Environmental justice practitioners have long accepted the centrality of indigenous knowledge. Global events converged to level the playing field, setting the stage for the diplomatic emancipation of the global South.
By Patience Ukama
Whether it be the fire that blazed the UN COP30 complex in Belém, Brazil, or indigenous communities who disrupted the event by protesting oil extraction in the Amazon, such dramatic responses to contemporary challenges in environmental governance frameworks have revived global interest in indigenous knowledge.
2025 delivered a masterclass in international diplomatic relations and categorically laid bare the changing global order using the G20 Summit, multiple COPs, and the now infamous visit of President Zelensky to the White House without a tie – God forbid.
The rise in global temperatures from 1.5 to 2.5 degrees has not buoyed narrative sovereignty. If anything, it has forced us to acknowledge that colonialists, historians and nationalists alike served their own interests in recounting history.
The need to decolonise environmental discourse and legitimise indigenous knowledge is now as apparent as the conflict between extractive and preservation values.
Conservation ethnography – the study of how communities, landscapes, and cultural knowledge shape one another under pressure from conservation, development, and climate change- is equally at work debunking environmental mythologies towards greater ecological justice narratives.
In the January 2026 edition of ETHNOMAD, Dr Tom Corcoran described the current pursuit of rigorous investigation like this:
Across much of the world today, conservation is treated as a moral absolute. Protect nature. Save biodiversity. Establish reserves. Enforce regulations. These aims are rarely questioned, and when they are, the questioning is often dismissed as obstruction or ignorance. It is experienced as disruption, negotiation, loss, and quiet resentment that rarely reaches policy rooms.
Where science argued that precolonial Africans were ignorant of the sustainable use of natural resources, indigenous knowledge highlights the dominance of both conservation and co-existence from a moral perspective in the African experience.
However, as with religion and politics, much of the value of indigenous knowledge has been eroded by the struggles of identity and tribal superiority.
In the Journal of African History (2007), Enocent Msindo unpacked the complexity of identity during the colonial era. The nostalgic pursuit of an authentic African identity, especially among middle-class Africans, led to invented cultural practices, in instances, to create a sense of belonging.
In Zimbabwe, history shows how prominent cultural heritage sites such as the Great Zimbabwe and the Matopos became contested among ethnicities. But the spiritual and ecological value of the shrines and other spiritual sites in the Matopo stand firm due to indigenous knowledge and oral tradition.
One such site is Diana’s Pool, located 70km south-east of Bulawayo near the Mzinyathini Communal Lands and Esimbomvu village. Named after the wife of JP Richardson, the first Native Commissioner in the area around 1800, Diana’s Pool is a series of natural pools with an elevation of 1,291 metres set in the rocks, against the foreground of the Matobo Hills.
Nothing prepares you for the breathtaking views of pristine landscape, rolling hills, and cascading waterfalls that greet you on arrival at “Embizeni”, which translates to “Place of the Pots”. The name “Embizeni” is derived from the potholes that rainwater has carved into the granite rocks around the pools over time.
Pots themselves are deeply ingrained in the culture and language, where water sources are often considered sacred and protected by spirits. It is a taboo to use black (from use on charcoal or open wood fire) cooking pots to fetch water.
It was understood that such actions upset the mermaid spirits who ensured continuous water flow to such sacred sources of water. Despite having been disputed by conventional science, this remains the reason only clean vessels are used to fetch water, especially at community wetland sites.
In 2020, a Sunday News (Zimbabwe) article stated that the mermaid at the bottom of Diana’s Pool is called Thobela. And further, this totem belongs to one of the first inhabitant clans of the area near the mysterious pools. According to the locals, Thobela and the Pools have a history dating as far back as 1969 and 1972, of ‘taking’ people into their supernatural depths. Not all of them are reported to have been returned alive.
This mystical Pool was one of the sites included in the awareness and learning visits conducted with legislators by DanChurchAid, under the “Voices on Wetlands Campaign” leading up to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, COP15, held in Victoria Falls in July 2025.
Zimbabwe has seven designated Ramsar Sites of international importance, including Victoria Falls, Mana Pools, Lake Chivero & Manyame, Chinhoyi Caves, Driefontein Grasslands, Monavale Vlei, and Cleveland Dam, all recognised for their unique biodiversity, water regulation, and cultural value.
The Ramsar Convention’s strategy explicitly recognises and integrates indigenous knowledge and the role of indigenous peoples and local communities in the conservation and “wise use” of wetlands.
The subsequent Victoria Falls Declaration affirmed political commitment for wetland conservation, a 4.1% core budget increase, and resolutions strengthening migratory bird protection, wetland restoration laws, and the incorporation of indigenous knowledge.
Zimbabwe pledged to restore 250,000 hectares of wetlands by 2030.
But such lofty ambitions are the way of all the COPs. Without indigenous communities to serve as stewards of these critical natural resources, these targets, like President Zelensky, deliver diplomatic commitment without a tie.
As one absorbs the narrative of how Diana followed her car to retrieve her handbag when it rolled down the hill into the Pool, not to be seen for three days, one realises that save for the cave paintings, the African history of the hills is unvoiced.
The meaning of the rocks and the indigenous names of such landmarks have long since been erased, as captured by the late Oxford academic and author Terrance Ranger in Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture, and History in the Matopos Hills (1999)
COPs like Ramsar, flawed as they may be, have given a new impetus to an alternative indigenous voice, black pots and all.
