Guiding the Young, Healing the Earth: Decolonising Environmental Education in Africa

Kori Bustard

08-10-2025

From that day on, Kingfisher never tried to change his diet again and stuck to eating fish. He learned his lesson the hard way that it’s better to stick to the known foods instead of trying new ones because taking risks could end up very disappointing.

In “Philosophy of Eating”; Wild Wise Weird [1]

© Hu Chen

Across Africa, environmental education (EE) has long been shaped by Western paradigms that emphasize management, control, and quantification of nature. These frameworks—imported through colonial education systems—have often displaced Indigenous ways of knowing that view nature as kin, teacher, and spiritual companion [2,3].

While global initiatives like UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples advocate for inclusivity, African curricula still marginalize local ecological wisdom and community-based practices. This exclusion not only weakens sustainability education but also perpetuates a deeper epistemic injustice: the erasure of African cultural identity in the classroom [4,5]. The question, therefore, is not merely how to teach sustainability, but whose knowledge defines it—and how education can reconnect young Africans to the land, values, and worldviews that have sustained their ancestors for generations.

A recent perspective paper by Nonkanyiso Pamella Shabalala [6] argues that transforming Africa’s environmental education requires a decolonisation of knowledge systems—a shift from Western-centric models toward Indigenous frameworks rooted in African philosophy and early childhood learning.

The study, guided by the isiZulu proverb “Zibanjwa Zisemaphuphu” (“they must be guided while still young”), emphasizes that ecological consciousness and moral responsibility must be cultivated early in life, when worldviews are still forming. Shabalala reviews 25 scholarly sources to examine how Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) can reshape curricula, teaching, and policy across the continent. Her framework integrates four key ideas: Ubuntu, Zibanjwa Zisemaphuphu, Granular Interaction Thinking Theory (GITT), and the Nature Quotient (NQ)—each offering insights into how learning can be both culturally grounded and environmentally transformative.

Findings reveal that most African education systems continue to privilege Western scientific paradigms, presenting nature as a resource to manage rather than kin to respect. This epistemic bias marginalizes Indigenous ecological wisdom—knowledge that, for centuries, has sustained communities through local water conservation, land stewardship, and weather prediction. The result is an “epistemic injustice”, where learners are alienated from their cultural heritage and disconnected from their environments.

Shabalala identifies storytelling, community co-teaching, and land-based learning as promising innovations that restore Indigenous voices and ethical relationships with nature. Integrating Ubuntu and IKS into early childhood education encourages relational ethics—teaching children to see themselves as part of an interdependent ecological community and improving their NQ by emphasizing emotional, ethical, and cognitive ties to the natural world, cultivating empathy, care, and ecological identity [7].

This vision links deeply with the pursuit of individual and social peace. By decolonising education and grounding it in Ubuntu, learners develop not only environmental stewardship but also emotional harmony and communal empathy [8,9]. A high NQ society—rooted in reciprocity, justice, and respect for life—builds peace within individuals and among communities. In this sense, environmental education becomes a moral act: a process of healing both people and the planet.

References

[1] Vuong QH. (2024). Wild Wise Weird. https://books.google.com/books?id=N10jEQAAQBAJ

[2] Matemba YH, Lilemba JM. (2015). Reclaiming indigenous knowledge in Namibia’s postcolonial curriculum: the case of the Mafwe people. In: Chinsembu KC, et al. (Eds). Indigenous knowledge of Namibia. Windhoek: UNAM Press.

[3] Eyong CT. (2007). Indigenous knowledge and sustainable development in Africa: Case study on Central Africa. In: Boon EK, Hens L. (Eds). Indigenous knowledge systems and sustainable development: Relevance for Africa (pp. 225–257). Delhi: Kamla-Raj Enterprises.

[4] Owuor JA. (2007). Integrating African Indigenous knowledge in Kenya’s formal education: the potential for sustainable development. Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 2(2), 21-37. https://doi.org/10.20355/C5Z594

[5] Ndofirepi AP, Gwaravanda ET. (2020). Inclusion and social justice: Creating space for African epistemologies in the African university. In: Ndofirepi AP, Musengi M. (Eds). Inclusion and social justice: theory and practice in African higher education (pp. 90-110). Brill.

[6] Shabalala NP. (2025). Decolonising environmental education in Africa through the early integration of indigenous knowledge systems guided by Zibanjwa Zisemaphuphu. Discover Sustainability, 6, 892. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-025-01822-5

[7] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH. (2025). On Nature Quotient. Pacific Conservation Biology, 31, PC25028. https://doi.org/10.1071/PC25028

[8] Nguyen MH, Ho MT, La VP. (2025). On “An” (安): Inner peace through uncertainty, nature quotient, and harmony with Dao. http://books.google.com/books/about?id=NIKMEQAAQBAJ

[9] Nguyen MH. (2024). How can satirical fables offer us a vision for sustainability? Visions for Sustainability, 23(11267), 323-328. https://doi.org/10.13135/2384-8677/11267