The folly of climate change language, meaning in Africa

By Patience Ukama | Jul. 19, 2024

A LACK of meaning has resulted in the exclusion of the majority of people in the global South from active participation in climate action and environmental governance.

The centrality of meaning in fostering global participation in these areas has been ignored in favour of advancing science. Those engaged in global climate change communications have long lost sight of the significance of ensuring audiences understand what is being communicated.

Such language perpetuates neo-colonial bias by forcing Africans to continue depending on the wisdom of the West for ideological, psychological, sociological, political, and economic modelling to solve contemporary problems for which their own knowledge systems have been disregarded.

This reinforces historic injustices, including repression, and conjures up notions of what has now come to be known as ‘climate change colonialism’. This further marginalises the poor, metaphorically tying their hands behind their backs by using schematics outside their social and psychological frame of reference, stifling their participation.

Folly refers to the absurdity of an event or action. It is absurd that the dominant language for the most significant global crisis of our time utilises complex terminology that most people cannot pronounce, let alone understand.

Zimbabwe’s climate change communication was developed using terminology from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Action for Environment (ACE) documentation. While the volume of work done to develop the strategy is commendable, it simply means that, like most national climate strategies, the formulation of the strategy was informed by dominant scientific thinking, disregarding centuries of local indigenous knowledge and the language of local people.

In many ways, Africa’s existential crisis has taken a different turn from that of the 1960s, where Tambu, the protagonist in Nervous Conditions (1988), Tsitsi Dangarembga’s award-winning novel, struggles with the lived effects of patriarchy, racism, and colonialism.

One of the most effective tools of the colonial era was to systematically disrupt local languages, crippling the effective flow of meaning and action. Almost 60 fictional years later, Africans have still not re-established the language to resolve this predicament in our favour.

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The use of unfamiliar scientific language in global climate and biodiversity discourse serves only to deepen the existential crisis for Africa.

Ironically, it is well-established that Africans experienced and responded to extreme weather patterns long before Bono (U2) and others came to Africa’s aid.

Communities have long since developed complex ways to adapt to climate risk, including research findings of robust practices and bodies of place-based knowledge that show that weather forecasting indicators such as the movement of animals, plants, insects, temperatures, and winds have all been used successfully to predict rainfall and droughts in both the past and present. Some of these indicators have served as early warning systems for droughts and floods.

However, the understanding of climate change through the indigenous lens is less about gas emissions and negative human activities like mass deforestation and industrial pollution, but rather as a catastrophe understood as an ‘Act of God’ or as reprisal from the ancestors, thus “spiritual”.

This is the African indigenous experience, a consequence of social and psychological framing, where actions come with consequences — cause and effect. Treat nature with respect, and it will be kind to you.

If one were to ask the average person on the corner of Rezende Street and Jason Moyo Avenue in Harare about greenhouse gas emissions, carbon sequestration, carbon trading, or any other climate terminology commonly used in discussions, it is likely they would be left confused, offended, or both.

It is for such people that climate change communication needs to be simplified, made more accessible, and ultimately empower them to act. But because the global North views indigenous wisdom as absurd, it leads us back to the current folly, where the dominant climate change discourse is not shaped by or for Africans.

The folly may, in fact, exist on both sides of the coin. On the one hand, the folly of climate change communication is the adoption of language largely void of meaning, mounting an artificial barrier to climate action by peripheral communities.

Where scientific knowledge is the dominant basis of climate knowledge, its communication is often so alarmist that academics have created the term “crisification” to explain the apocalyptic nature of climate change messaging, which demands immediate action for which communities have neither the ‘scientific’ knowledge nor the understanding upon which to act.

Consequently, existing climate change communication has created a superficial, highly politicised global misunderstanding of climate change, generating a considerable amount of anxiety and hopelessness in its wake.

The goals of the African Union Climate Change Strategy (2022-2027) include achieving theoretical integration and enabling the negotiation of different perspectives and experiences on climate change. Finally, a positive step.

To achieve this, the African Union, in a departure from any other global union, is posturing for the institutionalisation of participation in decision-making through climate education, specifically targeting women and youth.

Why? Because they are seen as particularly vulnerable to climate change as they are often less educated, and experience the worst impacts of climate change during their lifetime. Given its financial woes, Africa can only hope these good intentions amount to action.

To its credit, Zimbabwe is well ahead of the curve, having already formulated the National Climate Change Learning Strategy 2020-2030. It highlights the importance of climate change communication and education for people of all ages using formal and non-formal tools.

The issue, however, is what this education will entail and whether it will convey meaning to empower citizens or further the goal of climate change colonialism. With or without a strategy, carbon sequestration does not translate in any Nguni language.

Africans, like the rest of the global South, need to be more critical of imported governance products. Critics claim that the language of colonialism increasingly invokes a variety of acts of domination and control associated with injustices produced by climate change and the responses to it.

For example, an Oxford University publication recently stated that under the veil of development projects and carbon offsetting, western countries and companies have continued to pollute as normal. This, while six million people have been left with inadequate food in Zimbabwe, due to yet another El Niño-induced drought affecting Southern Africa in 2024.

In the 1972 book Meaning of Meaning, Ogden and Richards go as far back as Plato and Aristotle to demonstrate the power of words and meaning. They see the scientific function of language not just as an instrument of communicating ideas but of gatekeeping, both exercising and preserving power.

Where Jesus used parables to keep things “hidden” (Matthew 13: 10-17), the legal fraternity (lawyers, courts, judges) achieve the same for law and so forth. It is conceivable, therefore, that climate change scientists intentionally do the same for climate change so that they can “continue to pollute as normal.”

Global figures indicate that Africa has contributed only 3% to global emissions, yet the consequences have been grave — possibly worse than for those who contributed the 97% balance of global emissions. Research is showing us that anthropogenic climate change is affecting those with neurological and psychiatric diseases due to population genetics and widely differing temperatures in different geographical locations.

Evidence suggests that the prevalence and severity of many nervous system conditions such as stroke, neurological infections, and some mental health disorders can be affected by climate change.

Without meaningful indigenous references to build on, robust studies on the threats from a changing climate for people who have or are at risk of developing disorders of the nervous system remain without champions.

Yet it surprised the world how many people sought ‘zumbani’ (Lippia javanica) and other ‘natural’ remedies during the Covid-19 outbreak, without which many more would probably have succumbed where oxygen was scarce.

The language used to define and govern climate action is meaningless to those who reap the least benefit from the climate change crisis. Somehow those benefitting, whether from fossil fuels or plundering African resources are the same countries running the global climate change agenda.

They are the countries backtracking on climate finances and are also the same countries that set up the historical systems that created the climate crisis to begin with. More than millennia later, when the fog of the injustice that was colonialism appeared to have settled, history has found a new way in which to repeat itself. Did anything ever really change?

The difference between the Zimbabwe in the novel Nervous Conditions (1988) and today is that where the person of ‘babamukuru’ (Shona to refer but not limited to husband to older sister and aunt, or father’s and husband’s older brother) merely modelled the dependency complex of the colonial subject, we have become complicit in our own destruction beyond just simulation.

More often, corporate and financial interests are weighted above the interests of powerless citizens. Everybody is scrambling for the almighty Zimbabwe Gold (ZiG code ZWG) whether it is to survive and make ends meet or to get further ahead to join the coveted ranks of ‘mbinga’.

All the while, our natural resources on which citizens depend are being depleted at an alarming rate — trees, water, plants, fish, minerals, animals — and nobody is taking note of the cumulative consequences because people do not understand the language of climate change or its respective policies modelled against the likes of UNFCCC and ACE.

African indigenous knowledge systems were built on the pulse, the heartbeat, and understanding of the African psyche, experience, and need. These are, in fact, the homegrown, authentic natural remedies and solutions that should be the foundation of African policies, the safeguards of the future.

What is required is for Africans to do the work and come up with the language that will enable an indigenous climate response that makes sense to and empowers Africans to act while teaching science what we already know.

In truth, if the language for science to explain climate change can be found, then the language to explain indigenous knowledge for these climate-induced natural disasters can also be found to explain to scientists and global audiences an African view of climate change and how it could be solved.

It is, however, the 11th hour; we must act now. Like with most things, what is simply required is the political will to do so.

If the climate change Anthropocene requires action from everyone, including the world’s most vulnerable and poor, then it needs to be understood by everyone, not just scientists, the rich, and the educated.

Furthermore, if one of the objectives of the Paris Agreements is to eradicate extreme poverty and reduce inequality, then climate change communication can no longer be a barrier to peripheral groups.

Our engagement on platforms like the Convention of Parties (COP) needs to be less about begging for resources and more about fostering inclusiveness. Climate change policies need to address and present a holistic view of global lived social and psychological experiences.

Ukama is a governance and communications specialist. She heads communications for DanChurchAid Zimbabwe, the lead partner of the Utariri integrated biodiversity, climate change and livelihoods programme across the Zambezi Valley. She started her career as a journalist and has served as editor for the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group, and was head of communications for the African Union Foundation.