During the first decades of self-rule, decolonization was commonly understood as a telos predicated on state-driven socio-economic development and progress. Through collective endeavor, national agricultural, industrial, and economic planning, and the simple fact of political autonomy on the world stage, newly independent African nation-states would attain over time a similar standard of living as the former colonial powers and other economic leaders of the Global North. As anthropologist James Ferguson puts it: ‘If “backward nations” were not modern, in this picture, it was because they were not yet modern. Modernity figured as a universal telos’ (2006: 178). This modernizing ideal propelled governments to pump revenue into ‘ambitious national development plan[s]’ and to invest ‘in parastatal industries, education, hospitals, and mass media’, as well as in the ‘sports stadiums, national monuments, bridges, highways, and palatial hotels’ that would visibly signify these efforts (Apter 2005: 22). The euphoric anticipation of a quickly achieved modernization proved difficult to sustain. For one, it had become impossible to mask the vast quantities of revenue that were being siphoned off into the private bank accounts of government officials and their business-world cronies. Additionally, the global recessions of the 1970s and precipitous drops in commodities prices left vastly insufficient revenue to feed the voracious appetites of a corrupt leadership and fuel further construction and investment or even, for that matter, to fund the basic operations of the state bureaucracy.

As the foreclosure of the developmentalist telos became increasingly apparent, the criminal doings of the emergent kleptocracy proved irresistible to African detective fiction writers. In Amaeche Nzekwe's 1985 novel A Killer on the Loose, for example, Nigeria's Home Secretary hires Ken Whisky, a harddrinking and hard-living private detective and security consultant, to find his wife's killer and keep the story out of the press. For reasons that become clear later, the Home Secretary also hires the private detective to keep the police at arm's length. As it will turn out, the crime itself is commonplace. The wife was killed by a resentful ex-lover whom she had left for the greater material luxury of marriage to the Home Secretary.