Encountering Development in East African Fiction

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.