(In)formal Structure in Wizard of the Crow

In this chapter I show how the arbitrary and capricious force of modernity as it unfolds in the periphery drives the plot of Wizard of the Crow and thus constitutes its formal structure. Such a structure bears the imprint of starkly divided colonial societies rapidly integrated into the world-system upon independence, unable to undertake proper resource redistribution or infrastructural overhaul. The very narrative consciousness of the novel shifts rapidly between the different spaces of Aburĩrian society in much the same way as we saw in the South African novel. To this point I take up the work of Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, John Saul and Colin Leys, and Frederick Cooper, who argue—like Wolpe in the South African context—that the colonial-era reproduction of pre-capitalist social forms in order to pay labour below the cost of its reproduction generates fundamentally opposed economic zones within societies. What is different in the case of Wizard of the Crow, written as it was by a Kenyan author sensitive to the complex history of his country, is what I will call the vertical nature of the economic informality being represented. Given that “after 80 years of colonial rule and almost four decades of independence” there is, “in most of [sub-Saharah Africa excluding South Africa] some capital but not a lot of capitalism”, a small number of resources are distributed very unequally through highly informal networks at every level of society (Saul and Leys n.p.). The fact that ministers are as dependent on favour as the urban precariat manifests in Wizard as an extraordinary informal structure to the novel’s entire plot.