Like most fields designated by geography as opposed to period, topic, or form, African studies’ site-specificity is both its blessing and its curse. At its best, it marshals deep, locally embedded knowledge to challenge generalists’ more abstract claims. At its worst, it proceeds at a remove from, rather than in dialogue with, theoretical advances in the broader humanities. Cajetan Iheka's Naturalizing Africa seamlessly weds an Africanist's focus to a far-reaching set of ecological concerns, intervening in debates central to African literature; African studies; new materialisms; postcolonial theory; and the environmental humanities. It acts as a crucial and overdue link between postcolonialism's newest, anthropocenic iteration (most notably in books like Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor), and the fine-grained attention to language characteristic of its foundational discursive concerns.

Iheka's book is structured as a theoretical introduction and first chapter followed by three chapters devoted to readings of ecologically minded texts. Chapters 2 and 3 are organised around key sites in the continent's struggle with human and environmental degradation: Somalia in the first case, via Nuruddin Farah, and in the second, the Niger Delta via Gabriel Okara, Isidore Okpewho and Tanure Ojaide. The final chapter before the Epilogue selects its texts on the basis of theme, considering the relationship between literal gardening and a generalisation of its ethos in works by the Kenyan writer Wangari Maathai, the Botswanan Bessie Head, and J.M. Coetzee. At the same time, each chapter builds on the previous one to advance an argument for an inclusive, non-intentional conception of agency, and ultimately for an ethics of non-violence. This latter point is the source of Naturalizing Africa’s polemical heft, which Iheka outlines in always-gracious terms. He urges his Africa-focused readers, especially, to retire what have become predictable oppositions between violent resistance and ‘progress’ as a Western imposition. He bemoans an ‘either/or [that] manifests itself in the indigenous/imported and tradition/modernity paradigms within which [many] critics couch their readings. The problem is that these critics do not separate modernity from colonialism …’ (139). While repeatedly granting the past legitimacy of violent anti-colonial struggle in many parts of the continent, Iheka nonetheless enjoins us to think beyond the impasse between Western oppressor and African oppressed in order to activate a more expansive, ontologically rather than just socially attuned view of what it means to relate.

The conceptual leap that makes this expansion possible is one from agency conceived as intention to agency conceived as effect. Readings of Amos Tutuola's classic The Palm-Wine Drinkard, for example, have typically hinged on the interplay of the individual and communal, whereas Iheka suggests that this framework fails to account for ‘the juju from the gods, the eagle …, the trees in the forest, and so on’, all of which confound ‘a linear account of human agency’ (46). If readers prioritise what happens over what was meant to happen, or even why, African writing can come un-sprung from well-trodden political debates to appear as a series of blueprints for future modes of relation. In its orientation to readings of cause and effect – that is, to agency as ‘a factor of futurity that doesn't require linearity or intentionality’ (50) – Naturalizing Africa attends to the pained and powerful realities of non-humans without sanctimony or essentialism (such as that associated with care-based feminisms, to use one of the book's counter-examples). Similarly, it pays serious attention to indigenous cosmologies’ representation without flattening them into a homogenous force of anti-colonial resistance.

If there is one weakness in Iheka's graceful, lucid and measured book, it is also its virtue of restraint. It could push harder on its critique of Fanon's over-representation in African and post-colonial studies, and, by extension, on its suggestion that non-violent resistance may now be the way of Africa's future. It might also have developed its conception of the Enlightenment a bit more, as it has a tendency to serve as a strawman in the post-colonial field. On the whole, though, Naturalizing Africa is an important contribution to African studies’ long-view intellectual decolonisation, and it announces Iheka as a figure to watch across multiple disciplinary terrains.