Imperialism is the arsonist setting fire to our forests and savannas.1
–Thomas Sankara
Thomas Sankara’s infamous speech of anticolonial environmentalism in 1983, which locates the polis of insurgent struggles in the forest, came from an intellectual history of seeing independence as a geologic practice. Sankara, who was a revolutionary fighter and the first president of Burkina Faso, frames the “struggle to defend the trees and forests [as] above all a struggle against imperialism,” understanding trees as political subjects and the earth as a medium of struggle. He rails against people having to “passively watch their natural environment die,” and sets out an agenda in which “water, trees, and lives, if not by survival itself, have been fundamental and sacred elements in all action taken by the National Council of the Revolution.” Sankara positions an environment politics of life to counter colonial necropolitics.
Mobilizing trees, mountains, soil, and land as the architecture of anticolonial materiality, Sankara speaks in concert with agronomist Amílcar Cabral’s assertion that “our people are our mountains.”2 Cabral understood the terrain as part of the fight for territory, not just as the spatial acquisition of property or accumulation of resources, but as a poetics for growing lives that had the stature of geologic-like permeance. In the postcolonial era, the recolonization of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean through agribusiness, the continued exploitation of labor, World Bank/IMF-sponsored “Green Revolutions,” and major infrastructural projects led decolonized peoples to extend their theorizing of colonialism as a geological force of transformation. Wangarĩ Maathai enacted tree planting in Kenya as praxis towards power in Kenya’s 1977 Green Belt Movement. This was a response to environmental degradation caused by the colonial extraction of timber and charcoal, and plantations of tea and coffee. Planting did not simply activate intergenerational nonhuman temporalities, but focused on the commons as a space in which to site questions of environmental justice and political change.
As colonial architectures and their spatial afterlives imposed domination and racial apartheids, the social orders of plantations, and settler ecologies of land, anticolonial architectures of the earth were key to building the decolonial subject. In the context of such planetary dreams, Sankara proposed that at least one percent of money spent on space exploration be used as compensation to finance projects to save trees and lives as a counter-geology to the desertification of the Sahel. While a “dialog with the Martians” should not be abandoned, he suggested, the “earthlings that we are,” “reject a choice limited simply to the alternatives of hell or purgatory.” Sankara ends his speech by stating: “We can win this struggle if we choose to be architects and simply not bees. The bee and the architect, yes! … The bee, the architect, and the revolutionary architect.”3
The revolutionary architect, according to Sankara, is one who builds life with the earth, not against it. Until his assassination, his presidency of Burkina Faso (1983–87) organized urban planning, eviction, celebrations, punishment, and sentencing all through the medium of tree planting. Furthermore, the “ability to buy or simply rent one of the hundreds of the public dwellings [made available since independence], is strictly conditional on the beneficiary promising to plant a minimum number of trees.” A vast operation called the “Popular Harvest of Forest Seeds” was put underway in Burkina to supply villages nurseries to wage war against the “unpunished disruption of the biosphere by savage and murderous forays on the land and in the air.” Air conditioning was banned in government buildings, and the government fleet of Mercedes Benzes were sold off. Trees were enlisted as revolutionary subjects, foundational to fighting the desert and the colonial practice of making famine where abundance lies.
Reaffirming a relation to the environment was a way of becoming-other than colonial subjects. As Frantz Fanon names it, “the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people” not the politicians.4 The ravages of the earth and colonized peoples are situated within a continuum of extraction, and it is with those magic hands, planting in the soil, that political speech begins to shift the geopolitical “gravity” of the earth. As architecture was implicated in the establishment of “empires of geology” through far-reaching colonial earthworks and land practices—from the vast planetary movement of materials around the globe to the depletion of soils for plantation cash crops—anti-colonial movements practiced “planetary vernaculars” that were grown in the shadowlands of these colonial geologies, engaging the earth as a collaborator in making new life-ways and ways of life. Cultivating soils and materially demonstrating a reparative relation with geology and its lived social materiality was the basis of imagining and materializing new social worlds. These insurgent, anti-colonial geologies of resistance and repair were a cartographic rendering of how to build anti-racist futures defined by reciprocity with the earth.
Planetary vernaculars can be understood as resistant and regenerative practices made in the rifts of colonial/neocolonial environments (and their afterlives in climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, etc.). This vernacular, both as a process and outcome, and as an archive of specific architectural forms that are “earth-bound,” was conducted at a planetary scale, held together by the common experience of colonialism. As Indonesian President Sukarno said at the first Asia-African conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, “This is the first international conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind! … Almost all of us have ties to common experience, the experience of colonialism.”5 As a conference on “racialism and colonialism,” the Bandung Conference shifted the compass of where world geographies were imagined from and by whom.
Deeply moved by the “meeting of the rejected,” where every “religion under the sun, almost every race on earth, every shade of political opinion, and one and a half billion people from 12,606,938 square miles of the Earth’s surface were represented,” the African American writer Richard Wright traveled to West Java.6 Wright imagines the meeting in terms of geophysics: “There was something extra-political, extra-social, almost extra-human about it; it smacked of tidal waves, of natural forces … The agenda and subject matter had been written for centuries in the blood and bones of the participants.”7 The Bandung Conference was followed by several other important collective spaces of “other world” theorizing, including Cairo in 1961, Nairobi in 1985, Miami in 1991, and Rio de Janeiro in 1992.8
In the axis of solidarity of new geographies and geologic imaginaries, peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America gathered to address the double debt of colonialization: first, through the stealing of peoples, land, and communal ecologies through enslavement and invasion; and second, through the extraction of natural resources and raw materials by neocolonial expropriation leveraged by debt relations. The specter of neocolonialism was further sedimented in Africa through the assignation of democratically elected leaders and support for coups, elites, and puppet governments that brutally cut off ancestral traditions and environmental philosophies. Against this reoccupation of new economic architectures, the cooperation of Black and Brown peoples to counter Western powers and imposition of global environmental systems of agriculture, economy, and labor was often inspired by Black Marxism, scientific socialism, and peasant movements. It deeply connected ecological sustainability as the site of freedom from colonial mechanisms of incorporation. Within these geologic planetary vernaculars, a process of sedimentation takes place of that which was erased and marginalized under colonial impositions. They create living archives that speak to a poetics of world-building in the rift of colonial geology and its ongoing spatial violences.
The practice of insurgent geologies has been the mainstay of dissidents, runaways, resistance fighters, marginalized, and criminalized peoples that have long fought for a earth and ecology of relation while fighting for their lives. Forests and caves as political spaces of building autonomous communities were synonymous first with those escaping slavery, and then those resisting colonialism. James C. Scott called these spaces outside the jurisdiction of the state, “shatter zones.”9 This geologic condition is predicated on the engagement with environmental knowledges that are produced and shared amongst human and nonhuman communities to resist the coercive apparatus of state capture and its atomization of life.
According to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, practices of reciprocal consent with environments and nonhumans are not simply against colonialism, but for and actively center Indigenous life.10 And as the work of Wangarĩ Maathai makes clear, planting a forest can activate a sociality of anti-colonial politics, especially for those marginalized by gender and left out of the grand patriarchal narrative of political action. Animation of political life via an expanded environmental consciousness was crucial to activating a mutuality of the commons in the context of necropolitical conditions organized around the “thingification” of racialized subjects through extraction.11 The earth and nonhuman life were the medium through which intellectual traditions of the environment could be mobilized in different temporal scales and re-remembered from before the imposition of colonialism and settler-colonialism.
The spatial dynamics of insurgent geologies unfold distinctly in different physical geographies. The underground, for instance, can be a space of extraction, mine, waste sites, wasted landscapes, death, and deadly zones of the racialized poor. But it can also be a site of creative epistemologies of resistance in the creation and maintenance of other social possibilities and environmental practices: a space of resistance, a political shelter, a revolutionary pocket, or a line of communication and mutualism. Similarly, the forest can be a space of political activation through replanting, or a space of refusal through deforestation. But it can also be a retreat or space of gathering to activate new architectures of relation. For this reason, the forest itself has often been the target of colonial violence.
The so-called “Mau Mau Emergency” in Kenya, for instance, was largely conceived as a problem of the technicity of the forest for British authorities. In the now-declassified 1954 Emergency Directive No. 14, Foreign and Commonwealth Office Operations in the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya name the number one military objective as being to “dominate forests.” The directive reads: “At the end of the HAMMER operations we may expect that the faith of the terrorists in the forest as a secure refuge will have been seriously shaken … We shall burn down and destroy those that remain.”12 In the Kikuyu forest, the British strategy was one of infiltration to “break” the tribe and then “reconstitute the tribe” via the control of forest, severing ties to communal networks and sanctuaries.13 Yet the forest frustrated the violent tactics of the British insomuch as they did not have the environmental knowledges or “intelligence” to navigate the terrain. The forest was a political space to the colonialist but not an environmental one, nor a living archive of ancestral practices that could be drawn upon as a revolutionary friend.14
Archive files, Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, National Archives, Kew.
When she began her tree planting in Kikuyu, Maathai said “Nobody thought we could plant trees. It was not a Kikuyu custom for women to plant trees. So, when we planted, we felt we had made a breakthrough to be associated with trees.”15 The political economy of trees was a way to move into spaces of power, where “responsible governance of the environment was impossible without democratic space. Therefore, the tree became a symbol for the democratic struggle in Kenya.”16 Architectures of the earth, as built and cultivated forms, are a thread in which geo-stories can be unwound and told, and the difficult practice of making space in common launched.
The Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter’s account of “we, the underdeveloped” refuses the pathway that development offers via material development (eternal extraction) that is waged by the colonizing world in exchange for the psychic recognition of equality in terms of being human.17 This “price of a ticket” humanism is the cost of material development. As Wynter contends, the “resultant ongoing degradation of our human modes of life is, therefore, inseparable from that that of the physical and organic environment. The latter are seen as ‘natural resources’ within our cultural logic, to be ceaselessly exploited, thereby systematically ensuring the ongoing extinction of many other forms of life.”18
Wynter argues that the descriptive statement model of “being human” is specific to a model of material development, and that material development is offered as a pathway to the “undeveloped” (i.e., the formally colonized) to become human (within the limited Western genre of humanism). Wynter’s proposition is that development is teleological—that the problem of debt is primarily epistemological and only secondarily economic; that we cannot survive on a planet with a project that asks the whole world to emulate the greediest and most wasteful people on the planet (aka “the developed”). As Cabral, Walter Rodney and others have asserted, it is an “indispensable prerequisite for national independence that we should have recovery of our national resources.”19 Insurgent geological practices are a path to independence.
Alongside and within these political forums, leaders, organizers, and women’s movements advocated for a Black science in which the environment (as land, agriculture, soil, trees, and water) was seen as the seed of African decolonization. Amílcar Cabral, for example, the leader and secretary-general of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC), was an agronomist. Addressing the eroded soils of plantations was a challenge to food security and the viability of independence from continued neocolonial domination in imperial circuits of trade. Scientific practices were part of the Black radical tradition, where Black science was seen as a key tenant of the revolutionary struggle, and soil erosion and land use critical to realizing historic agency. Rather than monocultures and cash crops (like peanuts) which lead to soil exhaustion, Cabral advocated for “cropscapes” (mangrove rice) and the longue durée of West African technologies. He used “statistics and soil science to discriminate which concrete material practices enabled desirable African futures and which were ruining African life.”20 The future is activated as a space of enabling social equity through ecological revision.21
Land use by the different peoples of Guinea-Bissau. The top line (green) refers to cultivated land, the middle line (red) to burnt land, and the bottom line (black) to land lying fallow. Along the vertical axis, two centimeters corresponds to an area of 1,000 hectares, and along the horizontal axis, five centimeters corresponds to 1,000 families. From Amílcar Cabral, “Queimadas e pousios na Circunscrição de Fulacunda em 1953,” Boletim Cultural da Guiné Portuguesa 9, no. 35 (1954): 627–43. The archive of the National Research Institute, Guinea-Bissau, holds the collection of the Boletim.
Twentieth-century decolonization included arguments for “new metrics” and “new sciences” that respected African environmental practices as foundational to life (and politics), and saw it as a concrete way to improve lives impoverished by extractivism. The soil itself, according to Cabral, could be part of identifying emancipatory ways of producing decolonization. Cabral’s equation is one of “soil-life-climate,” where life is firmly sutured to the geologies of soils and the geophysical breath of the earth.22 Life cannot be extracted from that which supports and nourishes it.
In friendship with Cabral, who was assassinated by Portuguese agents in 1973, Walter Rodney argues that the west “underdeveloped” Africa by the extraction of people, wealth, natural resources, and by blocking environmental—and thus economic, social, and political—progress.23 As Aimé Césaire also reminds us, “the men [sic] they took away knew how to build houses, govern empires, erect cities, cultivate fields, mine for metals, weave cotton, forge steel.”24 What was taken, in other words, was communities of relations and the fabricators of a knowledge economy. Rodney argued that the colonialists came as outsiders, seeing the dense vegetation and incorrectly assuming a disastrous relation with the topsoil. “Rescuing communal elements,” by which he means the earth-life-atmosphere, the commons, the community of the earth, is therefore predicated on refusing the attachment to anthropocentric fictions.25 Rodney, like Cabral, saw the struggle for soil as the primary struggle for Africa’s future, in which subsistence was key to the possibility of freedom. The challenges of decolonization were therefore also those of the architectures of built agricultural environments, structures, and scientific practices predicated on the displacement and separation of bios and geos, land and people.
Foregrounding environmental practices that historically enacted agency and prioritized reciprocal relations, consent, and the continuance of life was at the heart of how to sustain resistance in turbulent postcolonial times. Soil and forest epistemologies were a way to liberation, whereby anti-colonial and environmental alliances nurtured each other through, after Cabral, an “agropoetics of liberation.” Geology was overwritten in emancipatory configurations. The environment as a decolonial practice and discourse linked food security and poverty to colonialism and deforestation to address the material aspects of poverty and combat the narrow focus of economic “development” with the non-material aspect of power and its activation.26
The question of geology in Africa remains one of almost permanent postponement and deferral. After political independence, the mythology of extraction surrounding geology was a byword for recolonization by other means. Where does this leave the geology of architecture? Buildings have long disavowed their origins in the earth (not to mention in labor chains, impacts of commodification, and in the devastation of market-led resource hunting of the deep and subsurface). Colonial, classical, and modernist architectural practices aimed at a dissociative geologic aesthetic, where materials perform as “elements” in the categorization of materiality as universal and without geography. The recidivism of extraction as a zero-sum game of planetary burn is bound up in ideologies of geology and the cultural imaginations that materialize these relations in symbolic and built form.
We might see anti-colonial intellectual traditions of working with earth as a medium of sociality, communality, and culture in the fight for a different political existence—one that does not follow the Western imagination in its burying of what makes its worlds possible—as a geostory to unearth. As Rodney points out, the primary contradiction of development is the geo-logics of depletion: “Africa … continues to be the main donor to Europe and the West.”27 The earth is a medium of memory, from cave art to plantation soils, different architectures of life speak of different earth relations, of what the planet can become, geophysically and socially.
Ideas have roots, but they borrow the roots of plants and forests that uphold cities, and the strata of ancient sea creatures that fold into limestone and marble facades. Cleaving to Édouard Glissant’s “whole-world” rather than the “museum world” of colonialism that Aimé Césaire decries, anti-colonial thinkers expanded their engagements with the earth as the basis for an expanded idea of the human in the context of their dehumanization by colonial powers.28 Forest, plants, and caves held historic roots that were destroyed or attempted to be erased by imperial cultures and pedagogy. As Maathai said on the occasion of her award of a Nobel Prize, “As it turned out, the idea that sprang from my roots merged with other sources of knowledge and action to form a confluence that grew bigger than I would ever have imagined.”29
Forests, rivers, and mountains are all physical geographies that make up communities of resistance and reimagination. Planting new insurgent geologies into the earth creates an architecture of practices to sustain the possibility of freedom. The enlargement of freedom is the enlargement of living architectures that speak of and with complex forms of growing. Architecture is an earth practice that must once more imagine itself within the architectures of the earth and their insurgencies of the rift, the geothermal earth, the rivers, the forests and caves, that are its first shelter. Planetary vernaculars are part of the “reverse futurism” of planetary change. They insist on specific geographies and embedded engagements with the built environment. Architecture, then, can become a deliberate collaboration with/in earth systems, redirecting our attention towards the fullness of those earth-bound relations of the planetary.
All quotes from Thomas Sankara are from “Imperialism is the arsonist of our forests and savannas,” a speech given at the first International Silva Conference for the Protection of the Trees and Forests in Paris, 1986, published in the February 14, 1986, issue of Carrefour Africain, ➝.
Guinea is flat, so forest or mountain revolutionary tactics were not an option. Thus, Cabral is referring to the people becoming their own self-authored geological entity.
Sankara is referring here to François Mitterrand's 1978 book, L'Abeille et l'Architecte (The Bee and the Architect).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 197.
Quoted in Richard Wright, “Colour Curtain: A report on the Bandung Conference,” in Richard Wright, Black Power (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 539, 541.
Richard Wright, “Colour Curtain,” 438, 538.
Richard Wright, “Colour Curtain,” 439.
The All-African Peoples’ Conference in Cairo, Egypt, 1961, was framed by the CIA/MI5 involvement in the assassination of Congo President, Patrice Lumumba just two months before. See All-African People's Conference News Bulletin I no. 4 (Accra: 1959): 1–2. Also available as “What is neo-colonialism? full text of the main resolution passed by the third All-African peoples conference,” Labour Monthly 43, (June 1961): 276–79. During the Third World Conference on the Status of Women in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985, the Chipko forest protection women of northern India, Vandana Shiva, and Mathai all contributed to a women-of-color environmentalism that sought to develop alternative frameworks for development. This highlighted the differential impacts of the environment on women because of their structural proximities to poverty, social and sexual divisions of labor, and exclusions in political and economic decision-making forums. This was followed by the first Earth conference in 1991 (World Women’s conference for a Healthy Planet), which finally led to the 1992 Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro.
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven, Yale University press, 2009).
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, A Short History of the Blockade (Alberta: University of Alberta Press and CLC, 2021), 10.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2000).
National Archives WO 276/429, EAC/61806/OPS(K), General Headquarters East Africa, Tracking/Combat teams, Emergency Directive No. 14, page 2.
National Archives WO 276/429, Appendix ‘A’ EAC/61806/OPS(k), 6 December 1954.
Recently declassified British government secret documents (2007) on the topic of “The Encouragement of Surrenders” cite “iii) the live ‘Mau Mau’ spirit amongst the people, particularly the women” as a contributing factor to the lack of success in the Rift Valley (National Archives, FCO 141/6600, CAB/MM/7/6). These documents have to be viewed in a special room and handled with gloves because of the application of pesticides to the files.
Maathai speaking in Lisa Merton and Alan Dater’s documentary film titled Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai (2008).
“Wangari Maathai: Nobel Lecture,” The Nobel Prize, lecture recorded December 10, 2004, ➝.
Sylvia Wynter “Is ‘Development’ a Purely Empirical Concept or also Teleological?: A Perspective from ‘We the Underdeveloped,’” in Prospects for Recovery and Sustainable Development in Africa, ed. Aguibou Y. Yansané (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 229–316.
Wynter “Is ‘Development’ a Purely Empirical Concept,” 302.
Walter Rodney, Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution (London: Verso, 2022), 297.
Mette Marie Kallehauge and Malou Wedel Bruun eds. Cave_bureau: The Architect's Studio (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2023), 25.
Cabral quoted in Filipe Carreira da Silva and Monica Brito Vieira, “Amílcar Cabral, Colonial Soil and the Politics of Insubmission,” Theory, Culture & Society 42, no. 1 (January 2025): 19–35. The authors note that in 1941, when Cabral is 17, he witnesses one of the worst droughts ever to affect the archipelago of Cape Verde in which some 20,000 Cape Verdeans starved to death, a figure that rose to an estimated 45,000 deaths.
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Verso, 2018), 238.
Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 21.
Rodney, Decolonial Marxism, 45.
Material economy is what is positioned as that which saves the African economy via the psychic infantilization that posits Africa as a child in global economies or as a geophysical landmass that has somehow been depressed by a great subducting weight (“Africa Rising”) rather than colonialism and its after- and new-lives that continue to try to “underdevelop” African economies. Development is then offered as a route to adulthood. Given that 90% of Africa’s natural resources are owned by countries external to the continent, with patsy shell fronts, what does this say about the paternalism that environmentally guides Africa as a site of extraction without end. See Walter RodneyHow Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
Rodney, Decolonial Marxism, viii.
See Édouard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World, trans. Celia Britton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020); Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.
“Wangari Maathai: Nobel Lecture,” ➝.