Abstract
Following Giovanna Di Chiro's argument for a ‘coalitional’ approach to social reproduction as environmental issue, this article examines representations of magic and witchcraft in Yaba Badoe's young adult novel Wolf Light as registering the impact of neoliberal ‘extractivist heteropatriarchal capitalism’. Accusations of witchcraft were, and still are, associated with grabs for resources, wealth and class positions occupied by women. To this we could add the notion of the environment as a further realm under threat by increasingly toxic strategies of extraction and disposal. This article extends these conceptual frameworks to consider how Yaba Badoe's speculative text, set in Ghana, Cornwall and Mongolia, depicts feminised magic and transformative supernatural powers as ways of combatting global extractivism. Significantly, ecological destruction has yet to be adequately theorised in relation to social reproduction theory. So too its cultural registration in fictions from peripheral areas long associated with extraction. Through focusing on Wolf Light, this article will theorise how the book's formal mode, alongside its figuration of witches as eco-utopian earth defenders and transformative shape-shifters, offers forms of cultural resistance. Critically, the novel builds consciously on global histories of women's oppression – including the resurgence of witchcraft accusations in Ghana, as discussed in Badoe's research for her film The Witches of Gambaga, and early modern British witch hunts. These narratives are reinvested with a focus on local struggle and resistance as imagined through the text's three main protagonists, whose shape-shifting abilities and trans-border magical connections provide a way of protesting neoliberalism's compound crises of reproduction.
Introduction
Following Giovanna Di Chiro's (2008) argument for a ‘coalitional’ approach to social reproduction as an environmental issue, this article examines global representations of magic and witchcraft in Yaba Badoe's young adult novel Wolf Light (2019) as registering the impact of neoliberal ‘extractivist heteropatriarchal capitalism’ (Houlden and Gunne, 2019: 39). Accusations of witchcraft were, and still are, associated with grabs for resources, wealth and class positions occupied by women (Federici, 2004; Badoe, 2005; Federici, 2018). To this we could add the notion of the environment as a realm under threat by increasingly toxic strategies of extraction and disposal. This article extends these conceptual frameworks to consider how Wolf Light (2019), set in Ghana, Cornwall and Mongolia, depicts feminised magic and transformative supernatural powers as a way of combatting global extractivism. Significantly, ecological destruction, particularly climate change, has yet to be adequately theorised in relation to social reproduction theory, or its cultural registration in fictions from peripheral areas long associated with environmental degradation. This article will theorise how the text's mode, alongside its figuration of witches as eco-utopian earth defenders and transformative shape-shifters, offers forms of cultural resistance. Critically, Wolf Light consciously builds on global histories of women's oppression as discussed in Badoe's research for her film (The Witches of Gambaga 2011), and early modern British witch hunts. These narratives are reinvested with a focus on local struggle and resistance as imagined through the text's three main protagonists, whose shape-shifting abilities and trans-border magical connections offer them a way of protesting neoliberalism's compound crises of reproduction.
Social reproduction theorists have long argued that unpaid work such as caregiving, domestic labour and earthcare, which is predominantly undertaken by women and marginalised groups, is omitted from accounts of productive labour, despite its necessity for the maintenance and reproduction of capitalist social relations (Barca, 2020: 31). Reproduction is here defined three-fold as relating to ‘“biological reproduction, the reproduction of labour power, and the social practices connected to caring, socialization, and the fulfilment of human needs” (p. 4)’ (Bakker and Gill, cited in Di Chiro, 2008: 281). A materialist approach to social reproduction theory and ecology involves acknowledging how this understanding of reproduction, as a biological, economic and social practice, is impacted by conditions ‘inside and outside the workplace such as lack of housing, exposure to asbestos, toxic waste, factory fumes, lack of adequate food, healthcare, and so on’ (Gimenez, 2019: 304). Crucially, if we consider capitalism as a web of life, or a bundle of human and extra-human relations (Moore, 2015), then the role of nature, as the site of and condition for the future flourishing of society and capitalism, must be foregrounded within social reproduction theory, which has had until now a limited focus on ecology.
This article treats social reproduction theory as a way not only of grasping the invisible calculus of gendered forms of unpaid work, but also of registering and challenging the compound pressures put on reproduction, through the exposure of sacrifice zones and communities to the wasteful, polluting impact of capitalist industries. Relatedly, Françoise Vergès (2017) argues, via Isabelle Stengers, for a commitment to ‘counterpowers’, or revealing the hazards of capitalist production ‘to human health, biodiversity, and the lives and well-being of minorities, indigenous communities, and poor peasants, the majority of whom are women’, while maintaining the ‘possibility of a world which does not answer the probabilities offered by green capitalism’. I argue that the resurgence of witches and feminist magical figures is a form of literary resistance by Yaba Badoe, whose work in documentary film and speculative fiction is consistently interested in reigniting the political potential of folklore and witches as earth-defending figures who respond to the worsening socio-ecological conditions brought about by the maturation of extractivist capitalism.
Rather than focusing on texts that engage with particular sites and modes of extraction, this article takes up Martín Arboleda's point that extractive activities now embody uneven ‘reconfigurations in the social composition of the global working class’ that are bound up with the neoliberal ‘dematerialisation’ of value and labour in core regions (2020: Ch. 1). For Arboleda, workers from rural sites of extraction and those from urban manufacturing hubs share ‘increasingly common conditions of existence’. The fragmentation and specialisation of labour, and the racialised and gendered dynamics upon which they depend, are not contrary to the rise and spread of ‘megafactories’ in East Asia, or the ‘casino capitalism’ of financial capitalism, but are part of a wider ‘metabolic process’. This metabolic process is under-defined in Arboleda's text, but implicitly refers to the global reorganisation of biogeographical and social conditions for planetary supply chains in the search for surplus value. Putting this dynamic more baldly, Mezzadra and Neilson argue that it is ‘possible to locate extractive dimensions in operations of capital that are seemingly remote from these domains’ of ‘mines and plantations’ (2017: 186), such as digital ‘mining’, but also in the broadening of debt and consumption. This expanded idea of extraction is focused on how capitalism aims ‘at extracting value’ from populations ‘in such a way that it expands and complements the notion of exploitation’ (Gago and Mezzadra, 2017: 579). The point is not to collapse differently experienced and articulated struggles, but to understand how capitalism expropriates un- and under-paid labour, and treats nature as a ‘sink’ for the extraction of value. Moreover, the struggles over social reproduction, for access to the conditions for flourishing, of ‘universal health care and free education, for environmental justice and access to clean energy, and for housing and public transportation’ are always intertwined with ‘political struggles for women's liberation, against racism and xenophobia, war and colonialism’ (Arruzza et al., 2019: 25). While Wolf Light does not consciously register the nuances of social reproduction theory, it does foreground a historical consciousness of feminist class struggle, as articulated through histories of witch accusations, and connects these to asymmetrically experienced colonial and capitalist dynamics, of extraction and expropriation, that influence the conditions for social reproduction.
Badoe's fictional representation of witches takes inspiration from her research for the documentary film (The Witches of Gambaga 2011), about a community of women accused of being witches and exiled to live in a sanctuary village in Northern Ghana, under the protection of a local chief. Badoe's prose essays, written about the experience of making the film, reveal an astute and materialist understanding that contemporary Ghanian witchcraft accusations are grounded in the diminishment of socio-economic conditions due to the effects of neoliberal deregulation. Her articulation of a feminist-materialist politics of storytelling provides the critical and contextual grounding for the second section here, which considers how Badoe fictionalises these conditions in Wolf Light. Through close readings, I unpack how the novel imagines witches as earth-steward figures, whose regional emergence finds global import, by triangulating extraction across Cornwall, Ghana and Mongolia. I examine how it portrays witches as an anti-capitalist coalitional force that can overcome the combined oppression of women, nature and post-colonies (Mies [1986] 2014), while attending to tensions in the text's relentlessly global narrative and heteronormative take on nature.
Neoliberalism and contemporary witchcraft accusations in Yaba Badoe's The Witches of Gambaga (2011)
Yaba Badoe is a Ghanaian-British writer, producer and film maker, whose most recent work includes a documentary film on the celebrated author Ama Ata Aidoo, several short stories, a children's fairy tale and three young adult novels. Key to Badoe's oeuvre are the interconnections made between folkloric traditions from West Africa to Cornwall, through the foregrounding of magical female protagonists, and an articulation of the transnational effects of environmental destruction. Her prose writing about the making of The Witches of Gambaga reveals a lucid understanding of how contemporary neoliberal economic pressures and emergent patriarchal social forces alike have led to a resurgence of witch claims in Africa. These writings are key to the socio-historical depth underlying her fiction, and the insights they generate provide much of the conceptual and historical underpinning here. 1
Writing about Gambaga, Badoe places Ghanaian familial and social dynamics in dialogue with systemic pressures, noting that accused witches are often from combative, polygamous families, and they are generally ‘assertive argumentative, determined’ women, whose refusal to remain subdued and obedient to male authority figures is punished by domestic violence and, ultimately, witchcraft accusations and banishment (2012: 92). They exceed normative gendered social roles, existing, as in Maria Mies ([1986] 2014) and Silvia Federici's (2004) accounts of early modern witch hunts, outside of traditional heteronormative notions of women as docile wives and mothers. For Badoe, this includes women who are at extreme poles of vulnerability and wealth: those without children lack the leverage that this brings them within complex family dynamics, and they are vulnerable as they age to attempts to sever ‘kinship obligations’ given that they are ‘competing with other women in the household for limited resources’ (2005: 50). In a contrary but related process, wealthy women are also subject to witchcraft accusations, in order to dispossess them of their assets.
What unites Badoe's witness accounts are the manifold pressures of neoliberal economic deregulation on extended family communities in which individuals vie for increasingly smaller portions of land and wealth. Post-colonial West African states struggled after colonisation to assert an economic alternative to global capitalism, with Ghana requiring, after two decades of political instability, drought and the knock-on impact of Nigeria's refugee crisis, World Bank and IMF Structural Adjustment (SAPs) loans in the 1980s, and frequently thereafter, as the nation struggled to meet debt repayments amidst worsening economic conditions (Opoku, 2010). Furthermore, women's work, which has traditionally relied on informal food-selling and small-scale mining, has become increasingly vulnerable to the Ghanaian government's formalisation of labour – especially through mining conglomerates, who demand monopoly access to land and minerals (Hilson and Maconachie, 2020). Silvia Federici, working in Nigeria in the mid-1980s, describes the impact of SAPs leading to witch hunts due to ‘the decline in the status of women brought about by the rise of capitalism and the intensifying struggle for resources which, in recent years, has been aggravated by the imposition of the neo-liberal agenda’ (2004: 237). These are a very different set of conditions to those of early modern Europe – when a rush of bullion from the Americas, inflation and demographic changes catalysed the role of women in guilds. This made them a target for state and regional powers in Continental Europe, who required additional capital to fund intra-state wars and colonial expansion, while also protecting the role of women as child-bearers, thus ensuring the reproduction of future workers and soldiers (Mies, [1986] 2014: 74–111).
In contrast, the contemporary increase in witchcraft accusations in Africa is tied to a loosening of the social contract between the state and its population, and the privatisation of welfare structures amidst the diminishment of employment prospects. In a parallel vein to the dynamics registered by Badoe, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (1999) describe the emergence of ‘occult economies’ in turn-of-the-millennium South Africa. There, capitalist narratives of sudden and miraculous wealth creation metamorphose in a post-revolutionary and neoliberal society stricken by ongoing and severe racial and class inequalities, leading to attacks on elderly ‘wealth gate keepers’ blamed for the lack of economic opportunities for youth (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999: 287). Neoliberalism is here defined from a world-systemic and world-ecological perspective, as ‘based less on formal characteristics and more as a dynamic phenomenon that registers the changing global composition of class relations governing the exploitation of peoples and the appropriation of natural resources’ (Deckard and Shapiro, 2019: 25). In the post-colonial context, this means attending to how the period from the 1980s onwards is characterised by the effort to, in Jameson's terms, ‘“proletarianize all those unbound social forces which gave the 60s their energy, by an extension of the class struggle, into the furthest reaches of the globe as well as the most minute configurations of local institutions”’ (cited in Deckard and Shapiro, 2019: 4). This neoliberal ‘proletarianisation’ includes the withdrawal of the state from basic provisions, the reemphasis on competitive market forces, the commodification of nature and the disciplining of radical social energies, with tremendous consequences for the labour of social reproduction.
Taking a cue from world-systems theory, the use of witchcraft accusations to expropriate women's capital emerged both in early modern Europe and in late twentieth-century West Africa as periodic symptoms of capitalism in crisis (see: Shapiro, 2008). Even though these have different structural conditions, the recurrent re-emergence of the witch, both in fiction and as lived reality, intimates that the gendered (and racialised) nature of capitalist exploitation is a key aspect of the world-economy, with women under particular threat of expropriation during straitened times. More specifically, Maria Mies’ formulation that capitalist production leads to the ‘superexploitation of non-wage labourers (women, colonies, peasants) upon which wage labour exploitation then is possible’ ([1986] 2014: 48) is worth returning to. Badoe's documentary work illustrates how the brutal disciplining of Gambaga's witches is a grassroots symptom of post-2000s systemic pressures, the recursive capture or domestic colonisation of women's capital a kind of ‘superexploitation’, with narrowing economic opportunities furthering women's dependence on family networks already pressurised to maintain living conditions. It is, the Comaroffs argue, ‘no coincidence that the most spirited witch finding occurs where conditions are most straitened and, also, where raw inequality has become most blatant’ (1999: 288) in the neoliberal era; notably, Gambaga town is situated in Ghana's underdeveloped North, a region heavily reliant on increasingly precarious agricultural and seasonal work (Badoe, 2005: 38–39).
Wolf Light: triangulating extraction across the world-system
Wolf Light references and draws on multiple geographic sites, histories and lived realities, refashioning these narratives to critique a moment of intensified climatic breakdown and gender oppression. The text's form, notably its use of young adult speculative fiction, means that it can do the impossible, traversing borders and cultures, without much ado. But this compression of regional particularity is a narrative choice, rather than a political erasure. Throughout Badoe's documentary work, she is attuned to the specificities of regional witch hunts, and the frontline role of women in the struggle against extractivism. Her fiction, meanwhile, is quietly analytical, suggesting rather than foregrounding a periodic and global patterning of women's struggles for environmental justice. In interview, Badoe describes herself as a ‘feminist-socialist’ (Niemi and Badoe, 2018: 258), and her most recent co-directed film, Women Hold Up the Sky (2019), focuses on grassroots feminist resistance to extractive projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa and Uganda for the WoMin ecofeminist African alliance. These thematic strands, of pan-African feminist struggles against global extraction, find their way into her most recent fictions: A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars (2017), Wolf Light (2019) and Lionheart Girl (2021). These novels all deploy speculative literary modes to limn feminist hero-protagonists who tap into (often West African) indigenous legends and magical abilities like telepathy, shape-shifting, healing and soothsaying, providing a utopian counterpoint to the grim privations of actual witchcraft accusations and heteropatriarchal extraction. Critically, Badoe's exploration of these issues in her young adult fiction, and particularly in Wolf Light, foregrounds the unique capacities of storytelling to interconnect climate change, environmental destruction, social discontent and gender inequality on a global level.
Wolf Light is focalised through three teenagers in Mongolia, Ghana and Cornwall – Zula, Adoma and Linet – who are tasked with the protection of resource-rich habitats. Drawing on the wisdom of their elders (Zula's Pa, Adoma's Grandpa Okomfo and Linet's Nana Merrimore), as well as an intense attachment to the lands under their stewardship, they use their combined magical powers and telepathic connections to defeat the prospectors, or ‘“skin-walkers”’, who threaten to destroy their environs in the pursuit of raw materials (Badoe, 2019: loc. 213). Their three tales of environmental destruction signify the past, present and future of resource extraction. Cornwall in the South West of England is a semi-periphery within a core nation, with a historically oppressed Celtic population who were fiercely disciplined and forcibly integrated by successive waves of English forces. While in the novel, Linet's Cornish lake is not threatened with immediate despoilation, she grimly states that ‘“If there was any hint of fracking anywhere near the Linet Lake, any chance of its water being drained or contaminated, I’d destroy their machines and peck out the eyes of any skin-walker who dared to walk by”’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 2109); this is in the context of the exhaustion of Cornwall's tin and copper mines for Britain's imperial infrastructure, and the modern privatisation and pollution of Britain's waters. Adoma's Ghanaian section gestures to the past and present of colonial capitalism: she is entrusted by her grandfather to protect a nearby forest and river under threat by galamsey, or small-scale, gold mining, which is being directed from abroad by Chinese interests. Ghana has, since antiquity, been known for its gold wealth (Dumett, 1998), but recently, competition between the Ghanaian state (which has banned the country's artisanal miners) and foreign gold prospectors (particularly Chinese companies) has fomented tensions between organised and informal mining operations. Finally, while Zula's Mongolian ‘Sleeping Giant’ mountain is famed for its stores of copper and coal – a fact exploited by her uncle Batu who uses his own magical gifts to help prospectors – in actuality, Mongolia's recent transformation from nomadic pastoralism into a global mining hub has earnt it the nickname ‘Minegolia’ (Bulag, 2009).
Although these environmental threats could be read as an example of Rob Nixon's (2011) ‘slow violence’, or the displacement of toxic industries to the Global South, instead the text's triangulation of extraction suggests how the logic of social reproduction, of care of the earth and others, is outsourced between and across cores and peripheries. Cindi Katz (2001: 714) argues that such processes are yet more evidence of the interrelation between social reproduction and nature, comparing the logic of offshoring hazardous industries to the transnational ‘geography of social reproduction’ (2001: 715) which relies on cheap labour in the Global South to both enable the relocation of industrial work (or the externalisation of toxic harm) and supply the migrants who will undertake caring and domestic labour in core regions. Writing almost two decades before Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser's Feminism for the 99 Percent: A Manifesto (2019), Katz's (2001) essay is concerned with fleshing out terms like ‘vagabond capitalism’ and ‘topographies’ that gloss how domination and inequality are linked across different arenas. As Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser more directly emphasise, social reproduction is always striated by ‘axes of domination’ or ‘the fault lines of class, race, sexuality, and nation’ (2019: 22–23). But Katz's article helpfully reimagines social reproduction spatially as a dynamic topography, or way of considering the uneven interrelation of seemingly disparate modes of harm and work.
This more totalising way of considering the ‘topographies’ of domination finds its formal correlative in Wolf Light's narrative repurposing of Cornish pagan spirituality and contemporary Ghanian witchcraft accusations. While the re-emergence of the witch across these contexts is due to different, even if periodic, crises, these historical specificities are quickly compressed in Wolf Light's relentless focus on feminist witchcraft as a way of transcending borders and interconnecting local ecological struggles. Notably, the central conflicts in the tale are the immediate ruination of Adoma and Zula's environments by prospectors, in a recentring of Global South experiences. In Ghana, Adoma battles gold miners who poison her local river, while in Mongolia, Zula tries to outwit her uncle who hunts for resources in a sacred mountain rumoured to be the burial place of Genghis Khan. The teenage trio even communicate through an adinkra tattoo of the symbol nsoromma, a West African Asante ideographic representation of guardianship. Contrastingly, the conflict in Linet's narrative is individual and melancholic, as she focuses on unearthing her tragic past, including her mother's postnatal depression, and the fate of ancestors like Hester Merrimore, ‘“the first woman in the parish to be accused of witchcraft and murdered for it”’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 639) – a nod to the association of Cornwall with pagan beliefs, particularly witches and ‘satanic’ magic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, while Adoma and Zula directly tackle extraction, and easily make transhistorical connections to explain how resource grabs lead to a loss of sovereignty, Linet prickles at her association with British colonialism: ‘Aba!’ said Adoma. ‘Once those skin-walkers know the source of your power, they’ll know how to control you, like you British did when you stole the Golden Stool of Asante …’ ‘Not that again!’ Linet snapped. ‘I wasn’t even alive then!’ ‘Linet, my sister, I’m not blaming you, I’m talking facts. Simple facts. You British conquered us, and after you took the Golden Stool and sent our chiefs into exile, we became your slaves.’ ‘And so?’ said Linet. Adoma sighed: ‘As for you, you are too sensitive! Fact: I am linking my history to Zula's. That. Is. All.’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 2086).
Linet's reaction is a reflexive moment, illustrating that her historical relationship to extraction is a racialised one, the consequences of which are still playing out in West Africa and Central Asia. To return to Martín Arboleda's point, the dematerialisation of extraction means reconsidering the ‘uneven reconfigurations in the social composition of the global working class’ (2020: Ch. 1). That Linet reroutes excess water from her lake in Cornwall to replenish Adoma's river, and helps recover a sub-Saharan environment struggling with the compound effects of climate change and extraction – ignited by capitalist colonialisation, and externalised onto the Global South – is an unconsciously anti-imperialist gesture, one that imagines solidarity across moments and geographies of oppression. Critically, Nana Merrimore notes that while witchcraft is a distantly remembered memory in Cornwall, Zula and Adoma are in immediate harm, living in places where ‘“people […] are sometimes murdered for what we do, murdered for simply practising our craft”’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 1394), as the text neatly relativises each character's experience of oppression. Wolf Light's ecological imaginary is a utopian one that depicts witches and witchcraft as an anti-capitalist coalitional force that can overcome combined (and historical) violence towards women and nature.
United, the witches of Wolf Light can stop the sacrifice of their lakes, forests and mountains. Their teenage ‘rebellion’ is that they refuse the logic of capitalist realism, of the equation of ecology with profit in ways that threaten the bioenvironmental conditions for social reproduction, of the clean water and air required for subsistence. At one point, both Zula and Adoma are in disbelief that anyone could claim that ‘“poisoning our river with cyanide and mercury will be worth it if they find gold”’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 1485). Indeed, Adoma and her grandfather are incredulous at the pursuit of profit against long-term ecological sustainability, pondering ‘“If they find gold will they be able to eat it for food and then drink it for water? How will their parents farm now? How will they find water for their families?”’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 1002). Later, appealing to family, they ask, ‘“Don’t you care when trees are cut down in the forest and cyanide and mercury are used in a sacred river to mine gold? Don’t you care that most of the river's fish are dead or not fit to eat? And that now it's poisoned, no one upstream can use its water: not for drinking, washing or farming’” (Badoe, 2019: loc. 1605). Repeatedly, the witches query the association of nature with value, and the ways in which environmental asset-stripping in the short term is prioritised over sustainable and long-term nature–society relations.
The harrowing tales from Gambaga, of witchcraft as a dangerous trait designed to discipline women amidst constrained neoliberal conditions, are overturned by Wolf Light's protagonists, who foreground the reparative possibilities of transnational solidarity: with Linet's tears and Zula's lightning serving as the final catalysts for the emergence of a ‘lake-full of water’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 2519), which is channelled by Adoma to replenish the Asuo Nyamaa river and to frighten away gold panners. Deploying a speculative reading of this passage, attentive to the text's critique of modern extractivism, we can draw out the water's spectral re-appearance as a metaphorical depiction of reparation and redistribution. Put differently, the text implicitly critiques the violence of extraction in global peripheries, and the pressures put on vulnerable eco-systems impacted by climate change. The trio's magic re-routes excessive weather conditions elsewhere – the famously wet Cornish climate, and the volatile weather-systems over Mongolia's mountains – to Ghana. The destruction of Adoma's forest is, as Granpa Okomfo observes, a microcosm for understanding the runaway impact of commodity crops, with the ‘“virgin forest”’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 833) destroyed for cocoa plantations, then ‘“charcoal”’, which undermines the basis for ecological reproduction: ‘“Now they wonder why the rains don’t come with the same vigour as before. They wonder why the land is drying up and the air is dusty”’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 834).
In materialist terms, then, the flooding of the Asuo Nyamaa river is a collective and reparative process: only with their combined knowledge and power can the magical trio undo the immiseration of Adoma's village. To push this reading further, given the anti-colonial context of Nkrumah-era modernisation, particularly dam building, the energetic potential of water to cleanse and renew the river contains the kernels of post-colonial utopian thought (Okoth, 2022). The witches’ magical connection gestures to the potentiality of the non-aligned Asia-Africa Bandung movement, combined with a contemporary feminist stance that transcends the problematic link between dams and energy-intensive extraction (like the multiple Volta River dam projects in Ghana), to provide a liberatory and enchanting conclusion. Namely, those most vulnerable to exploitation by a patriarchal capitalist world-system, young teenage women living in rural areas historically associated with internal and external forms of colonisation, can harness the excess water generated by climate change to overthrow an international mining operation and stop extraction in its tracks.
Eros and kernels of utopianism? A conclusion
Badoe's work marries local witchcraft mythologies from sub-Saharan Africa with a rich engagement with regional struggles over extraction, and a materialist-feminist approach that has anti-colonial and anti-capitalist roots. In broad terms, it also taps into the popular Global Northern re-emergence of witches in fourth-wave feminist cultural imaginaries as anti-patriarchal, ecologically conscious, anti-capitalist, and in coalition with queer allies (see: Sollée, 2017). This reappropriation of the witch has a longer lineage in post-1960s feminist and queer North American activism and culture (see: Castro, 2019; Brandl, 2022). But Wolf Light is not easily read through the lens of popular fourth-wave feminism, and its approach to nature is at times essentialist and oddly heteronormative. Zula calls the Sleeping Giant mountain ‘my man’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 2102), and describes her first sighting of the mountain as a commitment that stirred ‘an emotion I was able to taste but didn’t understand. [….] My heart tingled’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 135). The only way for the witches to fully cement their connection to the environments under their care is through an intensely charged libidinal energy that dissolves human–nature boundaries and renders mountains, forests and lakes as familiar to the trio as their own families. Zula remarks that ‘The more I lulled him (The Sleeping Giant mountain) in slumber, the more he became a part of me: blood, breath and bone. The deeper his caves and crevices bedded in my soul, the deeper my love for him. [….] I knew the crags the Giant lay on as well as I did the lines on my grandmother's face’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 1147). Similarly, Adoma remarks that their stewardship of natural spaces is akin to marriage, ‘“wedded for eternity”’ (Badoe, 2019: loc. 2098). Through a social reproductive lens, we could generously (but not unproblematically) read these libidinal descriptions as an unresolved and contradictory kernel of utopianism, of Marcusean ([1955] 1966) political eros, or liberation through pleasure and sexuality, even if they are coded within dominant presentations of heteronormative romance.
Witchcraft is thus both threat and promise in Wolf Light, suggesting counter-histories of feminist care and alternative ways of co-existing with nature that suture Cartesian mind–body binaries, while building unevenly on global histories of women's oppression, from European witch hunts to recent sub-Saharan African accusations. At its most powerful, it renders absurd capitalism's destruction of the very bioenvironmental conditions for social reproduction, to cathect an eco-utopian and cosmopolitan narrative that foregrounds three teenage girls overcoming extractive capitalism.
