Mapping the Unmapped: Climate Injustice, Water and Digital Visibility in Chioma Okereke’s Water Baby

Abstract

Contemporary African climate fiction increasingly represents environmental crises through the everyday experiences of communities negotiating poverty, displacement, infrastructure and unequal access to resources. Chioma Okereke’s Water Baby (2024), set primarily in Makoko, a floating community on the Lagos Lagoon, participates in this emerging body of African climate fiction by bringing together water, climate vulnerability, digital technology and questions of belonging. Existing scholarship on the novel has examined its watery materiality, multiscalar vulnerability, spatial exclusion and counter-mapping practices. This paper approaches the novel from a different perspective by examining the relationship between climate visibility and environmental justice. Drawing on Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, Cajetan Iheka’s African ecocritical framework, Astrida Neimanis’s posthuman feminist understanding of bodies of water, and scholarship on African environmental transformation, the paper argues that Water Baby presents visibility as an ambivalent form of climate politics. The drone-mapping project initially appears to offer Makoko recognition by placing an overlooked community within technological and public visibility. However, the novel complicates the assumption that being mapped necessarily produces justice. Through Baby’s movement between Makoko and global spaces, Okereke reveals the unequal processes through which local environmental vulnerability is transformed into a globally consumable image. The paper therefore proposes that the novel shifts the question of climate justice from simply asking who suffers environmental harm to asking who has the authority to make that suffering visible, interpret it and determine its future. Water Baby ultimately demonstrates how African climate fiction can challenge universalised representations of climate crisis by locating planetary environmental concerns within specific histories of urban inequality, gender, technological mediation and contested belonging.

Keywords

• African climate fiction
• Water Baby
• climate visibility
• environmental justice
• Makoko
• digital mapping
• slow violence
• African ecocriticism