Echoes of our Touch: the nexus between humanity and the earth in Véronique Tadjo’s ‘In the Company of Men’

This article interrogates the destructive socio-ecological nexus in Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men (2021) through a synthesis of Cajetan Iheka’s framework of ‘proximity’ and Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’. While existing scholarship primarily addresses pandemic memorialization, this study identifies a critical gap by analysing how Tadjo’s visceral and multi-sensory imagery functions as a diagnostic of the colonial and socio-economic forces driving ecological collapse. The central argument posits that Tadjo utilizes imagery to manifest the catastrophic outcomes of ‘vulnerable proximity’, where the material enmeshment of species under extractive capitalism facilitates a lethal bridge for pathogens. By applying Nixon’s theory, the analysis demonstrates how the ‘slow violence’ of habitat destruction and unregulated mining, often invisible and attritional, is accelerated into the ‘fast violence’ of zoonotic spillover. The findings reveal that when human-non-human proximity is mediated through post-colonial structural weaknesses and global market demands, it results in a terminal breakdown of species boundaries. This research contributes to the African environmental humanities by illustrating how Tadjo’s aesthetic strategies map the negative externalities of the human–non-human nexus, specifically identifying how habitat loss, pollution, pandemic eruptions and deaths of living beings emerge as inevitable consequences of fractured proximity. Ultimately, the study concludes that the pandemic is the visceral manifestation of long-term, attritional environmental degradation inherent in modern extractive regimes.