Personhood in African Environmental Ethics

Abstract

African environmental ethics has come a long way in advancing theories that would, (i) prove the existence of African philosophy to the rest of the world; (ii) show the efficacy of age-old African practices in sustaining the environment; and (iii) point out the African non-anthropocentric path towards preservation, conservation, and sustainability of the environment. However, there seems to be a misunderstanding of personhood as it applies to African environmental ethics, leading to the claim that the latter is essentially anthropocentric and offers no unique contribution to environmental ethics in general. Thus, a sound understanding of personhood in African thought would help to clarify the kinds of value, rights, and worth that are extendable to nature within African environmental ethics. It is against this backdrop that this paper highlights how personhood serves as the ontological foundation of African environmental ethics. To achieve this goal, the paper examines the concept and status of personhood within the ambit of three theories of African environmental ethics: (i) Segun Ogungbemi’s Ethics of Nature-Relatedness, (ii) Godfrey Tangwa’s Eco-bio-communitarianism,and (iii) Mogobe Bernard Ramose’s Ubuntu Ecology. The paper concludes that personhood lies at the root of the examined theories of African environmental ethics and determines the kind of worth they have extended to nature.