BARBARA BENISH

In the 1958 story by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, he framed and wrote about an African life in the genre of European colonization: the English language. He defended his choice to not write in his native Igbo, which, like most West African cultures, has a strong oral tradition.”...in the logic of colonization and decolonization it is actually a very powerful weapon in the fight to regain what was yours. English was the language of colonization itself.” The extraction of natural resources from the global South, to maintain the overextended economies of the industrialized North, combined with the enslavement of human lives (mainly from West Africa) to build that wealth, is an added tragedy that contemporary humanity is only beginning to address. Our move from local agriculture to trans-global corporate food production, exasperates the climate crisis with our dependence on oil, destroying the oceanic and forest eco-systems. Like the protagonist in Achebe’s story, it is human greed and arrogance, our ethnocentrism, that contributes to the unravelling of all that we know. Our being in the world changed from being with the world, when we developed the first tools to till, dominate, cult-ivate, and eventually control, the land.