Journal of African Studies and Sustainable Development

This article critically reconstructs selected Indigenous African environmental mores for contemporary environmental education, with particular attention to Igbo and Nigerian traditions. It addresses two recurring problems: the romanticisation of inherited practices as inherently sustainable and the reduction of Indigenous knowledge to material that must first be validated by modern science. Using critical conceptual reconstruction, the paper distinguishes cultural meaning, empirical consequence, ethical legitimacy, and educational relevance. Igbo conceptions of Ala/Ani, sacred groves and totemic species, environmental taboos, erosion-control practices, and oral ecological apprenticeship are examined alongside comparative Nigerian and southern African scholarship. The analysis advances an eight-stage Critical Reconstruction Model through which inherited practices are identified, interpreted, philosophically evaluated, evidentially differentiated, ethically screened, participatorily adapted, integrated into curriculum, and translated into environmental action. The concept of the “ultimate good” is interpreted through African relational ethics, according to which the good life involves morally responsible participation in life-sustaining relationships among persons, communities, generations, and the more-than-human world. Environmental sustainability is therefore partly constitutive of flourishing. The educational task is not cultural restoration, but the formation of ecologically knowledgeable, critically reflective, and morally accountable persons capable of sustaining just relationships with place and community.

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