Inhabiting “the world we live from”: “inhabitation” as a site for a decolonial discourse on representations of ecological crises in two Francophone Cameroonian texts

In Une écologie décoloniale (2019), political philosopher Malcom Ferdinand conceptualizes colonization not only as a historical process but as a way of “inhabiting the world.” He argues that European colonizers brought to the Caribbean a mode of “colonial inhabitation,” a notion I situate within Aníbal Quijano’s theory of the coloniality of power. Building on recent Francophone African scholarship on the notion of inhabitation, this article examines how Cameroonian writer Patrice Nganang represents the impact of French colonization on the Bamiléké people in his short story “The Land of Coffee” (2006). While Nganang foregrounds human exploitation and environmental extraction, I argue that the concept of inhabitation foregrounds the ontological dimensions of the ecological crisis experienced by indigenous communities in West Cameroon. A brief comparison with Samuel Mvolo’s Les Fiancés du Grand Fleuve (1973), which depicts colonial extraction and forced labor in 1930s rural Central Cameroon, suggests that inhabitation should be integrated as a philosophical and anthropological tool in African ecocriticism, enabling interdisciplinary and decolonizing readings attentive to the persistence of indigenous ways of inhabiting the world.