Saro-Wiwa was the first African writer of environmental commitment

Evidence

Saro-Wiwa’s generic versatility, his belief in an instrumental aesthetics, and his obsession with land rights place him in an established tradition of African writing. Yet there the similarities end. For in East and Southern Africa, such tendencies have been routinely associated with writers whose anticolonialism—or antineocolonialism—has been inseparable from their socialism. One thinks, for instance, of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Barrel of the Pen and Mafika Gwala’s essay “Writing as a Cultural Weapon” (which became the credo for a generation of South African writers). Saro-Wiwa, by contrast, cultivated a deeply international sensibility while standing outside any lineage of African socialism. He was the first African writer to articulate the literature of commitment in expressly environmental terms: “[T]he environment is man’s first right,” he wrote in a letter smuggled from a Nigerian jail. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 309

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘literature of commitment in expressly environmental terms’ means by contrast with the socialist anticolonial lineage.
• XREF: Serves the literature strand of the eco-justice polyad: the writer-activist as translator/visibility-maker.