Chapter 17: Indigenous Knowledge, Environment, and Education in Africa

There is very limited literature on environmental education in Africa, and the little there is was mostly written by European writers, who might not have had a grasp of how Africans viewed the environment and its conservation. Most of the information available about the environment in Africa is the recollection of oral knowledge as passed from one generation to another. This is because in Africa, there was no form of writing available until the advent of European colonialism.

Africa is enormous, not only in terms of its size and geographic diversity but also the spectrum of cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity that characterizes the people who live in the different countries. Olaniyan (1982) observes, “With almost a thousand separate language groups, a variety of climatic regions and greatly different levels of social and economic development . . . Africa is a continent of bewildering diversity and extraordinary dynamism” (p. 1).