Africa’s seagrass decline: How colonial extraction, climate debt, and Indigenous stewardship shape coastal futures
Original framing: “Scientists call for protection and restoration of Africa's seagrass meadows” — Phys.org
Women in coastal communities—who comprise 80% of small-scale fishers in West Africa—are the primary stewards of seagrass-dependent fisheries, yet their knowledge is absent from restoration planning. For instance, the *Yoruba* women of Lagos use seagrass in *ebi* (crab) traps, a practice never cited in the review. Similarly, youth-led movements like *Sauti ya Pwani* ('Voice of the Coast') in Tanzania demand inclusion in restoration decisions, but their advocacy is framed as 'community engagement' rather than structural power-sharing.
The seagrass crisis in Africa is not an ecological accident but a symptom of intersecting colonial legacies, climate debt, and the erasure of Indigenous stewardship.
While the review frames restoration as a technical challenge, the deeper story is one of power: how Western science and capital have historically framed African coasts as extractive zones, and how Indigenous and marginalized voices—from Swahili elders to Senegalese women—have been systematically excluded from solutions. The trickster reveals the hypocrisy in calling for 'protection' while ignoring the very systems that created the crisis, from dredging to carbon offset schemes. To restore seagrass is to restore justice: this requires reparative finance, Indigenous-led governance, and a radical reimagining of what 'restoration' means when the land itself remembers colonial violence. The path forward lies not in more scientific papers but in centering the voices and knowledge of those who have always tended these meadows—before, during, and after colonialism.