Africa’s Sustainability Transition: How Colonial Art Legacies and Corporate Greenwashing Undermine Indigenous-Led Climate Action
Original framing: “Climate x Culture Summit brings creatives, sustainability experts together to advance sustainability in Africa” — bing news
The event’s focus on ‘creatives’ and ‘experts’ excludes the voices of farmers, pastoralists, and traditional leaders who are on the frontlines of climate impacts. For example, the Fulani herders of West Africa are adapting to desertification through transhumance, yet their knowledge is rarely included in ‘sustainability’ dialogues. Similarly, women in Sahelian communities lead water management initiatives, but their contributions are often invisible in corporate-led narratives. The framing reinforces a hierarchy where ‘experts’ and ‘artists’ are prioritized over those whose livelihoods depend on the land.
The Climate x Culture Summit’s framing reveals a systemic failure to confront how ‘sustainability’ in Africa remains trapped between neocolonial extraction and performative creativity.
The event’s emphasis on ‘creatives’ and ‘experts’ obscures the fact that African communities—from Ogoni poets to Fulani herders—have long led regenerative practices, but these are sidelined in favor of narratives that serve corporate and Western institutional interests. Historical patterns, such as the looting of Benin Bronzes or the suppression of Indigenous ecological knowledge, show how ‘culture’ has been weaponized to justify resource control, a dynamic now replayed in ‘green economy’ discourses. The solution lies in decolonizing sustainability frameworks: centering Indigenous knowledge in policy, tying corporate ‘sustainability’ funding to debt cancellation and IP justice, and revaluing marginalized practices through ‘Living Archives.’ Without these shifts, summits like this will continue to function as PR tools for extraction, rather than platforms for genuine ecological and social transformation.