Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 1938–
Ngugi wa Thiong'o 1938-
(Born James Thiong'o Ngugi; also transliterated as Ngūgī also published as James T. Ngugi.) Kenyan novelist, playwright, essayist, short story writer, children's writer, and critic.
For additional information on Ngugi's career, see Black Literature Criticism, Ed. 1.
INTRODUCTION
Ngugi is widely regarded as one of the most significant contemporary African writers. His first novel, Weep Not, Child (1964), was the first English-language novel to be published by an East African and his account of Kenya's Mau Mau Emergency—an eight-year uprising by rebels against the British colonial government—in his novel A Grain of Wheat (1967; revised 1986) presented an African perspective on the revolt for the very first time. Additionally, Ngugi's Caitaani Mutharaba-ini (1980; Devil on the Cross) is the first modern novel written in Gikuyu (or Kikuyu), a Kenyan language in which the author intends to continue writing his creative works. Ngugi has also been influential in the field of education in East Africa and is recognized as a humanist who is deeply interested in the growth and well-being of his people and country.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Born in 1938 in Limuru, Kenya, to Ngugi to Thiong'o wa Nduucu and Wanjika wa Ngugi, Ngugi is the fifth child of the third of his father's four wives. He was one of the few students from Limuru to attend the elite Alliance High School. While at Alliance, he participated in a debate in which he contended that a Western education is harmful to African students; the headmaster subsequently counseled Ngugi against becoming a political agitator. Ngugi next attended Makerere University in Uganda and later the University of Leeds in England, where he was exposed to West-Indian-born social theorist Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, a highly controversial treatise that maintains that political independence for oppressed peoples must be won—often violently—before genuine social and economic change can be achieved. Ngugi was also influenced by the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, developing an ardent opposition to colonialism, Christianity, and other non-African elements in Kenya. During this period, he also began to write plays and novels criticizing Kenyan society and politics. In 1962 his first full-length play, The Black Hermit, was performed at the Uganda National Theatre. In the early 1960s he worked as a regular columnist for the Sunday Post, Daily Nation, and Sunday Nation. Ngugi wrote his first novel, Weep Not, Child, while he was a student at Makerere. In 1969 Ngugi—then an instructor at the University of Nairobi—and several colleagues mounted a successful campaign to transform the school's English Department into the Department of African Languages and Literature. After the publication of A Grain of Wheat, Ngugi rejected his Christian name, James, and began writing under the name Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He also began translating his play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) into Gikuyu, under the title Mzalendo Kimathi. Ngugi published his last English-language novel, Petals of Blood, in 1977.
Because of his vocal opposition to the injustice perpetrated by the postcolonial Kenyan government, Ngugi was arrested and imprisoned without charge in the Kamoto Maximum Security Prison from 1977 to 1978. There Ngugi wrote a memoir, Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981) and vowed to write only in the Gikuyu language. He began writing his first novel in Gikuyu, Devil on the Cross, on sheets of toilet paper while in prison. The group Amnesty International named Ngugi a prisoner of conscience in 1977 and he was released from prison the following year. Upon his release, Ngugi lost his position at the University of Nairobi. When his theater group was banned by Kenyan officials in 1982, Ngugi, fearing further reprisals, left Kenya and went into self-imposed exile. After the release of Matigari ma Njiruungi in 1986, the Kenyan government issued a warrant for the arrest of the main character, believing Matigari was a real person. Eventually realizing their mistake, the government confiscated all copies of the novel and prevented it from being sold in Kenyan bookshops from 1986 to 1996. Upon leaving Kenya, Ngugi lived primarily in London until he moved to the United States in 1989. He has since taught at several universities, including Yale, New York University, and the University of California, Irvine, as well as holding a visiting professorship at the consortium of colleges that includes Amherst, Mount Holyoke, New Hampshire, Smith, and East Massachusetts. In August 2004 Ngugi returned to Kenya for the first time since 1982. Within a week his apartment was broken into by armed gunmen and Ngugi and his wife were brutally attacked. They returned to California shortly thereafter, but have continued to travel to Kenya in the hope of prosecuting their attackers.
MAJOR WORKS
Ngugi's fiction reflects his concern for the poor of Kenya who have been displaced by white colonialists and by African opportunists who seized power after independence. His early novels, Weep Not, Child, The River Between (1965), and A Grain of Wheat, all explore the detrimental effects of imperialism. In Petals of Blood Ngugi offered a scathing critique of capitalism and accused wealthy landowners and bureaucrats of exploiting the poor and working classes. Devil on the Cross focuses on four protagonists who meet on a bus on their way to attend, as spectators, a "Competition in Theft and Robbery," in which the competitors all boast of the ways they have exploited the masses in the past and outline new plans for doing so in the future. One of Ngugi's most controversial novels because of its advocacy of armed rebellion against repression, Matigari follows an African rebel whose name means "the patriot who survived the bullets" in Gikuyu. In 2004 Ngugi published his first novel in nearly two decades, Murogi was Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow). A satirical portrayal of events in twentieth-century Africa, the novel tells the story of the people of the fictional Free Republic of Aburiria, for whose souls four different but equally sinister powers battle to control.
Ngugi began his playwriting career with The Black Hermit, but his two most widely recognized theatrical works are The Trial of Dedan Kimathi and Ngaahika Ndeenda: Ithaako ria Ngerekano (1977; I Will Marry When I Want). The former play was written in response to a 1974 play by Kenneth Watene that characterized Kimathi, the leader of the Mau Mau uprising, as a crazed and brutal paranoiac. The content of Ngugi's play derives from the actual trial of Kimathi after his betrayal and capture in 1956, but Ngugi makes extensive use of mime, dance, and Gikuyu song to portray Kimathi as a courageous freedom fighter struggling against the forces of imperialism. The symbolic focus of I Will Marry When I Want is the framed deed to one and a half acres of land that hangs in the house of a farm laborer, Kiguunda wa Gathoni, and his wife, Wangeci. The story shows how Kiguunda's employer, Kioi, a wealthy Christian businessman, gains possession of the land—to build a foreign-owned insecticide factory—by persuading Kiguunda to join the church.
Ngugi's nonfiction explores subject matter familiar from his novels, including the cultural and linguistic imperialism of the West, the loss of traditional African cultures, and the effect of Christianity on tribal communities. The essays in Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics (1972) emphasize the important social functions of African literature. Writers in Politics (1981) and Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) present essays that explore Kenya's myriad social and political problems and stress the need for radical, fundamental reform. Though both works underscore the need for African writers to use their native languages, rather than the languages of colonizers, Decolonising the Mind also contains Ngugi's pledge to write solely in Gikuyu, calling the collection his "farewell to the English language." Ngugi's has not written any fiction since that time in English, although he has released nonfiction works in English. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (1992) examines such social issues as the importance of language to national identity, the effects of globalization on native cultures, and Ngugi's hope for a strong and united Africa. Based on a series of lectures that Ngugi delivered at Oxford University in 1996, the essays in Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Toward a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (1998) discuss the role of the writer in contemporary African society and the complex relationship between art and the state.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Critics have consistently acknowledged Ngugi as one of the most important voices in African letters. His fiction is noted for its overtly political agenda, its attempts to give a literary voice to the poor of Kenya, and its per- sistent critique of colonialism and oppressive regimes. Critics have also praised Ngugi's role as an influential postcolonial African writer, particularly in his portrayal of corrupt post-liberation African governments—a topic rarely explored from within the continent because of the controversy engendered when Africans criticize their hard-won postcolonial governments. Ngugi's essays and critical works have been acclaimed as powerful and insightful explorations of relevant political, social, and literary issues in Africa. Moreover, reviewers have asserted that his nonfiction work has provided a much-needed African perspective on world affairs.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
The Black Hermit [as James T. Ngugi] (play) 1962
Weep Not, Child [as James T. Ngugi] (novel) 1964
The River Between [as James T. Ngugi] (novel) 1965
A Grain of Wheat [as James T. Ngugi] (novel) 1967; revised edition [as Ngugi wa Thiong'o], 1986
*This Time Tomorrow: Three Plays (plays) 1970
Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics (essays) 1972
Secret Lives and Other Stories (short stories) 1975
†The Trial of Dedan Kimathi [with Micere Githae-Mugol] (play) 1976
Ngaahika Ndeenda: Ithaako ria Ngerekano [I Will Marry When I Want] (play) 1977
Petals of Blood (novel) 1977
Caitaani Mutharaba-ini [Devil on the Cross] (novel) 1980
Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (diary) 1981
Writers in Politics (essays) 1981
Njamba Nene na Mbaathi I Mathagu [Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus] (juvenilia) 1982
Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (essays) 1983
Bathitoora ya Njamba Nene [Njamba Nene's Pistol] (juvenilia) 1984
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (essays) 1986
Matigari ma Njiruungi [Matigari] (novel) 1986
Njamba Nene na Chibu King'ang'i [Mjamba Nene and the Cruel Chief] (juvenilia) 1986
Writing against Neocolonialism (essays and criticism) 1986
Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (essays and criticism) 1992
Writers in Politics: A Re-Engagement with Issues of Literature and Society (essays and criticism) 1997
Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Toward a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (essays and criticism) 1998
Murogi was Kagogo [Wizard of the Crow] (novel) 2004
*Includes This Time Tomorrow, The Reels, and The Wound in the Heart.
†Ngugi later translated this work into Gikuya under the title Mzalendo Kimathi.
CRITICISM
Sam Raditlhalo (essay date 2001)
SOURCE: Raditlhalo, Sam. "‘Kenyan Sheroes’: Women and Nationalism in Ngugi's Novels." English Studies in Africa 44, no. 1 (2001): 1-11.
[In the following essay, Raditlhalo maintains that Ngugi's female characters represent Kenya's best hope for establishing a viable postcolonial existence through their fervent political and cultural nationalism.]
Women in Ngugi's novels are, in the main, nationalists whose presentation/re-presentation forms the basis of this essay. A political and social intrusion such as colonialism did not affect men only, but also seriously affected the status and economy of women in precolonial societies (Presley 13-31). In so far as the Crown assumed jurisdiction over governance, the legal system, taxation, choice of work, and location of work, it seriously undermined the domestic production of women in the Central Province of modern-day Kenya and elsewhere. Our interest lies in how Ngugi handles the issue of women in colonial and post-colonial Kenya with respect to their nationalistic fervour in his novels, specifically in The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), and Petals of Blood (1977).
Ngugi, starting with The River Between (1965), has written with a strong sense of history and a keen understanding of patriarchy. Ngugi is not ‘structurally incapable’ of recognising the evils of patriarchy, as he demonstrated in The River Between. In this text, in which change is wrought by imperialistic tendencies and resistance to such intrusion, the death of Muthoni comes about because her father, with expressive eurochristian zeal, ostracises her at home but is unable to sever links with their culture (36). Her seemingly simplistic statement—‘I want to be a woman’ (26)—is not as simple as it may appear. Ngugi shows an understanding of this complexity: human beings can and will strive to realise an ideal even at the cost of death. Muthoni is hardly a nationalist. But if, as we understand, nationalism almost always begins in the cultural terrain, then she is a cultural nationalist. By asserting her culture she reclaims her right to be part of the changes that occur in her community, while still appreciating the significance of some of the community values. In reading The River Between we are thrown back to the period of cultural nationalism in Kenya. We bear in mind the historical specificities of the interaction between cultural and po- litical interventions in Kenya. This interaction relates to the circumcision dispute which occurred in the late 1920s. Waiyaki, as protagonist in this text, promotes Independent schools because those children whose parents rejected enforced Christianity were barred from missionary schools. Since such children had to be circumcised, and the missionaries framed this practice as ‘barbaric’, independent schools became necessary. In promoting the schools, Waiyaki represents the political dimension of the intervention. The elders have invested in him a hopeful, ultimately triumphant outcome of ‘conquering the missionaries, the traders, the Government’ (98; emphasis added). The government can only realise that a political solution had to be found for a problem begun on the cultural terrain. The Gikuyu revolt against missionary interference was started precisely on this contested terrain, as evidenced by the Kikuyu Central Association's anti-missionary leaning in late 1929. This prompted the Native Commissioner in 1930 to comment on the level of greater political activity which grew out of the events of 1929 (Presley 94). So while Waiyaki represents the political dimension of this struggle, it is Muthoni who succinctly expresses its cultural dimension. For, as Simon During has noted, nationalism has often existed as a mode of freedom (here, the Independent Schools) and its most powerful form—cultural nationalism—was in fact developed against imperialism (138-39).
In The River Between Ngugi is able to show the importance of a female character as a potentially unifying and dividing force from the historical and nationalist viewpoint. Through Muthoni, Ngugi recognises that the (then nebulous) nation is both a subject and an agency of ambivalent narration that holds culture at its most productive position, as a force for ‘subordination, fracturing, diffusing, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding’ (Bhabha 308). Ngugi shows how this ambivalence leads to Muthoni's untimely death as she dies from a septic circumcision would but with infinite pride in her stance.
Given the above, I fail to understand the kind of ‘engineered disputation’ that underlies Elleke Boehmer's criticism of this death. Boehmer holds that in death Muthoni almost achieves the beatific state, a glorified woman submitting to the ancient laws of the elders (193). For her, in this instance Ngugi (un)consciously upholds patriarchy. But then Ngugi's handling of Muthoni's choice indicates that, for him, at least at this stage in his writing, he is concerned more with the ‘morality of action’, the logic behind the kind of individual choices that people make, than with creating allegorical tropes. The novelist shapes the character to elucidate the workings of his character's mind and feelings. With Boehmer, however, Muthoni's right to make her own decision about whether to accept circumcision is subordinated to the spectacle of disputation and the assumption that ‘We Are All Sisters In Struggle’. This assumption seems to bind women together in a sociological notion of the ‘sameness’ of their oppression, a viewpoint that Chandra Mohanty has decried (337). While the victimisation of women in particular societies cannot be ignored, smoothed over or condoned, Boehmer's analysis fails to take cognisance of the historical development in Kenyan nationalism outlined, for instance, by Likimani, Kanogo and Presley. The treatment of African women as a single entity obscures significant variations found among them and contributes to the continual misunderstanding of women and their position.
O'Barr notes that new research on Kenyan nationalism points to the diversity that existed within each ethnic group. For Mohanty, while it is true that the potential of male violence against women circumscribes and elucidates their social position, to define women continually as archetypical victims freezes them into ‘objects who defend themselves’, men into ‘subjects who perpetrate violence’, and thus every society into polar positions of the powerless (read: women) and the powerful (read: men). This makes it unnecessary to theorize on male violence and occludes the interpretation of such violence within specific societies, both in order to understand it better, as well as in order to change it (339). For Boehmer, Ngugi tends to ‘set up his women characters as icons—allegorical figures representing all that is resilient and strong in the Kenyan people’ (189). A careful analysis of these characters should therefore be our starting point.
Having begun with cultural nationalism, in his next novel Ngugi gradually introduces the core contributions of women in the liberation struggle. In A Grain of Wheat the most formidable nationalist woman is undoubtedly Wambui. She is described appropriately as an ‘enigma’, an integral part of the ‘Passive’ Wing of the Mau Mau fighters. We learn how, during the emergency, ‘she carried secrets from the villages to the forest and back to the villages and towns. She knew the underground movements in Nakuru, Njoro, Elburgon and other places in and around the Rift Valley’, showing her to be anything but ‘passive’ (19). Ngugi's portrayal here reveals both the commitment of Wambui and the wide-ranging activities which were entrusted to her. Then again we realise the extent of the area that had given the forest fighters support from ‘villages and towns’, nullifying the perception that the revolt originated only in the urban areas. But does Wambui then become an icon? If so, is this in and of itself a reprehensible representation? While we cannot charge Ngugi with a re-creation of the historical Wambui, surely we can grant him the right to use Kenya's material history? The historical Wambui Wagarama, past president of the Mumbi Central Association (Kiama Kia Mumbi) interviewed by Presley (127), was a rural woman of formidable qualities.1 Two features emerging from the interview about the MCA are important: one, that the women used the same tactics, as initiators, as men to organize themselves; secondly, that they did not see themselves as outside the concerns of the nationalist movement, but rather as concerned, politicized Gikuyu (118). Muthoni Likimani observes how nothing could have been achieved without the concerted help from women. It was the women who hazarded their lives to gain back a country by steering loyalists into traps, stealing guns and ammunition, transporting the same to the forests; spying for, hiding and feeding the freedom fighters (114). Ngugi probably pays homage to a historical figure such as Wambui Wagarama, but to read this homage as an allegory seems to de-historicise his literary concerns.
I think Ngugi only begins to become allegorical in his representations of women after A Grain of Wheat. Quite apart from anything else, Kenyan women played a vital role in often forcing issues with the colonial government. Fictively, in A Grain of Wheat Ngugi also relates how, because of the imprisonment of Harry Thuku, women took the lead in trying to free him for his agitation about taxation, land alienation and forced female labour (issues that women passionately identified with). This episode comes quite early in the text and is not easily erased from the mind of the reader as the marchers fall (14). Historically, in the organized attempt to release Harry Thuku, the first woman to fall was Mary Nyanjiru, the mother of female political protest (Presley 7). In another interesting parallel, Kanogo observes that the crowd which had gathered outside the police station seemed to be getting restive because of seemingly weak male leadership. Crucially, when the male leadership attempted to disperse the crowd the women were enraged at this perceived male compromise. They resorted to taunting the men, and one Mary Nyanjiru even performed the Guturama, the exposure of female genitalia as the ultimate articulation of simultaneous feelings of anger, frustration, humiliation or revenge (Kanogo 82; cf. Grain of Wheat 157). Ngugi uses the material history of Kenya, not to create ‘icons’ or ‘allegorical’ figures, but to reveal a confluence of the cultural and political issues expressed by the women who remain committed nationalists.
Probably the weakest and tritest criticism of Ngugi's women characters relates to the sexual relations in which they are enmeshed. In Boehmer's analysis, Ngugi seemingly has a penchant for resorting to the patriarchal monolithicism which he rhetorically seeks to demolish:
In the field of sexual relations, certainly, the willing submission of women is the order of the day. The texts are unabashedly frank: from The River Between to Petals of Blood, all descriptions of sexual encounters invariably and emphatically cast the man in the dominant position. The woman, whether she is the adoring Nyokabi, or the self-sufficient Wanja, is passive, openly subordinate, ‘exhilaratingly weak’, and apart from the raped Dr Lynd, consistently transported by phallic power.
(193-94)
The fallacy of a phrase such as ‘unabashedly frank’ is that it is posited without any contextualisation and a virulent streak of textual under-reading. Emmanuel Ngara shows that this is not a case of being ‘unabashedly frank’ but simply of being realistic and in keeping with what Ngugi sees as the canons of linguistic behaviour in the characters concerned (84-85). For Ngara, there is less control in dialogue involving characters such as Githua and Koinandu, since the author realistically records the turn of mind in such characters. Even in describing the sexual act, the reader perceives beauty in it rather than shock or disgust.
The claim that women characters in Ngugi's texts submit to men's advances so willingly that this may be characterised as being ‘the order of the day’, (hence) as oversexed individuals, and with men in the ‘dominant position’, is inconsistent both with the texts themselves and with what is a given social reality. Although Boehmer never clarifies exactly what she means by ‘dominant position’ one can only surmise that she means that men actually initiate the sexual encounters. To begin with, and with regard to the first statement, it must be observed that Mumbi's skilful choice of Gikonyo (Grain of Wheat 80), as an example, is her choice, her decision. Mumbi chooses the more reticent, doubtful Gikonyo over the flamboyant Karanja. A re-reading of the text shows that when Karanja outruns Gikonyo as they race for the train station, it is Mumbi who turns this seeming defeat to her advantage. Walking through the forest, Gikonyo suddenly realises that the prize of the race was never the train, but Mumbi's undivided attention—the giveaway is the mischievous glint in her eyes (79). Later, in taking advantage of Mumbi, Karanja sees it as just revenge arising from his long-held grudge.
In Petals of Blood, it is Wanja's decision to initiate sexual relations with Munira. As she contemplates her position, Wanja acknowledges her strength, knowing how weak men could become before her, a power that sometimes frightened her (56). Her encounter with Munira is also on her own terms, part of her scheme: ‘Come Mwalimu, take me for a walk, just a little walk. I have a knot only you can untie!’ (63). She is the one who decides on the appropriate time for their coitus: ‘The moon … the orange moon. Please, Mwalimu … stay here tonight … Break the moon over me.’ (66) And clearly, when she allows Munira to touch her again after the Karega debacle and her failed business venture, she sets both tone and pace: ‘He was about to jump into bed with her when she suddenly turned cold and chilly, and her voice was menacing. "‘No, Mwalimu. No free things in Kenya. A hundred shillings on the table if you want high-class treatment’" (279).
What is most significant is that we are required to psychologically close these episodes, invalidating the ‘unabashedly frank’ claim of Boehmer, and validating Ngara's claim about the reticence of Ngugi about sexual relations in his texts. Ngugi's stated philosophical undertaking is to dismantle the oppressive structures in society, and women play a major part in this. And yet, importantly, it is not a forced depiction, as the characters Ngugi portrays in the countryside of Kenya adequately show.
In addition to some women's influence in love and sexual relations, we need to understand that Ngugi exposes the present unfair and unequal treatment of women by the state. It is important to realise that the notion of citizenship focuses on the way the state acts upon the individual and does not address the problem of the way in which the state itself forms its political programme (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 132). By focusing on women, Ngugi is selecting an area in which pretentious state propaganda proclaims how the state cares for all its citizens, including women, while simultaneously undermining the very social fabric in which women live. In Petals of Blood it is the women who play a crucial part in transmitting the idea of collectivity. For instance, they have a profound understanding of thengeta, which state functionaries undermine in a thoroughly callous way, thereby showing themselves to be indifferent to the traditional community and to the role of women within it. If the nation-state is the basic political unit by which modernity reproduces itself, to denigrate the very citizens for which a state is supposed to care is to be less than modern (During 139). Ngugi's women are nationalists because Kenya—materially, culturally and politically—has become a battleground with women as a powerful and significant group of contestants (in real life, Charity Ngilu standing as a presidential candidate in the December 1997 General Elections is a case in point). In articulating women's struggles in Kenya, Ngugi thus began to link the social and political reality. The post-colonial texts of Ngugi on Kenya reveal an attempt at mapping possible futures through the intertwining of individual character with the body politic.
If Boehmer's criticism has any merit, it is with Ngugi's post-colonial texts. In them Ngugi allows his ideological standpoint to hold sway over his characterisation. James Ogude observes that the debate on gender relations in Kenya has tended to fall into two theoretical categories (153). On the one hand we have scholars who place great emphasis on women as an homogeneous group exploited by men and by a system controlled by men, and on the other we have scholars who see women as part of the broad labouring people consisting of workers and peasants. These categories suffer from their privileging of one category over the other and of regarding themselves as self-sufficient analytical categories. These contradictions are apparent in Ngugi's Petals of Blood.
Petals of Blood begins in the present, yet maps out the Kenyan landscape from possibly the twelfth century, with the incursions of Arabic and Portuguese traders and invaders. It is a present fraught with difficulties such as Africa's perennial drought, corruption in high places and legalised lawlessness. The natural phenomena, in the text, reverberate as the drought of morality and the insensitivity of the African ruling class. Ngugi centres his analysis of the African condition on the village of Ilmorog, and by extension, on all the villages in which the African peasants languish in poverty and misery. It is a village in the midst of a country where restiveness, repression and fear are discernible (42). Against this background of what is essentially a power struggle in its material, political, educational and gender forms and the concomitant repression, Ngugi draws women who will change in their lives. The formidable Nyakinyua has to contend with the modern-day Kenya on its own terms. With this character, Ngugi challenges our notion of patriotism and ‘matriotism’. Nationalism enables both. Nyakinyua's intention espouses the hard path of struggle to be rid of modern marimus and in this instance she is a matriot. If nationalism can be understood from myriad routes, so can patriotism and matriotism. Matriotism and patriotism mean an affection for one's country, loyalty to its institutions and zeal in its defence, and is a sentiment known to all men and women (Kedourie 49). The crucial difference, in an oppressive country, is to delineate which institutions claim one's loyalties. For characters such as Nyakinyua and Karega in Petals of Blood, Muturi, Wangari and Wariinga in Devil on the Cross, and Matigari in Matigari (1987), the institution of wananchi, its egalitarian values and mores, claims their loyalty. Ngugi's characters show that it is possible to be loyal to one's countrymen and women, displaying a tremendous sense of ‘a community in anonymity’ which is the hallmark of classical nationalism. Surely such loyalty to, and love for one's country and wananchi is equal to a search for liberty, independence, peace, and social happiness! This is unlike the more rabid form of patriotism centred on the State and practised by allegiances to flags, national colours and the armed forces. Since the ‘organisational bourgeoisie’ is definitely beyond the pale in their close association with the State, Nyakinyua's loyalty cannot then involve the presidency, the various state apparatuses and its personalities. Her intention is to have a say in the lives of wananchi, and to this extent she is a matriot. It is she who correctly perceives that despair and nonchalance at their neglect by Nderi wa Riera is not only foolish, but self-defeating. She sees the episode as allowing the city to dance, for once, to the tune of those ‘of us who sweat, of us who feel the pain of bearing’ (115-16). Like Wambui in A Grain of Wheat, Nyakinyua is placed at the centre of the decision-making process in what is a major undertaking for the community.
Metaphorically Nyakinyua presents her relationship to the state as a disgruntled citizen. All she did was to produce more citizens, but she never got anything out of it and even lost her children to the state. Her role here is not only as a link with the past but also to display the ability to posit a possible future for the Ilmorogians in the ‘leaky boat’ of the Kenyan state. Ngugi gives her more significance, because a grandmother plays many parts in traditional African society. She preserves the extended family, family history, wisdom and lore, in an individual and personal way. All this enhances her status and that of her community (Hill-Lubin 258). Ngugi's women characters eschew corruption for the enhancement of the community. By virtue of her long life, Nyakinyua is able to draw a parallel between the colonialists and the new national bourgeoisie, between colonialism and neo-colonialism (Lebdai 115-16; cf. Petals of Blood 86). In Mohanty's view, women are ‘constituted as women through a complex interaction between class, culture, religion, gender relations and other ideological frameworks’ (340). The role played by Nyakinua as an oral historian, a repository of individual and collective memories, a cultural broker, as well as a family and social member brings to the fore some of the complexities suggested by Mohanty. Another interesting character is Wanja, who epitomises the Kenyan ethic in her search for prosperity, and no matter how anti-social her morals, fits into this category of being willing to enhance the community through sacrifice. More than any other character, her willingness to ‘re-make’ her community stems from her experiences of the evils of patriarchy and its exploitative form. Her fulminations about the life of a barmaid-cum-commercial sex worker reveal the extent of her alienation in the state (128-34).
The correlation between prosperity and prostitution in Kenya is incisively portrayed in Petals of Blood. Wanja's loss of status, social standing and esteem forces her into a situation where, to regain the monetary power she had initially wielded, she resorts to commercialised sex. To this extent, in Petals of Blood the moral focus rests on Ngugi's premise that the Kenyan postcolonial government is nurturing a state of such dependency on tourists that it creates a nation of prostitutes, servants, cooks, shoeshine boys, bed makers and porters. In Wanja we come to realise the validity of G. C. M. Mutiso's assertion that the most liberated women are not represented as the most admirable in terms of moral values (72). Yet, crucially, they know their own minds.
Ngugi opens himself up to criticism in his ambivalent portrayal of Wanja. Instead of a balanced reading of Wanja's position as a prostitute, Ngugi moralises the issue by questioning her prostitution as a method of freeing herself and ultimately rejects the possibility of any form of struggle within the limits of a repressive patriarchal society. We feel for Wanja when the morally uptight Karega condemns her and in anguish she dismisses his ideological arrogance (327). Ogude observes how contentious the issues are in gender studies that Ngugi pursues at this point: the role of colonialism and capitalism in the liberation of women, and whether prostitution offers women any form of liberation within a patriarchal system (167-68). A form of nationalism in which love for one's country overrides one's impulse to despair motivates Muthoni, Wambui, Nyakinyua and Wanja. But, as O'Barr has observed, it is with characters such as Nyakinyua and Wanja that Ngugi ‘describes women's participation as emerging from their maternal attributes’, which (un)intentionally ‘genders’ them (12). And yet what Ngugi does show is that to seek to control women, in this post-modern moment, under the weight of custom and oppressive reactionary tendencies—‘what we have always done!’ (Obbo 110)—is as foolhardy as trying to keep women out of any arena in which their lives will be affected. The most striking detail of the devaluation of nationalism and sheroism in post-colonial Kenya is the bawdy song at the gathering by the ‘organisational bourgeoisie’ which we read about as Munira goes in search of help for the sick child. Such a return to the regressive nativism of ‘custom’ and ‘tradition’ misleads the unwary critic-cum-scholar into seeing the apparent seamlessness of cultural practices, where culture is seen as static, thus mummified.
What is wrongly interpreted as the erotics of nationalism in the early novels is now depicted by Ngugi quite seriously as the erotics of sexuality in the postcolony in which sex acts as a viable currency for women. During, in quoting Heine, alerts us to the fact that sexuality and nationalism have been used as analogous for a long time, which should not now be seen as the preserve of Africans (145). Heine, while contemplating English nationalism and the national identity it acquires after the French Revolution, sardonically waxes lyrical about how British beauties are: wholesome, nourishing, substantial and inartistic, yet as excellent as good Old England's simple, honest fare: roast beef, roast mutton, pudding in flaming brandy, boiled vegetables in water (with two kinds of sauces, one of which is melted in butter). It is such analogies that help to form a mutant culture. This conflation of sexuality and nationalism in the postcolony is what Ngugi questions when Wanja secures her freedom from Kimeria wa Kamianja (aka Hawkins Kimeria) with unsolicited sex (which is really rape). It is crucial to point out that whereas Wanja is brutally raped, in her article Boehmer hardly sees this as worthy of consideration. She merely mentions that Wanja is ‘equipped with an extremely durable vagina’ (193). Wanja's later descent into commercialised sex is as a result of the fickle nature of ‘the promised land’ of the pre-independence phase of nationalism. In that phase women were valued as important components of society and bona fide nationalists, not as sex machines. It is precisely for such reasons that Ogude's observation about whether prostitution offers women any form of liberation in the postcolony, remains valid. It remains an unresolved issue of the post-colonial period in Ngugi's fiction given such rigid categorisations within which postcolonial nationalism is framed.
If a ‘national chorus’ of the oppressed and the ‘liberated woman’ is an ideal for which Ngugi strives, it is because nationalism is still a potent force in African societies which seek to question their state apparatuses. These societies have, in retrospect, worsened with time. While women remain nationalists in those Ngugi texts set both in the colonial and post-colonial eras, in the latter era they do so only by joining in the class struggles of their compatriots. The opposite of such a representation, as the case of Wanja clearly shows, is authorial condemnation, with redemption being possible only when Wanja decides to take a stand in the struggle. Significantly, we are made to understand that she begins to feel ‘the stirrings of a new person’ after giving up prostitution (337). If prostitution is allegorical of the decadent state of the nation, then motherhood is allegorical of national rebirth and regeneration. In the end the whore image is transformed into a mother Africa trope (Ogude 168). As Ogude succinctly observes, in these post-colonial texts there exists no other struggle except the class war. This necessarily leads to an ideological laager for no democratic spaces exist outside class struggle (173).
While Ngugi shows a marked sensitivity to women as nationalists in pre-independent Kenya, after independence, particularly with Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross, he privileges class over the exigencies of other categories that constitute women. Although he strives to reveal the inter-connectedness of race, class and sex oppression, it is within the class paradigm that Ngugi mediates this intertwinement and posits only one outcome. Thus the newer phase of nationalism significantly ‘genders’ women, over and above the ‘birth pangs of national consciousness’ that the pre-independence women characters display.
Note
1. The Mumbi Central Association is an important association since it was formed in 1920 by women tired of their exclusion from the decision-making process within the then radical Kikuyu Central Association. The association's objectives were similar to those of the KCA: land, labour, taxation and education (see Presley 117-19).
Works Cited
Anthias, Floya and Nira Yuval-Davis. ‘Women and the Nation-State’. Nationalism. Ed. John Hutchinson & Anthony D. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 312-316.
Bhabha, Homi. ‘Narrating the Nation’. Nationalism. Ed. John Hutchinson & Anthony D. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 306-312.
Boehmer, Elleke. ‘The Master's Dance to the Master's Voice: Revolutionary Nationalism and the Presentation of Women in the Writing of Ngugi wa Thiong'o’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature xxvi.1 (1991): 188-197.
During, Simon. ‘Literature—Nationalism's other? The case for revision’. Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London & New York: Routledge, 1990. 138-153.
Hill-Lubin, Mildred A. ‘The Grandmother in African and African-American Literature: A Survivor of the African Extended Family’. Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature. Ed. Carole Boyce Davis & Ann Adams Graves. Trenton: Africa World Express, 1990. 257-270.
Kanogo, Tabitha. ‘Kikuyu women and the politics of protest: Mau Mau’. Images of Women in Peace and War: Cross-cultural and Historical Perspectives. Ed. Sharon Macdonald. London: Macmillan, 1987. 78-99.
Kedourie, Elie. ‘Nationalism and Self-Determination’. Nationalism. 49-55.
Lebdai, Benaouda. ‘Rachid Boudjedra and Ngugi wa Thiong'o: A Comparative Study of Two Post-Independence African Writers’. Diss. University of Essex, 1987.
Likimani, Muthoni. Passbook F.47927: Women and Mau Mau in Kenya. London: Macmillan, 1985.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’. Boundary 2 (xii), 3(xiii) 1984: 333-358.
Mutiso, G-C. M. Socio-Political Thought in African Literature: Weusi? London: Macmillan, 1974.
Ngara, Emmanuel. Stylistic Criticism and the African Novel: A Study of the Language, Art and Content of of African Fiction. London: Heinemann, 1982.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The River Between. London: Heinemann, 1965.
———. A Grain of Wheat. London: Heinemann, 1967.
———. Petals of Blood. London: Heinemann, 1977.
———. [Caitaani Muthabaraini] Devil on the Cross. London: Heinemann, 1982.
O'Barr, Jean. Introductory Essay. Passbook F.47927: Women and Mau Mau in Kenya. London: Macmillan, 1985.
Obbo, Christine. African Women—Their Struggle for Economic Independence. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1981.
Ogude, James. ‘Ngugi's Concept of History and Character Portrayal in his Post-colonial Novels.’ Diss. University of the Witwatersrand, 1996.
Presley, Cora Ann. Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992.
Jacqueline Bardolph (essay date 2002)
SOURCE: Bardolph, Jacqueline. "Moving away from the Mission: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Versions of A Grain of Wheat." In Missions of Interdependence: A Literary Directory, edited by Gerhard Stilz, pp. 133-41. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi, 2002.
[In the following essay, Bardolph contrasts Ngugi's first edition of A Grain of Wheat, which he wrote as James Ngugi, with his later revised edition, written after he renounced Christianity, his Anglicized name, and what he considered the trappings of colonialism.]
When Ngugi finished writing A Grain of Wheat in November 1966, he was in Leeds doing postgraduate studies. The date corresponds to a moment of qualified optimism in African history: Nkrumah was still in power. Obote had not yet taken over in Uganda. That same year, Oginga Odinga published Not Yet Uhuru, a socialist analysis of the way in which he considered the rural masses were being cheated of the benefits of independence. Ngugi was educated in a religious context before going to university at Makerere. One must also underline that during the years of Emergency, the churches as a whole were on the side of the British government, in particular helping with the propaganda that described Mau Mau as terrorists, violent outsiders refusing Christian and human values for the sake of atavistic regression. The villagers, suspected of helping the forest guerrillas, and the inmates in detention camps, were subjected to intensive re-education, told to confess, to seek rehabilitation. Moral Rearmament was explicitly involved in the campaign to cultivate guilt feelings among the people, and pacifist Revivalist currents encouraged them to ‘see the light’ at public meetings. The detainees who agreed to begin new lives were gradually restored to freedom, "going through the pipe-line," their card symbolically changing from black to grey and to white.
With this in mind, one can read A Grain of Wheat (published in 1967)1 as a novel written by the man still called James Ngugi. The revised edition produced twenty years later by Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1986) paradoxically helps one realize how strong some Christian elements were for the more politically aware mature writer who, by that time, had grown to consider them as unacceptable. Under the phrase "Christian elements," we include here several levels: the beliefs and practices of ordinary people of the time, the picture of the struggle as indicated by the combination of government and official churches, and the overall Christian vision that shapes the book, whether as expression of belief or as convenient parable.
The novel published by Heinemann seems at first to fit into the pattern set by Achebe's village novels. When one examines what has been cut out from the original manuscript (kept at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London), whether as a change of mind or under guidance from the publisher, several features become apparent. The early text has an even more nightmarish quality than the final version. Eliminated passages show characters suffering from one another's sneers or mocking gaze. Disgust is stressed in sentences that speak of bad smells, excrement and slime. The drop that moves towards Mugo's eyes in his opening dream is also a slug.2 Physical repulsion is connected with humiliation, and the humiliation is always of a sexual nature. The main elements which did not find their way into the published book have to do with rape fantasies of a twisted nature. The novel is framed by two instances when Mugo feels anger and disgust towards an old lady, first the aunt that brought him up, then at the end the old woman, the mother of the deaf and mute that was shot. These figures with their potential evil eyes are close to castrating witches. The early text adds a weird element to Mugo's irrational emotions. When he feels like throttling the aunt, the imaginary assault is told in terms of climax and release. He sees her with her legs in the air.3 At the end of the book he kills an old lady, in the same paroxystic mood, and sets her on a stool "burying her feet wide apart in the ashes."4 Another very long passage, in fact a whole chapter, dealing mostly with Thompson, has been eliminated. The man feels horribly guilty because he once saw a little girl sleeping on a bed in London and felt a strong desire to take her then and there. Years later in Kenya, ashamed of this fantasy, he starts scribbling at night in a notebook, wanting to confess and feel free again. His confession also includes the tortures inflicted as he was responsible for the detention camp of Rira. His exalted mood when he wants to liberate himself by this written account is described in the same terms as that of Mugo.5 The parallel is so strong that some terms could apply to either character. The intricate black and white pair, both feeling guilty and afraid of the other's sneer is not very far from the Munira/Inspector Godfrey pair at the beginning of Petals of Blood. Both are involved in the writing down of guilt, as a mode of atonement. Mugo has several nocturnal doubles, Kihika, Karanja, or Thompson, in fantasmatic couples which are clear echoes of Conrad. On the whole, the world in the early manuscript is more irrational, more anguished. All the characters, colonized or colonizers, are locked in nightmares and guilt, distrustful of one another—the parallel between the two adulterous couples, Gikonyo and Mumbi, Thompson and his wife, is underlined—and ultimately alone with their shameful past and oppressive fantasies.6
The published novel focuses on a group of people of the same generation. There are three men, Karanja, Mugo, and Gikonyo, and one woman, Mumbi, a pattern that will be repeated in Petals of Blood, as will be the confession theme. The others are peripheral to this central plot devoted to ordinary rural young people. There is the group of rebels, Koinandu, General R, Kihika, the politicians of the Party, and the whites. The older generation are here witnesses more than actors. Several fathers are missing or contested. The general atmosphere is one of fear, guilt and exhaustion on the eve of the independence. The village is coming to terms with the meaning of loyalty, courage and betrayal after a period where sides had to be taken but distinctions were often blurred. The process is helped by a chain of confessions, first private then public that help words to regain their meaning as they liberate the actors of this troubled period one after the other.
In 1986, Ngugi, who had not returned to Kenya since 1982, was well-known for his fiction and for the cultural and political positions contained in his collections of essays. Writing directly on an early copy of A Grain of Wheat, he brought several types of changes to bear on the novel. The situation of the 1950s and the 1960s is analysed differently. The simple terms, which were close to the world view of the villagers then, are replaced by more general terms: The Party, which is too close to Kenyatta's politics, is replaced by the Movement, which is of a more general nature. The pair of "traitors and collaborators" recurs repeatedly: There is no half-judgment (25, 60). Some elements of economic analysis are added, in particular concerning the relationship with Asians and Europeans. The possibility of ambivalent assessments is reduced through complete changes in some characters. In the first version, Gatu, a strange man in the detention camp, is full of wisdom, courage, but also despair, a kind of sad clown who commits suicide. His bleak assessment of human capacities is now replaced by certainties. The character who so disturbed Gikonyo is killed by the camp authorities who try to pass this as suicide. General R is, like all rebels in the early novel, a frightening figure (think of Boro in Weep Not Child ). The novelist has been at pains to find motivations for the violence of the forest fighters. In the 1967 version, General R who used to be a tailor, is an outcast because he has committed a major transgression by hitting his father. He is no longer part of his community. His motive for fighting is connected to personal pride and an inflated sense of honour. In the 1986 version, this disappears from the presentation of the character who becomes an articulate anti-colonial fighter. Koinandu is so altered that, in the 1986 version, he gets a new name, Koina. In 1966, Ngugi was trying to understand the violence committed against white people. He presented the rape of an unattractive spinster by her houseboy as such an extreme case, caused by envy, greed and a distorted sense of manhood.7 The odd thing is that, although such rapes featured widely in the anti-Mau Mau propaganda of the time, I have not been able to find historical accounts that would match the story. It is as if the young Ngugi still saw the guerrillas as they were presented by propaganda, as creatures totally beyond moral redemption, and tried to find motives and attenuating circumstances. Yet Koinandu remains a thug to the end, motivated by envy and fear. The new Koina does not rape Mrs. Lynd. He just hacks her dog to pieces and finds equalitarian justifications for his resentment.
There is however a very significant change. In the 1967 version, the Reverend Jackson is a minister, a true believer. He is respected by all, in particular the elders and preaches against Mau Mau. He becomes involved in the Revivalist movement. His position is described in a rather non-committal way, close to the point of view of the villagers. He dies at the hands of General R in a manner which can be read as martyrdom, and haunts the conscience of the ex-guerrilla. He is one of the Christ figures of the book, an element in the collective suffering. Any ambiguity there might have been in the interpretation of this important character is lifted by the way Ngugi modifies his presentation radically twenty years after. In 1986, the church minister who has been an informer is justly executed. The recent version is firmly didactic and shows as far as possible the people as more conscious, more united. The charismatic forest leader, Kihika, is no longer a marginal or ambivalent figure, a man his sister refused to see avenged.8 He is closer to the full national hero, Dedan Kimathi, as presented in the 1977 play.
The modifications point at some of the elements in the 1967 novel, which perhaps readers at the time had not analysed in the same way. Let us read again the system of values which is represented there and the part played by Christian churches and their teaching. It is obvious now, especially if one compares this with the unpublished extracts, that the main value system rests on manhood.9 When the moment of decision comes, a man tests whether he is true to his circumcision. The characters feel threatened by the laughter of young women and the all-seeing eyes of old ones, the sneers and sexual taunting on the part of white people. Kihika is admired for his courage in tackling a whiteman single-handed. Both Karanja and Mugo are grateful at some point to a white man who has saved them from humiliation, while at others they feel debased, un-manned by their oppression. Humiliation in the hands of representatives of the colonial power is always shown here as sexual in nature; all examples of torture are to do with castration and penetration. Virility, the capacity to engender males and look after one's honour is the core value. The young people do not seem to have other ethical codes to guide their behaviour. They often live in a spiritual vacuum, especially at the end of the years of Emergency. The novel is about spiritual drought, the kind of moral lassitude one sees after conflicts which in some aspects were a form of civil strife, as in the post-war fiction of Zimbabwe. Mumbi has "no words. No feelings. Nothing" (181). She wants Mugo to forget about the dead, but to "Speak to the living. Tell them about those whom the war maimed, left naked and scarred: the orphans, the widows" (161). There is no definite political consciousness in any of the ordinary people, whether they are loyalists, rebels or ordinary people caught in between. The central couple, Gikonyo and Mumbi, named after the mythical founding couple of the Kikuyu, have gone through the terrible period by trying to survive, both attempting to save some personal happiness in the chaos.
What, then, is the part played by organized religion and by the Christian vision in the overall narrative? The experience told is that of a community, and it is described in the terms used by the majority in their discussions, comments and songs. The Bible, the Old Testament in particular, plays an important part in the way people perceive themselves and give shape to their predicament. Mumbi sees herself as Ruth, an earth figure waiting for a child (69). The songs quoted are those sung at the time. From the beginning, anti-colonial attitudes were expressed in Biblical terms: The oppressed were the people of Israel, and Kenyatta was to be the Moses who would deliver them. The whole economy of sacrifice is close to what is left of the Kikuyu traditional religion and to a sombre view of the Christian message which stresses suffering and sin more than beatitude. The Revivalist movement is described in a noncommittal way, as a new development that helps some individuals. The violent figure of Kihika is redeemed by the fact that he always quotes from his Bible, which is true of his historical model. In such characters, the values of manhood can be reconciled with the Biblical vision.
The syncretic conception that equates Ngai with the Christian god and Gikuyu and Mumbi with Adam and Eve is part of the efforts of the missions to reconcile two visions and also part of the creed of the nationalist independent churches. In later works, Ngugi will use a more revolutionary mythical ancestor in Ndemi, an active Promethean figure. But here, the vision of the land to be fertilized again or of the allegorical woman to be impregnated is part of the agricultural rhetoric of the title. It is, however, to be noted that none of the main characters suffers from the loss of their land although repossessing land was the central claim for the people who rose against the power of the settlers.
At a deeper level, the narrative seems to be still permeated by the guilt feelings induced by the propaganda. We have seen how close the picture of the terrorists is to the way the rebellion was presented in Kenya and England, even if the young novelist tries to explain the humiliations and unjust treatments that drove some fighters to the forest. In a puritanical vision, sin is equated most of the time with the sin of the flesh. Suffering seems to be the only way forward, a system of atonement that can provide a fresh start when the world as it was known has collapsed. The image of crucifixion is used several times (152, 157). This is a major trope for Ngugi even when it appears in an inverted form in Devil on the Cross. The major characters go through a phase of soul-searching, then of confession that is close to the Revivalist method (86, 98). Ngugi's fascination with such emotional type of belief appears again, in a clearly distanced manner in the character of the barmaid in Petals of Blood.
Later in his career, when he publicly declared he was not a Christian and changed his name, Ngugi said he used the Bible as a source of metaphors and parables close to the culture of his people. It is true that, in the 1960s, a period when written literary Kikuyu was used essentially for the translation of the Good Book, references to the Bible served to establish a strong link between English, which he enjoyed in a guilty manner, and the popular rhetoric in his own language. The lyrical passages, the agricultural metaphors that give dignity to the simple English used here owe much to the psalms and parables, as well as to the songs composed at the time of the Emergency (75, 85, 126).
The enigmatic character of Mugo can thus be explained by the ambivalent attitude to the power and poetry of the Biblical text. When he speaks like a Messiah, a Moses, he is clearly deluded by a sense of his lonely elite position, like other similar protagonists in Ngugi's fiction. The pastiche of prophetic pronouncements is blasphemous in a man who knows his guilt, whereas others think of him as a saint, who is able to talk with God (108, 110, 112, 139, 164, 173, 188). His betrayal echoes all the other betrayals, however: Mumbi had no real excuse to give herself to Karanja; Gikonyo betrayed the oath because he had a wife to love, a selfish human motive for an act that weighs on them later. Mugo is more ambivalent, excessive in his courage and in his cowardice. Paradoxically, he betrays Kihika in order to save himself for his destiny as a saviour. There is no doubt yet that he is a fraud, and he knows it. He accepts in advance the trial and judgment by the couple of ex-fighters, even if they are not very positive figures. But somehow the book seems to imply that, for all his delusions and weaknesses, he ultimately embodies the major values of the community. His confession is the sacrificial act that allows regeneration: Mumbi and Gikonyo can come together again. And, in his choice to offer himself as a sacrificial victim, "he is a man of courage" who comes close to the manly virtue of a circumcised man. In some ways, Mugo's confession and his feeling of indignity are duplicated by the writing of the book itself. The long conflict has profoundly shaken everyone, divided families, encouraged individual acts of survival at the expense of solidarity. If one refers to similar situations around the world one sees how silence—Kenyatta's "Forget and Forgive!"—can be in itself destructive. The worse moments have to be faced, spoken about, and when one thinks how close to the actual events the 1967 novel is, one can only admire the courage of the young man who chose to give such an image of his people. Later on, political tools were acquired that helped him to analyse the factors differently and present a more militant text based on a clear idealization of fighters as opposed to "traitors and collaborators." It is much easier to see the choices that could have been made, the reasons that could have been given.
The first title of A Grain of Wheat was to have been Wrestling with God, a phrase taken from the struggle between Tobias and the angel as quoted in a letter by Conrad, referring to the act of fictional creation.10 The book does not just refer to the world view of Christian villagers seen from a detached position. It is written in the margins and between the lines of the Bible. It reflects some aspects of the colonizer's ideology as taught in a school system that conveyed good and bad together, the vision of the missions, the visions of independent churches and the syncretic popular narratives. But it mostly creates a highly personal world, the tortured self-searching and ironical distance of one who worked on Conrad and found there a pessimism to which he could relate. The end is very bleak, with isolated figures in the drizzle. In detention, Gikonyo has come to the conclusion that "to live and die alone was the ultimate truth" (102). On his return he finds it difficult to regain any kind of faith. All the heroes, even the near mythical couple, are at a loss. The only fruit of the period is an illegitimate child, but he is there, he is ill and needs attending to. The sick child, like in Petals of Blood, is an image of the pain of the world. In spite of the rewriting of A Grain of Wheat in 1986 to give positive examples to people in their present resistance, the novel remains complex, alive and fraught with deep contradictions. The Christian mode of narrative, whether a grand metaphor or the expression of a deep belief, is the only element that makes sense in this picture of a world that suffers spiritually from its division more than from external oppression.
Notes
1. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A Grain of Wheat (London: Heinemann, 1967). All page references to this edition unless otherwise indicated.
2. "A slug started moving towards him" (MS 3).
3. "He watched her struggles like a fly in a spider's hands, saw her kick her legs in the air" (MS 14).
4. "The new rage now fully possessed him, his body shook violently. But as in the meeting, he was clear about his next action. He knew he would put his hand around his neck. Would she groan? Anyway he would press, harder, and she would feel the power of his hands. He felt almost triumphant as he beheld the future, this little future he had just planned.
And that is what he did.
The old woman did not scream.
She fell from his hands onto the ground as if she had died at his touch … He bent down and raised the inert body from the ground. He placed it on the stool near the fire-place, making her head and hands rest on the stone. He then buried her feet, wide apart into the ashes. He stood back to survey the work of his hands" (MS 351).
5. "He wrote in fury. Images flowed, merged, clashed. It was as if he had only a few minutes to live and wanted to purge his soul of filth, a confession to a priest before the gallows fell" (MS 267).
6. Robson (who becomes Thompson): "I want to know what went wrong that even my wife laughs secretly at me" (MS 264). On Mugo: "At night, in the morning, I saw the grin, the sneer, the secret laughter, the face was everywhere" (MS 267). Mugo: "Mugo felt the woman look at him with a glint, the glint as of a puzzled recognition transformed her into Mugo's idea of a witch. The luridness seemed to ooze from her eyes and creep towards his flesh" (MS 10).
7. "He found his tongue and revealed his thoughts to other people: she was alone, it was not right for a woman to live alone, Man, I'll break her in. I'll swim in that hole. The others laughed at Koinandu's delightful tongue" (185).
8. "But she did not want anybody to die or come to harm because of her brother" (181).
9. Cf. pages 25, 31, 32, 106, 130, 157.
10. Jacqueline Bardolph, "Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood as Readings of Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Victory," The Conradian 12.1 (1987): 32-49.
Works Cited
Bardolph, Jacqueline. "Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood as Readings of Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Victory," The Conradian 12.1 (1987): 32-49.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Devil on the Cross, tr. from Gikuyu by the author (London: Heinemann, 1982).
———. "A Grain of Wheat" (original MS, kept at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London).
———. A Grain of Wheat (London: Heinemann, 1967).
———. A Grain of Wheat (London: Heinemann, rev. ed. 1986).
———. Petals of Blood (London: Heinemann, 1977).
———. Weep Not Child (London: Heinemann, 1964).
Odinga, Oginga. Not Yet Uhuru (London: Heinemann, 1966).
Evan Mwangi (essay date winter 2004)
SOURCE: Mwangi, Evan. "The Gendered Politics of Untranslated Language and Aporia in Ngugi wa Thiongo'o's Petals of Blood." Research in African Literatures 35, no. 4 (winter 2004): 66-74.
[In the following essay, Mwangi relates Ngugi's use of untranslated Gikiyu passages and expressions in Petals of Blood to the problematic status of women in postcolonial Kenya.]
Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood occupies a unique position in his oeuvre because it is the last novel he wrote in English. But unlike its predecessors, in which non-English expressions are stylistically integrated into English and subordinated to the English discourse, Petals of Blood contains numerous non-English expressions that are left either untranslated or loosely hanging in the sentence structure in a way that would suggest the narrative's ideal reader to be a person who is competent in both English and Gikuyu. Although critics have acclaimed the novel's political thrust and stylistic innovations as a culmination of Ngugi's gradual development from his earlier work, little attention has been paid to the untranslated language in the text and the novel's structural contradictions. This paper reads the untranslated moments as metonymic of the frustrated struggles to convert revolution into final liberation. The metonymy of untranslated language is backed by structural and gendered contradictions to draw our attention to the narrative's demand to be read against the grain. While the use of untranslated terms conforms to the narrative's desire to forge a decolonized English, it also ironically reveals how deeply colonial and patriarchal hegemonies are entrenched in the very articulations against them. My aim is to advance the conversation started by Craig V. Smith in his brief comments on the "frequent, prominent and sometimes untranslated use of African words, sayings and especially songs" (95) in Petals of Blood and his observation that the world presented in the text is "strongly gendered" (93). I want to relate gender to the untranslated language and further propose that this relationship complements structural contradictions in figuring the failed conditions of the postcolony, and I argue that Ngugi textualizes the postindependence condition as untranslated and sexualized, but the text does not step out of the patriarchal and colonial hegemony despite its use of elements of an African language.
Set in the rustic village of Ilmorog in postindependence Kenya, Petals of Blood is basically the story of the murder of three millionaires associated with the neocolonial government in exploiting the people. The narrative highlights the subsequent arrest of four friends as the police try to solve the mystery of the triple murder. These arrested characters are Munira, a teacher in a rural school whose diary at the police station forms the bulk of the narrative; Wanja, a prostitute exiled from the village by her family when she becomes pregnant, now returned to Ilmorog and staying with her grandmother, Nyakinyua; Karega, a politically naive school teacher who develops into a politically conscious activist and trade unionist; and Abdullah, an itinerant trader who fought in the guerilla war for Kenyan independence and became crippled. The epic narrative begins with the arrest of the suspects and uses flashbacks to recount the life stories of the characters until the deadly fire in which the millionaires die in Wanja's brothel. The use of the diary form, stories-within-the-story technique, and multiple flashbacks to bring together the various narratives and lay bare the evils of neocolonialism as a form of prostitution of the nation by its elites gives the anticolonial novel a rich texture. But patriarchy and colonialism remain deeply entrenched in the narrative's use of untranslated language and gendered tropes.
Petals of Blood is one of the numerous African novels that disturb the creative/critical dichotomy by theorizing their own content and form in a metafictional vein. This is evident in instances where we encounter artists and art as subjects in artistic works or where fictional audiences engage in the interpretation of texts. The metafictional impulse in Petals of Blood is accentuated by the narrative's presentation of multiple other narratives that concatenate in the story and its suggestion that the major characters are painters, performers, or critics of the social condition. A self-consciously political novel, Petals of Blood presents art as not only a means by which we understand our circumstances and narrate ourselves into existence but a reflection of the concrete conditions around us of which we perhaps might be unaware. Even the most trivial artistic production invoked in the novel suggests the material and political conditions in which we dwell, just the way the untranslated language and aporia express the condition in the postcolony. In the story, this is best articulated in an untranslated moment when children habitually enunciate the conditions of the postcolony in banal songs that remind them of the rank and gritty reality that defines their lives in Ilmorog. Through their teacher Munira's observation about their artistic production and material practice, we are shown the inextricable artistic bonding between the real self and the banality of habitual articulations:
They also sang: Kamau wa Njoroge ena ndutu kuguru; and thought of their own jiggers eating their toes and scratched them against the floor in earnest.
(10)
The narrator, presenting events to the reader from Munira's center of consciousness, assumes that the reader understands Gikuyu language and therefore leaves the non-English words untranslated. They literally translate into "Kamau son of Njoroge has jiggers on his foot." Even if this is a frivolous children's song from the common storehouse of oral traditions—the type that the text calls "nonsense songs" (20) and "nonsense work songs" (264)—it reminds the children of their own specific conditions. They in turn engage in self-reflexive projects of scratching their jigger-infected toes.
The novel contains numerous untranslated taboo words. These are expressions that are not used in polite society because they refer to intimate parts of the body, infallible beings, or phenomena whose mention would portend bad luck. Generally writers avoid taboo words by using euphemisms or truncated versions of the words. It is intriguing that that Petals of Blood is more articulate in translated taboo words, even when those words are a transcription from a pre-existing oral text. This implies the exultation of evil in the postcolony that is now defined by dirtiness and degeneracy. To be sure, the novel employs taboo words to underline its outrage with the arrested decolonization. In Petals of Blood, Ngugi inscribes swear words within the register of the male. To give an example, women in lawyer Chui's home sing a sexually innocuous, but politically laden, song to the effect that Irish potatoes are peeled at First Lady Ngina's home. When their male counterparts take over the poetic expression, they sing a circumcision song that uses taboo expressions that the author cannot reproduce in his mother tongue; the taboo expressions are reproduced in English but truncated with dashes to suppress their offensiveness. The narrator seems to be happy with the song in that he describes the taboo parts as "juicy sections." Oddly, the text sees juiciness in the offensive words it cannot reproduce unless it is in translation. The words cannot be articulated in the language of the self although their voicing is possible in English as an Other language.
Similarly, after the Ilmorog residents partake of the traditional brew, they utter obscenities openly in the traditional songs they perform. The taboo words are either unscripted or euphemized in translation. Njuguna and Nyakinyua, Ilmorog male and female elders, respectively, are particularly notorious in the parts of the song they vocalizes (207-09). Their enunciations are translated into English, albeit in words that are not as strongly taboo as the ones used in the traditional circumcision song that the characters would be singing in Gikuyu. When the same song appear before in the text and are given to the reader in Gikuyu as well, the taboo words are truncated and euphemized in the English translation (150). What is apparent here is the text's attempt to clean up the obscenities of the traditional culture while invoking it as a gesture against a debasing capitalistic modernity. The euphemisms and silences do not fully depose patriarchy and its obsessions. When debating who between male and female categories is more important than the other, Njuguna says: "Is it not a man who sleeps, hmmm! hmmm! You know where?" (162). The expression Hmmm! Hmmm! is a substitute for a taboo expression that refers to sexual activity. The new expression is cheekier than what it substitutes. The expression pretends to differ from what it is intended to express, but it is only deferring meaning for greater effect, a consequence Njuguna deems amusing, revealing how acceptable is the position that he presents.
For his part, Abdulla takes pleasure in repeating an Indian's Swahili swear words that refer to a mother's genitalia (253). The expression collocates the Swahili word for the female genitalia (k; truncation ours) and the Gikuyu word Nyukua, a derogate term for "mother." The text gives women, too, taboo expressions. When Munira's mucus accidentally flies into Nyakinyua's face, the words the old woman uses in reaction are taboo (7), designating a woman's sexual organ. They are in Gikuyu language, and no translation is given because their foulness cannot be expressed in any other language. They are foregrounded on the printed page by italicization to draw the reader's attention to their indecency and the outrage that frames Nyakinyua's response to the modernity that Munira and his school symbolize in the dilapidated Ilmorog. Abdulla jokingly uses a worse version of the taboo expression when ordering a beer for Munira (11); the untranslated expression, too, is a variant term for the female genitalia. In the postcolony, it appears that women have become a derogate category to such an extent that even positively drawn characters would habitually tap into antiwomen vulgarity to express themselves without the text fearing compromising the ideal reader's attitude towards the characters.
Through untranslated language and gendered self-contradiction, Ngugi's narrative presents to the reader women who derogate themselves by viewing their natural sexuality in negative terms. This is especially seen in the way some of the untranslated expressions tie up with bodily effluents to suggest that the nation is not yet fully liberated. Wanja, the principal female character, is one of the earliest rounded characters by a male writer in the history of African literature. Bonnie Roos succinctly summarizes the novelty in Ngugi's creation of Wanja when she says that "we find Wanja a refreshing change from the traditional, passive, melodramatic, male-dependent, lackluster heroines" (154). She reads Wanja as a trope and recognizes the "archetypal nature of her construction."
A cautious appropriation of Fredric Jameson's reading of postcolonial characters as allegorical representations of the condition and the fate of the nation is in order here to help us see how the characters represent untranslated desires. For Jameson, allegory as the structuring principle in narratives is used in a special way in postcolonial literature to inscribe a more communal mindset than would be found in the more individualistic western narratives. In the essay "Third World Literature and the Era of Multinational Capital," Jameson urges us to read the story of individual characters in Third World literature as national allegories of the embattled situation formerly colonized people find themselves in (69). He sees Third World texts to deploy the destiny of the private individual to allegorize the public cultural, economic and cultural domain. His theory has been criticized most articulately by Aijaz Ahmed because of what Ahmed sees as Jameson's essentializing and tendentious generalization. Rosemary M. George sees Jameson's typology as infused with an outsider's misunderstanding of texts he is reading from locations that are not his own. We would further criticize the theory in the sense that a text like Petals of Blood contains many individual characters with varied destinies. If we were to use Jameson's universalizing model, we might ask who, among Karega, Wanja, Munira, Abdulla, and the battery of other characters, does the text use as an allegory of the nation? David Punter cautions us that even while critiquing Jameson's "self-evident reductivism," it would be hard to extricate these texts from allegorical references to history (55). Although modern African literature is generally seen to be a development from—and of—traditional oral literature that is highly allegorical, the discomfort with Jameson's claim could be as a result of looking at allegory as comprising a "naïve mode of one-to-one mapping" (Szeman 806). But Jameson himself noted in the much debated essay that the kind of allegory that he is talking about is "profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia" (73). These, of course, are elements that would be found in any literature, the only difference being that in the Third World texts, the characteristics are used to ground the text in the concrete cultural and political dynamics of the society presented. Reading postcolonial Indian narratives, Peter Morey proposes that the national allegory is not expressed by an individual text or character but is "instead accretional, cumulative and continually being created and worked out" (163). Within an individual text, attempts to map an imaginary nation are made through different characters whose variegated destinies point to a multiplicity of the possibilities of the postcolonial "destination." The main characters in Petals of Blood suggest possibilities of the nation. But it is Wanja whose anxieties and condition most closely resembles the prostituted fate of the untranslated nationhood. In fact, the text invites the reader to see Wanja as a metonym of the state of the disintegrating nation (Boehmer 193; McLuskie and Innes 4; Ogude 118; Palmer 263; Roscoe 298; Stratton 48). Her body translates into the site upon which Ngugi records the mistranslation of the nation and recodes the nation to conform to her as a fictional personality. It is little wonder that her sad fate is tied to the capitalist forces the text links to the deterioration of the nation.
Wanja, the symbol of the nation, views her sexuality as a curse that ties her inextricably to her fate as a prostitute (293). She registers her anger through the use taboo expletives. But it is the way the narrative presents Nyakinyua's husband using similarly untranslated language that most forcefully creates the impression that femininity is a weakness to be shunned in favor of masculinity. Nyakinyua thinks one would have to be feminine to betray the fighting spirit. When her husband volunteers to dig a grave for young men killed by the colonialist Waitina Mzungu, she deprecates her husband as effeminate before she understands he intends to kill the colonial administrator:
And I was so ashamed: I was so ashamed I wept: so my man was a woman after all? To get a jembe to dig a grave of the young?
(325)
This underlines Njamba Nene's heroism through suspense and dramatic irony in that he is fully aware about his own intentions while the other characters and the readers are in the dark. It also inadvertently reveals, however, its anchorage of patriotism to patriarchy in the sense that Nyakinyua, and the text, would condemn Njamba Nene (Gikuyu for the Great Hero) as a woman had he not shown patriotism in attempting to kill the colonialist. Even if he does not kill the colonial officer because the gun jams with age and rust, he is a patriot and, in the text's gendered hierarchy, qualifies to be seen as a man.
Nyakinyua equates her husband's initial "womanish" response with "urine and shit in his bones" (325). It is productive here to recall Simon Gikandi's cogent reading of the image of body effluents as "the metaphor for postcolonial failure" (95). Although Gikandi's focus is on the failure of the former colony to liberate itself fully, it is this motif that Ngugi employs here in structuring Nyakinyua's husband in the pre-independence struggle. Julia Kristeva shows the use of body effluents as semiotic symbols through which otherness is expressed, saying that "excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse) stand for the danger from outside: the ego threatened by non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death" (71). Wanja's name means one who belongs to the periphery, and it is no wonder that in certain politically symbolized games such as football matches, she can only be a spectator, although that role still puts her in trouble with her parents. At work in Nyakinyua's words in refiguring her husband is the view of the woman as a death-trafficking non-ego. In the image the text evokes through Nyakinyua's expression, the threat to masculinity and nationhood is figured as excrement. The conflation of the figurative expression with womanhood confirms the patriarchal view of men as the society and women as its outside. Nyakinyua's husband is the ego, which should be fighting for the nation, while the colonial power and women are the non-egos to be fought and mastered if the nation is to realize itself. Further, the old man's intervention is a culmination of his childhood belief that "the flower of Ilmorog manhood" has been trampled underfoot when colonialists subdued the natives (324). This intervention concretizes men's representation of colonialism as enervation of masculinity and recalls the despoiled flowers of the novel's title.
It is particularly through intertextuality that the polluting non-ego aspect of Nyakinyua is crystallized. To protest the pollution of her traditions by the modernity that Munira and his school represent to her, the old woman defecates on the compound of the institution. Supported by untranslated language and the contradiction in the other characters' ability to access this private act, her protest ties her to the murdered capitalists. These are people who, in the overall philosophy of the narrative, are seen to have defecated, as it were, on the nation. In Gikuyu, her physical act would be described as kumia nja (emptying one's bowels on the compound). The reference bands her with Hawkins Kimeria's father, Kamia Nja, whose name translates into the Gikuyu for "the diminutive one who defecates on the compound." Kamia Nja has collaborated with the colonialists to exploit his own people. Nyakinyua is anticolonialist like her husband, Njamba Nene in the sense that she is the one who rouses the community against neocolonialism when the bank tries to sell their land to reclaim the loans it had cheated the public into.
The aporiae that suggest arrested translation reach a head through the anachronies that structure the narrative. By aporiae we mean moments of self-contradiction, silences, and narrative breaks. We can read these moments in Petals of Blood as highly gendered and political. To fully appreciate the aporiae, concepts that help us work out the structural contradictions in the novel must be clarified. In structuralist terms, an anachrony is the discrepancy between story-order (the sequence events take in the real world as created in the text) and text-order (the sequence in which events follow one another in the text). It is such a disjunction that causes a flashback or a flash-forward (Rimmon-Kenan 46). The anachronies in Petals of Blood reveal subterranean patriarchal and colonial values against which the narrative struggles long after its end. Female characters that may appear positive are revealed to be lacking when we come to terms with the anachronies that structure their appearance and actions in the narrative. A case in point is Wanja's mother, who is shown as developing in the text-order in the sense that she is a negative character when we meet her for the first time in the novel and has improved tremendously the last time she appears in the narrative. As the novel closes, Wanja's mother is a positive character, and the text uses her to show an ideal revolutionary who rejects her husband's alignment with the oppressor. Despite her husband's protest, she continues to see her sister who is reputed to have links with freedom fighters (233). He supports the colonial government despite the fact that it killed his father. While the husband of his wife's sister uses the skills he acquired in World War Two to make guns for freedom fighters, Wanja's father is busy amassing wealth at the expense of his family and country as a whole (233). Despite its negative portrayal of her husband, the text does not redeem Wanja's mother. In portraying her positively, the text is not so much interested in showing the reader her good nature as her husband's retrogressive ideas. To be sure, in the "actual" world outside the text, Wanja's mother is the admirable character we see in this instance long before the postindependence moment when she exiles her daughter. In the postindependence era, we never get to see her as the politically conscious woman she was during the fight for freedom.
When she appears next in the postindependence era, the text is silent whether the "now aged mother" has been transformed fully (337). Her heart goes to Wanja, but because the narrative is relayed to us through a hallucinating Wanja, it is not clear whether the mother is any different. When she and Wanja weep, the narrator uses the adverb maybe to describe the reason for crying, signaling to the readers that they should not be overly optimistic that the mother has changed from the dragon she acted when she sent Wanja to exile as a prostitute. She still remains a blindly religious woman with "faith in the mercy and in the infinite justice of Christ" (337). The text has already laughed at this predisposition in its female characters. Through Karega's reflection on the use of religion to enthrall the people's minds, the text pokes fun at religious crusades "in which girls claimed that they could speak in tongues, communicate with Jesus and heal by faith" (305). Such a performance is expressed earlier in an untranslated Gikuyu locution in which Karega's mother sings "kuu iguru gutiri mathina," which would translate into the naïve belief that "in heaven there are no problems"; so we should tolerate the problems on earth as we wait for the afterlife. By making Wanja's mother, like Karega's dead mother, a character who is still wearing religious blinkers, the novel completely silences the possibility of women shaking off the yokes of their slavery.
In a metafictional self-presentation it enunciates through Karega's theory of art, Petals of Blood express a desire to be different from critical realist texts that express the conditions of the postcolony without offering hope out of the situation (200). Through Karega, again, the novel criticizes the postcolonial tendencies to hide in sectarian groupings and "linguistic enclaves" (304). Ironically, however, the text is caught up in similar situations that it criticizes. Admittedly, Ngugi's texts in Gikuyu contain expressions, fairly elaborate passages, and signs reproduced to the reader in English and untranslated into Gikuyu. For example, Matigari ma Njiruungi (translated as Matigari by Wangui Goro) has a scene in which Kabuuru (Settler) William and Njooni Mbooi (John Boy, Jr.) dialogue in directly in English in a way that would be incomprehensible to a Gikuyu-speaking reader who does not understand English because the words are untranslated. Similarly, the Gikuyu texts, especially the children's book Njamba Nene na Mbaathi I Mathagu (first published in 1982 and published in the English translation as Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus ), mimic English texts that can be understood fully by a Gikuyu reader who understands English and has experienced the parodied texts in English language. The anticolonial discourse is so haunted by a deep sense of Englishness that the Gikuyu of the texts is conterminous with the colonial language, indicating the ubiquity of the colonialism in the postindependence present; but the untranslated English in Gikuyu texts are not as gendered as the untranslated Gikuyu in English texts. It is a fair conclusion that Ngugi's Petals of Blood uses untranslated language in pointedly gendered terms to express disillusionment with the postcolonial order. The very structure of the narrative seems to echo the unfulfilled expectations that the novel thematizes, expressing in its untranslated language what Biodun Jeyifo would call "arrested decolonization" in the sense that the struggles for independence have not been translated into human freedoms in Africa. Ironically, if it is lack of translations into English from Gikuyu that expresses metonymically that failure of revolution to translate into independence, it is its use of English that enables it to express the vulgarity of the postcolony.
Works Cited
Ahmad, Aijaz. "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory." In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.
Boehmer, Elleke. "The Master's Dance to the Master's Voice: Revolutionary Nationalism and the Representation of Women in the Writing of Ngugi wa Thiong'o." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 26.1 (1991): 188-97.
Gikandi, Simon. "Reading the Referent: Postcolonialism and the Writing of Modernity." Ed. Shusheila Nasta. Reading the ‘New’ Literatures in a Postcolonial Era. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. 87-104.
Jameson, Fredric. "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Corporations." Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88
Jeyifo Biodun. "The Nature of Things: Arrested Decolonization and Critical Theory." Research in African Literatures 21.1 (1990): 33-48.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Columbia UP, 1982.
McLuskie, Kathleen and Lynn Innes. "Women and African Literature." Wasafiri 8 (1988): 3-7.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Devil on the Cross. Nairobi: East African Educational Publisher, 1980.
———. Matigari ma Njirungi. [Matigari]. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1986.
———. Njamba Nene na Mbaathi I Mathagu [Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus]. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1982.
———. Petals of Blood. London: Heinemann, 1977.
Ogude, James. Ngugi's Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation. London: Pluto, 1999.
Palmer, Eustice. "Ngugi's Petals of Blood." Critical Perspectives on Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Ed. G. D. Killam. Washington: Three Continents, 1984. 271-84.
Punter, David. Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000.
Richards, Ivor A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. 1936. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics London: Routledge, 1983.
Roos, Bonnie. "Re-Historicizing the Conflicted Figure of Woman in Ngugi's Petals of Blood. Research in African Literatures. 33.2 (2002): 154-70.
Roscoe, Adrian. Uhuru's Fire. London: Heinemann, 1985.
Smith, Craig V. "Rainbow Memories of Gain and Loss": Petals of Blood and the New Resistance." The World of Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Ed. Charles Cantalupo, Trenton: Africa World P, 1995. 93-108.
Stratton, Florence. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. London: Routledge, 1994.
Szeman, Imre. "Who's Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization." The Southern Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (2001): 803-27.
FURTHER READING
Criticism
Gikandi, Simon. Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 328 p.
Literary critique of Ngugi's role in postcolonial Kenyan literature.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Angela Lamas Rodrigues. "Beyond Nativism: An Interview with Ngugi wa Thiong'o." Research in African Literatures 35, no. 3 (fall 2004): 161-67.
Interview in which Ngugi discusses his plans to return to Kenya from exile, the impact of globalization on Africa, and the role of the writer in preserving a historical sensibility and native languages.
Uraizee, Joya F. "‘Flowers in All Their Colours’: Nations and Communities in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood." International Fiction Review 31 (2004): 27-38.
Examines the idea of nations and local seats of government in Petals of Blood, highlighting contrasts throughout the novel that Ngugi uses to develop his themes.
Uskalis, Eriks. "Allegory and the Retrieval of History: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between and Matigari." ARIEL 36, nos. 3-4 (July 1, 2005): 85-102.
Argues that Ngugi uses allegory as a mode of dissent in The River Between and Matigari.
Additional coverage of Ngugi's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale: African Writers; Black Literature Criticism, Ed. 1:3; Black Writers, Ed. 2; British Writers Supplement, Vol. 8; Concise Dictionary of World Literary Biography, Vol. 3; Concise Major 21st-Century Writers, Ed. 1; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 81-84; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 27, 58; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 36, 182; DISCovering Authors Modules, Ed. MULT, NOV; Literature of Developing Nations for Students, Vol. 2; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Ed. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers (eBook), Ed. 2005; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; and World Writers in English, Vol. 1.