Fantasies of Limitless Growth: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Magical Thinking of Sustainable Development

This essay examines the turn to a discourse of sustainable development through two novels by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Devil on the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (2004). Looking at the specific characters, images, and plotlines from Devil on the Cross that are reworked in Wizard of the Crow , the essay traces the shifts in Ngũgĩ’s thinking on development and the environment across the roughly twenty years separating the two novels. Mapping these moments of rewriting onto the history of sustainable development, which emerged in the same period as a kind of rewriting of prior development paradigms, the essay shows how Ngũgĩ’s literary response to environmental crisis exposes the fantastical modes of thinking at the heart of sustainable development; it also provides a vision of sustainability that challenges mainstream conceptions of what solutions are considered to be—in the words of the mandate given to the World Commission on Environment and Development—“realistic.”