ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies African women’s literary gardening as a mode of dirty ecology, an environmental praxis that models a form of dwelling – what Greg Garrard calls living ethically toward the earth ‘in a relation of duty and responsibility’. Within postcolonial studies, the centrality of botanical concepts likes ‘hybridity,’ ‘transplantation,’ ‘rhizomes,’ ‘diaspora’ and ‘deracination’ have enjoyed much critical attention. But the connection between cultivation and (post)colonialism is more than purely metaphorical. The modern environmental movement is often dated to 1968, the year the famous photograph of Earth from space, an image known as ‘Earthrise,’ first provided a different perspective on the world. Bessie Head interest in the garden as a site of ecological, psychological and social healing is continued in her third novel, which again focuses on the problematics of dwelling in a political context defined by property and borderlines.
