Development House as a Microcosm of Social (Im)mobility: A Reading of Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road (1976)

Abstract

Mwangi’s urban oeuvre is rife with depictions of urban poverty in all its rawness. In Going Down River Road, he deconstructs the myth of national development in Kenya in the early decades of independence by exposing the extant inertia in the lived experiences of the urban underclasses. This paper discusses the depiction of Development House as a symbol of social (im)mobility in postcolonial urban Kenya. In our reading of the novel, we will draw from the Marxism literary theory to explore the impact of capitalist relations in postcolonial Kenya. The paper adopts a multidisciplinary approach that acknowledges a connection between mobility studies and literary analysis to portray how Going Down River Road narrates (im)mobility in the realistic descriptions the ugly and grotesque social economic realities of the slums and backstreets of Nairobi in order to inspire the search for practical ways to bring about socioeconomic emancipation for the urban poor.