Animism and the transmission of ecological knowledge in African children’s books: a close look at Ken Wilson-Max’s Eco Girl and Helvi Itenge’s Nekwa and the Baobab Tree

This article considers how African children’s picture books depict animist cosmologies and transmit ecological knowledge across generations. With a close reading of Ken Wilson-Max’s Eco Girl (2022) and Helvi Itenge’s Nekwa and the Baobab Tree (2023), it argues that these texts construct relational ontologies in which trees, animals, ancestors, and children participate in a shared moral ecology. Drawing on African philosophies of ubuntu, ukama, and eniyan, and Harry Garuba’s “animist unconscious” and Fikret Berkes’ theory of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), the article provides an analysis on oral esthetics, taboo logic, and intergenerational practices. Nekwa and the Baobab Tree foregrounds the baobab as elder and moral agent, using taboo, song, and multispecies cooperation to stage ecological correction as cosmological rebalancing. Eco Girl presents a quieter ecological becoming grounded in diasporic memory, familial tree-planting rituals, and imaginative kinship with the baobab. These books frame the baobab as an ecological “Tree of Life” and ancestral archive, mediating ethical relations between humans and the more-than-human world. The focus on early-childhood picture books rather than adult fiction extends African ecocriticism into the domain of children’s literature, showing how animist ethics and intergenerational storytelling shape ecological subjectivities and model environmentally embedded forms of African childhood.