How did microfinance become a craze championed by bleeding-heart progressives to Global South economists, American presidents, and business executives?
I wrote We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance (Metropolitan/Holt, June 2024) to understand the rise in popularity of small, anti-poverty loans, particularly among policymakers, celebrities, and funders in America and Europe, and the ongoing consequences of those loans for borrowers around the world. A big part of my research was focused on why this idea was championed by everyone from bleeding-heart progressives to Global South economists to American presidents and business executives, and how the narrative that microfinance presented a win-win-win—good for poor people, good for banks funding loans, and good for the world—became essential to propelling microfinance to global prominence. Alongside delving into this history, I also consider how borrowers in Sierra Leone, West Africa, continue to rely on, and are weighed down by, high-priced microfinance loans decades after the idea fell out of favor in America and Europe. The book is nonfiction, but I wanted it to be accessible to readers who don’t have a critical understanding of development, or even an understanding of the global development sector at all. To root the book in the history of debt and of modern economic development, I needed to read widely, including academic work, critical work, and speeches, books, and interviews with independence leaders critical of the Western path. To inspire the more narrative aspects of the book, I read fiction at night, to keep my brain and voice fresh.
One of the first books I read early in my research was Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber. The book is sweeping and broad, sometimes to its detriment, but it was thrilling and illuminating to read such a long history of something that has become so ubiquitous that we often forget to see it as a created, not natural, phenomenon. The book shines when Graeber considers how debt has been understood at different times for different people, and how and why those understandings have changed and been distorted, particularly by modern capitalism and its darkest aspects, such as the Transatlantic Slave Trade and colonialism. Graeber goes into detail about how debt can be understood not simply as money owed but as a relational act: by offering a loan or becoming indebted to someone, you are offering a link to that person, a way to bind yourself to them. Although I read the book about four years ago, I still think about it often.
I also read Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o early in my reporting. Thiong’o is a lucid, sharp, witty, compelling writer, and from a craft perspective it was inspiring to read a book that was strange and dreamy and wandery and also a page turner. The book is a deft critique of international organizations meddling in, and propping up, despotic leaders in the name of “good governance” and “development.” The critique isn’t on the nose, but particularly for those who have worked in or near large international institutions or NGOs, it’s right there to see, and at once damning and hilarious. I do want to note that Thiong’o has been accused, by his son, of beating his former wife. These claims put his depiction of female characters in a new light.
While I was writing a section on the history of the international development apparatus, it seemed obvious to revisit Kwame Nkrumah’s “neo-colonialism” critique. I had read bits and pieces of Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism before, but this was the first time I sat down and read it cover to cover. I was surprised by just how detailed and, frankly, at times boring it was. This isn’t just a broad, political critique about the nature of Western-led development, predicated on expanding national debts and stifling poor countries. The book includes detailed ideas and plans for Ghana and Africa’s trajectory, including for its infrastructure, financing, and manufacturing. It’s policy wonky, which doesn’t make for a great read, but it is an important one, especially since so many people quote Nkrumah’s critique without having read this work in full. It’s also fascinating, and a real honor, to see the inside of Nkrumah’s brain, the details of his plans, frozen on the page for us to examine and interrogate decades later, when so much, and so little, has changed.
This took me ages to read, but I finally finished Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer just as I finished writing my own book. I love Gordimer’s thoughtful, lyrical writing, but I found this one a beast to tackle: long, veering on stream-of-consciousness, with sentences that can be hard to follow. But the overall effect is a spell; the reader becomes fully immersed in the changing world and thoughtful vantage point of Rosa Burger, the daughter of anti-apartheid activists determining the trajectory of her own life. So much of my research for my own book was on the history of independence and anticolonial movements that it was refreshing, and difficult, to read a deeply human, flawed character working through her own place in this history. This is not a beach read. I’d recommend slowly digesting it in a quiet place where the book’s heavy atmosphere can slowly seep into your perspective.
We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky (2024) by Mara Kardas-Nelson is available from Macmillan.
