In 2021, the World Bank published a report assessing Colombia’s banking system and its ability to withstand various climate-related risks. The report notes two main categories of risk: “physical” risks, including wildfires, hurricanes, landslides, and severe flooding, and “transition” risks, including the financial impact that various decarbonization policies are expected to have on the country’s economy as it moves toward a greener future (Reinders et al. 10). In a cheeky reference to the country’s most famous literary figure, Gabriel García Márquez, the report is titled Not-So-Magical Realism: A Climate Stress Test of the Colombian Banking System. The title alludes to two kinds of realism: on the one hand, the literary style known as magical realism popularly associated with García Márquez and, on the other hand, a kind of realism that asks policymakers and government officials to be realistic, which is to say pragmatic and politically expedient, about the limits of what can be achieved through existing institutions. As the report suggests, now is not the time for “magical” thinking; now is the time to be realistic.
This article thinks across these different meanings of realism and the magical by looking at a series of literary and policy engagements with the discourse of sustainable development. By the early 1980s, it was clear that industrial development had produced dire environmental consequences, including pollution, deforestation, desertification, and ozone depletion. It was also clear that the oft-discussed gap between the world’s rich and poor nations was not closing but in fact widening apace. In response, in 1983, the United Nations founded the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), also known as the Brundtland Commission. The commission was asked to devise a “global agenda” addressing the interlocking environmental and economic issues facing the world (World Commission ix). From 1984 to 1987, the commission met regularly at strategic locations around the world, disbanding only after the publication of its 1987 report, Our Common Future. Footnote 1 The report helped to popularize the term sustainable development, which the WCED defined as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (43).
In formulating its definition of sustainable development, the WCED was responding to a particular policy mandate. As part of its official mandate from the United Nations, the WCED was instructed to “formulate realistic proposals for dealing with . . . the critical environment and development issues” of the day (356). This language of the “realistic” is threaded throughout the report, where it helps to shape not only how the WCED understands the interlocking ecological and economic crises facing the world but also what kinds of policy solutions the WCED is willing to consider. In one particularly telling instance, the report cites “political realism” (341)—which it frames as a form of innocuous and ideologically neutral pragmatism—to explain why the only “realistic” solutions to these global issues are ones that sustain global economic growth. In this regard, the WCED’s “political realism” maps onto what Mark Fisher has called “capitalist realism,” which he defines as the “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is not possible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2). Fisher argues that this “realism” is in fact predicated on a “fantasy structure” that has become increasingly apparent in a time of widespread “environmental catastrophe” (18). This “fantasy structure” includes two core beliefs: one in the infinite availability of resources and another in the “infinite expansion of capital” (18). In other words, by limiting itself to the belief that capitalism remains, even in an age of ecological crisis, the only possible or “viable political and economic system,” capitalist realism ends up embracing a series of fantastical impossibilities.
I call attention to the WCED’s “capitalist realism” to throw into stark relief other attempts to make sense of, and adjust to, the new realities of life in the Anthropocene, including the work of the prolific Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Ngũgĩ is known for his radical anti-imperial politics, and his works demonstrate his stated belief that the purpose of writing is to make “use of the imagination to paint images that capture the contradictions in society” and thereby produce change (“African Literary Tradition” 208). In this article, I consider two such uses of the imagination. The first is a novel known in English as Devil on the Cross. In a process Ngũgĩ describes in Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1981) and elsewhere, Ngũgĩ wrote this novel in his native language of Gĩkũyũ on scraps of toilet paper while imprisoned by Daniel arap Moi’s government between 1978 and 1979. The novel was first published in 1980 as Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ, and it was published in English translation two years later. An allegorical tale about postcolonial Kenya, the novel denounces capitalism in favor of a socialist model of industrialization.
By the late 1990s, however, when Ngũgĩ sat down to write Wizard of the Crow, the second of the two novels that I discuss here, the world had changed. The collapse of the Soviet Union and an ever-worsening ecological crisis called for new models of development. Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow answers to this new reality. Published in Gĩkũyũ in 2004 as Mũrogi wa Kagogo and in English two years later, Wizard of the Crow is set in the fictional sub-Saharan country of Aburĩria. In one of the novel’s two main plotlines, readers follow the Ruler of Aburĩria as he attempts to shore up his waning political and economic power through a loan from the Global Bank, a fictional proxy for the World Bank. In a second plotline, two Aburĩrians fight against the Ruler’s regime: a secretary and political activist named Nyawĩra and a destitute young man named Kamĩtĩ who, early in the novel, hides from the police by disguising himself as a healer known as the Wizard of the Crow. Eschewing the Soviet-style industrialism of Devil on the Cross, Wizard of the Crow culminates in a vision of economic and social well-being grounded in harmony with the earth and its cycles.
In what follows, I show how these literary works are closely tied to the emerging discourse of sustainable development. While there are notable differences between the two novels—Devil on the Cross makes its capitalists into grotesque caricatures of evil, while Wizard of the Crow operates in a more satirical mode, mocking the country’s ruling elites while also revealing the magic and wonder of life beyond the Ruler’s reach—scholars have also noted echoes between them, including characters, images, and plotlines from Devil on the Cross that reappear in Wizard of the Crow. In a review of Wizard of the Crow, for instance, Simon Gikandi calls the novel an “obvious . . . rewriting of Devil on the Cross” (161), while Ngũgĩ himself has described Wizard of the Crow as a “further development of what I tried to do in Devil on the Cross” (“From the Garden”). In this article, I look to these moments of “rewriting”—which consistently work to make the reoccurring characters, images, and plotlines more fantastical than they were before—for insight into how Ngũgĩ’s thinking on development and the environment shifted in the more than twenty years between Devil on the Cross and Wizard of the Crow. Mapping these moments of literary rewriting onto the history of sustainable development, which was itself a kind of rewriting of prior development paradigms, I show how Ngũgĩ offers an implicit critique of the WCED’s “political realism.” That is, while the WCED’s political realism acts as a kind of imaginative limit, constraining the range of possible policy solutions that the commission is willing to consider, Ngũgĩ’s magical realist revisions invite the reader into a world of greater imaginative possibilities, where alternative conceptions of sustainability are taken seriously and where the idea at the core of “sustainable development”—limitless economic growth—is revealed as a fantasy.
Economic Self-Reliance and Devil on the Cross
Ngũgĩ’s Devil on the Cross offers crucial insights into the multiple, contested meanings given to the concept of development prior to the sustainable turn of the late 1980s. The first of Ngũgĩ’s novels to be written in Gĩkũyũ, Devil on the Cross is also the first to be written after the author’s involvement with the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre, located forty kilometers outside Nairobi. In 1976, Ngũgĩ joined the center’s new management committee, and over the next six years he helped in the writing and production of two plays, Ngaahika Ndeenda (1977; I Will Marry When I Want) and Maitu Njugira (1982; Mother, Sing for Me). According to Ngũgĩ, the center was legally registered as a self-help project with the Department of Community Development in Kenya’s Ministry of Housing and Social Services (Detained 80) and viewed itself as a broadly developmentalist project.Footnote 2 An unfortunate marker of the project’s success was the response it elicited from the Kenyan government: in 1982, the government accused the center of disrupting its “plans to develop Kamĩrĩĩthũ” and ordered the theater razed to the ground (Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ 185).
Devil on the Cross carries on the legacy of the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre as it attempts to redefine the meaning of development. In contrast to the complex, interweaving plot of his 1977 novel Petals of Blood, Ngũgĩ keeps the central plot of Devil on the Cross simple and direct. Blending Gĩkũyũ folktales with biblical references, the novel follows five Kenyans representing five social positions: the worker, the peasant, the intellectual, the capitalist, and, as its protagonist eventually becomes, the revolutionary. The storylines of these characters converge when they share the same minibus, known as a matatũ, traveling from Nairobi to the fictional city of Ilmorog. There, they attend the so-called Devil’s Feast, a competition awarding theft and robbery. This competition is presided over by a foreign delegation from the World Bank–like International Organization of Thieves and Robbers.
The fact that two-thirds of Ngũgĩ’s Devil on the Cross is set in a car—a Model T Ford, no less (33)—traveling along the Trans-Africa Highway indicates the novel’s preoccupation with industrialization and the infrastructure needed to support this process. The novel’s capitalist and socialist characters alike demonstrate a keen interest in industrialization. In a speech at the Devil’s Feast, Mwĩreri wa Mũkiraaĩ—the matatũ’s business-minded capitalist—invites the other participants to reject foreign domination and instead pursue what he calls “true native capitalism” (170). To do so, Mwĩreri proposes that they exploit the country’s best-kept “secret”: its large reserves of iron ore. Referencing a long indigenous history of metalworking, Mwĩreri urges his compatriots to harness this “native knowledge” to become captains of industry, thereby liberating themselves from their dependence on Western capital (170). Advocating import substitution industrialization, Mwĩreri suggests that they focus on manufacturing a variety of metal-based items presently “made by foreigners,” including “pins, razor blades, scissors, matchets, hoes, axes, basins, water containers, tins and corrugated iron sheets, motor vehicles, tractors, steam and diesel engines, ships, aeroplanes, spears, swords, guns, bombs, missiles, missile-launching rockets or rockets for launching people into space” (171). Mwĩreri concludes by voicing his desire to see the country’s elites share more fully in the world’s wealth: “Then we would see if we too could not benefit from modern science and technology” (171).
Mwĩreri is not the only character in Devil on the Cross preoccupied with “modern science and technology.” Ngũgĩ pits Mwĩreri’s “true native capitalism” against a socialist model of industrialization championed by one of the novel’s most heroic figures, a union organizer named Mũturi. Like Mwĩreri, Mũturi speaks uninterrupted for several pages about his vision of the future. Addressing his fellow passengers, Mũturi describes a socialist society boasting many of the same technological marvels and industrial feats that Mwĩreri lists, including “telephones, radios, televisions” and “roads and rails, and cars and trains” (52). But unlike Mwĩreri, who calls for the exploitation of Kenyan workers, Mũturi repeatedly underscores that the economic gains from these technological marvels should be directed back to the workers who have helped to produce them. For his promotion of socialist ideals and for leading a demonstration against the Devil’s Feast, Mũturi is ultimately arrested and jailed.
With Mũturi absent, the novel recruits another character, Warĩĩnga, to fulfill its industrial socialist vision. In the coda, which skips ahead by two years, Warĩĩnga has left her job as a secretary to become an “engineering hero,” as the narrator calls her (217). Warĩĩnga is working in a mechanics’ garage and studying to become a mechanical engineer specializing in “motor vehicles and other internal combustion engines” (218). In the process, Warĩĩnga has also acquired a knowledge of metalworking; she is now an “expert at fitting and turning, at forging and welding, at shaping metal” (218), for whom the “noise of machines in a workshop, of iron drilling into iron, of iron filing iron, of iron hammering on iron,” is “like a beautiful song” (219). The coda thus implies that the country’s “native knowledge” of metalworking and its iron reserves can be used for purposes other than capitalist gain.
The novel’s final scene drives home the revolutionary potential of this “native knowledge” when annexed to a socialist consciousness like Warĩĩnga’s. During the scene of the workers’ demonstration, which is also Mũturi’s last appearance in the novel, Mũturi gives Warĩĩnga a pistol dropped by a capitalist robber fleeing a cave. Once again evoking metallurgical imagery, Mũturi describes the gun as an “iron pipe” and looks forward to the day when “iron pipes like this one, in the hands of the workers,” will save Kenya from neocolonialism as they once wrested the country from British colonialism (211). Substantiating this vision, Warĩĩnga eventually uses this “iron pipe” to shoot three capitalists who attended the Devil’s Feast, including the gun’s original owner. Thus, while Warĩĩnga’s individual fate remains ambiguous at the end of the novel, her actions herald a day when African socialism, by virtue of its industrial strength, will triumph over capitalism.
In valorizing industrialization, Devil on the Cross accepts and even encourages the exploitation of the natural world. At various points, both Mũturi and Warĩĩnga describe human progress as a Promethean struggle to dominate nature. For instance, while working in the garage, Warĩĩnga experiences “joy” at the thought of her “mind and body struggling against nature” (218). This notion of a struggle against nature also informs Mũturi’s understanding of socialist development. Not only is Mũturi’s list of the technological “fruits” he wants from an industrial society eerily akin to what Mwĩreri envisions; it also takes shape through extended comparison with the animal world. Mũturi describes “roads and rails, and cars and trains,” for example, as “types of wheel[s] that permit man to run faster than the hare” and “aeroplanes that give man wings more powerful and faster than those of any bird in the sky” (52). The novel thus advances a socialist program that not only renders nature “submissive and obedient” to human “needs” but also leaves nature increasingly irrelevant (52).
Sustainable Development: A “Realistic Proposal”?
Absent from the novel’s repeated images of metalworking and industrial development is any recognition of the toxic byproducts and ecological degradation associated with heavy industry. Devil on the Cross sometimes even celebrates this toxicity, comparing the “smell of burning diesel or petrol” to “the most intoxicating perfume” (219). To readers today, living through a climate crisis fueled by this “intoxicating perfume,” such an explicit embrace of heavy industry serves as a stark reminder that while Devil on the Cross may explicitly align itself with a project of African self-reliance like that of Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, its underlying preoccupation is with Soviet-style industrialization, not rural development.Footnote 3 Indeed, the novel’s vision of development is undoubtedly influenced by Ngũgĩ’s travels to the Soviet Union earlier in the decade. In 1973, Ngũgĩ paid his first visit to the USSR, passing through Moscow en route to the Fifth Conference of Afro-Asian Writers (Ngũgĩ, Foreword xii). Two years later, in 1975, Ngũgĩ returned to visit Anton Chekhov’s house in Taganrog and to finish writing Petals of Blood in nearby Yalta, then part of the USSR.
To demonstrate the viability of its economic model, the Soviet Union pursued a path of rapid industrialization that allowed it to compete with the economic growth rates of its rival, the United States. But the Cold War also birthed other ways of thinking about economic development. In 1950, the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch published a groundbreaking study that showed how the deteriorating terms of trade systematically advantaged the “industrial centres . . . of the world’s economic system” at the expense of the “periphery” (8). This idea laid the groundwork for what would become known as dependency theory. Building on Prebisch’s work, dependency theorists of the 1960s and 1970s pushed back against modernization theory, which had emerged from American social science departments in the 1950s. While modernization theory maintained that poor nations would develop through a gradual process resembling that of the already industrialized nations, dependency theorists argued that a fundamental restructuring of the world-economic system was needed for the peripheral economies to escape their state of dependence.
Meanwhile, at the margins of the world-economic system, intellectuals, policymakers, and activists committed themselves to thinking more creatively about—and beyond—development. In the early 1960s, as Prebisch and others at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development were working to “unif[y] developing countries into a cohesive political bloc on international economic issues” (Margulis 3), heads of state around the so-called developing world were also busy drawing up new national development programs. While many postcolonial leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru in India and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, pursued industrial models of development, other governments experimented with alternative economic models. Most famously, in Tanzania, Nyerere committed the country to a program of African socialism and self-reliance. In Devil on the Cross, Ngũgĩ references this history, suggesting that this self-reliance would be achieved through a process of socialist industrialization; in its 1967 Arusha Declaration, however, the Tanzanian government moved in the opposite direction. In a pragmatic move that recognized the country’s limited financial resources, the government called for a reorientation away from resources that it did not have—namely, money and heavy industry—and toward the resources that it claimed to have already: people and land. At the local level, too, nongovernmental organizations and community projects, including the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre, experimented with understandings of development that, against mainstream definitions of the term, were not principally organized around economic growth and production.
But it was not only those in the “periphery” who wanted to rethink the meaning and purpose of development; those in the center also recognized the need for new visions of a sustainable future. In 1968, convinced that the world’s problems needed to be considered in complex relation to one another, the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and the British scientist Alexander King joined forces to establish a think tank called the Club of Rome (Neurath 166). In its first report, titled The Limits to Growth (1972), researchers affiliated with the group presented findings from a computer simulation designed to predict the long-term outcomes of exponential population and economic growth.Footnote 4 Among other insights, the report showed how economies that grow exponentially—as they tend to grow under capitalism—grow so big and so fast that, left unchecked, they inevitably overshoot certain fixed ecological limits. The existence of multiple positive feedback loops means that an exponentially growing economy is unable to adjust quickly enough, and the world system collapses. To avert collapse, the report suggests that the world embrace a “deliberate, controlled end to growth” (Meadows et al., Limits 170).
Just fifteen years later, the WCED’s Our Common Future came to a different set of conclusions. Whereas The Limits to Growth identifies growth—and the tendency to “equate growth with progress” (Meadows et al., Limits 12)—as the most pressing issue facing the world, Our Common Future suggests otherwise. The report not only rehearses the common belief that economic growth is “absolutely essential to relieve the great poverty that is deepening in much of the world” (World Commission 1) but also repeatedly suggests that poverty itself is a “major cause” of “global environmental problems” (5). In doing so, the WCED follows a peculiar line of argument: if poverty is partly responsible for the world’s environmental problems and this poverty can only be relieved through economic growth, then the world’s economy must continue to grow to ensure better development and a better environment. This win-win logic helps to justify the report’s call for a “new era of economic growth,” defined here as “growth that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable” (Brundtland xii). What this “forceful” and “socially and environmentally sustainable” growth will look like is left unsaid, allowing the commission to sidestep one key question: Growth at what expense?
Ultimately, the difference in how the WCED and the Club of Rome think about growth stems from their different approaches and mandates—and in particular from the WCED’s understanding of and commitment to “political realism.” The authors of The Limits to Growth call for policy proposals that are “realistic” about the consequences of unchecked growth (Meadows et al., Limits 182; see also 184)—that is, for policy proposals that answer to the anticipated realities of an exponentially growing population and economy. To the WCED, however, a “realistic” policy proposal is one that is adequate, first and foremost, to the “realities of present institutions,” to “what can and must be accomplished today” (World Commission 343). The WCED presents a development program that privileges the familiar over the novel, the world as it is over the world as it could be. Indeed, as the authors of The Limits to Growth freely admit, proposals to end or restrict growth may seem “impossible,” “unnatural,” and altogether “unimaginable because they have not, in most people’s experience, been tried or even seriously suggested” (Meadows et al., Limits 167). Our Common Future does not risk this suggestion, but instead sacrifices the more radical possibilities suggested both by Third World (anti)development visions and by the Club of Rome’s report to a “political realism” that takes the “realities of present institutions” as a kind of imaginative limit. Akin to Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism, then, which “act[s] as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action” (16), the WCED’s “political realism” limits the realm of possible solutions to those that allow for continued economic growth.
Wizard of the Crow and the Fantasy of Limitless Growth
These more radical possibilities find expression in Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow, where the idea of limitless economic growth is presented as the kind of absurd “fantasy” that Fisher suggests it is. At its core, Wizard of the Crow is a story about the social, political, economic, and ecological limits that the Ruler encounters in his quest for limitless economic and political power. Over its more than seven hundred pages, the novel follows the Ruler and his coterie of sycophantic ministers as they pursue a series of get-rich-quick schemes masquerading (not very convincingly) as national development policies. One of these schemes involves the construction of a skyscraper so tall that, like the biblical Tower of Babel, it stretches to heaven. Dubbed Marching to Heaven (or Heavenscrape), the project is predicated on the same “fairy tale[s] of instant transformation” that Jennifer Wenzel suggests pervade narratives around oil (212). Instead of drilling downward, however, the Ruler envisions himself climbing to heaven, where he will become “the daily recipient of God’s advice, resulting in a rapid growth of Aburĩria to heights never before dreamt by humans” (Ngũgĩ, Wizard 16). Thus, the image of the impossibly tall skyscraper dramatizes the fantastic thinking guiding the Ruler’s growth-obsessed economic policy.
The fantastical image of a skyscraper reaching to heaven is one example of a broader repertoire of images that the novel invokes to satirize the fantastical notion of limitless growth. After news spreads of the Marching to Heaven project, queues of wealthy “contract hunters” and desperate “job seekers” begin to form throughout the fictional city of Eldares. The “queuing mania” spreads until queues begin to appear behind any Aburĩrian who stops moving even for a second (192). Without knowing that they had started a queue, these people eventually return home, only to rejoin that same queue the next day (159). Ngũgĩ thus bends the linear growth model of a line into one that approximates the (seemingly) limitless nature of an exponential curve. The effect is a self-reproducing, self-reinforcing system much like capitalism itself. As queues overrun the country, sowing social and political chaos, the novel reworks the capitalist fantasy of limitless growth into a nightmarish spectacle of social disequilibrium.
Wizard of the Crow recycles elements from Devil on the Cross in ways that make them more outlandish, more fantastical, more magical than before. For instance, in Devil on the Cross, Mũturi uses an extended metaphor of pregnancy to describe contemporary Kenya, remarking to the other matatũ passengers, “[T]his country, our country, should have given birth to its offspring long ago” (46). In Wizard of the Crow, Kamĩtĩ makes a nearly identical observation, writing in a letter to Minister Machokali, “The country is pregnant. What it will bear nobody knows” (504). Now, however, the metaphor of pregnancy is stretched toward an absurd literalization: the Ruler insists that the minister who reads Kamĩtĩ’s note to him substitute the Ruler himself for any references to the country since, as he proclaims, “I am the Country” (513); thus, Kamĩtĩ’s observation that the “country is pregnant” becomes a statement that the Ruler is pregnant. Soon after, the Ruler’s body begins to swell until one day his advisers find the Ruler floating, “his head touching the ceiling” (650). Assessing the situation, the Ruler’s doctors diagnose a case of “self-induced expansion” (650)—a name that recalls the self-reproducing logics of the “queuing mania” that had swept the country months before.
Elsewhere, the novel’s magical elements showcase the dire environmental consequences of the postcolonial state’s obsession with economic growth. A brief history of the real-life skyscraper that inspired the fictional Marching to Heaven project helps to illustrate this point. In the late 1980s, the Kenyan government partnered with British investors to build a sixty-story skyscraper, the Kenya Times Complex, projected to cost an estimated $200 million to build. Like the Ruler’s plans for Marching to Heaven, plans for the Kenya Times Complex were defined by excess, including a conference center, galleries, shopping malls, parking spaces for two thousand cars, and the headquarters of the Kenya Times, a newspaper affiliated with the Kenya African National Union (KANU) party (Maathai 185–86). Because the project was slated to be built in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park, the skyscraper raised both economic and environmental concerns. The project was especially concerning to the environmental activist Wangarĩ Maathai, who worried that it would deprive Kenyans of much-needed green space and recreational facilities. Maathai protested, first by pursuing a legal injunction and then with an organized letter campaign to pressure foreign investors. In January 1990, less than three months after construction began, the project was scrapped (Maathai 203).
Perhaps echoing Maathai’s use of tree planting as not only a pragmatic response to deforestation but also a gesture symbolic of social change, Ngũgĩ transforms the biblical parable of the talents into a plot about magical money trees. In the Bible, the parable begins with a man distributing his talents (sums of money) to three servants to invest. When the third servant decides instead to bury his talent in the earth, he is reprimanded (Bible, Matt. 25.14–30; see also Luke 19.12–27). In Devil on the Cross, Ngũgĩ rewrites this story about the virtues of productivity and good financial stewardship into an allegory of (neo)colonialism. In Ngũgĩ’s version, a colonial “master” decides to distribute his wealth to three of his most loyal servants as he flees an unnamed colony on the verge of independence. When the master returns after political independence to check on his servants, the third servant turns on him, having realized that it is “not money that develops a country” but labor (85).
In Wizard of the Crow, Ngũgĩ reworks the parable again, this time updating it so that it becomes a story about the virtues of sustainability. Early in the novel, Tajirika gives three bags of Aburĩrian dollars to Kamĩtĩ in exchange for his healing services as the Wizard of the Crow. Disgusted by the bags, which literally reek of corruption, Kamĩtĩ declares that “[t]he earth shall be my bank” and buries the three bags of money in the prairie outside Eldares. Later in the novel, it is revealed that the three bags of money that Kamĩtĩ “planted” have grown into “dollar trees,” bearing leaves made of green, unwrinkled American dollars (124, 549). Desperate for a new source of money after the Global Bank rejects his loan application, the Ruler demands that the three “dollar trees” be uprooted and driven to the palace; rather than pluck the dollar-leaves at a rate that the trees can sustainably replenish, the Ruler exploits the trees for personal gain, severing their connection to their natural environment. But the Ruler’s actions are not without consequence. When the trees finally arrive at the palace, the Ruler discovers that huge white termites have eaten through all the dollar-leaves, leaving the trees completely bare. Thus, in a magical twist that recalls a fairy-tale curse, the trees enact their revenge, punishing the Ruler for his lack of self-restraint.
Wizard of the Crow and the Cyclical “Magic of the Ordinary”
The looping, limitless queues that spread across Aburĩria; the Ruler’s case of “self-induced expansion,” which sends him floating to the ceiling; the magical money trees that grow American dollars until suddenly they do not—together, these images satirize and expose the fantastical thinking behind the Ruler’s pursuit of limitless economic growth. Against these images, however, Wizard of the Crow posits another kind of magic, grounded in the idea of living in harmony with the earth and its natural life cycles. In the worldview of the novel’s dissident characters, the goal is not to accumulate ever-increasing amounts of money, power, or prestige but to better perceive and experience the “magical” and “wonderful” in the “ordinary and the familiar” (758). To communicate this sense of wonder, the novel reaches for a repertoire of images privileging a logic of cyclical (and, arguably, more sustainable) regeneration over the logic of exponential growth under capitalism. The novel deploys magical images—including lakes that freeze and unfreeze, humans who turn into birds before changing back, arrows that appear and then disappear—to imagine a sustainable future beyond the growth logic of capitalism.
Like the plotline involving the Ruler and the Global Bank, the plotline involving Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra repeats images and plotlines from Ngũgĩ’s earlier work. In Devil on the Cross, readers are presented with two romantic leads: Warĩĩnga, the novel’s “engineering hero,” and her fiancé, Gatuĩria, a professor of African languages at the University of Nairobi. In Wizard of the Crow, Ngũgĩ offers a romantic pairing that, though similar to that of Warĩĩnga and Gatuĩria, better addresses the emerging challenges of the twenty-first century, including ecological crises. Gatuĩria’s academic intellect becomes Kamĩtĩ’s romantic environmentalism, while Warĩĩnga’s rebellious spirit—which, in Devil on the Cross, culminates in a spontaneous and solitary act of violence—becomes Nyawĩra’s militant politics. Through this reworked pairing, the novel emphasizes the importance of thinking about economy and ecology together. In Devil on the Cross, Warĩĩnga and Gatuĩria’s differences ultimately drive them apart; in Wizard of the Crow, Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra’s differences are shown to be complementary. While Nyawĩra initially rejects what she sees as Kamĩtĩ’s self-indulgent isolationism, the two eventually reconcile, joining forces against the postcolonial state.
Wizard of the Crow brings ecological concerns to the forefront in other ways as well. Whereas Devil on the Cross describes a rigid hierarchy between animals and humans, Wizard of the Crow troubles this distinction. Unlike any of the characters in Devil on the Cross, Kamĩtĩ is shown to possess special powers, among them the ability to “ease out of . . . his body” and take flight (Wizard 47). In an early scene, a severely malnourished and dehydrated Kamĩtĩ “collapse[s]” on a pile of garbage, leaves his body, and then transforms into a bird (38). In bird form, Kamĩtĩ flies through the heavily polluted sky over Aburĩria and, as he recalls later in the novel, “over Africa, the Caribbean, and South America” (731). Upon returning to his body, which remains on the pile of garbage, Kamĩtĩ affirms his humanity: “I am human, I am a human being, a soul, and not a piece of garbage” (40). Whereas Mũturi defines “human nature” (Devil 52) by contrasting it with animality, Kamĩtĩ here arrives at his definition of the human by transcending the divide between human and animal in an experience that shapes his thoughts and perceptions throughout the novel.
The novel connects Kamĩtĩ’s powers to multiple ancient and culturally specific sets of practices involving herbal medicine and spiritual healing. Kamĩtĩ has both a bachelor’s degree in economics and, like Mwĩreri, an MBA—though Kamĩtĩ (in a show of postcolonial solidarity by Ngũgĩ and in recognition of the shifting geopolitics of the twenty-first century) has received his advanced degree from an unnamed Indian university, which he has complemented with coursework in herbology. Kamĩtĩ’s interest in herbology is not principally a matter of book learning but an inheritance from his ancestors. In a conversation with his father, Kamĩtĩ learns that the Mĩtĩ clan were forest-dwelling healers, some of whom were seers. Indeed, the novel implies that Kamĩtĩ takes after his grandfather, a “holy seer” and “spiritual leader” endowed with the “gift of seeing things hidden from ordinary eyes” (Wizard 294). In noting that Kamĩtĩ’s grandfather died in the struggle against British colonialism, Wizard of the Crow signals the radical anticolonial possibilities of Kamĩtĩ’s powers, even if Kamĩtĩ himself is slow to realize them.
These possibilities are made explicit in the Movement for the Voice of the People, the dissident social movement fighting against the Ruler. By the end of the novel, the movement has absorbed Kamĩtĩ’s environmental ethic so that it now functions as an experiment in sustainable living. In one of the novel’s final scenes, Kamĩtĩ takes a tour of the Movement’s mountainous headquarters. Unlike the fantastical flights of excess and hyperbole that the novel uses to satirize the magical thinking of the postcolonial state, this scene is suffused with a subtle magic that recalls what Harry Garuba, in his work on animist realism, describes as a kind of “re-enchantment of the world” (265). Drawing a comparison to an earlier scene in the magical realist mode, the novel locates the “magic” of the Movement’s headquarters in “the ordinary and the familiar”:
The comrades took him [Kamĩtĩ] on a tour, a journey imbued with magic more potent than that in Maritha’s story of suspended motion and suffused with wonders more amazing than those in the healing laughter of Maritha and Mariko. Here, in the new venture, the extraordinary, the magical, the wonderful, and even the strange came out of the ordinary and the familiar.
(Ngũgĩ, Wizard 758)
In the scene referenced here, a lake made of tears forms in the backyard belonging to Tajirika, one of the Ruler’s ministers, and his wife Vinjinia. One day, the lake freezes over, freezing all animal life—birds, bees, butterflies, ducks, chickens, and antelopes—touching the lake, which Vinjinia and Tajirika dub the Museum of Arrested Motion (443). In an adaptation of a Gĩkũyũ folktale about a young girl sacrificed by her drought-stricken community, Vinjinia and Tajirika’s daughter is found frozen on the lake. She is eventually freed thanks to the intervention of Mariko and Maritha, an elderly Christian couple who know Vinjinia and Tajirika through their church. The couple’s “healing laughter” ultimately unfreezes the lake and all the life forms frozen on it. In this story, magic works to restore, not to grow or accumulate; the magical outcome is a local ecology restored to what it once was.
A similarly restorative impulse guides the Movement for the Voice of the People. Indeed, the novel stresses that the Movement’s farming practices are “healing” for a land long degraded: “Elsewhere Aburĩrian soil was dying from being doused with pollutants, imported fertilizer. Here they were working with nature, not against it. The forest was a school to which they often came to hear what it had to tell them: You take, you give, for if you only take without giving back, you will leave the giver exhausted unto death” (758). This moment repeats and inverts an earlier observation about the Aburĩrian state and its American, European, and Japanese business partners. Whereas state and corporate actors know “how to take but not how to give back to the soil” (201), the Movement for the Voice of the People does the opposite. Echoing the logic of sustainability as defined by the WCED, the Movement licenses the taking of the earth’s resources to meet the immediate needs of the present so long as something is given back to meet future needs. Indeed, this ethic of reciprocity and sustainability colors everything the Movement does—even its approach to knowledge itself, which the Movement regards as something that one has “[t]he right to receive” and “the duty to give” (759).
Lest the Movement be read solely as a project of nationalist renewal, the novel also mobilizes “the extraordinary, the magical, [and] the wonderful” to situate the Movement within a global history of anticolonial struggle and resistance. Ngũgĩ’s push toward the global is legible in the posters and drawings that decorate the Movement’s headquarters, including a “big map of the world with Africa at the center.” Gazing at the map, Kamĩtĩ spots a “flickering . . . neon-lit arrow” tracing the same global journey that he once made in bird form.Footnote 5 Kamĩtĩ is the only one able to see the arrow, which at first even he considers “too unreal” to be believed. The observation recalls Kamĩtĩ’s reflection, just sentences prior, that it was his globe-crossing journey as a bird that first “ma[de] him wonder about the thinness of the line that divided the real and the unreal” (757). Kamĩtĩ’s encounter with the “flickering . . . neon-lit arrow” thus signals a crucial distinction between the fantastical, maximalist imagery that Ngũgĩ uses to satirize the Ruler’s magical thinking and this second kind of magic, which Kamĩtĩ dubs the “magic of the ordinary” (759). This magic lies in the art of perception, not in the pursuit of accumulation. Its logic is regenerative and revisionary—magical in a subtler way than the Ruler’s flights of fancy, which tend toward the dramatic highs and lows of growth-driven overshoot-and-collapse.
Beyond Growth: Wizard of the Crow, Technology, and the Fantasy of Dematerialization
But growth is sneaky. A fixture of centuries of Western economic thought, growth has a sly way of slipping back into the conversation. Despite warnings from scientists and social science researchers, the mainstream discourse of sustainable development has remained staunchly committed to what Herman Daly, an ecological economist and proponent of the “steady-state economy,” decried as the “impossible” (and yet broadly popular) notion that “the world economy [can] grow its way out of poverty and environmental degradation.” Most notably, in 2015, the United Nations unveiled its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future” (“Sustainable Development Goals”). A revamping of the Millennium Development Goals, the SDGs include calls to “combat climate change” (goal 13), to “[c]onserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources” (goal 14), and to “[p]rotect, restore and promote the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems” (goal 15). Among the seventeen goals, however, is an outlier: goal 8, which calls for the promotion of “sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth” and for all countries—not only those in the still-developing Global South—to “[s]ustain per capita economic growth.” The SDGs here slip economic growth back into a conversation that otherwise seems to pull against it.Footnote 6
Something similar can be said of Wizard of the Crow. Throughout, the novel turns to India and China for spiritual knowledge, frequently referencing the teachings of Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. But even as the novel uses “the religions of the East” to articulate an environmentalist ethos in anticapitalist and non-Western terms (210), it simultaneously acknowledges and even celebrates the region’s rising economic power. For instance, at one point, Kamĩtĩ contests Tajirika’s stereotyped understanding of Indian culture by pointing to signs of the country’s growing economy. For Kamĩtĩ, these include the fact that “[m]any computer chips are produced in India” and the fact that “India and Pakistan are nuclear powers” that have each “successfully tested nuclear bombs” (54). Recognizing that the Tajirikas of the world continue to measure dignity and worth in terms of economic power and industrial might, Kamĩtĩ makes his defense of India, Indian culture, and—in a thinly veiled reference to the Indian diaspora in Kenya—the “Indo-Aburĩrian” community in these same terms.
In foregrounding these economic powers, the novel focuses on two industries—nuclear power and computer technologies—often considered less environmentally offensive than the fossil fuel industry. Nuclear power has long been understood as a (fraught) alternative to fossil fuels, while computer and information technologies are often mistakenly viewed as clean technologies with little environmental impact. In referencing these two industries, the novel not only suggests the importance of moving away from fossil fuels; it also risks reproducing yet another fantasy at the heart of the discourse of sustainable development, known as the “fantasy of dematerialization” (Breu 27). At root, this “fantasy” holds out hope that technological innovation will enable the world to separate economic activity from environmental impact. Proponents hold that more efficient, less materially intensive technologies are crucial in the fight against climate change. For skeptics, however, such talk of “dematerialization” risks distracting from the fundamental task at hand: accepting the existence of limits, both economic and ecological.
Wizard of the Crow’s complex relationship to this fantasy of a dematerialized future is nowhere more apparent than in its embrace of space travel. Throughout the novel, characters regularly meet in a space-themed café called the Mars Café. The café is owned by a man who, in reference to the Buddha, calls himself Gautama. Like Kamĩtĩ, Gautama has been heavily influenced by Asian culture and religion; among his favorite topics of discussion are the “Mahabharata, Ramayana, Gita, stars, and space” (Ngũgĩ, Wizard 764). Through Gautama, the novel also offers one of its final images of spiritual transcendence. When the Mars Café is demolished to make way for a (real) skyscraper—not unlike the mechanics’ garage in Devil on the Cross, which at the end of the novel is displaced by the Tourists’ Paradise Development Company (Ngũgĩ, Devil 238)—Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra find Gautama at the former site of Marching to Heaven. There, his “legs crossed Buddha-style,” Gautama declares outer space “our refuge” and elsewhere in the novel celebrates space travel in terms of a “quest for truth, freedom, and knowledge” (Ngũgĩ, Wizard 764, 765, 107).
In framing space exploration as a spiritual concern rather than a material one, Wizard of the Crow offers readers a vision of growth and expansion (apparently) without any ecological footprint. At one point, we learn that Gautama has decorated the café with “newspaper and magazine cuttings featuring not only rockets and other spacecraft and stations but also space travelers” (107). The emphasis lands on the “space travelers”—not on the material and technological realities (the “rockets,” “spacecraft,” and space “stations”) of space travel. Nowhere does the novel grapple with the extraordinary amounts of fuel or—in contrast to Devil on the Cross’s preoccupation with metalworking—the abundance of metal needed to sustain the space industry. Wizard of the Crow also downplays the material resources needed for humans to land on Mars, as Gautama hopes they someday will. And finally, ignoring the close historical relationship between knowledge and empire, the novel ignores the likelihood—especially apparent today in the age of SpaceX and Blue Origin—that Gautama’s spiritual quest for “truth, freedom, and knowledge” will be co-opted by the forces of empire and capitalism, which require expansion to survive (107). In this regard, the novel’s depiction of space travel feeds into a familiar fantasy of limitless expansion and growth.
For all their differences, Our Common Future and The Limits to Growth are in strong agreement on at least one point: for any policy to be put into action, broad social and cultural work is needed. In the foreword to Our Common Future, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the chairperson of the WCED, writes that the commission must find a way to “translate our words into a language that can reach the minds and hearts of people young and old” and suggests that teachers use the report as a teaching tool (xiv). Similarly, the authors of The Limits to Growth point to the broad social and cultural work needed to build a sustainable future. According to the Club of Rome researchers, while computer models can help predict future outcomes by extrapolating from “present patterns of growth,” they cannot tell us what new social and political formations would (or should) emerge in a “world of nongrowth” (Meadows et al., Limits 178, 170). For this, we need to operate in a more speculative mode—what, in a 1992 follow-up to the report, the researchers call “visioning” (Meadows et al., Beyond the Limits 223). By “visioning” they mean “taking off all the constraints of assumed ‘feasibility,’ of disbelief and past disappointments, and letting your mind dwell upon its most noble, uplifting, treasured dreams” (224). According to the Club of Rome researchers, then, the secret to good, effective policy is the willingness to envision futures beyond “the constraints of assumed ‘feasibility.’”
Literature, I suggest, may be one way of doing this work. Reading Ngũgĩ through sustainable development and sustainable development through Ngũgĩ, this article has traced how various actors—literary authors like Ngũgĩ as well as international organizations like the United Nations, financial institutions like the World Bank, and think tanks like the Club of Rome—have responded to a shared problem: environmental crisis. In each case, these actors have responded in a similar fashion—by returning to past (frame)works and revising.Footnote 7 And yet, despite this fundamental similarity, these updates vary widely in how they understand the problem of environmental crisis and in the various critiques and solutions they offer.
How each update constructs the problem of environmental crisis and the possible solutions to it is closely tied to its disposition toward what the WCED calls “political realism.” As Arturo Escobar has suggested, in common parlance and in the political sphere, the idea of “being realistic” is predicated on a reductive understanding of what is real and possible. According to Escobar, to be “realistic” in this way means believing that “there is a single correct way to see and understand things” and that any attempt (local, subaltern, or grassroots) to imagine otherwise is illegitimate (6).Footnote 8 This belief shapes the WCED’s ability, or inability, to imagine a world beyond capitalism and beyond growth. Believing that the only “correct way to see and understand things” is how they are already seen and understood by the world’s existing political institutions, the WCED plays down more radical visions of a sustainable future. It comes as no surprise, then, that the commission makes only minor adjustments to previous development paradigms. Growth becomes “green” growth, development becomes “sustainable” development, but the world remains much as we already know it: growing.
By contrast, Ngũgĩ’s response to environmental crisis, which is mapped here in the shift from Devil on the Cross to Wizard of the Crow, offers a more significant rethinking of prior development paradigms. In Devil on the Cross, Ngũgĩ denounces capitalism as a system designed for “theft” and “robbery,” while also reproducing capitalism’s fundamental disregard for nature; among the novel’s capitalist and socialist characters alike, nature is regarded as something to be used, discarded, or superseded. In Wizard of the Crow, however, Ngũgĩ offers a fuller reckoning with the social and ecological consequences of industrial development. The novel’s ecological focus also subtly shifts its critique of capitalism. Whereas Devil on the Cross directs its critique toward capitalism’s tendency to exacerbate inequality and exploit the working classes, Wizard of the Crow makes an additional point about the specific dangers of the exponential growth patterns intrinsic to capitalism. From endless lines to endlessly expanding rulers, Wizard of the Crow uses a series of fantastical images to confront readers with the social and ecological implications of continued (and exponential) economic growth. In doing so, the novel makes visible the fantastical thinking that underpins not only the Ruler’s economic policies but also much of the mainstream discourse of sustainable development today.
But the novel does more than reveal the fantastical nature of growth under capitalism; it also offers readers a compelling, if imperfect, vision of what a postgrowth world could look like. In the Movement for the Voice of the People, and in Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra’s blossoming romance, Wizard of the Crow presents a vision of social and economic wellbeing that resembles a state of true sustainability—what the Club of Rome researchers have called “equilibrium” (Meadows et al., Limits 171). In this state of equilibrium, the Movement for the Voice of the People gives and takes from nature in equal measure, just as Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra do with one another. Wizard of the Crow thus legitimates the alternative visions that the WCED’s “political realism” seeks to contain and suppress. This is especially the case when the project of the Movement for the Voice of the People is compared to the Ruler’s grandiose delusions, which send the country into various states of social and ecological disequilibrium.
And yet, instead of counterposing the Ruler’s magical thinking to an entirely unmagical alternative, Wizard of the Crow insists that sustainability, represented here by life at the Movement’s headquarters, can be magical as well. That is, while the WCED and the Club of Rome repeatedly tangle over which are the truly “realistic” policy proposals and which are the result of magical thinking, Ngũgĩ’s response to environmental crisis pits one form of magic against another. Against the magical thinking of a state that can only envision development in terms of limitless growth and accumulation, Wizard of the Crow invites readers to see, through Kamĩtĩ’s magical powers of perception, “other possibles and other realities” (Escobar 3). This seeing and imagining otherwise is a profoundly political act—one that challenges the limits of imagination at work in hegemonic discourses of the “realistic.” Taken as a whole, then, Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow suggests that what the world needs is not, or not only, politically pragmatic solutions to the climate crisis but also a greater tolerance for other ways of seeing and understanding what is real and possible. Paradoxically, then, Ngũgĩ’s magical revisions to Devil on the Cross suggest that it is only by embracing “the extraordinary, the magical, [and] the wonderful” that we can escape the constraints of “political realism” to face the realities of climate change.
