Binyavanga Wainaina’s Narrative of the IMF-generation as Development Critique

Abstract

This article looks at Binyavanga Wainaina’s autobiographical and essayistic writing as a site of development theory and criticism. The focus is on his memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place (Granta, 2011). In it, Wainaina used life-writing as a genre to tell what he called the “story of the IMF-generation”, meaning the children of a post-independence African middle class who came massively under pressure due to foreign-imposed structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s, and who became a driving force in democratisation movements after 2000. This article elaborates on how Wainaina reflected this African experience of neoliberal globalisation and the related expansion of Western humanitarianism in his writing. This is explored through, firstly, a focus on Wainaina’s engagement with development embedded in his narrative of the IMF-generation, and secondly, through his deconstruction of a humanitarian discourse on Africa anchored in colonising ideologies of the global North and embodied in representatives of the aid industry in Kenya. I read the memoir as a form of situated knowledge that enables readers from different regions of the world to understand their locatedness within power asymmetries in global development at a particular historical moment.