Recent African writings have taken up more pointedly environmental issues in ways that the earlier works did not. If these earlier writings can still be read, as Byron Caminero-Santangelo argues in Different Shades of Green (2014), for their proto-environmental themes, recent writings locate questions of the environment at the forefront. I want to explore in this paper a recent trend in African writing where a human character goes in search of another and in the process illuminates the conditions of the environment. These narratives promise a search for a human being, but that premise is soon extended to reveal the prevailing conditions of the environment. In other words, the object of the search becomes enlarged to include the space covered in the quest. Take the case of Helon Habila’s Oil on Water which introduces the search for the kidnapped British Mrs Floode but ends up as an expose on the ecological devastation in the Niger Delta. Or consider Nuruddin Farah’s Crossbones, which depicts Ahl arriving from the United States in search of his stepson who fled Minnesota to join Al Shabaab but then turns from that depiction to illuminate the decimation of Somalia’s terrestrial and aquatic spaces as a consequence of war. Why do these narratives proceed in this fashion instead of focusing on their original search or declaring the environmental intent early on? This paper will propose that there are at least two ways to understand this narrative phenomenon. On the one hand, we can interpret the interlinking of human and nonhuman concerns in these texts as the manifestation of their entanglement or what elsewhere I have called their proximity (Iheka Forthcoming). On the other hand, however, this strategy can be understood as evidence of the anthropocentricism undergirding the valuation of African literature. In this mode of reading, the human story can be said to be the hook to draw in the human-centered reader who may not necessarily be attuned to ecological questions. The environmental storyline becomes secondary to the main plotline involving the human search, which somewhat reinforces the idea of human priority.