Where the spirits live. Ecowomanist movements and interlegal struggles: the case of Kikuyu and Ogoni women

s it possible for women to advance their rights while promoting their cultural identities? A paradigm of contraposition underlies most of the legal research on women’s rights and customary law, reflecting the very same logic of antithesis permeating the international framework. However, this is not the only narrative. This paper shows evidence of a different thinking touching the international discourse on women’s rights, as well as legal research and actions of legal mobilization. The inquiry of two case studies of «bottom-up» environmental justice – the Green Belt Movement and the Foundation of Ogoni Women Association – highlights the interlegality perspective animating tools and strategies used by some groups of African women whose claims for the advancement of environment and women rights are embedded in the international human rights discourse as well as in their cultural identity and traditions. Through this pattern, which plastically expresses the eco-womanist theoretical frame, Kikuyu and Ogoni women shape the substance and procedure of environmental justice in pluralistic and relational terms; create a bridge between the world of customs and the world of statutes; heal the spirit injuries which hit the environment, the community and the (gendered) self.