The question of where the human ends and the non-human begins has been answered in many ways, across many traditions. Western philosophy drew one kind of line — through Descartes, through the Enlightenment, through the categorisation of nature as resource and landscape as property. It is one way of seeing. But it is not the only one, and across the African continent we observe something quite different.
In many African knowledge systems, the Earth is not a resource to be managed. It is a relative. A participant. A co-author of human life. This starting point shapes everything that follows.
The Post-Human Conversation
The post-human turn in Western academia — drawing on thinkers like Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Rosi Braidotti — has opened up important conversations about decentering the human. What we find worth noticing is how rarely these conversations engage with the African knowledge systems that have been thinking relationally for centuries.
“The most interesting work in this space doesn’t start with theory. It starts with listening — to the communities and traditions that have never separated themselves from the Earth.”
There is a pattern worth observing here: when Global South epistemologies do appear in post-human scholarship, they tend to show up as case studies rather than as frameworks. The knowledge systems themselves rarely get to set the terms of the conversation. That gap is part of what drew us to this research.
African Ontologies of Relation
Across the African continent, diverse cosmologies share a common thread: the insistence on relational existence. The Zulu concept of ukuhlonipha (respect/reverence) extends not only to elders and ancestors but to the land, to water, to animals. The Shona understanding of nyika encompasses not just territory but the spiritual and ecological totality of place. In Yoruba cosmology, orí (personal destiny) is understood as embedded within a web of relationships that includes the non-human world.
What strikes us about these knowledge systems is how directly they speak to the questions that post-human scholarship is only now arriving at — questions about interconnection, ecological responsibility, and the limits of human-centred thinking. These traditions have been sitting with these ideas for a very long time.
Art as Ontological Practice
Several contemporary African artists work explicitly within these relational ontologies. Their art does not merely depict human-nature relationships; it enacts them.
Nandipha Mntambo’s cowhide sculptures are a case in point. Working from her Johannesburg studio, Mntambo moulds raw cowhide directly over the human body — her own, in many cases — producing forms that refuse to separate the animal from the human, the organic from the crafted. The hides retain their smell, their texture, their weight. They are not representations of nature; they are nature, shaped by human hands but never fully domesticated. Her work sits at the exact boundary where the human body ends and the animal world begins — which is to say, it sits where that boundary dissolves.
Mohau Modisakeng, working across performance, film, and sculpture from Cape Town, approaches relational ontology through the lens of historical trauma. His figures — often submerged in water, weighted with industrial materials, dressed in garments that reference both colonial-era labour and ancestral ritual — make visible the ways in which Black South African bodies have been bound to land, sea, and extractive systems. The relationship between body and environment in Modisakeng’s work is never romantic. It is shaped by violence, by displacement, by the literal and figurative weight of history. And yet his figures endure. They breathe. They surface.
Implications for Anthropological Practice
What we observe, across our work in South Africa, is that the most compelling cultural research doesn’t begin with human subjects in isolation. It begins with relationships — between people, place, ecology, and the non-human world — from which culture emerges.
The artists and knowledge systems in this article keep returning us to the same observation: the Earth is not a field site. It is a relative. We are still learning what that means for how we work, but it is the starting point for everything that follows.