African Cultural Imaginaries and (Post-)Development Thought

In this special issue, we read discourses and practices of development in Africa through the lens of African literature and cultural imaginations. The issue brings together a group of scholars at universities in Africa and Europe, from the fields of literary studies, African studies, global history and social science. In their articles, they point out how development thought and practice can be theorised, contested and enriched through literary and cultural analysis.

The thinking around “development” has occupied intellectuals, politicians, economists, journalists, activists and writers in Africa and the world for almost a century now – whether affirmatively in the sense of a reflection on what societies need to develop their potential and provide a good life for all; or, controversially, in the sense of a critique of the continued colonisation of national economies, populations, of life and environment through an uneven integration into globalised capitalism in the name of “development” and the inherent “coloniality of power” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013). In all these considerations, one would think, cultural imaginaries play a decisive role. However, the opposite was and is often the case, as the agendas of governments, and of national and international organisations in the field of global development, have time and again shown. Indeed, in Africa in particular “culture” has often been constructed as an obstacle and as backward in the discourse on African development (see Odhiambo 2002). For the visionary activist and thinker Wangarĩ Maathai (2010), recognising this continued devaluation of cultural knowledge in postcolonial Kenya was tantamount to discovering culture as the “missing link”, which would allow us meaningfully to connect the struggle for economic rights and democratisation with the struggle for environmental protection in the Civic and Environmental Education seminars developed with impoverished peasants. What Maathai proposed was an understanding of ecological and economic development that starts from cultural self-knowledge – kwimenya in Gĩkũyũ – as the key to change (Maathai 2010, 170–171). Similarly, E. S. Atieno Odhiambo advocated a research practice “to demonstrate ways of raising cultural questions as a valid approach to critiquing development from above and conceptualizing development from below” (2002, 11).

One way to explore how cultural questions can inform a decolonial critique of development is to engage literature, in agreement with Adebanwi (2014), as a privileged site of social thought in Africa, in productive dialogue with development research. For decades, writers, poets and thinkers in Africa and across the diaspora have witnessed the transformation of their worlds through ideologies and practices of directed change, conceived as “development”. More often than not, their stories differ significantly from institutional discourses, bringing to the fore excluded voices, experiences and conceptualisations of development in Africa. With Hellen Shigali, we contend that writers in Africa have created “valid knowledge and truth rooted in critical thinking with the ultimate aim of structural social transformation” (2016, 45). Neither in development theory as academic field, nor in the development agendas of governments and international organisations, has the knowledge expressed in literature and oral culture in Africa been seriously integrated. Development studies and African literature as a field of knowledge rarely speak directly to and with each other. To date, development studies as an academic discipline has relied only to a small extent on the knowledge created in the humanities. With this special issue, we aim to address this imbalance and advance an interdisciplinary dialogue that conceptualises African literature, as proposed by Jeyifo and Julien (2016), as a field of knowing that speaks to multiple disciplines. Furthermore, we seek to contribute to Africa-centred debates on the history and meaning of development in Africa, and to value the place of literature and oral culture in the field of development theory and critique.

The articles examine the role and relevance of diverse bodies of writing and oral culture, mostly from East Africa, in the analysis and critique of one of the key ideologies of social, economic and political transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Additionally, we engage with literature as a site of development theory, as Anne Adams and Janice Mayes in their edited volume Mapping Intersections: African Literature and African Development (1998, 4) suggested: “We can refer to concepts of ‘development’ for contemporary Africa drawn from the spheres of political economics and philosophy, as well as from literature itself.”

The idea for this issue came out of a workshop on “Encountering Development in Postcolonial Fiction” held in May 2018, which I organised as a collaboration between the Department of African Studies and the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna. At the time, I was at the beginning of a research project funded through the Elise Richter Programme of the FWF Austrian Science Fund on concepts of development in postcolonial Kenyan literature and was eager to explore innovative methodological and conceptual approaches to the relationship between “development”, “literature”, and “postcoloniality” in African and global contexts. The articles by Veronica Barnsley (2022) on “Midwivery Narratives and Development Discourses” and by Eric Burton (2022) on conceptualisations of development in Swahili utenzi and shairi poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were originally presented at this workshop. To the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA) Conference in Nairobi 2019, I owe an encounter with James Wachira and his PhD dissertation project on narrating conservation in Kenyan eco-texts, represented here in an article on human-animal conflicts seen through the novella Terrorists of the Aberdare by Kenyan author Ng’ang'a Mbugua. Finally, the editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies put us in touch with other scholars at African universities, which gave us the chance to include Betty Okot’s article on concepts of gender and land in Acholi oral culture and Eve Nabulya’s article on the eco-humanist philosophy of Luganda folktales. My article on development theory and a critique of humanitarianism in Binyavanga Wainaina’s writing came out of the above-mentioned research project.

Burton's article deals with notions of development, progress and well-being under and against colonial rule, from the perspective of African history and global history. Swahili male writers of the East Coast at the time of the German occupation, whose poems were partly commissioned and collected by German scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are at the heart of Burton’s article. Moving away from reading the texts through dichotomous categories of either “resistance” or “eulogistic” poetry, Burton instead approaches them as cultural expressions of social thought from a contact zone characterised by highly asymmetrical relations of power. Using a discourse-historical approach, he engages with shifting notions and ideals of coastal town civilisation, and claims them as sources of knowledge within a global history of development.

In her article “Speargrass Blossoms: Patriarchy and the Cultural Politics of Women’s Ephemerality on the Land in Acholi”, Betty Okot intervenes in debates on women and land rights in Uganda through an investigation of concepts of womanhood in Acholi cultural expressions (Okot 2022). Through careful socio-cultural analysis, the author elaborates on how Acholi patriarchal and patrilineal society enabled women to negotiate and claim their access to land through a web of relations both in the family they moved into through marriage, and in the family they were born into. The article thus contests an “emerging, but synthetic narrative of precarious woman’s land rights in Acholi” in Western-oriented feminist discourse and male-centred traditionalist discourse alike and brings a pragmatic African feminist approach to a topic that, as Okot shows, is often misunderstood or wilfully misinterpreted.

In “Midwifery Narratives and Development Discourses”, Veronica Barnsley focuses on the midwife as a social agent as well as a literary figure (Barnsley 2022). During the transition from late colonialism to early independence, midwifery was one of the few professions that enabled African women access to higher education. This was one reason why women pioneers of modern African literature such as Grace Ogot in Kenya and Nafissatou Diallo in Senegal were trained midwives. Barnsley brings their and Makhosasana Xaba’s writing into dialogue with humanitarian approaches through a reading of Christie Watson's Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, a British-authored novel focusing on a trainee birth attendant in southern Nigeria. Barnsley's investigation of the figure of the birth attendant across the fields of global health research, African feminist fiction, autobiography and humanitarian literature brings forward decolonial epistemologies of women’s health and opens unique perspectives on birth as a biosocial practice that is fundamental to social development.

James Wachira explores transformations of human–animal relations, in the first place introduced through the violent segmentation of people, species and space according to the British colonialist practice of “divide and rule”, and continued in conservation policies in postcolonial Kenya, through the novella Terrorists of the Aberdare (2009) by the Kenyan writer and journalist Ng’ang’a Mbugua (Wachira 2022). Wachira builds his reading of this insightful narrative, of a rural community and their precarious relationship with the elephants confined to the bordering Aberdare national park, on two bodies of knowledge, namely scholarship on the history and legal regulation of human-wildlife-conflict in Kenya, and scholarship on environmental knowledge in literary studies, with an illuminating focus on the agency of labels assigned to animals.

An interrogation of environmental wisdom in Ganda culture is at the heart of Eve Nabulya’s “Rethinking Human Centeredness and Eco-sustainability in an African Setting: Insights from Luganda Folktales” (Nabulya 2022). The author works with folktales from Ganda communities living in formerly densely forested areas of central Uganda, which have in recent years been subject to heavy deforestation. Nabulya’s analysis suggests that human-centredness and environmental consciousness as revealed in the tales – unlike what much eco-critical scholarship and activist discourse suggest – do not have to be mutually exclusive, but can be productive grounds for an environmental practice serving both human and non-human needs. The tales were performed under the Ekyoto (fireplace) storytelling programme hosted by the Kingdom radio station (CBS). Thanks to the efforts of Eve Nabulya and this journal, the recordings and transcriptions in Luganda with English translation have been made as supplementary material with the online version of this article [https://www-tandfonline-com.uaccess.univie.ac.at/doi/suppl/10.1080/13696815.2022.2032618?scroll=top].

In “Binyavanga Wainaina’s Narrative of the IMF-Generation as Development Critique” I develop a reading of Wainaina’s memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place (2012) as well as his less well-known essays from multidisciplinary scholarship on foreign-imposed structural adjustment in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s and its disastrous effects on African people and economies (Kopf 2022). With a view to the disconnect between how African postcolonial development is conceived and remembered both in and outside the continent through this experience of neoliberal globalisation and the concomitant rise of Northern humanitarianism, I elaborate on how the Kenyan writer provided a narrative to understand and overcome this disconnect, taking the autobiographical and literary as its means.

In an article debating the kind and value of knowledge used in the development sector, Mike Powell (2006, 519) wrote:

There have been and are many different visions of development – as self-help, as solidarity, as “civilising mission”, as colonial self-interest, as economic development, as modernisation, as part of global integration. All visions, no matter how top-down or directive, view development as a process which involves change for the better, however defined, which in turn involves people doing things differently. … It is a process which cannot happen … unless it is based both on a good understanding of the particular socio-economic reality that the “development” is intended to change and, just as importantly, on an appreciation of the perceptions of local populations as to their options in that reality.

Literary and cultural texts from Africa are – as the articles in this special issue prove across historical periods, regions and languages – an excellent site to engage with this knowledge.

Acknowledgments

While working on this special issue, I was in contact with several colleagues whose work is not represented in this issue for a variety of reasons. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all who contributed to it at one stage or another. In particular, I would like to mention Alex Nelungo Wanjala, Yuvenalis Mukoya Mwairumba, Godwin Siundu, Neema Eliphas and Kirsten Rüther as well as the participants of the workshop “Encountering Development in Postcolonial Fiction” at the University of Vienna, Margarete Grandner, Hanna Hacker, Esther K. Mbithi, Ayšem Mert and Christiane Schlote. I'd like to thank Grace Musila who brought the proposal to the editorial board of the Journal of African Cultural Studies. Furthermore, I'd like to thank all anonymous peer reviewers and this journal for the invaluable editorial support. This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) V554-G23.