African Cultural Imaginaries and (Post-)Development Thought

Abstract

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 WangarĩMaathai (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