While the neoliberalization of the African state has generated new conditions of political exclusion and new forms of violation for those individuals and communities unable to harness capitalism's privileged mechanisms of economic advancement, the neoliberalization of the publishing industry during the same period has, paradoxically, given African writers of detective fiction a new instrument to represent and critique some of the specific neoliberal rationalities responsible for these emergent forms of subjugation. The new tool is the franchised novel series. While not new per se, novel series publication only becomes widely available to African writers in the first years of the 2000s. Once accessible, writers from West, East, and Southern Africa began to experiment with the narrative possibilities of seriality to build profitable brands, but also to explore the types of critical engagements made possible by a long-form series.

I have emphasized elsewhere in this book that the crime mystery is as much a genre of time as it is of investigation and discovery. Within an individual story, a detective fiction writer's ability to make effective use of suspense, delayed exposition, and a future perfect narrative grammar, as well as to play on the genre's implicit promise of future justice, is as important in sustaining a reader's attention as the fabrication of a seemingly unsolvable mystery. As the Nigerian writers of the 1970s and 1980s whom I examined in Chapter 3 additionally make clear, the strategic manipulation of narrative time also expands the genre's potential for social critique, especially for what the mystery genre can be made to reveal about the arrested teleology of decolonization. With seriality's expanded repertoire of temporal devices – namely, multi-novel plot lines and repetition – the series affords writers additional and unique opportunities to historicize the neoliberalization of everyday social life. The series format turns out to be equally productive for dissecting neoliberalism's own temporalities for their material and epistemic impact on the ongoing decolonial project.

As critical theorists emphasize, those impacts are significant. David Harvey (1991), for instance, contends that the delinking of nation and capital in favor of flexible production and flexible accumulation on a global scale has put the notion of national development, and with it its temporal registers, at risk of becoming irrelevant.

During the first decades of self-rule, decolonization was commonly understood as a telos predicated on state-driven socio-economic development and progress. Through collective endeavor, national agricultural, industrial, and economic planning, and the simple fact of political autonomy on the world stage, newly independent African nation-states would attain over time a similar standard of living as the former colonial powers and other economic leaders of the Global North. As anthropologist James Ferguson puts it: ‘If “backward nations” were not modern, in this picture, it was because they were not yet modern. Modernity figured as a universal telos’ (2006: 178). This modernizing ideal propelled governments to pump revenue into ‘ambitious national development plan[s]’ and to invest ‘in parastatal industries, education, hospitals, and mass media’, as well as in the ‘sports stadiums, national monuments, bridges, highways, and palatial hotels’ that would visibly signify these efforts (Apter 2005: 22). The euphoric anticipation of a quickly achieved modernization proved difficult to sustain. For one, it had become impossible to mask the vast quantities of revenue that were being siphoned off into the private bank accounts of government officials and their business-world cronies. Additionally, the global recessions of the 1970s and precipitous drops in commodities prices left vastly insufficient revenue to feed the voracious appetites of a corrupt leadership and fuel further construction and investment or even, for that matter, to fund the basic operations of the state bureaucracy.

As the foreclosure of the developmentalist telos became increasingly apparent, the criminal doings of the emergent kleptocracy proved irresistible to African detective fiction writers. In Amaeche Nzekwe's 1985 novel A Killer on the Loose, for example, Nigeria's Home Secretary hires Ken Whisky, a harddrinking and hard-living private detective and security consultant, to find his wife's killer and keep the story out of the press. For reasons that become clear later, the Home Secretary also hires the private detective to keep the police at arm's length. As it will turn out, the crime itself is commonplace. The wife was killed by a resentful ex-lover whom she had left for the greater material luxury of marriage to the Home Secretary.

Nigerian novelist Kole Omotoso pinpoints the central challenge facing African detective fiction writers, namely ‘how to prosecute the people who are powerful enough to totally ignore the process of law. The private dick angle doesn't work; somebody has to do more than this’ (1979: 10). The conflict between the classic British whodunit's implicit promise of legal justice and the entrenched fallibilities of Nigeria's judicial system animates Omotoso's claim. For him, the scenarios and resolutions of the typical British mystery cannot credibly accommodate Nigerian realities. To plausibly provide the pleasures of suspense and catharsis, detective stories must reflect the worlds in which their readers live. Omotoso's example of legal accountability for the rich and powerful is less uniquely African than he suggests as other global crime mysteries play on the same dynamic. He also overlooks the elasticity of the ‘private dick angle’ to account for a wide range of social and judicial scenarios, including the Nigerian situation. Yet Omotoso's question about how African detective fiction writers will represent the law and the courts, notions of criminality and justice, and the relationship between the citizen and state more broadly signals the imperative for African writers to interrogate what kinds of stories their detective fiction should tell and, most significantly, to what ends.

By the early 1940s, African writers had already begun answering Omotoso's question. Rather than replicate British manor-house mysteries with little more than an Africanization of character names, the earliest writers turned the tyrannies of colonial policing and the challenges of achieving equitable justice under colonial judiciaries into rich material for suspenseful and convincing detective stories. Over time, other African writers would do the same with the criminalization of state institutions by self-dealing politicians, the authoritarianism of military rule, and the neoliberal elevation of unbridled selfinterest to a public virtue. Ghana's R.E. Obeng was possibly the first to reimagine the detective genre for an African context, in 1942, with his collection of mystery stories featuring the detective Issa Busanga. Nigeria's Cyprian Ekwensi followed Obeng later in the decade with his first two investigation narratives and was joined in the 1950s and ‘60s by writers from South Africa, Ghana, and Ethiopia.

In 1960, the prolific Ghanaian fiction writer Gilbert A. Sam self-published what is possibly the first Anglophone detective story to appear in print in a politically independent African nation-state. The novella, Who Killed Inspector Kwasi Minta?, is set in Accra in the late 1940s and traces the police inquiry into the murder of a fellow police investigator. Tasked with the case, Sergeants Oduro and Ahia pursue the investigation with little fanfare and a great deal of the drudgery that defines routine criminal detection in both the police procedural and real life. Sam's cops are never less than methodical, practicing what Sergeant Oduro describes proudly as ‘practical criminology’ (9). The novella's main plot twist comes when Minta's love interest Georgina beats the cops to the big reveal, eliciting the killer's confession while the police can merely listen from the wings, present only to make the formal arrest. From the moment of Oduro and Ahia's introduction, however, there is never a question that with or without Georgina's private sleuthing they will prevail over the killer. Set as it is during the colonial era, Sam misses no opportunity for his African protagonists to show up their white British superiors, demonstrating again and again Ghana's superior claim to self-government. Even the plot resolution, with the private citizen dedicating herself to the public good, suggests the primacy of popular sovereignty for effective and democratic governance. For its post-independence readership Who Killed Kwasi Minta? dramatizes the socially beneficent power of a civicminded citizenry working in tandem with an equally civic-minded African police force. In every respect, Sam's vision of the state as a guarantor of the rights and protections of citizenship contrasts radically with the assessment of state power laid out in the colonial-era texts encountered in the previous chapter.

As it would turn out, in Nigeria, too, the first detective story to appear after independence, Cyprian Ekwensi's Yaba Round-about Murder (1962), was a police procedural with a similarly salutary vision for the state. Other West African writers would follow, steadily producing police investigation narratives throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The announcement of fully participatory democracy in South Africa in 1990 ushered in the quick publication of two Black South African-authored police investigation novels there as well.

During the final decade of the twentieth century Kenya underwent what one specialist calls ‘the most rapid and total deregulation of an African economy ever seen’ (Smith 2008: 33–34). The country had witnessed half of its International Monetary Fund and World Bank aid withheld from 1990– 1992 for not implementing multiparty elections and again a few years later for not privatizing public corporations briskly enough for the funding agencies’ managers. In response, finance minister Musalia Mudavadi took the steps of abolishing import licensing and price controls, floating the currency, ending restrictions on profit repatriation, and slashing public spending and civil servant roles and otherwise reshaping governmental priorities and processes to align with the IMF's and World Bank's neoliberal economic imperatives. On one hand, the public welcomed reforms like multi-party democracy and governmental transparency that checked the abuses of power endemic to President Daniel arap Moi's twenty-three-year rule. On the other, there was outrage at what was perceived as the international funding agencies’ appropriation of Kenya's political sovereignty. Moreover, coming after a period when democracy had been associated with the equitable distribution of resources to the public, neoliberalism's valorization of individualized accumulation and income inequality left large segments of the population feeling that Kenya's social fabric had rotted (Smith 2008: 21, 31).

Variations on the Kenyan experience have played out across the African continent since the 1970s. With massive loans needed to mitigate the debilitating effects of the oil shocks and global recessions of that decade, African governments seeking aid from the World Bank, the IMF, and other global development banks were forced, like Kenya, to adopt a range of governance reforms that undermined the nationalist consensus that structured state-citizen relations during the first decades of independence. While tenuous in practice, that consensus was predicated on the developmentalist paradigms discussed in earlier chapters, through which governments would oversee jobs programs, price controls, and other forms of economic planning and lead the citizenry to the higher levels of prosperity enjoyed by the industrial nations of the Global North.

The locked-room mystery typically comes to its dramatic close with the detective gathering everyone together to reveal the identity of the culprit. To the captive audience the detective tells two stories. The first is that of the murderer's motivation and sequence of actions leading up to the seemingly perfect crime. The second is that of the detective's own investigation and reasoning through of the available evidence. This moment in the locked-room whodunit is, in Robert Champigny's (1977) formulation, the twinned story of ‘what will have happened’. Champigny explains that it is the narrative equivalent of the grammatical future perfect in which the detective explains what will have happened in the lead up to the crime and what will have happened in the lead up to the detective's astonishing revelation. This narrative grammar puts the reader in the present tense of the moment of the crime's initial conception rather than that of the crime or the solution. From that temporal position, the detective, the gathered suspects, and the reader look forward in time to the execution of the murder and to the revelation of the murderer's identity, which is to say that it anticipates the moment of justice achieved. Few locked-room mysteries populate the history of Anglophone African detective fiction, and the few that do can hardly be argued to conform with the classic whodunits of Poe, Doyle, or Sayers. But it seems fitting to end this study of detective fiction by African writers with an analogous accounting of what will have happened to make the detective genre so productive for engaging with the problematics of the state, selfhood, and sovereignty, and for anticipating futures beyond them. What follows requires me to revisit and review a few key details that should be familiar by now but hopefully this denouement will fit the puzzle pieces into a clearer whole.

From the earliest experiments in the 1940s and 1950s, the story of Anglophone African detective fiction has been, at its most basic, a narrative of writers establishing and extending the boundaries of the detective story to make it serve African realities. As just a few examples indicate, African writers have been, and remain, endlessly innovative in domesticating the detective story for local, regional, and Africa-wide audiences.

Anglophone Africa's first detective stories arrived in a world primed to receive them. Readers and cinema-goers from Lagos to Sophiatown were already avid consumers of locked-room whodunits and Hollywood gangster films. Perhaps more importantly, the anxieties about individual autonomy, competitive social relations, urban complexity, and the availability of state-backed protections that give detective fiction its emotional weight and cultural currency were felt acutely in the fast-growing colonial cities where most potential readers resided. The urban social atomization that freed individuals from the traditional strictures of village sociability often left individuals isolated and anonymous, and vulnerable to predation. The privations of the colonial economy could force otherwise law-abiding people into the various forms of criminality required for basic economic survival. Above all, the colonial state could, and did, exert its repressive powers into even the most private spaces the city, serving as a continual reminder that the state's purpose was not to ensure the rights and security of its African population but to dispossess Africans of them. For all the city's economic opportunities, radical individual freedoms, and illicit pleasures, few places could be considered safe, few strangers or friends fully trustworthy, and no agent of the law a reassuring presence. The colonial city remained the locus of persistent menace, of perpetual risk and vulnerability, and danger of physical, social, and psychic obliteration.

With an appreciation for the detective story's unique ability to dramatize anxieties such as these, Ghana's R.E. Obeng and Nigeria's Cyprian Ekwensi wrote their first detective stories in the 1940s, and South Africa's Arthur Maimane and Mbokotwane Manqupu published theirs, in Drum magazine, in the 1950s. Little information remains about the style, content, or themes of Obeng's now-lost detective story collection Issa Busanga. The same cannot be said for Maimane's Chief series (1953), Manqupu's ‘Love Comes Deadly’ (1955), or Ekwensi's short stories (1947, 1948, 1951) and novel People of the City (1954). For their African readers, Maimane, Manqupu, and Ekwensi craft distinctly African mysteries that play on the fantasies and fears of modern urban life.