This paper argues that “The Winds of Harmattan” treats wind as an active infrastructure that binds climate, memory, and justice. Using a diffractive method grounded in agential realism, decolonial ecocriticism, and Ubuntu-inflected multispecies ethics, the analysis shows how seasonal rhythm and social order rise and fall together. The narrative marks ecological crisis with a broken cycle of winds and ties that failure to the policing of a woman’s atmospheric kinship through rumor, domestic coercion, and ritual ordeal. Read as a material–discursive apparatus, the Harmattan organizes perception, movement, and decision; its absence registers ethical injury, and its reluctant return signals only partial repair. The paper’s contribution is threefold: first, it demonstrates that wind in the story is not scenic but operative, shaping plot and risk; second, it identifies “ecological memory” as the hinge that connects temporality to ethics, linking seasonal timing to communal responsibility; third, it reads rumor and trial-by-ordeal as social technologies that overwrite wind-based care with patriarchal control, a process the tale’s closing revision of Asuquo’s story makes explicit. By keeping theory accountable to textual detail, this research offers a clear, transferable approach to African speculative narratives in which atmospheric processes and social life are co-produced.
Mukim et al. (Fri,) studied this question.