Can Literature Save The Congo Basin? Dr Kenneth Toah Attempts Answers In Ph.D Defense

A young Cameroonian has defended a PhD dissertation on literature and the Congo Basin in Denmark. The dissertation is entitled “Can Literature Save the Congo Basin? Postcolonial Ecocriticism and Environmental Literary Activism.” It is written by Dr Kenneth Toah Nsah (popularly known as Nsah Mala), a poet and writer, who hails from Cameroon. Dr Nsah’s dissertation was co-supervised by Professor Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Associate Professor Peter Mortensen at Aarhus University (Denmark). 

On Friday 11 March 2022, Dr Nsah defended his dissertation at Aarhus University in a hybrid format that simultaneously unfolded in Aarhus and on Zoom. The doctoral assessment committee consisted of Professor Scott Slovic (University of Idaho, USA), Associate Professor Étienne-Marie Lassi (University of Manitoba, Canada), and Associate Professor Marianne Ping Huang (Aarhus University, and committee chair). 

As Dr Nsah explained, the central objective of the dissertation was to examine the role that literature can play in addressing climate change and environmental problems and in promoting sustainable development in the Congo Basin, which is the second-largest tropical rainforest in the world after the Amazon. The Congo Basin is located in central Africa and its tropical rainforests run through six countries: Cameroon, Central African Republic (CAR), Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. 

Using a theoretical framework known as postcolonial ecocriticism, Dr Nsah analyzes a wide range of novels, plays and some poems principally written in English and French by ten authors from five of the six Congo-Basin countries, except Spanish-speaking Equatorial Guinea. These ten writers include Assitou Ndinga (Congo-Brazzaville), Athanasius Nsambu Nsahlai (Cameroon), Ekpe Inyang (Cameroon), Étienne Goyémidé (CAR), Gaston-Paul Effa (Cameroon), Henri Djombo (Congo-Brazzaville), In Koli Jean Bofane (DRC), Nadia Origo (Gabon), Osée Colins Koagne (Cameroon), and Patrice Nganang (Cameroon). 

The dissertation examines selected literary texts by these writers in terms of their usefulness and intervention in climate change and environmental or ecological debates, policies and practice in the Congo Basin. Dr Nsah argues that “this literature—both the literary texts and their ecocritical analysis—has a crucial role to play in saving the Congo Basin from biodiversity loss, climate change, and ecological breakdown.” 

The comparative literary scholar highlights literature’s capacity to raise environmental awareness, to engage with complexities and contradictions, to question human beliefs and values that destroy nature, to depict human-nature entanglements, to put human faces to the climate-environmental crisis, to unveil valuable indigenous knowledge system, to prophesy and mobilise young people into climate activism, to challenge wrong metaphors and colonial myths which underpin fortress conservation and the violence it entails, and to advocate environmental justice. 

“The central contribution of the dissertation lays in its discussion of the role that literature, and postcolonial ecocritical scholarship, can play in saving the Congo Basin which is one of the most important geostrategic and biodiversity hotspots on Earth today,” writes Dr Nsah. The dissertation also contributes to the field of postcolonial ecocriticism by studying both Anglophone and Francophone texts together and by engaging significantly with drama or theatre whereas most studies in the field have tended to focus on fiction and poetry.  In addition, the study decentres the predominance of the Niger Delta, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wangari Maathai and Zakes Mda in much of African postcolonial ecocritical scholarship.

Dr Nsah has brilliantly contributed new theoretical concepts such as “background-informed environmental literary activism” and “simultaneous violence.” Such concepts have earned high praises from the assessment committee. For instance, Professor Slovic, founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), urged Dr Nsah to make sure that his original concept of “simultaneous violence,” which complements ecocritic Rob Nixon’s notion of “slow violence,” is widely disseminated in order to earn international usage in the field. The committee also praised Dr Nsah for his outstanding blending of both international and African theoretical and epistemological formulations in his interdisciplinary literary analysis. 

Dr Nsah concludes as follows: “Overall, the dissertation argues that literature can contribute its own quota, in synergy with other academic disciplines and efforts (political, scientific and technological), in preserving the Congo Basin by ensuring its sustainability, conserving its biodiversity, mitigating climate change therein, and promoting environmental justice for both humans and nature in the basin and well beyond.”

Collectively, the assessment committee observed that Dr Nsah “demonstrates impressive awareness of Congo Basin literature and African literature more broadly.” Their overall assessment of the dissertation is as follows: 

“Kenneth Toah Nsah has contributed an original and impressive dissertation, carefully researched and well presented. The overarching goal of the project is to work with novelists, playwrights, and poets from five Congo Basin countries to demonstrate how literature can impact climate and environmental crises in the Congo Basin,

and powerfully illuminate a wide range of misconceptions about Africa that support neo-colonialism and neoliberalism and undermine African cultural traditions and

knowledge systems. …  This deservingly opens up Nsah’s research, and also the literature of the Congo Basin the presents, to international scholarship. Kenneth Toah Nash’s dissertation is an ambitious project, one that few scholars would be capable of undertaking, and certainly not with the breadth and depth and clarity that Nsah demonstrates.” The committee unanimously congratulated Dr Nsah before awarding him the title of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Comparative Literature.

Although the Danish PhD systems do not award grades in PhD defences, it is indisputable that Dr Nsah’s dissertation would receive the highest grade in any system that attributes grades such as “très honourable avec les félicitations du jury à l’unanimité” in some Francophone systems or “summa cum laude” in the German system. 

After the defence, Dr Nsah remarked that he was highly honoured and humbled by the high-level assessment of his dissertation and the committee’s outstanding praise for his work. “Above all, I am super delighted to have been the pioneer literary scholar to spotlight the Congo Basin from a comparative literary perspective. May this dissertation help in preserving this basin which means a lot to all its six countries, including my native Cameroon,” he added.