Book Review: How Beautiful We Were

 

In Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were, environmental destruction is presented as a climate problem. It is experienced through poisoned water, dying crops, sick children, broken livelihoods and the slow destruction of a community’s relationship with its land.

Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, the novel tells the story of a community confronting an American oil company whose operations have contaminated the environment and undermined the future of its people. At the centre of the story is a question that is deeply ecological and deeply political: What happens when the land that sustains a people becomes the site of their destruction?

Mbue’s novel offers a powerful literary space for thinking about ecofeminism particularly an African or Afro-ecofeminist understanding of the relationship between environmental exploitation, power, colonial histories, gender and community. There are a number of themes How Beautiful We Were examine.

1. When the Earth Becomes a Body

One of the most striking aspects of How Beautiful We Were is the way environmental destruction is experienced as bodily destruction. The people of Kosawa do not simply lose an abstract resource called “the environment”; they lose the water they drink, the soil they cultivate, the fish they depend upon, and, eventually, the health and lives of their children.

The novel captures this slow violence from its opening lines:

“When the sky began to pour acid and rivers began to turn green, we should have known our land would soon be dead.” (Mbue, 2021, p. 3)

Although Mbue does not use the verbs “drink” or “choke” in this sentence, the imagery is insistently corporeal: acid rain falls on bodies, rivers turn toxic and undrinkable, and the land itself is described as dying. Environmental harm is thus rendered as a form of bodily harm, a poisoning that moves through water, air, soil, and flesh.

This framing is crucial for ecofeminist thought. Ecofeminism has long critiqued systems that treat both women and nature as objects available for control, extraction, and exploitation. The same logic that enables a powerful corporation to view land primarily as an economic resource also enables it to view communities especially racialised, colonised, and impoverished ones as expendable populations.

In Kosawa, the question therefore shifts from “Who owns the oil?” to “Whose lives are considered expendable for the extraction of it?” The novel insists that ecological violence is never abstract: it is always embodied, gendered, and unevenly distributed.

2. The Logic of Extraction

At the heart of Kosawa’s tragedy is an extractive relationship. The oil company arrives with promises of development and prosperity, but the wealth generated from the land does not translate into ecological security for the people who live there. Instead, extraction produces contamination and dispossession (Mbue, 2021).

This reflects a broader history of oil‑producing communities across Africa, particularly in the Niger Delta, where petroleum extraction has transformed landscapes while leaving many communities to contend with pollution, damaged livelihoods, and struggles for environmental justice (Watts, 2009; Obi, 2010).

Ecofeminism gives us a useful vocabulary for understanding this contradiction. The problem is not that nature has been damaged. It is that a particular economic and political system determines whose relationship with nature matters. The land becomes valuable because it contains oil. But for the people of Kosawa, the land is valuable because it is home. That distinction is crucial.

“The Land Belongs to the Ancestors”

The novel opens a clear window onto an Indigenous ecological worldview through the villagers’ insistence that their land is ancestral and inalienable. As one scholarly reading summarises, “the people of Kosawa believed that the land was given to them by their ancestors,” and they maintain that “no one has the right to take from them that which the spirit gave their ancestors” (Biama, Oketch, & Kimathi, 2022, p. 317).

The land is not understood or seen as private property. It is part of a relationship between the living, the dead, and those yet unborn. This understanding challenges the dominant capitalist conception of land as a commodity that can be bought, sold, leased, and exploited. The state and Pexton act as if the valley belongs to whoever controls the oil; the villagers act as if the valley belongs to the lineage that has inhabited it for generations. As a character notes, “His Excellency had declared that just because our ancestors claimed the entire valley as theirs did not mean that the valley was theirs and ours as a result” (Mbue, 2021, p. 210).

From an ecofeminist perspective, this matters because environmental ethics becomes more than a question of conservation. It becomes a question of relationship and responsibility. If the land is inherited from the ancestors and held in trust for future generations, then destroying it is not merely environmental damage. It is a violation of an intergenerational obligation. The people of Kosawa therefore resist not only because oil pollution has made their present unbearable, but because extraction threatens their ability to hand a living world to the future. As they insist, “Pexton could never be our neighbour because the land wasn’t theirs” (Mbue, 2021; see also Biama et al., 2022).

3. Women, Care and Environmental Survival

Ecofeminism also asks us to pay attention to the gendered dimensions of environmental destruction. Environmental crises rarely affect everyone in precisely the same way. Women particularly women whose lives are closely connected to farming, fishing, water collection, food preparation, and family care can experience ecological destruction through multiple and overlapping burdens (Ogunniyi & Azeez, 2026; Shiva, 1993).

When water becomes contaminated, the crisis enters the household. When crops fail, food security becomes a domestic concern. When children become sick, caregiving responsibilities intensify. When traditional livelihoods collapse, women often have to find new ways of sustaining families and communities (Mai‑Bornu, 2024; Owhofasa, 2011).

This is where literature becomes especially valuable. Rather than presenting environmental degradation through statistics alone, How Beautiful We Were allows readers to encounter ecological violence as lived experience. The environment is connected to childhood, motherhood, food, health, memory, spirituality, and belonging (Mbue, 2021). An ecofeminist reading therefore asks us to look beyond the question of what is happening to the environment and ask:

• Who carries the consequences of environmental destruction?

• And equally: Who is resisting it?

In Mbue’s novel, women are not only disproportionately affected by oil pollution; they are also central agents of resistance and community mobilisation (Ogunniyi & Azeez, 2026). The character of Thula, for example, is often read alongside real‑life figures such as Ken Saro‑Wiwa and Wangari Maathai, linking gender, land rights, cultural identity, and environmental justice in a single struggle (Hypercritic, 2025). By foregrounding women’s experiences within petro‑capitalist exploitation, the narrative challenges dominant accounts of oil, power, and development that render gender invisible (Ogunniyi & Azeez, 2026; Mai‑Bornu, 2024).

4. Beyond Victimhood: Women as Environmental Agents

There is a danger in discussing women and environmental destruction only through the language of vulnerability.

Ecofeminism is not just about representing women as victims of ecological violence. It is also concerned with women's agency, knowledge, resistance and political action.

This distinction is particularly important in African contexts.

Women in communities affected by extraction are not ordinary people waiting to be rescued from environmental catastrophe. They possess ecological knowledge. They understand changes in water, soil, vegetation, food sources and seasons. They often occupy social positions from which they can organise, protest, negotiate and mobilise collective resistance.

An Afro-ecofeminist reading of How Beautiful We Were can therefore move from women as victims of environmental destruction to women as agents of environmental justice.

Their relationship with the land is not necessarily based on domination. It can be grounded in care, continuity, interdependence and collective survival.

This does not mean romanticising women or assuming that all women naturally have a closer relationship with nature. Rather, it means examining how social roles, indigenous knowledge and unequal power structures shape people's relationships with the environment.

5. Ecofeminism and the Politics of Power

Perhaps the most important contribution of How Beautiful We Were to ecofeminist thinking is its exposure of unequal power.

Kosawa is confronted by a corporation with enormous economic and political resources. The villagers possess the land, the memories and the lived knowledge of their environment, but they do not possess comparable institutional power.

The conflict is therefore not simply:

People versus pollution.

It is:

Community versus corporate power.

Local knowledge versus institutional authority.

Ecological survival versus economic extraction.

A living landscape versus a resource frontier.

This is where ecofeminism intersects with decolonial and anti-imperial thought.

The exploitation of African environments cannot always be separated from the histories of colonialism and contemporary global economic structures. Who extracts? Who profits? Who bears the pollution? Whose knowledge is recognised? Whose suffering is ignored?

These are environmental questions, but they are also questions of justice.

What Does It Mean to Heal the Earth?

The title How Beautiful We Were carries a haunting sense of memory.

It asks us to think about beauty not simply as something aesthetic, but as something that can be lost.

A beautiful landscape can become contaminated.

A thriving community can become fragmented.

A river can cease to sustain life.

A child's future can be altered before that child has the power to understand what has happened.

This makes the novel especially relevant to conversations about Earth healing.

But perhaps healing must begin with something before healing itself: restoration.

Before the earth can be healed, the conditions that continue to injure it must be confronted.

Restoration requires more than cleaning polluted water or repairing damaged land. It requires restoring relationships between communities and their environments, between present and future generations, and between those who exercise power and those who bear its consequences.

From an Afro-ecofeminist perspective, Earth healing can therefore involve justice, indigenous ecological wisdom and collective responsibility.

Why This Story Matters

How Beautiful We Were is ultimately not only a story about an African village and an American oil company.

It is a story about what happens when powerful systems decide that some places and some people can bear the cost of economic progress.

It reminds us that environmental destruction is never only environmental.

It is social.

It is economic.

It is political.

It is cultural.

And it is profoundly ethical.

Ecofeminism helps us see these connections.

It asks us to question the hierarchies that place humans above nature, corporations above communities, profit above life and domination above care. More importantly, an African ecofeminist reading invites us to recover ecological relationships rooted in community, indigenous knowledge, interdependence and responsibility to future generations.

Kosawa's struggle therefore speaks beyond its fictional borders.

Its poisoned water could be the Niger Delta.

Its damaged livelihoods could belong to any community living beside an oil field.

Its questions about land, ownership and survival remain painfully contemporary.

And its central warning is one we should not ignore:

When we destroy the land that sustains us, we are not merely destroying nature. We are destroying the conditions that make our own lives possible.

That may be the deepest lesson How Beautiful We Were offers ecofeminism and perhaps one of literature's most important contributions to the struggle for a living Earth.

 

References

Biama, T. M., Oketch, S. A., & Kimathi, C. K. (2022). A voice of resistance and activism: A critique of Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were. African Educational Research Journal, 10(3), 312–320.

Hypercritic. (2025, June 26). How Beautiful We Were | Battling for environmental justice. Retrieved from http://hypercritic.org/collection/how-beautiful-we-were-battling-for-environmental-justice-2021-review

Mai‑Bornu, Z. L. (2024). Green criminology in the Niger Delta of Nigeria: Why African women’s voices matter. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 13(1), 41–55.

Mbue, I. (2021). How beautiful we were. New York, NY: Random House.

Obi, C. (2010). Oil extraction, dispossession, resistance, and conflict in Nigeria’s oil‑rich Niger Delta. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 30(1–2), 219–239.

Ogunniyi, O. O., & Azeez, A. S. S. (2026). Oil, gender, and environmental justice: An intersectional reading of Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were. Journal of Ecofeminism and Resistance, 1(1), 1–15. Retrieved from https://www.ajol.info/index.php/jer/article/view/331687

Owhofasa, B. O. (2011). Ecofeminism and the Niger Delta women’s struggle. In Gender and development in Africa (pp. 120–135). Ibadan, Nigeria: University Press.

Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the mind: Perspectives on biodiversity and biotechnology. London, UK: Zed Books.

Watts, M. (2009). Oil, insurgency, and the Niger Delta: Managing the curse of petroleum‑based development. In S. D. Brunn (Ed.), Changing world: Global issues, processes, and problems (pp. 283–300). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

 

About the Author

Francisca Okwulehie is a Nigerian author, philosopher, and founder of the Ecofem Tales Environmental Foundation. Through her work, she explores African women’s environmental stories and the role of storytelling in ecological restoration, environmental awareness, and collective action.