This paper introduces ‘counter-erosive storytelling’ to challenge assumptions that indigenous ecological knowledge requires preservation as endangered heritage. Through analysis of Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Odia Ofeimun’s Under African Skies, and Yusuf Adamu’s Our Wonderful Planet, it demonstrates how Nigerian literature deploys oral narrative techniques as dynamic epistemological technologies that actively generate environmental knowledge. The paper identifies three counter-erosive mechanisms: temporal feedback loops that make readers co-producers of ancestral wisdom, pedagogical strategies embedding indigenous cosmology in accessible forms, and ontological experimentation representing environmental crisis as relational collapse. These mechanisms challenge Western linear temporalities by revealing cyclical indigenous frameworks where past, present, and future ecological understanding continuously reshape each other. Counter-erosive storytelling maintains indigenous knowledge as living and adaptive practice rather than fixed monument leading to a reframing African literature as active site of knowledge production for decolonial environmental humanities.
Abubakar et al. (2026) studied this question.