Weep Not, Child

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Weep Not, Child

by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in Kenya in the 1950s; published in English in 1964.

SYNOPSIS

A Kenyan boy comes of age in the turbulent final years of British colonialism.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

Weep Not, Child, the first novel published in English by a black writer from East Africa, launched the career of the most famous of Kenyan novelists. Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 into the Gikuyu (also known as the Kikuyu) people of Kenya’s central highlands. His childhood coincided with Kenya’s struggle for independence through the actions of Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya African Union (KAU) and the violent Mau Mau Rebellion. After independence in 1963 Ngugi emerged as an influential writer and intellectual. Serving as chairman of the English Department at the University of Nairobi in the late 1960s, he successfully agitated for a curriculum focused on African literature. In the late 1970s the author who had led Kenyans in writing in English returned to his native tongue. In 1977 his Gikuyu play Ngaahika ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want; written with Ngugi wa Mirii) was performed by peasants and workers. This highly political drama caused the government to jail Ngugi without trial for over a year. This experience did not intimidate him; since his release, he has continued to write, in Gikuyu and in English, and to comment on the politics of Kenya and the world.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

Colonial context

From the beginning Britain’s involvement with Kenya differed greatly from its colonial adventures elsewhere in Africa. First, the origins of British interest in East Africa were quite different from those of their interest in West Africa, where they dealt directly with the many local ethnic groups. The British came to Kenya as a result of their longstanding relationship with the Arab sultan of Oman. The Omani Kingdom dominated trade throughout the Middle East and Indian Ocean; almost as a sideline, the sultan held important trading rights in East Africa. The British offered the sultan their military might in exchange for trading privileges in all of these areas.

To protect these trading interests the British sought, and gained, increasing influence over the Omani Kingdom. The death of the powerful Sultan Seyyid Said in 1856 gave the British a perfect opportunity to turn their alliance with Oman into a functional protectorate: using military threat and diplomatic muscle, they picked the next sultan and managed all his affairs. By 1885 the threat of German colonialism in the area convinced the British that indirect rule of East Africa through the Omanis was inefficient; they began to deal directly with the Germans and in 1895 established the British East African Protectorate, which included the island of Zanzibar and Kenya.

GIKUYU LIFE BEFORE THE BRITISH

Before the British assumed direct control over them, the Gikuyu followed a way of life not much different from that of their ancestors many centuries before. An agricultural people, they devoted themselves to the land and the ancestors who had tamed it. The most important figure in their religion was Murungu, the creator who gave to Gikuyu and Mumbi (the first man and the first woman) all the lands that the Gikuyu people held. The sense of connection to the land was essential to Gikuyu culture; they were enraged when the British expropriated their land and limited them to small reserves.

The Gikuyu owned and worked the land collectively. Every clan or extended family (called a mbari) owned and worked a certain amount of land to their own benefit. A few without land of their own, called ahoi, were allowed to work on the land of a mbari; the whole social collective of neighboring mbari was governed by a council of elders. The family structure of the Gikuyu was polygamous, or, more exactly, polygynous: a man could marry as often as he could afford to pay dowry, and—since wives worked not only at producing children but also as field laborers—a man’s wealth could be said to reside largely in his family.

The incursion of the British disrupted nearly every aspect of Gikuyu society. The British dispossessed the Gikuyu of their land, then appointed Gikuyu chiefs who often enriched themselves by preying on their people. The British also brought Christianity, which found many converts among the Gikuyu, but which also disrupted the rituals that held the people together. In particular, female circumcision and polygyny drew the wrath of Christian missionaries, who made rejection of these practices a prerequisite for baptism. Pushing these issues to the front in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Christians forced many Kenyans to choose. Many agreed with the Christians and abandoned these traditional ways. But a similarly large number either rejected Christianity or adapted it by blending it with indigenous forms. This early division played a significant part in shaping the Mau Mau Rebellion of the 1950s, which was fought less between the British and Africans than between Africans who supported the British and Africans who wanted the British gone.

Declaring a protectorate in East Africa turned out to be easier than establishing a genuine colonial government there. After 1895 the British faced continual armed struggles against such peoples as the Nandi, the Abagusii, the Turkana, and many others. The Nandi and Abagusii gained prominence for their ferocity in fighting the British, though other groups (the Gikuyu, the Maasai, and the Galla) outnumbered and out-influenced them. To cope with this situation the British colonial administration was divided into two structures. White overseers filled the posts of greatest authority, making all major decisions and shaping the larger path of Kenyan development. However, because qualified colonial administrators were few, and the native Kenyan groups so difficult to manage, the British also attempted to use the power of local chiefs to control the colonized groups. They established a legal structure that allowed those African leaders recognized by the British to decide local matters, administer law, and find laborers for British public works programs. When they encountered peoples such as the Gikuyu, who were ruled by councils rather than chiefs, the British simply created chieftaincies. In this way the British hoped to be able to extract the greatest amount of wealth from Kenya with the least amount of political turmoil.

However, their aims were complicated by another distinctive aspect of the British experience in Kenya: the presence of significant numbers of Europeans who hoped to make Kenya their permanent home (see Out of Africa , also covered in African Literature and Its Times). The Kenyan highlands, where the Gikuyu people were the dominant group, had a climate far superior—to European tastes—to that of West Africa: temperate, easily arable, and free of malaria. From the 1890s to the 1940s white settlers flooded into Kenya, appropriated land, and forced native Kenyans to work for them. The Kenyans had to cope, therefore, not merely with a miscellany of bureaucrats, traders, missionaries, and soldiers, but with a large group of Englishmen who had come to Kenya not to trade or convert or administer, but to settle.

The British did not have an easy time conquering Kenya; many of the ethnic groups in the region fiercely resisted the colonists’ encroachments. Even after the greater unity and more advanced weaponry of the British made it obvious that armed resistance was futile, the region could not really be called subdued. Almost immediately native Kenyans began to clamor for a greater share in government; in less than 20 years from the official British annexation of Kenya, resistance groups pressured the British government to alter fundamentally the nature of the British presence in Kenya.

From the beginning the British settlers in Kenya had a simple aim: they wanted self-governance and a degree of independence from London. Their model was Southern Rhodesia, whose white settlers profited from self-governance blended with a fruitful economic relationship with England. Almost to a person, settlers assumed their natural superiority to the Africans; why should they not rule Kenya? However, in order to persuade England to allow self-governance they had to accomplish certain things. They had to prove that they were economically viable and could survive without assistance. They had to prove they could defend Britain’s political interests in the area against the colonial ambitions of her great rival, Germany. Perhaps most importantly, they had to prove themselves capable of managing and controlling the African population. The white settlers of Kenya failed, to varying extents, to accomplish any of these objectives, and they failed particularly miserably in the third. From the beginning the Kenyans protested their condition loudly; in the 1950s protest metamorphosed into mass action and violent rebellion.

Jomo Kenyatta

In 1931 a young Kenyan named Jomo Kenyatta journeyed to England as part of a delegation that planned to air African grievances to the British government. The delegation was largely unsuccessful, but Kenyatta ended up staying in England for 15 years, and this long stay turned out to be anything but a failure. In England Kenyatta associated with other anticolonialist Africans, both from Kenya and elsewhere. In 1944 he was among the 33 founding members of the Kenya African Union (KAU), whose objective was to force the British government to give native Kenyans a much larger share in the colonial government. Two years later, in September 1946, he returned to Kenya and found himself mobbed by enthusiastic supporters everywhere he traveled. In 1947 he was elected president of the KAU and molded what began as a policy-study group for an educated elite into a mass political party. For native Kenyans he was the leader who transcended their division into local groups and pointed the way to freedom; for the white settlers and the British government he was public enemy number one.

The activities of the KAU raised immeasurably the political consciousness of Kenyans. Before the party’s birth Kenya’s African peoples had remained somewhat isolated from each other; they did not realize that success against the British required intergroup cooperation. Kenyatta’s insistence on multigroup leadership underscored the fact that, even if they shared nothing else, all of Kenya’s black peoples shared oppression. They would have to work together to expel the British. Perhaps more importantly, Kenyatta stood as a personal symbol of what Kenyans could accomplish: refusing to back down to the British, he proved that military might could be countered by a strong will and firm purpose.

The accomplishments of the KAU are all the more remarkable when one considers that, from the very beginning, the party was split between conservative and radical elements. The conservatives wanted peaceful agitation, gradual reform, and a greater share of self-government within the structures of colonialism. The radical element

THE COLONIAL LAND GRAB

The great Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta once said, “If you woke up one morning and found that someone had come to your house, and had declared that the house belonged to him, you would naturally be surprised, and you would like to know by what arrangement.” (Kenyatta in Ochieng’, p. 119). This was precisely the situation of countless Kenyans in the early twentieth century. By no other arrangement than the power of their guns, the British claimed the Kenyan highlands for themselves. Kenyans living on land that Britain claimed were called squatters and were able to remain only as long as the British allowed it. Worse, the British became both government and landlord. In the former capacity, they levied taxes; in the latter, rent. Both were to be paid not in cash or goods, but in labor—labor on the farms of the new settlers. Thus a Kenyan could find himself legally obligated to work for someone else on land where his ancestors had lived for generations.

The British land laws exempted villages, and a system of reservations for Africans was set up in 1915, concessions that hardly satisfied the African peoples. For centuries Kenya had hosted innumerable visitors: traders from as far away as Arabia and India had passed through. However, when Kenyans realized that the British not only planned to stay but actually claimed to own the country, they realized they could not exercise patience. They would have to act to expel the visitors who would not go away.

would settle for nothing less than the immediate end of British colonialism and the introduction of democracy in Kenya. Kenyatta himself had a foot in each camp. On the one hand, he was committed to independence, and even refused to rule out the use of force to achieve it. On the other, he was too canny a politician to eschew attempts to reform British rule from within. Therefore, he continued to work within the system to bring about change. When real violence began in the early 1950s, however, Kenyatta’s prominence made him a natural target of British punishment. In a 1952 trial whose significance echoes in Ngugi’s novel, Kenyatta was convicted (on flimsy, tainted evidence) of being a leader of the Mau Mau Rebellion.

The Mau Mau Rebellion

The Mau Mau Rebellion is shot through with contradictions and mystery. It would not have happened without the peaceful agitation of the well-organized KAU, yet it was a radical grassroots movement without a single structure of leadership. It began and flourished in the city of Nairobi but is best remembered as a jungle war. It was a war waged against British imperialism, yet it ended up killing more Africans than Englishmen; thousands died violently, the vast majority Kenyan, and many of those were fighting on the side of the British. Perhaps most paradoxically, this military failure was a political success. Mau Mau was the inversion of a Pyrrhic victory: the rebels lost the battle, but they won the war.

The origins of the name “Mau Mau” are uncertain—suggestions have ranged from a British misspelling of mumua (the Gikuyu word for “oath”) to a variation of uma uma, meaning “out, out,” to a variety of others—but the origin of the rebellion can be summed up in one word: frustration. Mau Mau drew its strength from the legions of Kenyans, especially Gikuyus, who agonized over the snail’s pace of peaceful reform and the daily indignity of living as squatters in their own country. Conditions on the African reserves were abominable: overcrowded, impoverished, and handicapped by colonial law, Kenyans also had to suffer the sight of British and Indian settlers living in what seemed like wealth and ease.

After World War II this frustration was intensified by the presence of thousands of Kenyan veterans (called askaris). Black Kenyans had fought for the British in all phases of the war, gaining experience of the world and a broader perspective on political action. They returned to Kenya to find limited jobs and racial discrimination. Some 15,000 askaris had served as truck drivers in the British Army, and many hoped to continue this line of work but there were only 2,000 trucks in all of Kenya (Ochieng’, p. 134). Askaris embodied a dangerous mixture: bitterness at their dismal futures compounded with practical experience in the methods and ends of warfare. From the beginning ex-servicemen played a key role in Mau Mau.

In the late 1940s and very early 1950s, Mau Mau gathered strength as a kind of secret organization. Initiates swore some version of the “Mau Mau Oath,” a pledge to fight for Kenyan independence, accompanied by mutations of traditional initiation rights such as drinking the blood of a goat. Late in 1952 the gathering storm broke. Waruhiu, a Kenyan chief staunchly loyal to the British, was assassinated outside Nairobi. This sensational crime (Waruhiu was killed by anti-colonial black men in the uniforms of the colonial police) spurred the colonial government to declare a state of emergency. On the night of October 20, 1952, 187 suspected Mau Mau leaders were arrested, including Jomo Kenyatta. While this move did round up a number of Mau Mau leaders (along with many, like Kenyatta, who were fundamentally uninvolved in the incident) , it did nothing to quell the rebellion because Mau Mau was so widespread. Instead, arresting the known leaders left the movement in the hands of younger, more aggressive leaders—like Boro in Weep Not, Child.

Mau Mau was less a full-scale war than an aggressive guerilla campaign. Rebels hid in the forests and swept out to attack a single settler or an African chief loyal to the British; they stole guns and ammunition in daring raids. This campaign of terror profoundly alarmed the white settlers and the British government, whose response did not address the underlying grievances that caused the rebellion. Instead, by bombing the forests, stepping up police brutality, and allowing the questioning and detention of thousands of innocent Kenyans, the British seemed to prove the Mau Mau’s point: the British were a violent invading force and could be driven away only through force. The British Army, supported by a Home Guard composed of loyalist Kenyans, slowly broke the back of the rebellion. Aggressive campaigns of bombing, preventive detention, and forced relocation severed the link between the forest Mau Mau and their supporters in Nairobi and the villages; over time, the British were able to strangle the life from the rebellion. With the capture and execution of the great Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi in February 1957, the rebellion was effectively over.

Judging by numbers, the Mau Mau failed miserably. Close to 15,000 Mau Mau died during the fighting, compared to fewer than 5,000 settlers, soldiers, and loyalists. Only about 30 white civilian settlers were killed. In fact, during the rebellion more white settlers died in traffic accidents than at the hands of the Mau Mau. But even though the Mau Mau lost the battle, they helped win the war for Kenyan freedom. Their aim had been to frighten whites into leaving the land. They did not accomplish this, but they did effect a long-term shift in British thinking. Forgetting the bloodshed required to conquer Kenya in the late nineteenth century, the British assumed that African peoples were cowardly, unorganized, and easily led. Mau Mau put an end to this way of thinking. If the colony could be held only by the kind of massive expenditure of money and power it took to quell this rebellion, then Kenya was hardly worth the holding. By 1960 the British had agreed to a radical restructuring of Kenyan goverment, one which guaranteed African majority rule. In 1961 Jomo Kenyatta was released from prison. On December 12, 1963, he became the first prime minister of a free Kenya.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

Weep Not, Child opens as Njoroge, a boy of about nine who lives near the village of Kipanga, is asked by his mother if he would like to attend school. This question opens up a whole new world for Njoroge, who has always dreamed of an education. He enthusiastically agrees. This brief exchange begins a novel that, although short, is vast in scope and rich in incident and character. However, from beginning to end the novel is loosely unified by Njoroge’s dogged pursuit of an education. On his first day Njoroge walks to school with Mwihaki, the daughter of Jacobo, his family’s landlord. She protects him from the bullying of the older schoolboys, and they begin a friendship that will survive the political events that make their families bitter enemies.

MAJOR CHARACTERS IN THE NOVEL

Njoroge: A Gikuyu schoolboy.

Ngotho: Father of Njoroge; a veteran of World War I and a foreman on Mr. Howlands’s farm.

Nyokabi: Mother of Njoroge; Ngotho’s second wife.

Njeri: Ngotho’s elder wife; mother of Boro and Kamau.

Kamau: Brother to whom Njoroge is closest; a carpenter.

Boro: Njoroge’s eldest brother; emotionally scarred by his experience in World War II. Later a rebel.

jacobo: Kenyan landowner and Ngotho’s landlord. Collaborates with the British.

Mwihaki: Jacobo’s daughter and Njoroge’s closest friend.

Mr. Howlands: A British man rewarded for his service in World War 1 with land in Kenya. Later tries to suppress the rebellion of the Kenyans.

Jacobo is a man of consequence in the community and a friend of the British colonists. Ngotho, on the other hand, works for Mr. Howlands, a rich British settler, but he is no friend of the colonial regime. He works on Mr. Howlands’s farm in order to remain close to the land of his ancestors; at night, he tells his family stories from the religion of the Gikuyu nation to which they belong. These stories prophesy that the British will be forced out and the Gikuyu will resume control of their ancestral lands.

“Do you think,” Ngotho was asked, “that the prophecy will ever be fulflled?”
“I don’t know.... It may not be fulfilled in my lifetime.”
(Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 29-30)

Ngotho’s stories are openly revolutionary, but for one of his sons, Boro, they are not revolutionary enough. Boro served the British in World War II and is permanently embittered by the death of his brother, Mwangi, in the war. Ngotho is confused and hurt by the open disdain Boro shows him. As the novel progresses, Boro withdraws from the family, spending more time with the young men agitating for rebellion in Nairobi. Eventually, he brings these agitators to Kipanga, forcing Ngotho to choose between his job and the struggle for freedom. But at the beginning, he pins his hopes on Njoroge’s education: “If Njoroge could now get all the white man’s learning, would Ngotho even work for Howlands?” (Weep Not, p. 16).

Njoroge does well at school and becomes closer to Mwihaki. The two of them discuss the situation of Kenya with the naive earnestness of children, unaware that their parents are on opposite sides of a great political divide. The only thing Njoroge does not share with Mwihaki are his developing religious and political ideas. He combines the religion told him by his parents with the Christianity taught at school (and Ngugi points out how similar the two are) to develop a sense that his people have a special mission to acquire their freedom. His hopes are pinned on the freedom fighter called “the Black Moses”: Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta, the great fighter for Kenyan liberty, and eventually the first leader of free Kenya, casts his long shadow over the next, more intense phase of the novel. His return to Kenya from England intensifies the hostility between Kenyans and the British colonists. Agitators brought by Boro to Kipanga spread the word: a general strike is planned. All Kenyans employed by the British are asked to stop working until Africans are given pay equal to that of Europeans and Indians, and until racial discrimination is abolished. The call for a strike means that Ngotho must make a choice. Up till now he has passively waited for Mr. Howlands to leave, using his job as an opportunity to stay close to the land which he is confident will be his again. But Mr. Howlands says that any of his employees who goes on strike will be fired at once. For Ngotho, then, the stakes are unusually high. In spite of the risks, and over the objection of his two wives, he decides to go on strike.

The strife comes to a head on the day Njoroge and Mwihaki learn that they have passed their preliminary examinations. Both rush home, excited to share the news with their families, and both find their families stunned and terrified by horrible events. At a meeting held by the organizers of the strike, Jacobo, who had convinced the British settlers that he was a man of great influence in the Kenyan community, took the stage and attempted to convince the strikers to return to work. The crowd listened in disbelief. But Ngotho was enraged. Years of frustration boil within him, and, seeing Jacobo as the consummate traitor, he rises and attacks him, and is soon joined by the crowd. The intervention of white policemen saves Jacobo’s life, and Ngotho is seriously injured.

More significantly, the strike reveals fractures in Kipanga society. When the strike fails Ngotho and thousands of others lose their jobs. Jacobo kicks Ngotho and his family out of their homes, and they are forced to eke out a living on the land of Kamau’s former boss, the carpenter Nganga. Superficially, Njoroge’s life shows less change. He begins attending his new school, upset by the suffering of his family and confused about his friendship with Mwihaki, daughter of his father’s enemy; but he is isolated from the political turmoil of the country. For this is the time of the Mau Mau Rebellion, and the struggle for freedom has turned extremely violent. Njoroge hears of the Mau Mau in stories told by the other schoolboys; he suspects only vaguely how directly his family will be involved in the bloodshed.

After the strike attitudes harden on both sides. Jacobo is made a chief, a Kenyan collaborator in the British attempt to suppress rebellion. Howlands himself, who had been content as a simple farmer, becomes district officer, an official with broad powers to harass suspected revolutionaries. A similar intensification has occurred in Ngotho’s family. Boro and his brother Kori have joined the Mau Mau, and Boro pressures their father to follow them. Although sympathetic, Ngotho refuses to take the oath of allegiance from his son, which he considers a violation of his patriarchal authority.

However, his refusal to align himself with the Mau Mau does not save him from harassment. Both Jacobo and Howlands resent Ngotho and focus their energy on him out of proportion to his minimal involvement in the uprising. His wife, Nyokabi, and son, Kori, are arrested for violating curfew; Kori is held in a detention camp. Boro flees permanently to the forest. Open conflict is inevitable.

Meanwhile, Njoroge and Mwihaki meet again in Kipanga, as they have not done since the day of the strike. Somehow their friendship has survived the breach between their families. Their conversations about the turmoil in their country are inconclusive; Njoroge, especially, doubts that their alliance can survive the forces of politics. Nevertheless, this interlude of cautious optimism provides a source of light in a rapidly darkening novel.

EDUCATION IN COLONIAL KENYA

Formal education in colonial Kenya was, at first, provided solely by Christian missionaries. This education was not free and was thus limited to a select few African children, most of whom, like Njoroge’s brother Kamau, learned a traditional skill like carpentry. This Christian education tended to disconnect its students from their ethnic roots; many Christian Gikuyu rejected traditional ways altogether, although Njoroge never does.

Despite these shortcomings, European education was very highly valued by the Gikuyu—they understood that it was the only way to gain access to the white man’s cultural power. Great sacrifices were made, even by poor families, to send at least one child to school; this child’s success or failure would be watched and felt, not just by his family but by the whole village. It is no surprise that one of Jomo Kenyatta’s demands was compulsory primary education for all Kenyan children, nor that, in the 1930s, various ethnic groups set up their own independent schools, which provided a British education without Christian disdain for such practices as polygamy and female circumcision.

The structure of Christian education in Kenya basically followed that in Britain. In primary school students learned the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. If they passed an exam at the end of primary school, they were sent to intermediate school (equivalent to American junior high school). Both Njoroge and Mwihaki pass this exam, but they are still split up: Njoroge goes to an intermediate school near home, and the more affluent Mwihaki is sent to a boarding school in the country. After intermediate school another exam determined the next step. Those who performed best were sent to secondary school; this is what happens to Njoroge, Mwihaki, who does less well, finds herself at a teacher-training school.

Until the climax of the novel Njoroge’s educational career follows that of Ngugi. But while Njoroge is forced by political circumstances to leave his secondary school, Ngugi went on to get university degrees, first in Nairobi and then in England.

Events unravel in short order. Njoroge passes through intermediate school and goes to Siriana Secondary School. Here he discovers another oasis of peace. He strikes up friendships with representatives of all the peoples of Kenya; he even finds common ground with Mr. Howlands’s son, whom he had feared as a boy. It turns out that the young white child had been just as terrified of Njoroge as Njoroge had been of him. But soon this place of peace is shattered. Policemen come for Njoroge, and he is interrogated, beaten, and mentally tormented. Mr. Howlands informs him that Jacobo has been murdered. Worse, Ngotho has confessed to the crime, even though everyone knows that Boro was the actual murderer. Ngotho has been tortured nearly to death but will not divulge Boro’s hiding place. Finally Ngotho and Njoroge are released. Because of the scandal Njoroge cannot return to school; he returns home with his father, who is dying rapidly. He lives long enough, however, to be reconciled with Boro, who visits his father’s deathbed before retreating to the forest.

Two chapters remain, set several months later. Boro has killed Mr. Howlands and been captured. Njoroge, now 19, his dreams of education and a grand future seemingly ruined, is working as a salesclerk in an Indian store in Kipanga. He meets Mwihaki again; their friendship has survived even the murder of her father. She invokes the duty to his people in which he used to believe, but she fails to reinspire him. He pleads with her to leave Kenya with him, and when she refuses, he is desolate. He climbs a hill and ties a noose, intending suicide. The novel ends, not in despair, but with a ray of hope: his two mothers have followed him, and they save him from death. As he allows them to lead him home, he begins to remember his obligations to others, and the novel ends in a simple act of courtesy: “He ran home and opened the door for his two mothers” (Weep Not, p. 136).

Adam and Eve, Gikuyu and Mumbi

One of the most riveting episodes of Weep Not, Child has Ngotho retelling for his family the Gikuyu story of the creation. The creator, Murungu, saw darkness all over the face of the world; he created a single sacred tree that rose up from the foot of Mt. Kenya. Beneath it he created the first man and woman, named Gikuyu and Mumbi, and he told them: “This land I hand over to you. O man and woman, / It’s yours to rule and till in serenity sacrificing / Only to me, your God, under my sacred tree” (Weep Not, p. 24). The immediate effect of Ngotho’s story is to remind all his family that their land has been stolen from them. But the creation story has another effect as well: it underscores the similarities between the Gikuyu’s homegrown religion and the imported Christianity that made many converts in Kenya. It also foreshadows the idiosyncratic blend of Christian and Gikuyu themes that Njoroge develops later in the novel: “It did not make much difference that he had come to identify Gikuyu with Adam and Mumbi with Eve. To this God, all men and women were united by one strong feeling of brotherhood” (Weep Not, p. 49). Christian education became part of the sweep towards freedom; for example, Ngugi describes Jomo Kenyatta as the Black Moses. An optimism, reinforced by Christianity, that God will eventually right the injustices visited on His people sustains Njoroge through much of the novel. Christianity, it can be concluded, was never for Ngugi simply a tool of colonialism. Britain’s staunchest African allies were those Gikuyu who had been deeply Christianized and Westernized. The Christian teachers whom Njoroge encounters are kind and passionate but convinced that white ways are best: the headmaster of one school “brought up his boys to copy and cherish the white man’s civilization as the only hope of mankind” (Weep Not, p. 115). And even among those Gikuyu who do not reject their traditional customs, Christianity seems to encourage a political passivity that hinders the vigorous fight for freedom. Nevertheless, the novel does not reject Christianity. Ngotho’s story is paralleled later in the book by the impassioned sermon of a Christian revivalist. This sermon predicts the imminent return of Jesus but also comments on the political turmoil of Kenya. After they leave the church Njoroge and Mwihake discuss the idea of the end of the world in a passionate blend of theology, personal conviction, and politics. They end up with a kind of cautious optimism, based on the trust that God works in mysterious ways, but always for the ultimate good of His people. This optimism is counterpoised against the violent nihilism of Boro, who states that he believes in nothing but revenge. While it is Boro’s active will that brings about political change, Njoroge’s quieter drive really propels the novel; it is only when he loses this optimism that he attempts suicide.

Ngugi’s own relationship to Christianity is as multifaceted as his first novel’s. Like Njoroge, he was in his youth a devout believer, and many critics have seen an autobiographical component to the novel. But by the time he wrote it, and especially later in the 1960s, Ngugi had come to question the role of Christianity in Gikuyu life. He saw that, whatever their stated beliefs, the Christian churches supported the oppressive ruling class. As his interest grew in radicals like Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon (see The Wretched of the Earth , also covered in African Literature and Its Times), Ngugi rejected anything that might aid this class. More importantly, he came to believe that Christianity forced its adherents to denigrate their Gikuyu heritage: the Church “meant rejection of these values and rituals which held us together: it meant adopting what, in effect, was a debased European middle-class mode of living and behavior” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Killam, p. 8). The somewhat accepting view of Christianity evinced in Weep Not, Child is replaced in the 1970s with a tendency to denounce Christian influence. This trait must be classed with Ngugi’s other attempts to minimize European influences, such as writing in Gikuyu and attempting to refocus college literature departments on African literature. In 1970 he even changed his name. After addressing a Church council with the words, “I am not a man of the Church. I am not even a Christian,” Ngugi was confronted by an angry Christian who pointed out that Ngugi still used his Christian name: James. Reflecting on this, Ngugi decided the man was right. He dropped “James” from his name and reverted to the Gikuyu form of his name: Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

Sources and literary context

Ngugi’s early work should be placed alongside the first literary fruits of African independence. He is young enough to have felt the influence of slightly older African writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka (see Things Fall Apart and Death and the King’s Horseman , also covered in African Literature and Its Times), and shares their concern with defining the African experience and assessing the legacy of colonialism. In Kenya, Ngugi was the first writer to publish in English and has remained Kenya’s most famous international author.

Like many African authors, Ngugi received a rigorous, European-style education and has benefited from being positioned between two cultures, the Gikuyu and the British. Even as he has worked to accentuate and enrich his own Gikuyu culture, he has continued to acknowledge a debt to certain English writers, especially D. H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad. In the late 1960s and early 1970s his work became more stridently political; Petals of Blood, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi and Ngaahika ndeenda excoriate Christianity, colonialism, and the political shortcomings of Kenya after independence in terms much harsher than those of his first published work. Ngaahika ndeenda, especially, landed him in trouble for just those reasons: this massive three-hour play, put on by peasants in the Kenyan countryside, was performed only once before government officials, upset at its frank treatment of corruption and greed, halted production and arrested Ngugi. He was imprisoned without trial for more than a year.

Despite this arrest, or perhaps because of it, Ngugi has continued to be a powerful, influential voice both within Kenya and outside it. His more recent works have been banned in Kenya, and Ngugi himself has lived in exile (in the United States and Europe) since the mid-1980s; however, the memory of his work continues to inspire many Kenyan authors. For the world at large, Ngugi is the most visible and striking literary representative of Kenya, its first authentic voice.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

Uhuru and after

Weep Not, Child ends at the darkest point in the life of its protagonist and in the life of Kenya. The Mau Mau Rebellion has been crushed; Jomo Kenyatta and many other Kenyan leaders have been imprisoned. It seems as if native Kenyans are powerless to win their freedom, and will have to depend on the dubious generosity of the British interlopers.

However, by the time Ngugi sat to write the book, the situation had turned around completely. From the failed Mau Mau Rebellion, the British had learned that Kenyans would never accept colonial domination peacefully and that they themselves would have to relinquish power. A series of conferences in the late 1950s and early 1960s set the terms by which native Kenyans would be brought into the colonial government, with the eventual aim of uhuru (freedom) from Britain. Like many anti-colonial leaders, Kenyatta went almost straight from jail to the state house; he became prime minister in 1962 and, late in 1963, oversaw the final departure of the British. The land laws were overthrown, and white settlers fled in droves.

With independance Kenya had its share of the internal strife experienced by many other newly freed African states. Political freedom was an important step, but it would mean nothing without economic self-sufficiency. Potential conflict between different peoples also loomed, and Kenyatta had to walk a thin line to keep the differences between Gikuyu and Maasai, Nandi and Abagusii from sapping the political life of the country. An even more invidious division, perhaps, had arisen between the small minority of Kenyans who had benefited from England’s rule, adopting Christianity and Western dress, and the majority who continued to live traditional African lives. It is in this final area that the importance of Ngugi lies. Beginning with the plays he staged as part of the Independence celebrations in 1964, and more stridently as the years passed, Ngugi has insisted on the unity of all Kenyans in a glorious African culture that needs little from Europeans.

Reviews

Opinions of Weep Not, Child vary greatly. The cover of the British edition proclaims it “Ngugi’s masterpiece,” but this judgment is far from universal. No one denies the novel’s historical importance as the first written in English by a black East African. However, many categorize it as a work of Ngugi’s youth that bears all the marks of apprenticeship. Charles Larson claims that the characters of the novel “are for the most part underdeveloped” (Larson, p. 365). Ngugi’s language has been praised and criticized in equal measure. Peter Nazareth says that “the real problem of Ngugi’s language is that one is constantly irritated by its naivete and extreme complexity” (Nazareth, p. 9). But G. D. Killam notes the biblical intensity of Ngugi’s style, and observes that this style blossoms in his subsequent novels (Killam, p. 52). There is also a split between critics who see the novel as a flawed, naive attempt to capture the historical truth of the Mau Mau Rebellion and those who see such naivete as a way of capturing the feelings of being young in troubled times. For the former assessment, W. J. Howard writes: “Very good historical prose fiction has always included an interpretation or a reading of the history.… This creative coming to terms with historical fact is absent from Weep Not, Child” (Howard in Rob-son, p. 124). Clifford Robson replies, “Ngugi’s work reveals a developing but consistent interpretation—that in a dynamic situation people are often caught up in a complex pattern of events to which they react in unpredictable, irrational ways” (Robson, p. 124).

However, even those critics who dismiss Weep Not, Child grant that it is important for two reasons. First, its publication marks a major stage in the development of East African literature. Second, it indubitably shows some glimmer of the promise fulfilled in such later masterpieces as A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood.

—Jacob Littleton