Wizards, Superwonders, and a Fictional African State: Money and the Ecology of the Grotesque in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow has been read as an examination of the relationship between oral and written literatures and as an exploration of the politics of the African postcolony. As I show, however, Wizard of the Crow should be understood as an ecological fiction as well. Indeed, the novel’s representation of Aburĩria, Ngũgĩ’s fictional African state, links economic inequality indelibly to the ruined environments in which its characters live. It also offers the Movement of the Voice of the People as the source of a popular environmental politics rooted in the grotesque aesthetics of the metropolis in which the novel is set. Thus while Aburĩria’s dictator represents an ethos that seeks to separate economic accumulation from the ecology to which it is tied, the movement’s grotesque environmentalism works to bring the country’s economic life back in line with the ecology of the region its people call home.