ABSTRACT

This chapter explores a development in African literature wherein a human character goes in search of another human and, in the process, illuminates the debilitating condition of the environment. The growing corpus of eco criticism in African literary scholarship has devoted attention to the rationale for the late environmental turn in African literary studies, the ways that African literature draws attention to environmental problems on the continent, and its participation in discourses on ecological sustainability. Matthew J. Christensen claim that ‘one tactic used frequently by African detective novelists as a practice of cultural critique is to confound the genre’s normative narrative resolution’ applies to Helon Habila’s novel, where the ending denies the closure associated with this genre. Habila’s Oil on Water follows a journalist Rufus who is on a mission to the Niger Delta creeks to ascertain the status of the kidnapped Isabel Floode, the wife of a British oil industry expatriate.