Bessie Head, National Economic Development, and the Planning Imagination

Abstract

While Botswana today is remembered as a nation rich in mineral resources, this essay identifies another key to the country’s remarkable economic transformation after independence: national economic plans. Noting that it was Botswana’s ability to efficiently produce national economic plans that helped the country attract and sustain the interest of foreign lenders and development institutions, this essay makes the case for thinking about Bessie Head’s early work, much of which was marketed to foreign readers, in similar terms. As a means of thinking across the literary and the economic, this essay introduces the concept of the planning imagination, a mode of thinking reliant on techniques such as abstraction, miniaturization, and modeling. This essay argues that while Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather, replicates such techniques, implicitly encouraging its readers to think of themselves as development planners, Head’s later works—here, A Question of Power and Serowe: Village of the Rain-Wind—critique and resist this mode.