African Tropics and Ecological Crisis: Tourist Gaze in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Travellers

The paper examines how Helon Habila’s novels, Oil on Water (2010) and Travellers (2019), critique the tourist gaze as a means of commercializing ecological degradation and human dislocation in the vulnerable African tropics. Drawing on an African and Western postcolonial ecocritical framework, it demonstrates how Habila’s narratives foreground the convergence of tourism, extractive capitalism, slow ecological violence, and neocolonial power dynamics. Applying John Urry’s concept of the tourist gaze, Rob Nixon’s theory of slow violence, and Judith Butler’s notion of grievability, this paper argues that Habila’s work shifts tourism studies and ecocriticism towards ecological justice and decolonial ethics. The paper highlights African environmental activism and intellectual traditions, particularly legacies inherited from Ken Saro-Wiwa and Wangari Maathai, by situating Habila’s novels within a much longer history concerning resistance against environmental degradation in Africa. This paper attends to both theoretical dimensions as well as textual particulars within Habila’s novels while contributing toward a postcolonial ecocriticism that resists Western domination over environmental knowledge by insisting on African epistemologies as central to any broader understanding of environmental crisis.