About Us

One of the most challenging elements of contemporary post-colonial, post-apartheid and globalization-induced homogenization and pasteurization of the academy in Nigeria and Africa is the supposition that, because human needs and natures are similar, therefore the modalities for attaining sustainable development in every society African must be identical. This has had the consequence of ensuring that the curriculars that are adopted from primary to secondary and tertiary institutions in global Africa are patterned after the dicta of erstwhile colonial hegemons. In a very similar fashion to how the African youth and child is robbed of the most valuable six to eight years of her early life when she begins “formal” education, as she is treated as a tabular rasa, with no early childhood learning or retention capacity, similarly the African peoples are treated as totally bereft of any knowledge of their environments, realities, or beings, till the colonizer came to name them and tell them about rivers, rocks, minerals and social organizations in their environments of existence. The most dangerous part of this manifests in the ways in which African communities are being conscripted into applying alien solutions to indigenous challenges, thereby creating more confusion than clear ways forward.

Left alone, Africa would have found her way back to meaningfully and culturally providing relevant solutions to most of the challenges facing her – African peoples have pioneered virtually every aspect of the sciences, technologies, governance, medicines and neurosurgery among others before Europeans and Arabs decapitated the intellectual destiny of Africa. But with educational paradigms which are exogenous in nature and culturally denuding in orientation, the balkanization of various knowledge areas and approaches into disciplinary silos, where specialities and specialisms are fabricated out of thin air, and the practitioners are tamed into disciplinary decadence (Gordon 2006), the incommensurability and incapacity of the ideas generated in monadic disciplinary locales then ensure that the kinds of synthesis and synergies necessary to solve and resolve challenges are alien to African “educated” egg-heads. The ways and manners in which our ancestors shared knowledge, relied on the expertise of each other and had no chips on their shoulders regarding who is an elite specialist or novice, thereby ensuring that the most important element in being and existence is utilizing whatever knowledges and insights to assist and promote human welfare in society, without prejudice to who is the originator of any ideas. It was no wonder that patents and copyrights, landed property ownership titles, and wealth covetousness were alien to most African societies before the ingress of Arabian and Nordic peoples polluted and corrupted the societies with alien individualistic traditions and “cultures”. These traditions and “cultures” are so deranged in orientation that they even postulated realms of posthumous existence where solitary hedonism was their coveted expectation.

In Europe and United States of America, a new interdisciplinary field is becoming popular. That is “Environmental Humanities”. The movement for this started just a couple of decades ago, but it has not yet caught on in subaltern communities, like many of the disciplines which have been spawned over the last half a century. The reason for that may be probably the protagonists of this new movement are constrained by the jet-lag of institutional traditions which frame their practice, especially as Africa waits on the West for direction and instruction. This ensures that, in Europe and America, they see “Environmental Humanities” narrowly, in the sense of constituting a bullock for the harnessing of the resources of current disciplines in the humanities to tackle environmental challenges. If this were what is envisaged here, we would only be subsuming our interest within the colonial tradition and traction once again. We not only recognize that avoiding this kind of dependency game is critical, but more importantly, Environmental Humanities in Africa must do more than just play the gramophone and be “His Masters’ Voice”. Environmental Humanities in African academy must transcend these narrow limitations to ensure that the huge challenges faced by Africa, where the environment is concerned, are addressed and solved, utilizing the wealth of indigenous knowledge systems native to various African intellectual ecologies.

The Vision of the Leadership of the Federal University Lokoja is well-articulated as the desire to give students a modern, robust, and competitive education to graduate to become responsible and responsive citizens of your various communities and our country, Nigeria and to inculcate in students the need to be enterprising to become self-reliant at the end of your studies.

On this basis, the Federal University Lokoja International Centre of Excellence in Environmental Humanities will undertake novel inter/cross/multidisciplinary approaches to resolving diverse global environmental humanities issues. Thus, using African positionalities and intersectionalities of indigenous knowledge systems and traditions, and activating values and inclusive wealth creation mechanisms and sustaining methodologies become critical imperatives.