Encountering development in East African fiction

Abstract

In this article I address how East African writers have responded to and conceptualized the encounter with development in works of fiction. The article combines two lines of enquiry: first, a historical perspective on “development” as a history of changing and conflicting meanings and practices in planning and controlling social and economic change, and, second, a narrative studies perspective on fiction as a source of knowledge in social and political research. The article presents an analysis of two novels and a short story from Uganda and Kenya: Akiki Nyabongo’s The Story of an African Chief (1935), Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road (1976), and Binyavanga Wainaina’s Discovering Home (2003). The texts are from three different historical periods from the colonial past to the present. Bringing them into dialogue with institutional discourses relevant to their respective periods, I argue that these works of fiction open up a unique understanding of key issues and problems in development thinking and planning. Furthermore, my analysis sheds a different light on critical debates that perceive the “development encounter” as a story of the “West versus the rest”. Instead, this essay links recent trends in writing to more entangled histories of development.

Introduction

Walking through an African capital — be it Accra, Yaoundé, or Nairobi — one cannot avoid noticing how the promise, the ideology, and the business of development make their mark on everyday life. This starts with a surface reading of urban semantics. Looking at advertisements, business signs, and the nameplates on buildings, one will discover a large number of organizations that carry the terms “development” or “develop” in their wording and titles. Walking through government districts, one can count the state agencies, international organizations, and financial institutions which define their mission as a contribution to the development of the country. Even if they do not carry the term in their title or have outright banned it from there — like the German Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) — one cannot avoid encountering it in their mission statements and organization profiles. Travelling from the capital to the more distant — read “less developed” areas — of African rural life does not mean that one leaves the semantics of development behind. It travels along and reappears in the language and self-representation of branch offices of governmental and non-governmental organizations, of local NGOs and associations. In talking with professionals as diverse as the staff members of a town hospital to farmers organized in agricultural associations, one will notice how they frame their activities as part of the “development” of their region or country.

Referring to various studies on the social anthropology of development, Ralph Grillo observes that development and the exposure to development discourse are a fact of everyday life for most peoples of the world (1997: 1). The encounter with development in African daily life is — of course — not only a matter of semantics, but involves confrontation and interaction with the policies and practices related to the discourse of development. This confrontation embraces very different experiences, memories, and histories: one may think of large-scale economic projects ranging from the export-oriented agricultural projects of the French Office du Niger and the British Groundnut Scheme in twentieth-century colonialism, the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund of the 1990s, or the giant dam projects of present governments. One may equally think of interventions into social life through the introduction of formal education, the experience of communal labour in community development endeavours such as the Ujamaa movement in Tanzania, or the emergence of new forms of cultural expression such as theatre for development activities in many African countries. From the colonial period to the present day, African societies have been confronted with a great many interventions into social, cultural, and economic processes, all defined under the umbrella term “development” (see Hodge and Hödl, 2014).

The phrase “development encounter” was coined by Arturo Escobar (1991), one of the most influential representatives of what has become known as post-development theory. He described this encounter as both a continuation and a substitution of the colonial encounter, which continues to define and shape the realities of a large part of the globe. In Escobar’s analysis, the development encounter amounts to an “act of social and cognitive domination” (1991: 675). Development discourse is interpreted as a site where the former colonial powers and Western and international capital continue to exert their hegemonic power (see also Escobar, 1995). In this encounter, people, communities, and societies of the global south have never been silent, however silenced they have been in the official records of development programmes and planning. The post-development view of “development as a monolithic enterprise, heavily controlled from the top”, in which there are “(Western) perpetrators of development and non-Western victims of it” (Grillo, 1997: 20; viii), has given way to more nuanced and differentiated approaches. Post-development critique has been challenged, on the one hand, by historical studies which rediscover and reconstruct the history of development through multi-faceted, regionally diverse policies, practices, and discourses (see Hodge et al., 2014; Van Beusekom, 2002), and on the other, by anthropological research that examines locally specific receptions and conceptualizations of development (Bordonaro, 2009; Dolan, 2005; Grillo and Stirrat, 1997).

To date, studies of African and postcolonial literature have been reluctant to take up the history of development in Africa as a category of research. While the colonial encounter between Africa and Europe continues to be a major field of research in literary studies and cultural studies, the same does not hold true for the development encounter and its versions and subversions in cultural representations, its undeniable impact on African societies and cultures notwithstanding. Looking at the encounter through the lens of stories told in East African writing opens a whole range of questions. How has the daily contact with development shaped the imaginations, the mental and intellectual landscapes expressed in works of fiction? How has fiction represented the “expert” — either in the shape of a person, an organization, or, metaphorically, in the form of “expert knowledge”? How have novels received the development industry created through the encounter, its global, international, and national actors, its material signs and promises? Which meanings do narratives give to the encounter? This essay approaches some of these questions by combining two lines of enquiry: first, the conceptual history of “development” as a catalyst and instrument of social and economic change and, second, fiction as a cultural practice that creates and mediates knowledge.

Knowledge in fiction and narrative

It is instructive to consider the increase in research across the disciplines arguing for fiction as a source of knowledge in society, politics, and history (for example Darby, 1998; Hunt, 2007; Lewis et al., 2008; Noxolo and Preziuso, 2013). This academic trend is accompanied by proliferating debate on the parameters appropriate to scholarly use of works of imagination. Theoretically, this article draws on interventions into different disciplines in the fields of African history, imperial history, postcolonial studies, and development studies that seek to combine literary studies with historical and sociological research on the grounds of a shared interest in the social functions of storytelling and narrative. As Kirsten Rüther points out in relation to African history, in recent decades the “notions of what constitutes an archive have changed fundamentally” (2012: 27). Her argument resonates with current rethinking of African cultural production in terms of an intellectual archive (Ogude et al., 2012). In development studies, David Lewis et al. have diagnosed a crisis of representation. They suggest including fiction as a source of authoritative knowledge to “widen the scope of the development knowledge base conventionally considered to be ‘valid’” (2008: 199). Clemens Sedmak (2003) makes a similar point in the case of poverty research, extending Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description” to poverty narratives in fiction. In fact, academic research on African writing has traversed the line between fiction and history for decades, with the emergence of postcolonial theory and the establishment of postcolonial studies providing further impetus to this border crossing (see Kopf, 2014). From a literary studies perspective, however, endeavours to include works of fiction and art as complementary sources alongside the archives and data of sociological and historical research tend to pin down works of imagination in content-based and fact-oriented readings that do not take into account how fiction works. In African literary studies, in particular, an empirically informed approach has to challenge (neo-)colonial reception traditions that reduce the works of African writers to what they tell — or seem to tell — about Africa, instead of acknowledging them as valuable aesthetic and intellectual works in their own right (Gikandi, 1991, 2001; Minh-ha, 1991; Nfah-Abbenyi, 1997). Simon Gikandi describes this kind of reception via Roland Barthes’ articulation of the danger of the “first” reading, whereby “the consumption of the text [leads to] a reading which erases the problematics of the text and its contradictory meanings in its quest for the artifice of continuity” (1991: 2).

Keeping the dangers of one-dimensional reading in mind, I now explore conceptualizations of the development encounter in the works of three East African writers, bringing their creative work into dialogue with institutional discourses of development. The three works discussed are Akiki Nyabongo (1935) The Story of an African Chief, Meja Mwangi (1976) Going Down River Road, and Binyavanga Wainaina (2003) Discovering Home. While Going Down River Road clearly qualifies as a novel, the other two works are less generically classifiable, crossing boundaries between autobiographical writing, fiction, and creative non-fiction. In The Story of an African Chief, re-edited under the title Africa Answers Back in 1936, Nyabongo presents an autobiographical account with a fictional character, combining autobiographical with novelistic elements. Similarly, Discovering Home does not fully fit into the conventions of a short story — although it was acknowledged as such by the jury of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002 — but rather presents itself as loosely connected episodes of an autobiographical first-person account in which the author/narrator sets out to explore his home country Kenya after several years of absence. In this article I address the three texts as works of fiction, given their shared quality of making use of fiction to varying degrees while witnessing processes of social and economic transformation.

I am interested in the ways in which these three texts in their acute observation of these processes interact with discourses of development, and the extent to which they have shaped, opposed, or subverted these discourses. The three works of fiction are from three different historical periods: the colonial period of the 1930s, the era of decolonization and independence, and the moment of Kenya’s political opening after the end of President Daniel arap Moi’s regime. Each of the three texts responds to significant trends and debates in the governance and economics of development of its respective period. Reading each text against the backdrop of the contemporaneous development discourse of its period, I assign a particular, prevailing narrative function to each. Akiki Nyabongo’s The Story of an African Chief (1935) constructs a vision of development in dialogue with and in opposition to European colonial concepts and practices of development. Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road (1976) exposes inherent inequalities, power relations, and modes of exclusion in the postcolonial development industry. Binyavanga Wainaina’s Discovering Home (2003) adds an alternative version to the “single story” repeated in present discourses on poverty reduction and rural development.

Development encounters under colonial rule in The Story of an African Chief

He felt proud and confident and knew that he would develop the possibilities in his people and country. (Nyabongo, 1935: 307) ¹

The Story of an African Chief (1935), by the Ugandan writer Akiki Nyabongo, first appeared in New York and in 1936 was reissueed in Great Britain under the title Africa Answers Back. Tobias Döring aptly describes the generically indeterminate text as “a strange mixture […] of fact and fiction, of history textbook and ethnography, with novelistic and autobiographical elements” (1996: 141). Akiki Nyabongo belonged to southwest Uganda’s line of Toro kings. With his Master’s degree from Harvard University and PhD in anthropology from Oxford, Nyabongo may also be regarded as one of an early generation of Western-trained intellectuals. In his account he tells the story of a son of a Buganda chief — Abala Stanley Mujungu — from his birth around 1890 until his succession to his father’s title roughly 20 years later. The publication of this book marked a watershed literary event. It was one of the first book-length narrations of the colonial encounter written in English and interpreted from an African perspective, and as such is a foundational text of postcolonial African literature. Out of the educational career of his protagonist, Nyabongo constructs a witty and rich narrative, showing the boy Mujungu in continuous conflict with and resistance against a biased missionary pedagogy that tends to devalue his cultural upbringing and background.

The text documents the rise of a self-confident elite, oscillating between and comparing different systems of knowledge, and exploring new ways of adapting and reforming African communities. The novel engages with contemporary discourses on developing Africa and contests their inherent Eurocentrism and paternalism that used “development” as a signifier for European superiority. Nyabongo responds to development discourse with an indigenous vision that portrays Europeans in command of useful and powerful knowledge, skills, and technologies that are objects of desire and can be learned, but not in possession of a superior culture as a whole (see Kopf, 2014). As Döring argues, this vision of a productive synthesis between African and European knowledge and cultural practices also differs from the more essentialist counter-discourse of the Négritude movement, since the novel “proclaims no African essentialism, but simply and rather pragmatically claims elements of the traditional heritage as yet the best way to tackle practical problems” (Döring, 1996: 150). The text draws parallels between the construction of its protagonist as a “developed subject” and a discourse on the transformation of society through colonial governance, missionary education, and European science. In an earlier article, my focus was on the voice and agency of Africans in the politics of knowledge in colonial development, analysing Nyabongo’s and fellow Kenyan writer Parmenas Githendu Mockerie’s (1934) openly critical perspectives on the transfer and control of knowledge between Africans and Europeans (Kopf, 2014: 356–62). One aspect that should be elaborated in more detail here is the way Nyabongo’s novel intervenes into discourses on (the governance of) health.

As newly installed chief, Abala Stanley Mujungu actively seeks the help of European doctors to fight the smallpox epidemic that caused the death of his father and many villagers. While the white doctors travel the region on a rapidly organized vaccination programme, one of the accompanying villagers breaks his arm and is treated by one of the Europeans. Seeing the bandaged arm, Mujungu calls for a local healer to treat the fracture in the traditional way. I shall quote the dialogue that ensues in full, since it is so unusual and utterly progressive in its historical context:

“Well, doctor, I think it will be better for this man to have his broken arm treated in our own way. If God please — may I say that the African people treat broken bones better than Europeans do.”

And the German doctor said, “Ach, I read about it, that the Egyptians treated broken bones without using bandages; but I never understood how they could.”

And one of the other doctors said, “Mujungu, we are here to learn and to co-operate with you. If some of your old traditional methods are better than ours, then we should like to see them. We must exchange our ideas.”

Mujungu felt very flattered to hear that the European doctor had listened to him and had accepted his statements.

The German doctor said, “How do you do it then?”

Mujungu said, “I have sent for one of our doctors who is an expert at treating bones.”

And the other doctor asked, “Do you think he will agree to let us see his procedure?”

Mujungu replied, “Certainly. You are willing to co-operate with us. We learned your method of vaccination. Before he comes, I have to take off the bandage.”

The English doctor proceeded to take the bandage off. Before he finished, the Mujumu — the native doctor — arrived. Mujungu said, “These gentlemen are willing to listen and to exchange their views with us. They do not think that what we have is inferior. They try to see the best in everything, so I will ask you to show them our method of treating broken bones.” (290–91)

Through this encounter, Nyabongo expresses an understanding of traditional medicine ² and Western biomedicine as two systems of knowledge that offer effective solutions to different health issues, complementing each other once they are brought into dialogue. The novel thus conceptualizes traditional African medicine as well as its relationship to biomedicine in a manner that was well ahead of the intellectual framework that governed development policies of its day. In his seminal work on the social roots of health and healing in modern Africa, Steven Feierman writes of the integration of popular healing into public health systems: “Recognizing popular healers is also a way of affirming the value of African technology and culture, denied by white rulers during their years of control” (1985: 125). As the major colonial powers in Africa during the 1930s, Britain and France were seeking to transform their colonial politics into a politics of economic and social development. However, in no area could they be further from acknowledging “African technology and culture” than in their interventions in public health. Since the First World War, social development had been emerging as a concern — rhetorically at least — distinct from the economic development of colonial thinking and planning. Social development became an official aim of colonial governance with Britain’s Colonial Development and Welfare Act and France’s Fond d’investissement pour le développement économique et social. In Frederick Lugard’s (1922) The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa and Albert Sarraut’s (1923) La mise en valeur des colonies françaises, the 1920s saw the publication of two major colonial doctrines, which would shape the imperial discourse on development in Africa throughout the interwar period. Both Lugard and Sarraut understood measures to improve the living standards of African societies as part of imperial politics. Concerning East Africa, Walter Bruchhausen (2014: 209) describes the Report of the East Africa Commission (1925) as a turning point “for social development becoming an end in itself, and not just a contributing factor to an intended economic exploitation”.

From the mid-1920s onwards, in discourse and in practice, colonial policies intervened increasingly into issues of public health. ³ They did so in such a way that there was a complete rupture with existing therapeutic systems of healing. Bruchhausen (2014: 210) defines this complete break as one of the characteristic features in the history of health and development in Africa. According to him, the rupture radically distinguished health from other sectors of intervention, such as administration, where collaboration with traditional leaders was at least formally sought. In colonial discourse on Africa’s development, African medicine was generally dismissed in terms of “witchcraft”, a system of thought considered as being exclusively built on superstition and supernatural belief, lacking the empirical, physical, and rational basis associated with Western medicine. Being conceptualized as such, African technology and culture in health and healing entered colonial development policies and planning only in the form of a massive hindrance. A more objective — and indeed more rational — attitude toward existing systems of healing would enter the policy papers of international organizations only almost half a century later. Feierman quotes a report of the World Health Organization of 1978 as one of the turning points in the re-evaluation of African traditional medicine with the following definition:

[T]he sum total of all knowledge and practices, whether explicable or not, used in diagnosis, prevention and elimination of physical, mental or social imbalance and relying exclusively on practical experience and observation handed down from generation to generation, whether verbally or in writing. Traditional medicine might also be considered as a solid amalgamation of dynamic medical know-how and ancestral experience. (WHO quoted in Feierman, 1985: 112, emphasis added)

With its conceptualization of traditional African medicine and understanding of African and Western medicine as dynamic medical know-how, Akiki Nyabongo’s novel comes much closer to the WHO-definition from 1978 than it was to the discourses that governed health policies in development thinking and planning of the mid-1930s. Popular European understandings of African “witchcraft” found their equivalent in Western anthropology which dealt with African medicine predominantly under the aspect of “supernatural belief”. ⁴ With a PhD in anthropology from Oxford, Nyabongo was perfectly familiar with European constructions of African cultures. Indeed, his novel in many ways constitutes an appropriation of the anthropological gaze by a cultural insider, particularly in his detailed portrayal of the rules and patterns that structure gender relations and hierarchies in the polygamous household of the elder chief, Mujungu’s father.

By portraying traditional bone setting as absolutely safe and efficient, the author was presumably not as empirically informed as he pretended to be. More recent studies on traditional bone setting in various African regions suggest that these methods, their popularity notwithstanding, are not generally more efficient than biomedical methods (see Ogunlusi et al., 2006; Dada et al., 2011). The novel’s achievement, however, lies in the fact that it suggests a rational examination of this practice not in terms of culture and popular belief, but in terms of medical knowledge. Nyabongo thus uses fiction and narration to shift indigenous practices of healing as an object of interest from the anthropological realm into the realm of public health governance. More than that, his novel mimetically performs a dialogue between Western and indigenous medicine, examining competing and potentially complementary systems of knowledge on an equal footing. In the scene quoted above, this discursive shift is most strongly represented in the words of one of the European doctors: “Mujungu, we are here to learn and to co-operate with you”. It is interesting how the novel constructs this exchange of knowledge as a complex and polyvocal communication process, thus putting emphasis on the importance of dialogue in transfers of knowledge and highlighting how much dialogue determines whether or not the exchange succeeds and produces lasting effects (Kopf, 2014: 356–62). With this episode Nyabongo constructs what would, in today’s development jargon, be called “best practice” in improving the living standards of the people. This “best practice” entails a successful interaction of European and African knowledge and techniques. The exchange, however, only partly succeeds. Asked to perform his expertise, the indigenous healer does not share the full technique with the white observers, making them understand that the necessary herbs “were secret and could not be divulged without breaking the ancient traditions of the tribe” (294). Through his reluctance, the author inscribes yet another significant aspect of cooperation between Western biomedicine and indigenous systems of knowledge into the story, which is the question of control. In the novel, the Bugandan healer as an agent of knowledge keeps control and protects his knowledge by denying his European counterparts full access to his technique. Nyabongo’s conceptualization of development thus does not make of indigenous practices of healing a hindrance that needs to be overcome, as governmental discourses on development did in colonial East Africa and have continued to do for almost half a century after independence. Rather, he diagnoses a hindrance in the terms of dialogue and exchange between (Western) biomedicine and indigenous practices of healing.

Despite its progressiveness in modelling a dialogue between European and African systems of knowledge, Nyabongo’s vision of interventions in public health shares common grounds with colonial and colonizing policies of development in terms of being authoritarian and top-down. Not once are those who suffer illness consulted. The narrative neither gives voice to the man with the broken arm and on whom the competition between African and European medicine is staged, nor to the villagers who are subjected to a vaccination programme during an outbreak of smallpox.

Constructing the Development House in Going Down River Road

Besides, there is no hurry in building a twenty-five storey Development House when you are only on the fourth floor. You will only throw yourself back into the masses of the hopeless jobless if you hurry. (Mwangi, 1976: 35) ⁵

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the literary landscape in East Africa changed considerably through the rise of popular fiction in Kenya. The serious, political novel of early independence — predominantly represented in the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o — found a counterpart in popular, urban novels which entered the literary scene without articulating any political or emancipatory claims. They diversified the cultural production of Kenya and beyond and were welcomed by local audiences (Kurtz, 1998; Odhiambo, 2008). One of the writers who strongly contributed to this popularization of Anglophone writing and moved literary production out of academic circles was Meja Mwangi. His name is tightly connected with the postcolonial urban novel and a new type of character: the young, urban male, educated but unemployed, who subsists on poorly paid jobs or tries to get his share of the unequally distributed wealth through criminal and criminalized action (Kurtz, 1998; Odhiambo, 2008). This character is at the centre of Mwangi’s Nairobi trilogy Kill Me Quick (1973), Going Down River Road (1976), and The Cockroach Dance (1979). The Kenyan critic Tom Odhiambo (2008) sees the emergence of the urban, criminal novel that started with Kill Me Quick as part of a larger social discourse on the unequal distribution of wealth in the 1970s and as the cultural expression of a new “moral economy”. The following section takes a closer look at the second and most successful novel of the trilogy, and the way it interacts with the discourse on growth and distribution that governed the debate on Kenya’s national development after independence.

Going Down River Road is a postcolonial urban novel portraying lives in unstable and informal working and housing conditions, articulating the hungers and desires of those settling the margins of global and national capitalist market economies. The novel tells the story of Ben, a former military commander in the Kenyan army and white collar worker at an insurance company, who, after his involvement in an arms deal, finds himself on the lower ranks of society as a contract worker on a construction site in Kenya’s capital Nairobi. He gets involved with Wini, a teenage mother who funds her rent and higher education through casual sex work, eventually abandoning Ben and her five-year-old son, Baby, for an advantageous marriage with her white boss. Ben and Baby find temporary shelter with Ocholla, Ben’s companion at the construction site in the day and drinking mate in the evenings. The shared male household in a shack in an informal housing area disintegrates when Ocholla’s two wives and children, who could no longer sustain themselves and left the village for the city, move in. The different stories are connected by a reticent omniscient narrator, who intervenes with commentary in only a few passages. He connects the stories from the construction site and from urban slum life through his protagonist Ben, who is also the focalizer of the novel. From a feminist standpoint — and here I fully agree with Nici Nelson’s (1996) critical discussion of the novel’s biased representation of women — Ben’s perspective conveys an at times appallingly macho and sexist attitude. Nevertheless the text is rich in reflecting change in gender relations and gender roles in processes of urbanization. It is also successful in tracing alternative masculinities, particularly in those scenes where Ben develops a caring relationship with the abandoned boy Baby. Going Down River Road opens a range of perspectives for anyone studying issues of urban planning and urban development. Conflicts and grievances created by interventions through the city authorities run through the narration — for instance when the workers’ food kiosks in Haile Selassie Avenue are closed down and Ocholla’s shack and the whole neighbourhood are repeatedly razed, allegedly for health reasons, leaving customers and inhabitants without alternatives. The novel exposes these interventions as top-down measures in an urban population characterized by extreme social divisions and political exclusion.

“Development” as a state policy and an international business is represented through “Development House”, the 25-storey mega-construction the workers are building. Some literary critics have interpreted the name of the building as “a sarcastic comment on the ideal of ‘development’ beloved of the postcolonial era government” (Odhiambo, 2008: 76). I read Mwangi’s Development House as a signifier, a sign for the novel’s reception, and a site for the rewriting of development discourse. As a metaphor, the Development House represents an alienating and alienated economic order, an anonymous, yet highly visible kind of wealth. Ironically, the politics and economics of postcolonial development are represented in the shape of a giant construction site, built by workers whose lives do not see any personal progress. Looking at development business from the perspective of construction workers, Mwangi creates “development” as a narrative space where class distinctions and unequal distribution of wealth and power become manifest. The construction site emerges as a microcosm which reflects hierarchies of class, “race”, and gender in post-independence Nairobi. It is a site that symbolizes and produces exclusion as well as connection. The workers’ lives and fates are intertwined with the economics of development represented by the building. They are part of it while being simultaneously excluded. This antagonistic relationship is pointedly expressed in the narrator’s voice: “only crummy bastards ended up building […] offices they would never be allowed into once completed” (12).

At the same time the construction site marks a space where different and antagonistic interests and desires intersect. At the top of the hierarchy is an Asian-owned building company, represented through Yussuf, a relative of the owner and foreman at the construction site. The skilled work is in the hands of Asians, while African men form the majority of unskilled workers, known as “hands”. Three African women, whose job is the recycling of used nails, are at the bottom of the hierarchy. The novel ends with Development House finished and the workers about to move to the next construction site of a tourist building complex, the “Sunshine Hotels”. The shift from “Development House” to “Sunshine Hotels” connects to a shift of power relations in independent Kenya. As a result of government directives to “Africanize” the building industry, Ben is promoted to be the — first African — foreman. This seeming progress is received with legitimate suspicion by the other workers when it becomes clear that Ben will not replace Yussuf. Instead, the company creates a new position for the latter at the expense of jobs, thus leaving the hierarchy intact (198).

Three years before Going Down River Road appeared, the International Labour Organization had published the report Employment, Incomes and Equality: A Strategy for Increasing Productive Employment in Kenya (ILO, 1972). The report was part of a major project financed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to investigate problems of labour in five developing countries, with the case study of Kenya being the pilot project. The resulting report was presented to the Kenyan national government and distinguished itself from earlier studies of international organizations. First, the presented data and analyses were largely based upon the research of Kenyan economists and social scientists and of international scholars who had worked on issues of Kenya’s development for a longer period, all of them mentioned in the preface. Second, it shifted the focus from the problem of unemployment to the question of the “working poor” (ILO, 1972: 9), thus bringing a new concept into public debates and international discourses of development which redefined governing notions of poverty and its causes. The report defines social and economic “imbalances” as root causes; the suggested solution accordingly shifts the focus of the recommended policies from creating more jobs to achieving a more balanced distribution of wealth combined with sustained economic growth (see ILO, 1972: 8–12; 30). The narrative of reconciling economic growth with labour would dominate national and international discourses on Kenya’s development throughout the 1970s. The ILO report was one of the first institutional publications to address the problem of unequal distribution on a major scale, and it belongs to what would become the canon of development literature in postcolonial Kenya, making its impact on all succeeding studies and investigations (see Ochieng’, 1995: 89–90). Different actors and schools of thought largely agreed in identifying the main problem in terms of an opposition between labour and economic growth, even though they substantially disagreed as to the defined causes and the proposed solutions. ⁶

It is highly improbable that Meja Mwangi, when writing Going Down River Road, had read the reports of the ILO or the World Bank, and even more unlikely that his characters would have had an interest in reading them. The gap between these two narrative worlds — the grand narratives of political and economic actors on the one side and the stories told in postcolonial popular fiction on the other — resembles the gap that Mwangi’s novel sketches between the realities accessible to the workers and the opaque order of reality to which Development House belongs. Yet institutional discourses on development and Mwangi’s popular novel were organized around the same central opposition of growth and labour. In Mwangi’s fictional narrative, this opposition finds a powerful metaphor in the relationship between “house” and “hands”. Read metaphorically, this opposition represents different conceptualizations of change. On the one side we find the vertical growth of Development House, which gives the novel an outer structure; the chapters reflect the progress of the construction, following each other roughly according to the steadily growing number of stories on the construction site (see Kurtz, 1998: 127). The workers’ lives, Ben’s in particular, on the other side, do not know of linear progress and growth. They evolve narratively in meanders, knowing regression, stagnation, and painstaking slowness.

At the beginning of the novel, Ben’s career has already been reversed by a series of setbacks. With his move to the construction site — where the steep, vertical growth of Development House is established — his individual opportunities for individual progress and growth are already exhausted. At the construction site, these two dimensions meet — the workers’ distress and capitalistic growth. The achievement of the novel lies in the way it connects these two dimensions and relates them with each other. While externally structured by the linear growth of the building, the narration unfolds around the unspectacular and frustrating movement of lives without any visible change. What emerges through this narrative choice is an alternative concept of ownership. At the level of the narration, the novel does not disclose the identity of those who own Development House. It is precisely the narrative and physical absence of the owner, however, that gives way to developing an idea of ownership through presence, labour, and identification. The workers — those who will never set foot into the building once completed — eventually “hand it over”.

Rural development revisited in Discovering Home

He! You are bringing development back to Mwingi! (Wainaina, 2003: 22) ⁷

The third text to be discussed here is Discovering Home, a short story by the Kenyan writer and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina, awarded with the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002. Since then, Wainaina has been one of the most prominent and active protagonists in the emergence of a highly outspoken, nationally and internationally visible creative writing scene, which has flowered during the past decade with the foundation of the writers’ organization the Kwani Trust (Strauhs, 2012, 2013; Odhiambo, 2012). The associated “re-invention of art and culture” (Odhiambo, 2012) has unfolded within a wider revival of the arts and creative industries in the country following the political opening after the arap Moi era. The Kwani Trust, the arts, culture, and media organization Twaweza Communications, the spoken word movement initiated by Shailja Patel, the Pan African Writers’ collective Jalada, the NEST collective, and the writers’ collective Storymoja are all initiatives working at intersections of cultural production and civil society engagement. By their range of activities and interventions they make Kenya and its capital Nairobi a vibrant intellectual space of rethinking and reformulating relations between the creative and the political, between the local and the global (Davis and Schulze-Engler, 2013).

In its reception of and response to discourses and policies of development, Wainaina’s writing indicates a paradigm shift. It witnesses the development encounter from the perspective of a generation that has grown up with the emergence of a mainly foreign-ruled development industry. From the outset, this paradigm shift is accompanied by a diversification of national and international development through the emergence of civil society organizations and movements on the one hand (see for instance Okuku, 2002), and on the other, it connects to an African middle class in Kenya and in the diaspora which increasingly intervenes as a player and as critic of the economics and cultures of development. In Discovering Home the first person narrator recounts moments of a prolonged return to his mother country, Kenya, after eight years of living and working in South Africa. The stations of this rediscovery are Nairobi, his hometown Nakuru, Mwingi district, and Maasailand, while the last section leads to his mother’s ancestral home in Uganda, to a reunion with the exiled Rwandan branch of the family. The narration describes a movement from the centre to different peripheries. It can be described as a series of loosely connected encounters, each of which contains a moment of disruption with the familiar and expected and leads to a fuller, more comprehensive understanding. One of these moments is set in the Ukambani region in Eastern Kenya, a region that has been classified in development literature as a “classic example” of a “region at risk”. To quote from a same-titled UN study published in 1995:

The region regularly recurs as a “classic example” of land degradation in accounts dating back to the 1930s (e.g. Dregne, 1990: 434; Hall 1938: 396; Matheson and Bovill, 1950: 218), and state policies have continuously been devised to address this concern. Rural residents report frequent crop failures and water shortages, and food relief has become a permanent feature of rural life. (Rocheleau et al., 1995)

The episode in Wainaina’s story is titled “Ai … But Your Land is Beautiful” — which already marks a difference from portrayals of the region in mainstream development literature. Yet, it starts out as if it is just another version of the “region at risk” narrative:

I’ve got a part-time job. Driving around Central and Eastern Province, and getting farmers to start growing cotton again. I have been provided with a car and a driver. (18)

To be honest, Mwingi is not a place I want to visit. It is a new district, semi-arid, and there is nothing there that I have heard is worth seeing or doing, except eating goat. (18–19)

The author puts up the framework of a typical “development encounter” comparable to narratives in institutional development literature and evoking Escobar’s critique of the “development encounter” as an “act of cognitive and social domination” (1991: 675). Wainaina’s narrative uses the same setting: an organization, enterprise, or institution in whose name the narrator visits the region. He is endowed with an externally defined mission that means certain privileges: a salary, a car, and a driver. The same driver will later be revealed as the actual “expert”, holding a diploma in agriculture but living on casual driving jobs. The wording (“semi-arid”) and the imagery evoke the “act of cognitive domination”, being the way the region is commonly represented in development literature.

Having evoked the rules and expectations of a typical “development encounter” the narration takes an unexpected turn. Following a sudden idea the narrator leaves the highway to Mwingi town and continues on a side road. Downing a drink in a bar, he runs into the local chief. The chief enters the scene as the embodiment of a captivating and powerful vitality. From the moment of his appearance, he takes the lead in the encounter. What follows is a shared meal of fresh goat, an invitation to the chief”s home, and a night spent in a local dance club.

The primary, predefined mission — “getting farmers to start growing cotton again” — is abandoned in the narration and is brought up again only once, when the chief casually remarks: “Cotton! Oh! You will need someone to take you around the District Agricultural Office” (22). The encounter with the Agricultural District Office is described in a single sentence: “Our meeting there is blessedly brief, and we get all the information we want” (22). Cotton turns into a side issue. The actual encounter and intervention do not take place in the district capital, but in the remote nightclub, in a genuine exchange between Kenyans of different ethnic and class backgrounds, dancing and “talking politics” with each other. The narration creates a utopian moment with this conversation’s potential for true social change (26).

The “informal” encounter leads the narrator to think of the region in a different way and to discover vitality, creativity, and resilience in what he thought of as a site of mere scarcity and crisis. Instead of exerting social and cognitive domination, he leaves the region cognitively and socially enriched. The value of the encounter is not to be measured in economic but in ethical and intellectual terms. Wainaina’s representation of the development encounter changes the roles of giving and taking. Yet it does not fall into the opposite stereotype of “they are poor, but they are happy”. Wainaina’s representation does not elide the social and economic imbalances at stake. But it shifts the focus to the energies, desires, and frustrations of the people. It thus opens another page, like adding a different version to confront what the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called “the danger of the single story”:

So that is how to create a single story. Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. (Adichie, 2009: c. 9:20)

Through Wainaina’s narration, a region that has been constructed and represented over and over again in a way that makes the visitor “expect nothing worth seeing or doing except eating goat” reveals unexpected wealth and exuberance. Wealth — as Wainana’s narration suggests — lies in the wit and resilience of the people. Adding this alternative version of a development encounter to the already existing pool of narratives, Wainaina accomplishes an act of restoration: “Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair the dignity of a people” (Adichie, 2009: c. 17:30).

Conclusion

Read within a larger conceptual history of “development” as a catalyst and instrument of social and economic change, the three works of fiction reveal insights into changes and continuities in the thinking of development from colonialism to the present day. The Story of an African Chief takes for granted the idea of developing African societies through directed interventions into social structures and practices. It is consistent with contemporary policies of the colonial powers insofar as it embraces Western knowledge and techniques as necessary and desired means to reform African societies. Although the narration does not differ from European versions of colonial development with regard to the aims, means, and sectors of intervention, it significantly differs with regard to the modes and the agents of intervention. Nyabongo’s version focalizes development from an African position marked by material and symbolic wealth. Despite speaking from a colonized society, the author’s ways of participation and cooperation construct a vision of development based upon dialogue and exchange.

Mwangi’s version of “development” in his novel Going Down River Road, published during the period of early independence, is much more cynical than Nyabongo’s, anticipating the post-developmentalist critique of the 1990s. “Development” there appears as an alienated and alienating industry, built upon the exploitation of African labour. It reproduces and reinforces class divisions and inequality and is completely set apart from ordinary people’s everyday living and working conditions. Mwangi’s picture of development is exclusive and excluding. His protagonists neither have control over nor access to the political and economic processes symbolized by Development House. The power divide in Mwangi’s version, even though he speaks from the historical context of independence, is absolute and insurmountable.

In Wainaina’s story Discovering Home, “development” is introduced as an individualized business. Just as in Mwangi’s novel, the agency behind the mission remains unnamed, invisible, and anonymous. It could be the national government, an inter-national organization, or an agricultural enterprise — as with Mwangi, these positions seem to be interchangeable. The stakeholder behind the intervention is absent and alienated from the narrative events, and does not matter to the progress of the story. Unlike in Going Down River Road, however, the development mission is represented by an African. Despite being a Kenyan, the first person narrator comes to Mwingi district in the role of the foreign expert. The development encounter is one between Kenyans of different ethnic communities and classes. The way in which the narrator introduces his visit to Mwingi district shows how global distinctions into developed, developing, and underdeveloped countries continue to work within the nation state. Wainaina’s story is indicative of the transposition of global discourses on poverty and underdevelopment into a national framework.

Read as a source of knowledge, the fictional narratives go beyond being mere reflections or documentations of social experience. Rather than authentic representations of experience they constitute the creative responses of African writers to their own and their societies’ experiences of development in practice. Concerning the above dialogue between Mujungu and the European doctors in The Story of an African Chief, I doubt that the author Nyabongo ever experienced a situation like that. Rather, his experience of the colonialist bias against indigenous knowledge entered into imagining a different kind of communication between Africans and Europeans within processes of directed intervention. Or, taking into consideration the huge gap between the development industry and ordinary people’s lives portrayed in Going Down River Road, the same motive came up in the grand narratives and their critique of the imbalance between economic growth and employment. The difference lies in how the novel makes readers know, in the sense that it makes them feel and experience this gap through telling the story entirely from the perspective of the workers. The ILO report of 1972, worth rereading today for its unchanged actuality, was also remarkable in giving the “working poor” narrative space, voice, and individuality through the inclusion of five case studies, among them the story of a young man with higher education in Nairobi who lived on occasional, poorly paid jobs (ILO, 1972: 357–62). These case studies can be considered a successful integration of elements of fiction and storytelling in the formation of development knowledge. The report makes use of the stories to give the subaltern a name and a voice, to represent different faces of poverty and to illustrate the predicament of those left behind by unbalanced economic growth. This is, on the one hand, remarkable, and on the other the report leaves the reader with the impression that with these brief stories she can imagine and understand what it means to be “working poor”. But how does one live, when one’s work can do nothing to change or to improve one’s life? What does it mean to live with knowing the unchangeability of one’s living conditions day by day? The grand narratives, even when — or rather because — they are committed to change, do not represent the knowledge gained from the experience of being and remaining poor, one’s hard work and best efforts notwithstanding. They promise change and solutions — an improvement, if only the right decision-makers make the right decisions at the right time and the right place. The achievement of Going Down River Road lies precisely in the fact of producing a narrative out of experienced unchangeability without promising change; in giving the narrative representation of lives lived in material poverty a different function from being an illustration of a problem. Symbolically, the novel frees the vast majority of people who have been sacrificed to unequal economic growth from the burden of illustrating a problem. Ben, Ocholla, the sex workers, and Baby do not illustrate. They are. The novel allows them to be.