Fabulating the Environmental Villain: Technocultures, African Cultural Rhetorics and Community Literacies of Ecological Justice in the #StopGalamseyNow Campaign

At the interstices of critical African communication studies, digital cultural rhetorics, and community literacy studies, we theorize how galamsey actors are rhetorically fabulated as environmental villains within Ghanaian protest rhetorics. Through a rhetorical discourse analysis of posts collected during the #StopGalamseyNow campaign, this paper traces how anthropocentrism, moral culpability, and community literacies of ecological kinship are discursively communicated in Ghanaian digital culture. In attending to the rhetorical valences of activist discourses, we ground our analysis in ukama, a Shona relational philosophy which emphasizes kinship, care, and multispecies stewardship. Our analysis traces rhetorical motifs of biophilia, ecocentrism, and ancestricide discursivities through which galamsey actors are sculpted as ‘unsavoury' threats to Ghana’s land, water, and national futures. We argue that such intrepid technocultural activism enacts a praxis of environmental fracturization, which renders galamsey actors as communal villains, while topicalizing triad structures of political complicity, neoliberal extractive governance, and clandestine galamsey networks. More importantly, the reticularity of protest rhetorics pushes us to advocate for a dialectical synergy between digital authorship of ecological justice and offline, place-based activism toward just ecological futures. By foregrounding African environmental epistemologies, this study thus extends global conversations on environmental humanities, cultural rhetorics, and ecoliteracy.