology at the intersections of Afri-indigenous and endogenous knowledge, culture, and heritage preservation with issues of land, water, climate, and environmental justice.  

 

Contact the special issue editors for further inquiries and questions:

Dr. Afia Zakiya: afiazakiya@gmail.com

Dr. Kwasi Densu: kwasi.densu@famu.edu