At independence, African leaders, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals were deeply concerned with how they were going to use the natural resources within their newly national borders as the material basis for industrial development and economic sovereignty. Despite the importance of the environmental framework of decolonization for African actors, scholars have largely overlooked the implications of nature for state-making and belonging in favor of questions about how Africans fought for political and cultural independence and imagined post-colonial citizenship. Through research in Gambia, Senegal, and Ghana—spanning the themes of agricultural development, indigenous architecture, and mineral exploration—we interrogate how men and women, farmers and politicians, geologists and architects fought over the place of “nature” in the ideological and material project of decolonization.