Postcolonial environmentalism in Africa explores interactions between humans and nature in the context of intensifying ecological violence in the aftermath of formal colonialism and its trademark violence of extractive power. As a critical approach that stresses the influence of colonial remains in everyday socio-political processes and relations, postcolonial environmentalism has been widely deployed to examine the interconnected relationship between the environment, materiality, and humans, with a focus on how one impacts and define the others. This study invokes, in a broad sense, African postcolonial ecocriticism to explore how creative literature is being used as a strategy of negotiating ecological violence in the era of global multi-national corporatism. The study adopts Grosfoguel's idea of global coloniality as a conceptual framework to examine how Imbolo Mbue's novel How Beautiful We Were (2021) portrays a Cameroonian postcolony where transnational corporations and corrupt governments perpetuate colonial machineries of extraction, ecological devastation, improvisation, dehumanization and violence. The article argues that Mbue symbolically uses decolonial environmental motifs to illustrate what is lost when symbiotic bonds between communal African societies and their natural environments are sacrificed for corporate profits that leave exploitation, environmental degradation and moral debauchery in their trails. Plain language summary: Global coloniality and environmental injustice in How Beautiful We Were This article provides an analysis of how the Cameroonian American writer Imbolo Mbue engages, in her novel How Beautiful We Were, the ways in which historical patterns of domination and colonization continue to cause various forms of injustices on powerless people and nature. In the novel, such injustices occur as ecological violence where a wealthy inter-continental company named Pexton exploits the natural resources of an imaginary African village called Kosawa, leaving a trail of environmental destruction. The article examines how the motifs of ecological degradation and the consequent unnecessary human suffering become metaphors for interlocking political, material, and social effects caused by persisting global networks of capitalist extraction. Mbue's characters suffer the consequences of Pexton's extraction. How this suffering is evoked by Mbue, particularly the loss of livelihoods through contaminated agricultural soil, poisoned water bodies, diseases as well as exposure to extractive toxins, demonstrate, in a critical way, the interconnected nature of human and ecological violation. The authors call upon appropriate ideas from critics who have generally thought through the relationship between capital, humans and nature, to deepen their understanding of how Mbue's novel highlights major cultural, economic, environmental and socio-political issues that arise when powerful global institutions use their financial might to extract more wealth in places where the poor are left worse off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]