ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS IN AFRICA: INSIGHTS FROM THE MINISTRY OF GARRICK SOKARI BRAIDE

Abstract

Employing a critical re-reading of Garrick Sokari Braide''s ministry, this investigation interrogates the nexus of religion, culture and environmental ethics in African Christianity. Whereas existing scholarship has generally interpreted the movement for Braide within paradigms of prophetic revivisms, anti-colonial resistance and indigenous Christian agency, scant attention has been paid to its ecological dimensions. The paper argues that Braide, in common with many indigenous ecopoetic narratives of nature protection, occupies an implicit ecological ethic embedded within fossilized frameworks of indigenous cosmology and moral purification. By employing a qualitative method, influenced more by the interpretative analytical mill, this study contextualised Braide within wider African ontologies that stress the interrelationship among humans, nature and all spirits. Based on historical sources, and the broader literature on Niger Delta religious movements, the paper reconstructs an environmental ethic expressed through Braide’s prophetic practice of concepts of purity, sacred space, and moral discipline. It also argues that these indigenous Christian perspectives provide vital riches in responding to the contemporary environmental disasters in the Niger Delta, especially considering continued exploitations and ecological devastations.