Environmental Destruction as a Colonial Residue in Nnimmo Bassey’s I Will Not Dance to Your Beat and Richard Inya’s Katakata

In most African countries as in Nigeria, colonialism introduced an exploitative system in which the people and their lands were subjected to intensive extraction. This exploitation of the environment has continued as a colonial residue, with natural elements constantly destroyed decades after formal colonialism ended. Postcolonial writers, particularly Eco-poets, have foregrounded environmental destruction as one of the most devastating colonial outcomes. This paper examines Nnimmo Bassey’s I Will Not Dance to Your Beat and Richard Inya’s Katakata as ecocritical poems that mirror how both poets portray the continued existence of colonial systems of environmental exploitation. It employs postcolonial ecocriticism as its guiding framework, drawing particularly on Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s tenets that link contemporary environmental damage to colonial histories. The study finds that both poets portray the language of erasure and mechanisation of nature as colonial patterns of exploitation that still dictate Nigeria’s environmental destruction. By revealing these ongoing systems of environmental damage, the paper concludes that both Bassey and Inya link contemporary pollution to enduring power structures, while also making eco-destruction a site of active political resistance.