ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the literature on rain and rainmaking in Africa and considers the implications of post-humanist concepts of relational personhood, non-human social actors, and ontological anthropological methods for understanding rainmakingng and climate change in sub-Saharan Africa. The first section examines rainmaking as an Indigenous knowledge system embedded in particular ecological contexts. The second part reviews the classic functionalist literature on rainmaking and the recent transition to more processual political ecology and phenomenological approaches. Relational and composite personhood is the subject of the third section, and the fourth evaluates new materialist, multispecies ethnographic, and ontological approaches to rain in Africa. The final section applies these concepts to case study material from Tanzania's North Pare Mountains and the widespread cultural model of “vital flows” of life ae and fertility in African societies. The results indicate how an ontological perspective on the gendered and sexual aspects of rainmaking in Africa require a complementary materialist view from feminist political ecology. The conclusion offers some suggestions for post-humanist perspectives in African climate research and activism.
