Journal of African Studies and Sustainable Development

Despite growing scholarship on ecofeminism and environmental justice in the Niger Delta, limited attention has been paid to how women's lived experiences and oral testimonies, read alongside literary narratives, generate ecological knowledge and contribute to environmental justice. This study uses Afro-ecofeminism as its analytical framework and adopts a phenomenologically informed hermeneutic reading of Kaine Agary's Yellow-Yellow, Tanure Ojaide's The Activist, and women's oral testimonies from Gbaraun, Bayelsa State. Through thematic and comparative narrative analysis, it examines how ecological degradation is lived, remembered, narrated, and resisted. The findings articulate that women's oral accounts and literary representations document ecological violence, preserve Indigenous ecological knowledge, and challenge extractive capitalism, patriarchal governance, and colonial legacies. The paper positions storytelling as an Afro-ecofeminist environmental praxis through which embodied experience becomes ecological knowledge and through which community-centred, gender-responsive pathways to environmental justice are imagined.

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