Decolonizing Ecological Knowledge and Ecofeminist Resistance in Tanure Ojaide's The Tale of the Harmattan and Nnimmo Bassey's We Thought it was Oil but it Was Blood

Abstract The Niger Delta environment is one of the worst oil polluted environment in the world with women and children being the worst victims of this pollution. The search for an indigenous ecological knowledge is among the greatest of all decolonial projects towards gender and ecological sustainability. Focusing on women and the environment, this paper engages the injustices of oil pollution in the textual Niger Delta region of Nigeria using Ecofeminist life interconnections and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) also known as Indigenous Ecological knowledge (IEK). Precolonial Africa is an organized ecologically prioritized society in which no part of the environment is neither neglected nor unruly exploited. Nevertheless, gender takes the modernist approach to exit the margin, as colonial intrusion and socio-political disillusionments dominate the postcolonial discourse with almost no reference to women and the environment in African literature. From Ecofeminism and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, our paper examines images of indigenous ecological knowledge and women resistance to oil pollution in Tanure Ojaide’s The Tale of the Harmattan and Nnimmo Bassey’s We Thought it was Oil, but it was Blood”. The Environment is further investigated as a detrimental space, a kind of contradiction foregrounded in the toxicity of the exploited environment and its implications on the Niger Delta women.