The Bildung of the professional class: development’s narrative genres in Mary Karooro Okurut’s The Invisible Weevil

Abstract

Global development discourse presupposes a close relationship between nations and the professionals who administer them. This paper uses formal analysis to articulate problems of political representation facing the African professional class when it assumes the responsibility of governing a national population. It does this via a reading of Mary Karooro Okurut’s The Invisible Weevil, a 1998 roman à clef that recounts Uganda’s postcolonial history from the perspective of its professionals. In addition to being a novelist and intellectual, Okurut is also a politician with close ties to Yoweri Museveni's government. The novel situates the Museveni government over against the violent dictatorships that plagued the country since its independence. On the surface, the novel offers professionalized government as a corrective to the cycles of violence that characterized earlier regimes, a renewed national Bildung. I argue, however, that the novel’s multi-generic structure—alternating between bildungsroman and naturalist war novel—discloses several pernicious contradictions within the emergent narrative of professional pragmatism.

Keywords:

• Professional class
• governance
• genre
• bildungsroman
• naturalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge all of the readers who offered invaluable feedback on this manuscript at every stage of its composition: Olakunle George, Khristina Gonzalez, Alison Fagan, Mollie Godfrey, Dawn Goode, Siân White, Sofia Samatar, the participants in the Africana Literatures and Cultures Workshop at James Madison University, and the anonymous reviewers for JALA.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Okurut entered government service in 1994; when The Invisible Weevil was published in 1998, she was a Commissioner in the Ugandan Ministry of Education. Shortly after, she became Museveni’s press secretary, from 1999 to 2004. Since then, she has served as her district’s MP, as well as being a minister in Museveni’s Cabinet since 2012. There she has held numerous posts, including Minister of Gender, Labor, and Social Development, Minister of Security, and Minister in Charge of General Duties in the Office of the Prime Minister, where she currently resides at the time of publication. See “Okurut Mary Karooro Bushenyi” and “The Cabinet.”

2 This push for inclusivity, unfortunately, has not extended to Okurut’s approach to LGBT + issues. In her role as press secretary as well as in her later roles as cabinet minister, she has steadfastly supported anti-gay measures. See, for instance, “Ugandan President Urges Softening of Anti-Gay Bill,” and Okurut, “Come On, Dr. Tamale, Gayness Is Not African.”

3 For theorizing this generic designation and its importance to African literature, my analysis is deeply indebted to The People’s Right to the Novel, by Eleni Coundouriotis, which I discuss in greater detail below.

4 Okurut refers to this epithet by choosing “Kazi” as Museveni’s pseudonym in The Invisible Weevil.

5 This quote is in reference to Deo D’Souza, the civil servant narrator of Peter Nazareth’s In a Brown Mantle. For more representations of professionals as a fractured, debased class during the Amin era, see Peter Nazareth, The General is Up; John Ruganda’s The Burdens, and The Floods; Henry Kyemba’s nonfictional A State of Blood; Alan Tacca’s Silent Rebel; and, more recently, Moses Isegawa’s Snakepit.

6 John Marx has identified this shift in a genre he calls “failed state fictions,” in which “[t]he ideal of citizenship cedes center stage,” and “competent management” is presented “as an aspiration every bit as compelling as the goal of national liberation” (47).

7 I am, of course, borrowing the phrase “bifurcated state” from Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject, where he argues that this split state structure is colonialism’s most enduring political legacy in contemporary Africa. For Mamdani’s own multi-dimensional account of how Museveni’s government reproduced colonialism’s bifurcated state structure, see Mamdani 207–17.

8 For the full spectrum of neoliberal initiatives undertaken throughout the Museveni presidency, see the essays collected in Wiegratz, et al.

9 Kruger observes: “These hazing rituals derive their authority from the church and the military…In its caricature of Christian and military rituals, the novel critiques modern institutions and their rhetorical inscription into a narrative of progress and civilization” (88).

10 As Nambula puts it, “Genesis’s negative turn of behaviour is an invisible weevil, a threat to the development of the country. His death leaves Nkwanzi with hope for a better future for the country” (62).

11 See Atkinson, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.

12 Coundouriotis’s book represents a major revision of prior understandings of naturalism in postcolonial criticism, which contest Lukács’s famous account emphasizing the defeatism of the genre with regard to revolutionary class struggle (See Lazarus). Simon Hay has even shown how the postcolonial bildungsroman, specifically, strategically incorporates naturalist modes of narration to create radical effects. Whereas Lazarus and Hay focus on the political consequences of naturalism as a narrative style (i.e. the impressionistic recording of facts), however, Coundouriotis’s more comprehensive study enlarges the focus to include the recurring thematic motifs that have informed African authors’ deployment of the genre.

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Notes on contributors

David Babcock

David Babcock is Assistant Professor of English at James Madison University. He is currently completing a book manuscript on professionalism and political subjectivity in contemporary global Anglophone literature. His work has appeared in PMLA, Cultural Critique, Diaspora, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Contemporary Literature.