Imagining Power in Reverse: Counter-Historiography, Satire, and Narrative Justice in Abdourahman A. Waberi’s <i>In the United States of Africa</i>

This article reads Abdourahman A. Waberi’s In the United States of Africa as a work of counter-historiography in which the reversal of Africa and Euramerica is enacted not only through premise but through narrative form. I argue that Waberi makes inversion operate through voice, humanitarian diction, scene construction, and naming. Close readings of the opening Yacuba sequence and Malaïka’s introduction show how the novel mimics the classificatory habits of crisis reporting, development discourse, and racial stereotype in order to expose them as techniques of power. I use the term narrative justice to describe this formal operation: not moral compensation or a simple exchange of victims and victors, but a redistribution of legibility — who is granted complexity, who is rendered as case or type, and who occupies the position of interpreting subject rather than interpreted object. Situating the novel within the Francophone literary archive of Djibouti and attending to its movement from the French original, Aux États-Unis d’Afrique, into English translation, the essay argues that Eastern African literary study must make greater room for speculative and satirical forms alongside realist testimony.