ABSTRACT
In this chapter I bring into the conversation urban political ecology with Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the violence of colonization as “suffocation” when identity, ways of knowing, and ability to live at all was imprinted in the relation of colonizer and colonized. I examine the ways climate change and global policy operate as suffocation in three cities of Africa: sea-level rise in the coastal city of Saint-Louis, Senegal; disrupted electricity infrastructures in Accra, Ghana; and a waste management programme in Mbale, Uganda. This shows how climate change and global policy operate as “social-ecological violence,” which sustains coloniality in that it excludes local knowledge and voices, and deepens racialized capitalism.
