Ubuntu-Ukama Epistemologies: Towards a Shift from a Colonial Grammar of Possession and Exploitation to Ecological Kinship and Community in Environmental Communication

From an African Indigenous worldview, Ghana's artisanal gold mining industry evinces a troubling breakdown in relationality between humans and the natural environment. Such a breakdown, traceable to colonial-capitalist logics, is fueling increasing rates of environmental destruction. To restore this ruptured relationality, I argue for a shift from environmental communication practices which reify climate coloniality and resource colonialism to environmental relationality and ecological kinship informed by Indigenous African environmental knowledges, specifically ubuntu and ukama epistemologies. The paper contends that to reimagine environmental communication from African Indigenous worldviews, an ubuntu-ukama approach reorients us to advance two primary communicative praxes by: (1) shifting from a colonial grammar of possession and ownership of the natural environment which fuels environmental exploitation to an ecological kinship which advances sustainability and care; and (2) reclaiming “community” as a bureaucratic, exclusionary term from political elites and redefining it as a central ethic of being-in-community between humans and the natural environment.