ABSTRACT
Environmental degradation hardly ever strikes us as a form of atrocity yet its slow incremental repercussions (Nixon 2011) certainly translate(s) into horrendous irreversible distortions to livelihoods. This chapter explores textual framings of environmental destructive acts as atrocity in Okiya Omtata Okoiti’s Voice of the People (2007) and Nganga Mbugua’s Different Colours (2011). While focusing on stylo-rhetoric strategies used to frame these environmental atrocities, the chapter interrogates the ideas which emerge and locate those ideas in the contemporary ecocritical debate. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s notion of persuasion to attitude, this chapter argues that these texts not only articulate environmental atrocity, but should be read as acts of protest against environmental devastation. Discussions in this chapter proceed with full awareness of the Kenyan socio-environmental history and its affinity to the situation in other African countries, and therefore, recognize allegorical associations.
