Ngugi - 039 - S - Novels - and - African - History - Narrating - The - Nation 2 PDF

Ngugi’s Novels and
African History
Narrating the Nation
James Ogude
Pluto P Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA
First published 1999 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive,
Sterling, VA 21066–2012, USA
Copyright © James Ogude 1999
The right of James Ogude to be identified as the author of this work

has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1436 8 hbk
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Ogude, James.
Ngugi’s novels and African history: narrating the nation / James
Ogude
p. cm.
ISBN 0–7453–1436–8 hbk
1. Ngügi wa Thiong’o, 1938– —Knowledge—History. 2. Historical
fiction, Kenyan (English)—History and criticism. 3. Literature and
history—African—History—20th century. 4. Literature and history–
–Kenya—History—20th century. 5. Ngügi wa Thiong’o. 1938–
–Fictional works. I. Title.
PR9381.9.N45Z82 1999
823—dc21 99–23065
CIP
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Writing Back and the Restoration of a

Community/Nation 1
1. Ngugi’s Concept of History 15
2. The Changing Nature of Allegory in Ngugi’s Novels 44
3. Character Portrayal in Ngugi’s Novels 68
4. The Use of Popular Forms and the Search for
Relevance 87
5. Allegory, Romance and the Nation: Women as
Allegorical Figures in Ngugi’s Novels 109
6. Ngugi’s Portrayal of the Community, Heroes and
the Oppressed 126
7. Conclusion 153
Notes 161
Bibliography 169
Index 176
To my brother Aguyo Kogude, who sacrificed for
my education and to my mother Helida Akuno Ogude
for showing me the value of discipline and hard work.
Acknowledgements
Ngugi’s stature in African literature and his interventions in

the debates on Africa’s historiography have been major
influences on my academic career. My first encounter with
the social relevance of literature was through my contact
with Ngugi as a student at Nairobi University and I thank
him for the insights without which this book would have
been different. Special gratitude goes to my academic
mentor, Njabulo Ndebele, and to members of the African
Literature Department at the University of the
Witwatersrand, especially Phaswane Mpe, Isabel Hofmeyr
and Bheki Peterson for their support and encouragement.
Mpe in particular helped with the initial proofreading of the
manuscript – many thanks. Special thanks to the African
literature students, whose stimulating debates in class
helped to sharpen some of the ideas expressed in this book.
And to my friend, Atieno Odhiambo of Rice University,
Texas, for his support and useful sources on the production
of Kenyan history.
Although this book is based on my PhD thesis written for
the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, it has
been revised substantially to include the early novels of
Ngugi and to provide a more comprehensive historical
perspective – thanks to Roger van Zwanenberg of Pluto Press
for insisting that I include the early novels of Ngugi. I have
also endeavoured to simplify the academic jargon and
terminology originally used in the thesis in order to make
the book accessible to a wider audience without
compromising the academic value the book may have. Some
parts of this book have appeared as articles in various
journals. Parts of the introduction and Chapter 1 were
drawn from ‘Ngugi’s Concept of History’ in the Canadian
Journal of African Studies 31.1. (1997): 86–112. Parts of
Chapter 4 appeared in English in Africa 24.1 (1997): 71–87
vii
viii Ngugi’s Novels and African History
and parts of Chapter 6 were drawn from my article appearing

in Wasafiri 28 (Autumn 1988): 3–9. Where permission has
been required for republication, I am grateful to the editors
of the journals for that permission.
Finally, I would like to thank members of my family who
have sustained me with encouragement throughout this
project: to my daughter, Didi, my son, Omondi, and to my
wife, Nthabiseng, for love and understanding as I kept away
from their company while preparing this book.
Introduction
Writing Back and the Restoration
of a Community/Nation
Early African narratives have always been seen as writing

against colonial discursive practices in an attempt to validate
Africa’s historiography denied by colonialism. Chinua
Achebe, the Nigerian writer, called it ‘an act of atonement’
(quoted in Awonoor 1976, p. 251) – the process of returning
to self or what Basil Davidson calls the reconstituting of a
‘shattered community, to save or restore the sense and fact of
community against all the pressures of the colonial system’
(1978, p. 155). Edward Said calls it restoring ‘the imprisoned
community to itself’ (1994, p. 259). In literature, this process
of restoration was marked by a strong sense of cultural
nationalism.
The emergence of cultural nationalism as an engagement
with the epistemological practices that came with colonialism
was an attempt at the recovery of African gnosis repressed by
colonialism. These forms of African writings, rooted in the
emergent African nationalism, were engaged in what Gikandi
calls ‘the act of willing new realities into being’ and
elaborating new knowledges of Africa (1991, p. 2). Signifi-
cantly, the knowledges were reconstructed not simply from
what colonialism was attempting to repress, but also from
the historical conditions colonialism had created. The
nationalist thought depended, in part, upon the realities of
the colonial powers and the discursive practices that came
with it. But the new narrative of ‘nation formation’
constituted a dialogue, not just with the West whose
discursive instruments the writers had appropriated to subvert
the colonial project, but also a dialogue with other adjacent
zones of knowledge such as history, anthropology, political
science, religion, etc., within the academy. In other words, the
process of social engineering, the process of specifying the
1
2 Ngugi’s Novels and African History
ideological lexicon of nation formation, involved the African

writer as much as it involved the historian, the political
scientist, the anthropologist, the politician and the religious
leader. The sites of construction and idioms may have been
different, but they certainly interfaced and interlocked in
search of an enduring moral centre.
Ngugi has been most poignant in his engagement with
other disciplines and the discursive practices emanating from
the West. Narrative, particularly the novel, has tended to
provide Ngugi with the space to imagine Africa’s history
which he believes had been repressed by colonialism. Ngugi
has insisted, correctly, that his writing is very much part of
Kenya’s (and by implication Africa’s) historiography and the
theorising of its political economy. Ngugi’s writing is not just
laying a claim to the terrain of culture, but also to radically
‘revised visions of the past tending towards a postcolonial
future, as urgently reinterpretable and redeployable
experiences, in which the formerly silent native speaks and
acts on territory reclaimed as part of a general movement of
resistance, from the colonist’ (Said 1994, p. 256). Ngugi posits
narrative here as an agent of history because it provides the
space for challenging our notions of national identities, uses
of history, and ways in which they are deployed in power
contestation in modern Kenya and Africa in general.
And yet, in spite of Ngugi’s interest in the grand project of
writing back to colonialist historiography, and in spite of the
apparent radical reinterpretations that have been hailed in
his novels ranging from The River Between (1965) to Matigari
(1987), the element of historical invention has not been
adequately explored. The element of historical invention
could provide a useful point of entry into Ngugi’s concept of
history, particularly when one bears in mind Ngugi’s stated
commitment to presenting ‘true’ images of Africa’s past as a
counter to ‘false’ colonial portrayals of the continent (Ngugi
1972, pp. 39–46).
This book seeks to look beyond the current state of criticism
which has failed to locate Ngugi’s texts within the contested
terrain of Kenya’s historiography.1 Critics have been content
to take their image of Africa from the literature itself and then
praise the literature for its ‘truth’ or lack of it without trying
Introduction 3
to understand the nuances underpinning the alternative

histories embedded in these texts. If Ngugi sets out to offer an
alternative picture – ‘the true image of Africa’ – then we need
to enquire into the ‘truth’ of his picture in order to avoid the
temptation to erase the problematics and contradictory
meanings of his texts.
The need to rethink Ngugi’s texts in the light of new
experiences and theoretical insights is desirable if we want to
enrich the production of knowledges in Africa. The call for
rereading Ngugi’s texts does not imply that the ‘first’ readings
were entirely useless or even irrelevant. In this book I
anticipate the kind of interrogation that would bring to the
surface certain things that may have been taken for granted
due to a number of factors, for example, the trend closely
associated with the ‘new criticism’ which tends to isolate the
text from its social and historical setting. A literary text at its
best, we are told, should express some timelessness, which
could be demonstrated even if one ignores time and
specificity. But of particular interest to me is the now well
rehashed debate around the literature/history couplet in
which literature is seen as the signifier and history the
signified. This approach, which privileges history as the
source of literature, tends to overemphasise literature’s
fictiveness and to delete its historical and political relevance.
The fundamentals of this argument are that literature and
history belong to different spheres of being in which history
is regarded as more basic and ‘“more real” ... than the domain
of textual representations’ (Bennet 1990, p. 42). The effect of
this dualistic ontology, Tony Bennet writes, ‘is to privilege
history as both the literature’s source and its ultimate referent’
(p. 42). In other words, ‘literature always constitutes the
phenomenon to be explained just as surely as history provides
the means of explanation; no other ordering of their relations
is imaginable’ (p. 42). Ultimately, the explanatory power or
even the epistemological usefulness of literature depends on
how close it approximates the historical truth which is its
ultimate referent. Thus ‘the political effects and value of
literary texts are assessed on the basis of the position accorded
them in relation to the independently known history’ (p. 42)

which is assigned the status of their ultimate referent.
I take the view that fiction is a representation of history.
And to the extent that both history and fiction deploy
narrative structure, Mink writes, they can both be seen as ‘a
primary and irreducible form of human comprehension, an
article in the constitution of common sense’ (1978, p. 132).
For this reason, narrative has increasingly come to be regarded
as a type of explanation and a form of knowledge as forceful
as so-called ‘scientific knowledge’ (White 1987, p. xi; Mink
1978, p. 133). White makes much the same point when he
argues that the historical text is necessarily a literary artefact
because the process of creative imagination involves the
writer of fiction as much as it does the historian.2
The point is that both fiction and history, while having
marked differences, also share vast similarities. Both history
and literature invoke the principle of selection and derive
their material from specific cultures and historical
experiences. According to Tony Bennet, ‘History does not
supply a key with which to unlock the meaning of the literary
text, nor does the latter function merely as a particular route
into the study of a history conceived as a set of realities
outside its own boundaries’ (1990, p. 71), but rather, the
literary text should be seen as part of the wider historiography
in its own right. Most critics desist from treating Ngugi’s texts
as part of Kenya’s historiography. I am hoping that this book
will reassert Ngugi’s narrative within the contested terrain of
Kenya’s historiography.
What, then, is the substance of Ngugi’s historical
invention? Has it remained consistent throughout his works?
How does Ngugi’s idea of history influence the choices of
narrative strategies he makes in his novels? These are some of
the issues I seek to explore in this introduction and the
chapters that follow. A closer look at Ngugi’s works will reveal
that they are contingent, in many ways, on the sociopolitical
climate of Kenya at the time of their creation. Ian Glenn has
made this point in an interesting if problematic article3 which
attempts to relate the deep structures of Ngugi’s novels to the
ambiguous position of the ‘elite’ in independent Africa.
However, this point notwithstanding, I would suggest that
Introduction 5
to have a nuanced understanding of Ngugi’s texts one has to

grapple more closely with the intellectual climate – the
pertinent issues and debates – within which his novels were
located at the time of their writing.
Nationalism, Ethnicity and Individualism

In Ngugi’s earlier texts one is forced to grapple with the
notion of nationalism and other related issues such as
ethnicity and individualism that confronted the African
writers in their attempt to define the new nation-state and,
more importantly, to give an alternative African historiogra-
phy. The bedrock of this new African historiography was
nationalism: what Frederick Cooper has described as an
attempt to ‘put together “Africa” in the face of general
perceptions of everlasting and immutable divisions’ (1994,
p. 1519), or what Edward Said defines as ‘an assertion of
belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the
home created by a community of language, culture and
customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to prevent
its ravages’ (1984, p. 162).
If we accept for a moment that Ngugi’s earlier texts are
linked to the problematic of the nationalist discourse of the
early 1960s and beyond, then we need to interrogate the
notion of nationalism by drawing on the work of certain
theorists who have reconceptualised nationalism.4 The major
point of this reconceptualisation has been to stress the
inventive nature of nationalist ideologies rather than the
organic, ‘natural’ explanations which nationalism tradition-
ally gives to itself. This process of invention is of course highly
contradictory and I will attempt to argue that Ngugi’s earlier
texts were written in just such an ambiguous moment of
national invention and that the texts bear the imprints of
these contradictions.
Manufacturing Nationalism and the East African

Experience
Recent scholarship has pointed to the close link that exists
between the notion of the nation and the book. Benedict
Anderson, for example, has focused on the development of

print language as a primary terrain in which the idea of the
nation is constituted: ‘these forms (the novel and the
newspaper) provided the technical means for “re-presenting”
the kind of imagined community that is the nation’ (1983,
p. 30). The idea of the nation, as Anderson stresses, emerged
when print capitalism provided a medium to establish a
bounded identity. As early as 1972, Ali Mazrui made a similar
point in Cultural Engineering and Nation Building in East Africa
when he drew attention to the close link between cultural
engineering and the printed word. Mazrui was both validating
and reinforcing literature’s role in nationalism. Mazrui was by
no means a lone voice on this issue in East Africa because
many others entered the debate on how to manufacture a
suitably nationalistic literature for East African countries.
Taban lo Liyong, for example, talked of a ‘literary barrenness’
in East Africa and argued that a nation without writers is a
dying nation (1969, pp. 23–42).
Whether we agree with lo Liyong’s infamous statement is
beside the point. The point is that certain people felt there
was a lack of appropriate literature that could give some
substance to the idea of East African nations. Ngugi – studying
in Makerere, editor of Penpoint, author of several short stories
and working in drama – was no doubt centrally involved in
these debates. Much of his thinking was coloured by an
orthodox nationalism and he saw the writer as having a
socially prominent role in the formation of the nation.
Writers, he said, ‘are the herald of a new awareness of the
emergent Africa’ (quoted in Lindfors 1981, p. 30). However,
his nationalist orientation, like that of others, was shot
through with contradictions. On the most obvious level
elements of his Christianity and liberal individualism cut
across his sentiments on nationalism and the writer’s role
within it (Ngugi 1972, p. 32). At a subtle level, Ngugi, like
many nationalists in the colonies, was also caught up in the
colonial definitions of nationalism. He was implicated in
what was ‘a derivative discourse’: the nation-centred
nationalism rooted in the kind of modernist politics that
eventually had a major influence on the colonies, focusing on
the European-defined boundaries and institutions, and on
Introduction 7
notions of progress shaped by capitalism and European social

thought. But he saw ethnicity as a major stumbling block to
the creation of a nation.
To look from the tribe to a wider concept of human

association is to be progressive. When this begins to
happen, a Kenyan nation will be born. It will be an
association, not of different tribal entities, but of
individuals, free to journey to those heights of which they
are capable. Nationalism, by breaking some tribal shells,
will be a help. But nationalism should not in turn become
another shackle. Nor should it be the end. The end should
be man ultimately freed from fear, suspicion and parochial
attitudes: free to develop and realise his full creative
potential. (Ngugi 1972, p. 24)
Ngugi, then, like many others in the early 1960s, was

grappling with the issues of ethnicity, individualism and
nationalism, uneasy bedfellows at the best of times.
And yet, Ngugi’s nationalist discourse is not entirely a
European derivative, but the kind that gestures equally
towards what the Indian scholar, Partha Chatterjee, calls ‘a
“modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western’
because it is located in a spiritual domain set outside colonial
economy and statecraft (1993, p. 6). Chatterjee argues that
Indian nationalism was janus-faced: looking both backward
and forward at the same time. As a result it was neither willing
to repudiate tradition nor to condemn those elements of
colonialism from which it benefited. Ngugi’s reconstruction
of Agikuyu nationalism around the Agikuyu myth of creation,
while at the same time embracing modernist notions of
progress and development in his earlier texts, lends credence
to Chatterjee’s argument. These issues clearly form the
foundation of Ngugi’s earlier novels: The River Between, Weep
Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat. To an extent, they continue
to be of serious thematic concern in his subsequent novels in
English and Gikuyu: Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross and
Matigari. Chatterjee, for example, concludes by making a
distinction between elite nationalism as a gradualist attempt
at change as opposed to the more radical ‘war of movement’,
a distinction that Ngugi appears to be making in his latter

novels. In the following chapters, I will explore Ngugi’s earlier
novels as texts written under the shadow of nationalism,
whose creation involved a process of invention which was
both contradictory and ambiguous. They were texts born in
the throes of the problematic nationalist discourse of the early
1960s. The texts bear the scars of these contradictions and
complex imaginings of nationalism.
The Postcolonial Phase

More recently, Ngugi wa Thiong’o has argued for a ‘radical’
reinterpretation of Kenya’s history. The thrust of his argument
is that Kenya’s history has been distorted by the colonial
writers and Kenya’s professional or guild historians, trained
and schooled in Western critical modes of thought.5 At the
heart of Ngugi’s thesis is his contention that Kenya’s working
people, the workers and peasants, are marginalised, if not
totally ignored, in the country’s narrative history. Ngugi,
therefore, seeks to intervene and to salvage the history of the
subaltern6 from the ruins of colonial plunder. Ngugi’s inter-
vention in this process of history-making, to use Cooper’s
words, strives to ‘recover the lives of people who are forgotten
in narratives of global exploitation and national mobilisation’
(1994, p. 1516), all of which calls into question the very
narratives themselves, indeed, the theoretical frameworks,
and the subject positions of the colonialist and Kenyan
historians implicated in the project. Ngugi’s engagement with
them is unequivocal, particularly in his novel, Petals of Blood:
For there are many questions in our history which remain

unanswered. Our present day historians, following on
similar theories yarned out by defenders of imperialism,
insist we only arrived here yesterday. Where went all the
Kenyan people who used to trade with China, India, Arabia
long long before Vasco da Gama came to the scene and on
the strength of gunpowder ushered in an era of blood and
terror and instability – an era that climaxed in the reign of
imperialism over Kenya? But even then these adventures of
Portuguese mercantilism were forced to build Fort Jesus,
Introduction 9
showing that Kenyan people had always been ready to

resist foreign control and exploitation. The story of this
heroic resistance: who will sing it? Their struggles to defend
their land, their wealth, their lives: who’ll tell of it? What
of their earlier achievements in production that had
annually attracted visitors from China and India? (Ngugi
1977, p. 67)
Clearly, Ngugi rejects those historical archives akin to the

West; he privileges resistance as the key plot element in African
history; and he insists that the metanarrative of the nationalist
victory has to be revised and reconstituted as the story of
workers and peasants – history from below. Ngugi, to use
Frederick Cooper’s argument, takes the path many African
scholars have taken by putting ‘more emphasis on showing
that Africans had history than on asking how Africans’ history-
making was implicated in establishing or contesting power’
(Cooper 1994, p. 1528). For Ngugi, Kenyan history should be
about the struggles of the subaltern, their resistance to colonial
and neocolonial domination in the postcolonial state. This
struggle crystallised itself in the Mau Mau anticolonial war, a
struggle which should continue to inspire new resolves for
freedom and dignity in Kenya’s post-independence period. It
is the narrative of the marginalised, Ngugi avers, which
Kenya’s pioneer historians like Ogot, Were, Muriuki and
Ochien’g have suppressed.
And yet, can one safely argue that Ngugi has a monopoly
over what constitutes Kenya’s history simply because he
privileges the history of the subaltern? Does not the
privileging of one form of history also entail the suppression
of another? To raise these questions is to ask questions of
theoretical approaches to historical meaning: they are
questions about the politics of historical interpretation. But
they are also questions about the complexity of the
theoretical perspective a writer adopts and how that choice
enhances or limits his or her grasp of the subject under
scrutiny.
The view taken in this book is that one can best understand
history by exploring the politics of interpretation that inform
a specific historical subject or phenomenon. Here I lean on
Hayden White’s thesis that the significance of any historical

narrative lies squarely in the politics that inform the inter-
pretation of that subject and that ‘interpretation presupposes
politics as one of the conditions of its possibility as a social
activity’ (1987, p. 59). White’s point is that historical appre-
hension is guided by specific interests that a given historical
interpretation ultimately serves: ‘Everyone recognizes that
the way one makes sense of history is important in
determining what politics one will credit as realistic,
practicable, and socially responsible’ (p. 73). In other words,
there is no interpretation that is value free and, indeed, there
can never be one interpretation of an historical subject. This
does not mean, however, that every interpretation is adequate
once the politics behind it have been established; one needs
to explore the possibilities and the limits offered by a given
interpretation or framework in exploring complex layers of
knowledge.
Tracing Ngugi’s Ideological Shift and Politics of

Interpretation
What, then, is the possible nature of the politics behind
Ngugi’s interpretation of Kenyan history? How do we account
for Ngugi’s radical shift in his representation of Kenyan
history in his postcolonial novels?7 We can begin to account
for Ngugi’s ideological shift in terms of his biographical
development. His exposure to the works of Marx and Fanon
and the influence of a cohort group of African scholars while
he was at Leeds University has been well documented.8
Reading Fanon, in particular, must have transformed Ngugi’s
views on a number of issues, ranging from violence for
liberation to the nature of neocolonialism. Fanon’s criticism
of the national bourgeoisie and his prediction of their
neocolonial mentality find echoes in the postcolonial novels
of Ngugi, as does Fanon’s embracing of violence as a cardinal
imperative in the decolonization process. Fanon’s notion of
the ‘native poet’ as the custodian of national culture and as
educator is frequently echoed in Ngugi’s essays (1972; 1981a).
But Ngugi was also influenced by the changes that were
taking place in the Kenyan body politic following indepen-
Introduction 11
dence. The political scenario after independence was fraught

with fears and frustrations, and disillusionment with Uhuru.
As early as 1966, Ngugi’s bitterness was beginning to show. In
a note to A Grain of Wheat he observes: ‘But the situation and
the problems are real – sometimes too painfully real for
peasants who fought the British yet who now see all that they
fought for being put to one side.’
That Ngugi was increasingly frustrated by the new African
government that could not deliver became abundantly clear
(Ngugi 1981b). Like many of his contemporaries, Ngugi was
beginning to suspect that for the national bourgeoisie (used
loosely here to mean the African ruling class), independence
did not entail fulfilling the fundamental promises the
nationalist elite had made at the height of nationalism. As the
historian Frederick Cooper observes,
African novelists were the first intellectuals to bring before

a wide public inside and outside the African continent
profound questions about the corruption within postcolo-
nial governments and the extent to which external
domination persisted. Growing disillusionment made
increasingly attractive the theories of ‘underdevelopment’,
which located the poverty and weaknesses of ‘peripheral’
societies not in the colonial situation but in the more long-
term process of domination within a capitalist world
system. (1994, p. 1524)
Besides, the 1970s were marked by major debates on the

nature of Kenya’s political economy, and these were primarily
within the related theoretical frameworks of dependency and
underdevelopment. These debates sought to explain Kenya’s
political and economic predicament by linking colonial trans-
formations and postcolonial development strategies.
Two major studies set the tone for the debate. E. A. Brett’s
Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa (1973) and
Colin Leys’s Underdevelopment in Kenya (1974) spelt out the
broad outlines of the underdevelopment and dependency
perspectives, as well as their empirical manifestations in the
context of Kenya’s development processes. Focusing on the
effects of colonial rule on economic change in Kenya, Brett
(1974, pp. 302–9) noted how colonialism catalysed Kenya’s

absorption into the world capitalist system while fostering
economic measures that resulted in an imbalanced
development.
Leys characterised Kenya’s emergent economy as a
neocolonial one with numerous structural constraints. He
argued that Kenya’s blend of neocolonialism was rooted in
the transition from colonialism to independence, a transition
which resulted in the transfer of political power to a regime
based on the support of social classes closely linked to foreign
capital. On the question of the evolution of an indigenous
social class capable of spearheading national development,
Leys noted that a middle class of educated Africans and new
property owners became the core of the nationalist
movement during the later phase of the colonial period. Yet
this emerging class was unable to lead the socioeconomic
transformation after independence because of its subordina-
tion to settler and international interests (Leys 1974).
The influence of Brett’s and Leys’s analyses of Kenya’s
political economy is evident in Ngugi’s texts. For one, they
reinforced Fanon’s thesis on ‘the pitfalls of national con-
sciousness’ whose reading, Ngugi argued, was central to the
understanding of African literature (Ngugi 1986, p. 63).
Meanwhile, on Ngugi’s recommendation, Fanon’s The
Wretched of the Earth, Lenin’s ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage
of Capitalism’ and Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
were compulsory reading in the literature department at
Nairobi University.9 All these books point to underdevelop-
ment and dependency perspectives which Ngugi has
passionately embraced since his days in Leeds. These per-
spectives continue to inform his texts, whether in Gikuyu or
English.
Finally, I need to add that the continued existence of
poverty and inequality in the postcolonial Kenyan society
forced Ngugi to look back into history for a radical tradition,
particularly after the banning of the Kenya People’s Union
(KPU), the only popular voice of the marginalised group in
Kenya at the time (Furedi 1989, pp. 211–13). Fired by his
admiration for Fanon’s theory of ‘revolutionary violence’,
Mau Mau was a sure source of instant inspiration for Ngugi;
Introduction 13
it became the central link in the tradition of struggle among

the subaltern and seems to be at the heart of Ngugi’s sense of
history in all his narratives.
The thrust of my argument in the chapters that follow is
that, whereas in the earlier novels Ngugi captures the moral
complexity of the historic war, in the later works the Mau
Mau war is singularly seen as the ultimate expression of
Kenya’s anticolonial struggle – a class war against the
colonising oppressor. It is the continuation of this war that
Ngugi dramatises in his postcolonial novels. While in the
earlier novels Ngugi expresses the possibilities of a syncretic
culture, in the later novels he displays utter hostility towards
anything deemed Western. In the postcolonial novels there is
an increasing commitment to political, and more specifically
Marxist ideals. The portrayal of heroes in Ngugi’s postcolonial
novels, for example, contrasts sharply with his portrayal of
heroes in the first three novels. In the earlier novels Ngugi
brings out the moral dilemma that confronts his heroes in
their efforts to reconcile two antagonistic social groups in
their society. If reconciliation, both to oneself and to
community, is central to the structural organisation of the
texts in the earlier novels, class conflict is central to the organ-
isation of the later texts. If in the earlier novels character
portrayal draws our attention to the complexity of issues
raised in the narrative, in the later novels Ngugi tends towards
a more mechanistic allegorising in which human and social
issues are articulated through a linear representation of
characters and history.
In the first chapter, I draw a sharper link and contrast
between Ngugi’s earlier works and the more contemporary
works dealing directly with the independence period. I have
used his response to the nationalist imaginings of the 1960s
as a way of probing into the vexed historical representations
in his works. I also locate his radical shift in the representa-
tion of Kenyan history in the 1970s and beyond in the
sociohistorical debates of the period. Chapter 2 traces the
changing nature of Ngugi’s allegory and makes the point that
there has been a major shift from the complex allegorising
that we find in his earlier novels to the more traditionalist
articulation of allegory as simple-minded in the postcolonial
texts. The third chapter attempts to examine the narrative

shifts from the more realistic modes of characterisation in the
earlier novels to the overdetermined character types that we
tend to associate with his more recent texts. The fourth
chapter explores Ngugi’s experimentation with popular forms
as a major aspect of his new regime of ‘decolonising’ fiction.
The focus is on the interface between orality and the written
forms. The chapter attempts to show that although Ngugi’s
recourse to oral forms is more pronounced in his works,
originally written in Gikuyu, his earlier novels have always
been rooted in both popular mythology – the popular forms
of the Agikuyu – and a fusion of modern Western
conventions of writing. The fundamental difference between
the two phases is that Ngugi anticipates differnt audiences at
each phase. Chapter 5 traces Ngugi’s treatment of gender
relations in his texts and argues that romantic relationships
act as major allegorical tropes in all his novels. The chapter
explores how Ngugi relates these romantic relationships to
the broader social concerns in his narrative. The radical shift
in Ngugi’s treatment of gender relations will be compared to
his relatively more conservative readings of gender relations
in the earlier novels. Finally, Chapter 6 focuses on Ngugi’s
portrayal of heroes, the marginalised groups and the
community. I argue that Ngugi’s portrayal of the community
has tended to parallel his ideological convictions and shifts
over the years. What is of interest here is how Ngugi
negotiates the delicate balance between the individual and
the community, the hero and the collective.
1
Ngugi’s Concept of History
The Contradictions of Imagining the Nation in Earlier

Works
In the early 1960s, when Ngugi was writing, the relationship
between ethnicity and nationalism was clearly a vexed one.
For one, the site for constituting the nation lay in recon-
structing the past. But if one turned to history it had of
necessity to be ethnic, an area of experience at which many
writers tended to look with disdain. Alternatively, attempts to
resolve this issue would seem to have involved the unwitting
adoption of an anthropologically evolutionist position which
posited ethnic polities as an earlier form of social organisation
that would wither into the modern state.1 Ngugi at this time
clearly felt some irritation with the manifestations of
ethnicity: ‘To live on the level of race or tribe is to be less
than whole. In order to live, a chick has to break out of the
shell shutting it out from the light’ (Ngugi 1972, p. 23).
Ngugi’s ideas on ‘community’ and African socialism did not
make his case any better because these two became another
terrain in which the ‘tribe’ and the nation could meld:
The traditional concept of the African community should

not be forgotten in our rush for western culture and
political institutions which some regard as the ready-made
solution to our problems. In the African way, the
community serves the individual. And the individual finds
the fullest development of his personality when he is
working in and for the community as a whole. Land, food
and wealth is for the community. In this community,
culture belongs to all. For the rich and the poor, the foolish
and the wise are all free to participate in the national life of
the community in all its manifestations. Perhaps that is
15
what some have meant when they talk of African socialism.

If so it is a worthy ideal. (Ngugi 1972, p. 25)
Ngugi’s early novels, particularly The River Between, carry the

ambiguities and contradictions that he is struggling to grapple
with in the above passages. The construction of the Agikuyu
community is, not surprisingly, complex and contradictory.
On the most obvious level the community is meant to have
an anthropological feel to it. Words like ‘custom’, ‘ancient’,
‘traditions’, ‘tribe’ and ‘ritual’ abound and immediately create
some anthropological texture. The precolonial history of the
polity is constituted almost exclusively through a religious
myth of origin and the whole issue of ‘tribal tradition’ is
collapsed into one single institution – circumcision, which is
seen as a fulcrum of the community. The influence of
Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, which Ngugi has described as
‘a living example of ... integrative culture’ (Ngugi 1972, p. 7),
is most evident here. Kenyatta makes a meal out of Agikuyu
female circumcision and it is significant that the plot of The
River Between, which centres around the Agikuyu history of
the 1920s and 1930s, crystallises around the Protestant
mission’s opposition to female circumcision.
Another meaning of ethnicity in the text emerges from
Ngugi’s attempt to portray the community as an anachronis-
tic, ossified force. In the opening chapter of the novel, the two
communities in the novel are heavily associated with
geography in a way that is almost geological: the two ridges
on which the communities live are like ‘sleeping lions which
never woke. They just slept, the big deep sleep of their
Creator’ (Ngugi 1972, p. 1). Related to this strand is the
constant emphasis on the secretiveness of ‘the tribe’ which is
constituted by a ‘secret language of the hills’, by unspecified
‘tribal secrets’ and ‘hidden things’. This mysteriousness is
transposed onto the shadowy Kiama and its penultimate
showdown with Waiyaki (Chapter 23); the constant emphasis
on murkiness is transposed onto the organisation and the
‘tribalism’ that it represents. On one level, then, ethnicity
signifies anthropological curiosity and obsolescence, a strand
of meaning which incorporates Kabonyi and Kiama who
refuse to heed the calls of the ‘modernisers’, act with impure
Ngugi’s Concept of History 17
motive and favour a type of ‘backward-looking primary

resistance’ in an age of ‘modernisation’. This model of
inward-looking nationalism arguably owes something to a
brand of early 1960s African historiography associated with
people like Robinson and Gallagher (see Ranger 1968,
pp. 437–8).
And yet, the tensions associated with ethnicity and its
meaning are numerous. Ethnicity must bear the weight of
being ossified and backward-looking; it must also refract a
sentimentalised construction of precolonial society as an
organic whole. And finally, ethnicity in certain parts must
stand for itself and the nation simultaneously. This strand of
investing the ‘tribe’ with the meaning of the nation is perhaps
not pronounced but is mediated obliquely.
In addition, an implied familiarity with the landscape (‘The
two ridges’ rather than ‘two ridges’) and certain specified geo-
graphical markers can be read to signify ‘nationness’.
However, this is not without its contradictions and the
narrator, for example, vacillates between an implied
familiarity with the landscape and acting as a guide to a
foreign reader: ‘Unless you are careful, you could easily lose
your way in the hills’ (Ngugi 1965, p. 8). This narrative duality
can, I think, be related back to the contradiction of ethnicity
as anthropological curiosity and the ethnic polity as partial
metaphor for the nation. However, this myth of origin, as we
shall see in Ngugi’s later texts, is replaced by the imagery of
dispossession, of loss, of landlessness, of longing for the ‘lost
lands’ to be restored. In later texts Mau Mau becomes a major
symbol around which the various aspects of Kenyan history
cohere.
With regard to nationalism, the depiction is more complex
than that of ethnicity. In the opening chapter of the novel,
alongside portrayals of the ossified ethnic polity, we are
presented with glimpses of the ‘proto-nationalists’, those who
seek to shake off the claustrophobic secrecy of the ‘tribe’ in
favour of some wider social aggregate. In a brief historical
pageant, we are presented with Mugo wa Kibiro, a ‘great
Agikuyu seer of old’, Kamiri, the sorcerer and Wachiori, ‘a
great warrior’ (Ngugi 1965, p. 2). These belong to the select
band of people who ‘went out. Those who had the courage to
look beyond their present content to a life and land beyond,

were the select few sent by Murungu to save a people in their
hour of need’ (p. 3). But it is also made clear that these
messiahs will not be hailed in their own time and will instead
be given short shrift by the people of the ‘ancient’, ‘isolated’,
‘sleeping’ ridges. This line of proto-nationalists includes
Chege, Waiyaki’s father, and his prophecies about the
corrosive effects of colonialism will also be ignored. This
lineage of outward-looking men gets its fullest realisation in
Waiyaki, the fully-fledged, youthful, nationalist protagonist.
His credentials as a nation-builder lie in the language that he
speaks which is that of the 1960s ‘moderniser’: education,
unity, advancement, growth, development, patriotism, high
ideals, reconciliation, tolerance, enlightenment, mission and
vision are the words that form the backbone of his lexicon.
The bright boy of Siriana, meeting people from other parts of
Kenya, he is the ideal embodiment of the nation. And yet
Waiyaki has of necessity to be constituted through a series of
ambiguities and ambivalences. On the one hand, he
embodies a type of pure nationalism: ‘Kinuthia [his friend]
was convinced that Waiyaki was the best man to lead people,
not only to a new light through education, but also to new
opportunities and areas of self-expression through political
independence’ (p. 118). Part of this project involves an
attempt to escape or free himself from the ‘ritual demand of
the tribe’ (p. 121), while another part entails an endeavour to
try and modernise the ‘tribe’ through education. On the other
hand, Waiyaki has to try and inscribe his nationalism with
some vestige of ethnicity and his attempts to do so are
couched in the following terms: ‘A people’s traditions could
not be swept away overnight. That way lay disintegration.
Such a tribe would have no roots, for a people’s roots were in
their traditions going back to the past, the very beginning,
Gikuyu and Mumbi’ (p. 141). Waiyaki, in attempting to
articulate the essence of the ethnic ‘tribe’, can only do so in
nationalist terms of a myth of origin.
Evidently, Ngugi’s maiden text, The River Between, was
written under the shadow of nationalism whose creation
involved a process of invention which was both contradictory
and ambiguous. It was a text born in the throes of the

problematic nationalist discourse of the early 1960s. The text
bears the scars of these contradictions. For example, there are
two compelling historical omissions which relate directly to
the writer’s attempts to give a picture of an organic and united
ethnic community, threatened by a foreign force. The first
omission relates to the independent school movement which
fell under two broad organisational umbrellas: Kikuyu
Independent Schools Association and the Kikuyu Karing’a
(Pure) Educational Association. The movement began in the
early 1920s and formed part of a more general response to a
variety of pressures that were making themselves felt in
Agikuyu societies. On the one hand, colonial tax and labour
demands sharpened drastically as the colonial state
intervened to reconstruct settler agriculture which up until
the end of the First World War had been a rather ramshackle
affair. On the other hand, many ordinary Agikuyu faced
growing landlessness as the chiefly class of Agikuyu notables
consolidated their land holdings, often at the direct expense
of their tenants. Various political organisations capitalised on
this discontent and these movements had links with the
independent school associations. These associations directed
their attention specifically to mission education and by their
separatist strategies attempted to focus on and remedy the
quantitative and qualitative shortcomings of church
schooling (see Anderson 1970, Chapter 8; Ranger 1965,
pp. 55–85).
But exactly what is the substance of Ngugi’s historical
deviation? His deviation lies in the fact that the novel
contains not a single reference to an independent church
movement. And yet any account of the period will tell you
that independent school movements invariably went hand in
hand with an independent church grouping. The relation-
ship between the two was always complex but seemed to
hinge around a symbiosis: a church could attract schoolgoers
and a school, church members. In addition, the independent
churches could provide an avenue for advancement which
white-dominated mission institutions blocked. The
independent churches attracted a large-scale popular
following and have remained an important feature of Kenya’s

socioreligious landscape (Gertzel et al. 1969).
The second omission in the text concerns the depiction of
Agikuyu society, which is highly artificial. Throughout the
novel it is their isolation that is stressed and one of the
Kiama’s aims is to protect this insularity. In addition, the
populace of the novel constitutes a subsistence society that
does not seem to trade and there is only one brief mention of
Indian traders. This isolation does bear some resemblance to
Kenyan history and, through its broad outline, Ngugi was
probably attempting to capture the relative lateness and
suddenness of British colonisation since the Agikuyu, unlike
societies further south, did not experience centuries of
European contact through slave and ivory trades. All this
notwithstanding, to posit an isolated community in the
Central Highlands of the 1920s is noteworthy, particularly
when one bears in mind that up until 1918, 75 per cent of
export commodities and produce was produced by peasants
(Brett 1973, p. 176). The second reinterpretation involves the
sociological texture of the community which in the text
appears to be entirely homogenous. As pointed out above,
the Agikuyu community by the 1920s was becoming increas-
ingly stratified as intruding settler agriculture and colonial
administration exacerbated precolonial patterns of
landholders and tenants.
It is in his next two novels, Weep Not, Child and A Grain of
Wheat, that Ngugi manages to resolve some of the nationalist
contradictions that are most manifest in The River Between.
Although Ngugi’s abhorrence of ethnicity remains a major
subtext in the two novels, the nature of his historical
invention is more nuanced than it is in The River Between. In
both texts Ngugi is at pains to foreground the necessity for
struggling towards a Kenyan nation without either falling
back on some organic ethnic community or deleting histories
of conflict and difference among the Agikuyu community.
For texts that revolve around land alienation and the Mau
Mau war, it is significant that Ngugi uses ethnicity more as a
template for his nationalist imaginings rather than as a
negative force that must be obliterated.
The texts still revolve around the Agikuyu myth of origin as

founder of the Agikuyu nation. Land, which is at the heart of
the struggle in the two texts, was designated by God,
Murungu, to the Agikuyu founders: Gikuyu and Mumbi. If
political freedom in Kenya became synonymous with repos-
session of the land, the spiritual and moral justification for
this quest for freedom lies in the fact that this land is linked
to the spiritual right of the people, the Agikuyu. The land was
God-given; it was entrusted to them by their legendary
ancestors as a form of covenant between God and his people.
If the Agikuyu from time immemorial have used land as a
rallying symbol and a metaphor for cohesion between the
living and the dead, now Ngugi posits land as a metaphor for
change and conflict. With the advent of colonialism, land
which hitherto united the Agikuyu now divides them.
Although they are convinced that the land has to be
recovered, they are divided by the means of recovery. The
fundamental question confronting a nationalist writer like
Ngugi is how one invents a nationalist history in the face of
divisions engendered by colonialism? How does one begin to
imagine the nation if the very vehicle for its foundational
unity, land, now divides the nation? In fact, how does one
articulate the ambivalent relationship between land,
ethnicity, individualism and nationalism?
To begin with, the strand of inward-looking ethnicity that
we find in The River Between, chiefly represented in the Kiama,
is almost deleted in Weep Not, Child. Instead we are presented
with the Agikuyu community in the throes of change; it is a
society in turmoil and conflict. Divided, as it were, between
the settler colonialists and the natives, the homeguards and
the ahoi (squatters), Ngugi’s basic dilemma is how to
constitute a purely nationalist discourse in the face of these
divisions. Of course the easy way out is to repress the divisions
and to gesture towards a unitary Kenyan nation in keeping
with the nationalist discourses of the 1960s. This option is so
real and tempting that once again Ngugi resorts to the image
of the ‘modern’ nationalist builder and its lexicon – a portrait
almost reminiscent of Waiyaki. Just as in The River Between,
the school in Weep Not, Child continues to provide the neutral
space for imagining the nation and the young Njoroge and
Mwihaki are its most striking icons. Both in their language

and vision they gesture towards a future Kenyan nation free
of strife, ethnic divisions and even racial hatred. The school
for Ngugi is a microcosm of diversity, peace and the ideal
nation: ‘Njoroge at times wished the whole school was like
this. This seemed a little paradise, a paradise where children
from all walks of life and of different religious faiths could
work together without any consciousness. Many people
believed the harmony in the school came because the
headmaster was a strange man who was severe with everyone,
black and white’ (Ngugi 1964, p. 115).
The significance of the school for Njoroge lies in the fact
that it can bring together people of diverse backgrounds and
cultures: the ahoi and the homeguards; the settler and the
native. For Ngugi the school, a colonialist institution in the
form of education, could be appropriated in the service of
black freedom. In a significant way, Njoroge continues the
modernist lexicon of Waiyaki – education for liberation – and
like Waiyaki, he ends up dejected and disillusioned because of
the complexity of the moment which cannot be understood
purely in such simplistic terms like unity, sacrifice, education
and progress.
It is in A Grain of Wheat, generally regarded as Ngugi’s most
accomplished novel, that he gives his most complex picture
of the nationalist politics of liberation. Written less than four
years after Kenya’s independence, it is both a novel of anti-
cipation in its historical setting and a novel that draws
attention to the present by interrogating the nationalist meta-
narratives of the triumphal takeover of the nation-state, while
at the same time gesturing towards the future. As Caminero-
Santangelo writes, the text ‘represents the possibility of
betrayal of the ideals and goals of the national liberation
movement by those who have gained power in the newly
independent Kenya, precisely because they are still controlled
by self-interest and by conceptions of social-political relations’
(Caminero-Santangelo 1998, p. 142). Unlike Ngugi’s first two
novels, it deviates from the modernist project embraced by
both Waiyaki and Njoroge. Where education provided the
space for imagining a new Kenyan nation in The River Between
and Weep Not, Child, in A Grain of Wheat the Mau Mau war
becomes the major icon around which national identity has

to be built. In this sense it provides a major link to Ngugi’s
later novels.
The Mau Mau war, the anticolonial struggle, provides
Ngugi with the space to imagine the birth of a new Kenya.
Here, Ngugi also resorts to oral mythology to naturalise the
process. Colonial invasion of Kenya had been prophesied by
the Agikuyu seer of old, Mugo wa Kibiro. The seeds of
nationalist war of liberation also go back into the people’s
history. Warriors led by Waiyaki took up arms during the
primary resistance to colonial penetration, thereby planting
seeds of sacrifice and resistance that would later find their
ultimate expression in the Mau Mau war. Waiyaki is followed
by Harry Thuku who founds the Young Kikuyu Association
which by 1923 had provided the base for broadening the
party into a nationalist movement. By the time Kenyatta
emerges on the scene, the party’s base had broadened and we
are told that the party’s ‘influence stretched from one horizon
touching the sea to the other resting on the great Lake’ (Ngugi
1967, p. 11). In the meeting that Kenyatta was to address, the
writer is at pains to stress that among the speakers, ‘there was
also a Luo speaker from Nyanza showing that the Party had
broken barriers between tribes’ (p. 14). In the same meeting
Kihika talks of ‘the call of a nation in turmoil’ even if it means
going against a brother (p. 15).
In a typical nationalist idiom, Ngugi underscores the
centrality of unity and necessity of sacrifice for a better Kenya.
The notion of sacrifice is embodied in Kihika and, more
importantly, in Ngugi’s endorsement of the Mau Mau violence
– a major shift from the first two texts in which education
provided the neutral space between the forest fighters on the
one hand and the homeguards and the colonial settlers on
the other. The nationalist perspective of the text hinges on
sacrifice, sowing of seeds which would die in order to bear
grain. Indeed, the first two chapters dramatise this sacrifice,
with the ultimate price paid by Kihika: ‘although killed, the
party, however, remained alive and grew, as people put it, on
the wounds of those Kihika left behind’ (Ngugi 1967, pp.
18–19). And although Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat and to an
extent Weep Not, Child draw attention to the grand themes of
a nationalist text par excellence, unity and sacrifice to freedom,

they nevertheless deviate from the orthodox portrayal in a
very fundamental way.
Deviation from the Standard Nationalist Portrayal of

Guerrilla War
While both Weep Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat
acknowledge the sacrifice of many Kenyan heroes and indeed
celebrate it, and while they both gesture towards similar
nationalist projects that The River Between anticipates, they
nevertheless make a radical shift away from the standard
orthodox portrayal of a liberation war. They do this in several
ways. By examining the moral choices that a war of liberation
imposes on people, they are able to show that both sides – the
nationalist fighters and collaborators, blacks and settlers –
confronted difficult moral choices and dilemmas. In terms of
their social ideology the texts do not privilege collective
experience over individual subjectivity, but draw our
attention to how lives of individual characters and groups
were affected by the war of liberation.
In Weep Not, Child, for example, Ngugi is keen to draw
attention to the disruptive nature of a liberation war. The
emergency period is presented as disruptive, not just of the
social structure of the Agikuyu society, but also of the lives of
the colonial settlers, chiefly represented in Howlands. The
war not only affects the ideal African family of Ngotho that
is torn apart, but it also affects the lives of collaborators like
Jacobo. Above all, it is most disruptive of the lives of innocent
children, Njoroge and Mwihaki. And far from being a
unifying phenomenon, the liberation war unleashes new
forces of change. It leads to a realignment of power relations
and shifts in traditional roles and authority. The inaction of
the elders leads to a crisis of authority in Ngotho’s household.
Boro, Ngotho’s son, having lost respect for him, now wants to
administer oath. Ngotho’s intervention and interest in the
Mau Mau war is not entirely motivated by land alienation. He
is primarily motivated by a basic loss of authority brought by
the youthful Mau Mau fighters. He cannot accept oath
administered by his son, Boro. The war thus engenders gen-
erational conflict, thereby shifting the traditional power base

away from the elders to the youth. Ngotho is interested in the
war, only to the extent that it will restore his authority. He is
faced with a moral dilemma: whether to defend his power
base or to follow the younger generation; to capitulate to
their recently acquired authority or to resist. Ironically, even
for Boro, the struggle has been so ugly that he has lost interest
in its recovery. The struggle for land has been so violently
bloody that he has ‘lost too many of those whom [he] loved
for the land to mean much to [him]’ (Ngugi 1964, p. 102). The
violent aspect of the struggle has only served to alienate Boro
further and further away from his family and from its
ultimate goal – land restoration.
In A Grain of Wheat, Ngugi points to the difficulty that one
is likely to encounter in trying to give an historic account of
a liberation war and its effects on ordinary individuals. Here,
again, Ngugi is at his most poignant in drawing attention to
the disruptive nature of war and the moral choices it imposes
on people. In a definite departure from orthodox nationalist
narrative, Ngugi is reluctant to valorise sacrifice and hints at
the fact that the nationalist triumph is in fact a historical
farce. The difficulty of identifying the hero of the novel that
many critics have alluded to points to his reluctance to
celebrate war heroes. Instead he subverts the standard
nationalist ideology of hero worship by giving voice to all
those who are implicated in the struggle, directly or
indirectly. He privileges the voice of the peasants, often
deleted in grand nationalist narratives in favour of the ‘elite’.
Isolated and away from the political rhetoric in Nairobi, the
Mau Mau war becomes for the rural peasants distasteful
because it has failed to deliver. The Uhuru celebrations are
met with apprehension by the peasants of Thabai. Signifi-
cantly, the outcome of the Mau Mau war does not coincide
with the expectations of the peasants. Instead, the narrative
hints directly at the incessant betrayal, almost embedded in
the practice and process of war from its inception. The
individual themes of betrayal translate into political themes
of betrayal. If in the later texts Ngugi seems to isolate patriots
from traitors, in A Grain of Wheat the line between the two is
blurred and the narrative calls for political scepticism and
cynicism towards heroism and hero worship. Retrospection

and introspection, as opposed to uncritical celebration of
triumphant ideologies that marked the history of resistance in
the 1960s, are called for if the dream of a new Kenyan nation
has to be realised. It is for this reason that all characters,
ranging from Gikonyo to Mumbi, Mugo to General R, come
to the realisation that the calamity of the war is real and has
left an indelible mark in their psyche and consequently
everything else is seen through a filter of a disturbed mind –
the very evidence of the ravages of war. Not even the
guerrillas are spared in this retrospection and introspection,
because their atrocities are not disguised. This is the ultimate
historical truth that confronts the young Njoroge in Weep
Not, Child when he remarks: ‘“I thought the Mau Mau was on
the side of the black people” ’ (Ngugi 1964, p. 83).
In A Grain of Wheat Ngugi also deconstructs the primordial
national essence or character which he left unresolved in The
River Between. In the new ‘postcolonial’ Kenyan nation, the
belief that the age of colonialism is over because the British
have left is likely to undermine the interests of a majority of
Kenyans since it will mask the need for resistance against neo-
colonialism. While A Grain of Wheat is certainly concerned
with the effects of underdevelopment under colonialism, the
danger at the moment of decolonisation is that despite the
departure of the British, colonial and capitalist structures and
ideology will continue to shape Kenyans’ perceptions.
Colonialism continues under black colonial masters working
with white settlers and European powers. Kenyans are,
therefore, likely to embrace the colonial structures which will
continue to underdevelop their society. It is this theme of
underdevelopment and dependency syndrome that
dominates Ngugi’s later novels dealing squarely with the post-
colonial state.
The Later Novels

The thrust of Ngugi’s narrative concerns over the last two
decades has been the struggle for Matunda ya Uhuru – the
Fruits of Freedom. It has been a project directed at decolon-
isation, embodying the varied processes of political
independence, national liberation and people’s revolution. It

has been a project focused on the making of democracy – the
struggle for social change in the postcolonial state – and
therefore a useful intervention in the postcolonial discourses
in Kenya.
This section is both a critique and a demonstration of
Ngugi’s sense of history as a major voice in the struggle for
sociopolitical change in the postcolonial state in Kenya. I seek
to demonstrate here that Ngugi’s sense of history is closely
linked to his politics of interpretation – to his political project
vis-à- vis the postcolonial body politic in Kenya – and that his
texts depicting postcolonial Kenya are best understood if
placed against the contradictory flux of postcolonial
discourses in Kenya that I have discussed in the introductory
chapter. It seeks to demonstrate that although Ngugi’s novels
have been perceived largely as discourses on cultural
decolonisation, they involve the quest for a new sociopolitical
order. In this quest, Ngugi foregrounds land as a recurring
economic and political metaphor in the decolonisation
process in Kenya; he critiques the African elite that captured
state power at independence as mere watchdogs of Western
capitalism; and, of course, he raises his pet theme of cultural
imperialism and strategies for the African revolution. A
dialogical reading of Ngugi’s texts, as I will argue with regard
to his later novels, links his concept of history to dependency
theory discourses in Kenya and Fanon’s conceptualisation of
the postcolonial revolution in Africa (Brett 1973; Fanon 1967;
Kitching 1977 and 1980; Langdon 1977 and 1981; Leys 1974).
The silences – the suppressed histories in Ngugi’s texts – are
invariably linked to the tendency within a dependency
framework to suppress local and the more specific social
conflicts in society.
According to Ngugi, the single most important virtue in
traditional African society was common ownership of land
which was worked by all for the common good. When the
white colonialists appropriated the land, conflict and general
suffering ensued. Ngugi’s treatment of these issues suggests
that Kenya’s precolonial history was devoid of any turmoil
and conflict until the advent of colonialism. Thus, one might
deduce that, for Ngugi, the history of conflict in Africa is the
history of colonialism and how it affected the African

populace. Ngugi is therefore at pains to document colonial
injustices in most of his works. In works that deal with the
postcolonial experience, the colonial context always serves
as a major backdrop against which the postcolonial
experiences (read neocolonial) are examined.
The colonial state for Ngugi is always allegorical of the
postcolonial state. The most outstanding image in his
recreation of the colonial and postcolonial experience is land.
Land, for Ngugi, remains an important metaphor for
explicating Kenya’s past and present history in his later
novels. Land is depicted as a metaphor for life; it is a source
of livelihood. Land is both a metaphor for struggle and the
physical space for political contest in virtually all the writer’s
works. A metaphor for flux, land is the agent for social
change and economic mobility: the agent for social transfor-
mation within society. Indeed, the theme of resistance to
and collaboration with the colonial institutions is linked to
this metaphor. Thus the nature of the colonial and
neocolonial experience in Kenya can be understood only
through the contradictory and multiple functions and
conflicts that land generates for Ngugi. The solution to social
conflict is, by implication, only possible when land is shared
and worked by all.
Ngugi’s interest in the plight of the peasantry as a dispos-
sessed group seems to echo Fanon’s understanding of the
peasantry both as the most exploited group and as having
the potential to provide revolutionary change in the post-
colonial state (Fanon 1967, pp. 85–118). It is significant that
Ilmorog, which is both a symbol of land in its most ideal state
– land as communal property and a home of the peasantry –
is one of the major settings of the two novels, Petals of Blood
and Devil on the Cross. And with the advent of colonialism
and capital investment in Ilmorog, we witness economic
deprivation of peasants and workers. They are forced to live
off the slave wages of African landowners and African
businessmen in partnership with multinational companies
that have recently taken over Ilmorog. The deprivation of the
peasants of Ilmorog contrasts sharply with the wealth of
colonial settlers and African farmers. Independence does not
usher in any comfort or economic gains for peasants and

workers; it is the same group of loyalists, otherwise called
‘homeguards’ by Ngugi, that emerges as the beneficiaries of
Uhuru. Ilmorog is, therefore, a physical manifestation of the
contradictory presence of poverty and capital in Kenya. Thus
the ills of the colonial state are simply reproduced in the post-
colonial state. For example, Kimeria, who betrayed Abdulla
and Ndinguri during the Mau Mau war, is the new hero of
political independence. Through Waweru – the landowner –
and his father Brother Ezekiel, Ngugi demonstrates that the
exploitation of deprived peasants and workers becomes a
family business.
The ‘mutilation’ of land by both colonial and postcolonial
oppressor is done through the aid of religious, cultural and
educational institutions which instil and perpetuate mental
slavery of the oppressed and buttress the interests of the
oppressor (Ngugi 1972, p. 31). Christian religion is used to
inflict what Ngugi calls a ‘psychological wound ... on the
whole generation’ (Ngugi 1973, p. xii). Ngugi’s position is
that religion is a tool for oppressing workers. In Petals of Blood,
Waweru is portrayed as a man who propagates Christianity
because it is rewarding to him and his family. Reverend
Waweru is said to have taken refuge in religion at the time of
Kenya’s struggle for independence, denouncing all anticolo-
nial activities such as Mau Mau oathing rituals as the devil’s
work. In addition, cultural and educational institutions are
seen too by Ngugi as tools for mental slavery; they are used to
perpetuate mental captivity in the postcolonial state.
Criticism of naked imitation of Western values is chiefly
represented by the native bourgeoisie in Devil on the Cross.
Here, Kihaahu is a typical example of the alienated black who
aspires to be white in all respects – he changes his name to a
white one. Indeed, Ngugi’s satire on Kenyan bourgeois
attitudes is best expressed by Kihaahu’s nursery school
scheme whose success is associated with everything white
(Ngugi 1982, p. 113).
The love for Western goods reaches a level of absurdity
when Gitutu suggests that they should import air (Ngugi
1982, p. 107). Thus, for the African elite, goods acquire their
true value only if and when they are imported. In this way,
the writer is providing a salient critique of the postcolonial

economy in which the raw materials are exported from the
colonies, manufactured in the West and brought back as
finished products. From Ngugi’s point of view, the national
bourgeoisie is much worse than Fanon’s assessment of them
as entrepreneurial because they are mere consumers helping
to entrench trade imbalances between the poor and the rich
Western countries, while perpetuating the poverty of their
own people. In Petals of Blood, Ngugi depicts the displace-
ment of Abdulla and Wanja of Theng’eta Breweries as a
conspiracy between rich African financiers and their foreign
allies. Ngugi seems to point to a conspiracy between the
African leadership in the postcolonial state and international
capital as the major cause of this cultural and economic
impoverishment. They are a decadent class that perpetuates
contempt for African values.
To recapitulate, Ngugi seems to be suggesting that the
churches, the African leadership, the local and foreign capital
are in an undeclared pact to exploit Kenya’s resources to the
detriment of the poor masses. Ngugi seems to be echoing
Fanon’s critique of the national bourgeoisie as a shallow and
uncreative lot, a class which works at naked imitation of its
European counterpart without helping the lot of the African
masses because it simply cannot sever its links with the
Western bourgeoisie, which it serves. In Devil on the Cross,
Ngugi is apparently dramatising the fate of this class through
the use of the fantastic and the unbelievable by putting on
show characters who boast about their cleverness and their
cunning in the ways in which they steal from the people and
they serve their foreign masters.
But as a response to this deplorable state of affairs in the
postcolonial state in Kenya, Ngugi suggests that workers do
resist the postcolonial leadership’s naked robbery. He does
not just create the possibility of revolt and a revolution, but
demonstrates that Kenya’s history has never been a one-sided
story of the victorious oppressor, but that it has been charac-
terised by heroic resistance of ordinary people. As Karega, the
main protagonist in Petals of Blood, says:
The true lesson of history was this: that the so-called

victims, the poor, the downtrodden, the masses, had always
struggled with their spears and arrows, with their hands
and songs of courage and hope, to end their oppression
and exploitation. (Ngugi 1977, p. 303)
Ngugi reinforces the possibilities of revolt in his creation of

characters who are positively disposed to revolutionary trans-
formation within the society.
But Ngugi’s position in relation to the revolutionary force
in Kenya remains blurred. It is not consistent, as he seems to
shift his opinion in all three novels from the peasants’
political consciousness to the proletariat as the custodians of
the political future. At times, Ngugi seems to be espousing
Fanon’s theory on the role of the peasants as a decisive force
in Ilmorog, exemplified by the march of the Ilmorog peasants
to the city in Petals of Blood.2 And yet he shifts to the
alternative of the trade union as a vehicle for change. Karega
the brewery worker and trade union leader embodies Ngugi’s
shift. After organising with the peasants the march to Nairobi,
he moves on to build a union and organise strikes in the
industrial world, for better wages and better working
conditions.
Ngugi seems to anticipate a socialist revolution through
organised labour. The description of the desperate conditions
of the workers shows that Ngugi moves away from Fanon’s
theory on the urban proletariat as a pampered lot (Fanon
1967, p. 86). He does not, however, create a distinction
between the urban working class and the poorer peasantry. In
Petals of Blood, neither the poor peasantry nor the factory
workers own the means of production, and those who own
some form of business like Wanja and Abdulla are displaced
by big capital.
Ngugi’s message would seem to suggest the formation of a
revolutionary movement consisting of committed intellect-
uals such as Karega and the people, whether they are peasants
or workers in factories. It is this same vision that we find in
Devil on the Cross where Muturi rallies the Ilmorog workers to
invade the Devil’s feast. Muturi also tries to create political
awareness among the workers by organising them to demand
higher pay in Boss Kihara’s company. Apparently, the role of

trade unionism as a tool to build a socialist state appeals to
Ngugi. This would seem to be Ngugi’s primary discourse on
resistance in Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross as reflected
in his portrayal of Karega and Muturi.
In these two novels, the possibility of violent resistance is
an undeveloped sub-text. We have the constant reference to
Mau Mau as the ultimate symbol of national liberation in
Kenya.3 Resistance through armed struggle is pushed further
through a symbolic gesture in the action of Wariinga in
killing Gitahi ‘to save many other people, whose lives will
not be ruined by words of honey and perfume’ (Ngugi 1982,
p. 253). But the theme of violence in Kenya’s history is best
dramatised in Matigari. According to the hero, Matigari, the
oppressor cannot be rooted out without violence (Ngugi 1987,
p. 131). Indeed, Ngugi seems to be suggesting that armed
struggle should supplement trade union resistance. What
Ngaruro wa Kiriro, the worker leader in Matigari, is doing in
organising workers only finds its concrete expression in the
violent attempt by Matigari to win back his house and land,
first taken by Settler Williams and later passed on to John
Boy and family.
Ngugi seems to be saying that the history of the postcolo-
nial state in Kenya is one in which peasants and workers grow
poorer, where women are exploited, where the national
cultures of the people are trampled upon by a powerless
bourgeoisie – alienated to the extent of thinking in terms of
and blindly serving European values. The answer to all these
problems is the concerted struggle of peasant workers through
mass mobilisation, trade union movements and violent
resistance aimed at defeating, as Ngugi himself puts it,
‘imperialism and creat[ing] a higher system of democracy and
socialism in alliance with all the other peoples of the world’
(1986, pp. 29–30).
Suppression and Silences

Ngugi’s understanding of the historical processes in Kenya is
too deeply embedded in dependency theory to allow for a
nuanced understanding of the complex colonial and post-
colonial experience in Kenya. Ngugi’s articulation of Kenyan

history from a dependency theory perspective cannot allow
him to deal with specific contradictions and local divisions
within Kenya, and Ngugi is therefore forced to suppress
certain histories.
What then are these ellipses in Ngugi’s narrative? One of
the major gaps concerns Ngugi’s linear representation of the
Mau Mau as a monolithic nationalist movement devoid of
any contradictions. If the colonialists gave an extremely one-
sided and perhaps an entirely biased historical version of the
Mau Mau war, it would seem to me that Ngugi, in his anxiety
to counter this, has tended to give a wholly romantic picture
of the Mau Mau war. In Ngugi’s postcolonial novels, Mau
Mau is appropriated to legitimise the anti-imperialist struggle
in the postcolonial Kenyan political economy. In the process,
Ngugi gives Mau Mau ‘new’ ideological attributes: it was class-
based in both its aims of eradicating capitalism and
establishing a socialist Kenya; it united all Kenyan peasants
and workers; it was not just a regional revolt, but a nationalist
revolution with a clear vision for the postcolonial state.
In his invention of the Mau Mau, Ngugi presupposes the
existence of a collective consciousness among the peasantry
and the working class in Kenya, the kind of consciousness
that engendered their struggle against colonialism (Ngugi and
Mugo 1976, Preface). Thus, for Ngugi, all Kenyan peasants
and workers had the same nationalist goals in their resistance
to colonial rule, and the same interests continue to inspire
their resistance in the postcolonial state. What we have is a
situation in which the intellectual writer subsumes what may
be local or regional interests of the peasants into national or
class issues.4
For Ngugi, the Mau Mau war was not just a localised anti-
colonial resistance waged by a section of the Agikuyu, but a
national phenomenon and a point at which the schismatic
segments of Kenyan history are summoned and ordered into
a coherent centre. Thus, the ethnic interests and dimensions
are suppressed, and the Mau Mau fighters are given a class
vision. Ngugi is therefore silent on the diverse and often
conflicting layers of consciousness that might have informed
the historic Mau Mau. For example, the Mau Mau songs
testify to their simultaneous commitment to the house of

Mumbi, to the Gods of mount Kerenyaga, to liberating the
land, and also to a future Kenya ruled by Kenyatta (Kinyatti
1980; Kabira and Mutahi 1988). The songs point to layers of
consciousness and complex layers of knowledge about the
Mau Mau that cannot be conflated into a monolithic
narrative of the Mau Mau as Ngugi attempts to do in most of
his works.
The view here is that the production of Mau Mau history
has always fallen within the terrain of power contest
(Odhiambo 1991, pp. 300–7; Cohen 1986, p. 48), and as long
as the contestants continue to appropriate Mau Mau either to
subvert or to legitimise the politics of the day, the image of
Mau Mau can never be as absolute as Ngugi attempts to
present in his narrative. Over the years, the Mau Mau war
has survived as an ambivalent phenomenon in colonial and
postcolonial Kenyan politics. It is a symbol to be appropri-
ated, and at times negated, for political gains.
In this game of political manipulation, the Mau Mau war
veterans have tended to serve sectarian, conservative and
ethnic interests. Kenyatta suppressed the role played by the
Mau Mau fighters on the eve of independence and declared
that all Kenyans fought for Uhuru. In 1966, when Oginga
Odinga broke ranks with Kenyatta and formed an opposition
party, Kenyatta deemed it fit to rally Mau Mau veterans, as the
custodians of the Agikuyu interest, against the perceived
threat from Odinga’s Luo-dominated Kenya Peoples Union
(Furedi 1989, p. 208). When Bildad Kaggia, a former Mau Mau
detainee, joined KPU to help Odinga to articulate the interests
of the Mau Mau guerrillas, especially on the question of land,
he received no support from former guerrillas. Ethnic interest
took precedence (Maloba 1993, p. 175). As recently as 1992,
the current president of Kenya, Daniel Arap Moi, rallied an
estimated 3,000 former Mau Mau fighters against the main
opposition parties fighting for the restoration of democracy.
Ironically, in this shrewd political ploy, Moi, who was
perceived by many as the lackey of the colonial regime,
reaped the spoils of Mau Mau heroism in order to subvert
democracy. In the typical language of Ngugi and wa Kinyatti,
the former guerrillas dismissed certain members of the
opposition as ‘collaborators’ and ‘sons of homeguards’ (The

Weekly Review, 24 July 1992, p. 18).
Another major gap in Ngugi’s narrative is his attempt to
link the conditions of the colonial state with those of the
postcolonial state. Ngugi assumes a linear tradition and
continuity in the anti-imperialist struggle. He contends that
the fight against colonialism and capitalism in post-
independent Kenya is a continuation of the Kenyan people’s
struggle which stretches back to the primary resistance against
colonialism. We are given a glorified picture of the heroic
resistance, by Kenyan peasants, to foreign invasion. Indeed,
this linear approach to historical interpretation also overlooks
the possibility that there may be no link between the militant
nationalist struggles of the 1950s and the anti-imperialist
forces in the post-independence Kenya. And yet, Ngugi seems
to suggest that the same continuity persists in the camp of the
collaborators who seem to reproduce themselves in a
geometric manner right from the colonial period into post-
colonial Kenya.
It seems to me that Ngugi does not succeed in capturing the
ambivalent relationship between the colonial state and the
loyalists. In Ngugi’s texts, there seems to be no tension
between the loyalists, on the one hand, and the colonial state,
on the other. He depicts the relationship as one of mutual
trust and dependence. A good example of this relationship is
Ngugi’s portrayal of Waweru and Ndikita in Petals of Blood
and his treatment of John Boy in Matigari. All the characters
seem to have a linear and unproblematic relationship with
the colonial regime, with their loyalty to the colonial state
being absolute. This relationship of absolute dependence is
best dramatised in Wariinga’s nightmare in which the
colonising devil is crucified upon the cross, and he ends up
being rescued by the local comprador – symbolically
signalling the emergence of neocolonialism (Ngugi 1982,
pp. 13–14).
The story of resistance and collaboration, as portrayed by
Ngugi, has a certain unity of view which lacks precision when
one is searching for a complex interpretation of history. First,
this approach tends to oversimplify the real nature of the
colonial and imperialist context within which the initiatives
of resistance and collaboration by Africans were undertaken.

The impression Ngugi creates is that the choice between col-
laboration and resistance was always a simple one in which
the loyalists were always motivated by sheer economic greed,
while the resisters were motivated by their love for humanity.
Second, Ngugi gives the impression that once one was in the
loyalists’ camp one remained there and ensured that one’s
progeny continued to prosper. There are no grey areas in
Ngugi’s colonial and postcolonial worlds. One is either a
patriot or a traitor. But, as Berman and Lonsdale argue:
The development and character of the African petit-

bourgeoisie in Kenya, and elsewhere in colonial Africa,
cannot be understood outside its deeply ambivalent rela-
tionship with the colonial state. This ambivalence,
expressed in sharply contrasting and often alternating
patterns of collaboration and conflict, encouragement and
constraint, attraction and rejection, was felt both by African
and the colonial authorities and was grounded in some of
the most fundamental contradictions of colonialism.
(1992a, p. 197)
Evidently, the dialectic of collaboration and struggle which

characterised the relationship between the emergent African
petit-bourgeoisie and the colonial state was a complex one in
which grounds were ever shifting, positions were never
permanent and relationships were never free of conflict and
contradictions. For example, Marshall Clough (1990) has
demonstrated that the position of the African chiefs, particu-
larly in the Kiambu district of Kenya, kept on shifting,
depending on whether or not their interests and those of their
subjects were threatened. Paradoxically, Kiambu, which was
regarded by the colonial officials as a soft and loyal district,
was also the home area of such key political leaders as Harry
Thuku, Koinange wa Mbiyu and Jomo Kenyatta. It is also the
district that lost most land to settlers in spite of protests
(Clough 1990, pp. 65–7).
William Ochien’g has also questioned the popular
assumption that all loyalists were motivated by personal
economic greed. He writes that the so-called Mau Mau
loyalists were neither stooges nor self-seekers but an integral

part of the struggle of Africans for progress and dignity in the
face of acute political and economic difficulties (Ochien’g
1972, pp. 46–70). Ochien’g’s position is also supported by M.
Tarmakin, who sees the Mau Mau loyalists ‘as having entered
in the political struggle to defend legitimate group interests,
to promote their political ideals and even to fight for what
they regarded as the interests of their fellow Africans’ (1978,
pp. 247–61).5 The loyalists, for example, saw themselves as
the legitimate defenders of progress and development, which
were best expressed in Christianity, education and
investment in small business and farming.6 They were
defending a way of life. In other words, for the loyalists
colonial policy could be contested within limits, the bounds
of which were often violated by the young rebels who, in
their view, had no reverence for the Kikuyu traditions of
respect for elders and were threatening the community.
Therefore, the relationship between the loyalists and the
colonial state was never a linear one. Ironically, the moral
complexity of the Mau Mau, as I have argued, was well
captured in Ngugi’s early novels, particularly, Weep Not, Child
and A Grain of Wheat.
Ngugi’s portrayal of workers and the emergent African petit-
bourgeoisie robs them of initiative in the context of
decolonisation. The workers and peasants are doomed to a
vicious circle of poverty which renders all their struggles
irrelevant because there are no gains – no democratic scores
in the postcolonial state after many years of anticolonial
struggle. They cannot manipulate spaces open to them and,
when they try to do so, like Wanja in Petals of Blood, all efforts
are brought to naught by big capital. The native bourgeoisie,
on the other hand, are mere ‘watchdogs’ of foreign capital.
They are not innovative, but are instead reckless imitators of
Western values – the masters that they serve dutifully. The
Kenyan petit-bourgeoisie are portrayed as having no desire to be
their own masters, but wanting simply to limp after the image
of the Western bourgeoisie. Those who want to be their own
masters like Mwereri wa Mukiraai are eliminated.
Dependency Theory and Class Dynamics

The picture of the national bourgeoisie as mere puppets or
watchdogs of the white imperialists, and as totally powerless
without their masters, is hard to sustain and it tends to over-
simplify a rather complex class dynamic in Africa. The
problem is inherent in dependency theory in that it tends to
divert attention from the national struggles within Africa by
‘underplaying the growth of real local divisions’ (Cooper
1992, p. 38), and by implying that the local bourgeoisie may
not be as dangerous as the international capital that it serves.
Dependency theory seeks to explain the problems of Africa,
and indeed those of the so-called ‘Third World’, as problems
of global imperialism ‘depicted as part of a self-reproducing
global system in which the perverse underdevelopment of
the periphery was the necessary mirror of genuine capitalist
development at the centre’ (Berman and Lonsdale 1992a,
p. 197).
Ngugi is a prisoner of the broad perspective of dependency
theory. In most of his works, he creates a simplistic binary
opposition between the oppressor and the oppressed, which
precludes any possibility of conflicting interests within these
broad social categories. Apart from conflating workers and
peasants into one group, without any social content or
specific defining features, Ngugi’s construction of ‘the people’
in these broad categories of the leaders and the led, the
oppressor and the oppressed, constitutes ‘the people’ as
lacking initiative – a passive group which is acted upon.7 And
although Ngugi attempts to create a picture of an heroic
collective of workers and peasants, they come through as
faceless. The so-called power of the working people is not
visible beyond the slogans of the workers, undefined strikes
and mass demonstrations (Ngugi 1977, p. 4). The workers do
not seem to have any visible conflicts of interest other than
the politics of ethnic divisiveness which Ngugi presents as
primarily a construction of the elite. Wanja seems to be
speaking for Ngugi when she insinuates that it is the rich –
‘the Mercedes family’ – who are preoccupied with cultivating
ethnic divisions to delude the workers into believing that
there is no divide between the rich and the poor within one
ethnic community.
For to us what did it matter who drove a Mercedes Benz?

They were all one tribe; the Mercedes family: whether they
came from the coast or from Kisumu. One family. We were
another tribe: another family. (Ngugi 1977, p. 98)
Ngugi tends to dismiss ethnicity as an invention of

colonialism and the ruling elite in Kenya. The likes of Moi
and his cohort group, according to this logic, are therefore
responsible for generating ethnic consciousness and manip-
ulating, to their advantage, what was invented by the
colonialists.
Ngugi’s argument that modern ethnicity is a product of
colonial history of divide-and-rule, which helped to give the
‘tribe’ its real identity by ‘specifying “tribes” culturally within
the context of a uniquely colonial sociology’, to use Vail’s
words, may have some strength (Vail 1989, p. 3). His pet
argument, that ethnicity is an ideological mask employed by
ambitious and crafty members of the petit-bourgeoisie as a way
of securing their own interests against the ever-growing class
divisions within their own ethnic groups, may also have
certain elements of truth in it. However, Ngugi’s dual stance,
while having some validity, does not answer the question
why ethnic consciousness and its close relative, regionalism,
remain attractive to ordinary Kenyans long after the colonial
period. Why was it possible to revitalise ethnicity so easily
and to mobilise popular opinion around ethnicity, for
example, in the recent multiparty elections in Kenya?8
The position taken in this book is that ‘ethnicity is not a
natural cultural residue but a consciously crafted ideological
creation’ (Vail 1989, p. 7). The construction of ethnicity,
however, is not always from above. Quite often it is also given
impetus by practical needs of those from below and the actual
persistence of ‘ethnic moments of identity’ (Piper et al. 1992,
p. 13). The theory that the African masses are gullible pawns
– easily manipulated by colonialists and the crafty African
elite into ethnic consciousness – is ripe for debunking.
Ethnicity, when seen as a mechanism for political and
economic control, ceases to be the often abhorred return to

primordial values, or a monopoly of the ruling elite in which
they manipulate the ignorant masses in the struggle for power
in the modern state.
Ethnicity, on the contrary, should be seen as an important
instrument of control steeped in ethnic ideologies and in
group interests that are constantly changing. In the words of
Berman and Lonsdale, ethnicity is ‘a vehicle of unquestioning
sectional ambition’ (1992b, p. 317). In this struggle to realise
sectarian ambitions, ordinary people have found ethnicity
useful in protecting internal rights and as a defence against
external threats, whether real or perceived. Of course, in the
invention of ethnicity and its appropriation into competitive
politics, the elite have emerged as the most eloquent articu-
lators of the cultural characteristics of their ethnic identities
through written histories, accounts of traditional ways of the
tribe, and through written ethnic literatures.
In this sense, it might be argued that even Ngugi has, in
modern Kenya, contributed to the reinvention of Agikuyu
ethnic consciousness by resorting to the use of Gikuyu in his
recent creative works and essays.9 But, ultimately, it is
competitive politics and the fear of economic exclusion that
have made ethnicity, with its appeal to common heritage of
the group and its land, so attractive in modern times. As
Gerhard Mare has observed, material (and ultimately
political) factors provide the impetus for ethnic moments of
identity to be transformed into politicised ethnicity:
Political ethnicity (ethnic nationalism) moves social

identity to political agency, provides the means for political
mobilisation, and submits the ethnic identity and group
to another set of rules – those of competition for power.
(1992, p. 43)
Evidently, if Mare’s argument carries some weight, then

ethnicity cannot be dismissed as an invention of colonialism
and the intellectual elite in Africa, as scholars like Ngugi are
wont to do. Neither is it useful to dismiss ethnicity as false
consciousness. It is, in my view, an effective instrument in a
political power game in which the ordinary people are as
much active agents as the ruling elite in Africa. There is

‘nothing wicked’, to use Lonsdale’s phrase, in ethnicity’s
‘modern persistence’ (Berman and Lonsdale 1992b, p. 329).
Instead, in a society such as Kenya, which is still groping for
a sense of nationhood, and, indeed, striving to build a
modern state, one should expect a coexistence of multiple
identities, often in a continuous and dynamic tension. The
Mau Mau songs, for example, were used by ordinary men and
women to express their identity both as belonging to the
house of Mumbi (meaning the Agikuyu community) and also
with the desire for the broader Kenyan nationhood in the
face of colonial oppression. Here was a classic case of two
layers of identity coexisting within the consciousness of a
specific ethnic community in Kenya. The construction of a
specifically Agikuyu identity did not preclude the imagination
of the wider Kenyan identity.
Lastly, Ngugi’s narrative seems to be silent on the role of
dissenting voices within the church. His presentation of
religion is one-dimensional. For Ngugi, religion is a tool of
oppression; a vehicle for lulling the poor and turning them
away from the material reality of this world. No one doubts
that religion in Kenya has in certain instances served to
entrench and justify exploitation in both colonial and post-
colonial contexts. But it is doubtful that religious groups are
mute tools of exploitation, as past and recent histories of such
groups have proved in Kenya.10 At the height of intertribal
(ethnic) tension in 1969, when a section of the Agikuyu took
to oathing, which Ngugi refers to as the ‘tea party’ (Ngugi
1977, p. 84), it was the National Christian Council of Kenya
(NCCK) that condemned its ethnic parochialism.11 In the
run-up to multiparty elections in 1992, the church (under
the NCCK umbrella) played a crucial role in calling on the
government to democratise the levers of governance and
appealed to the opposition to forge unity in the interest of the
nation. A leading Kenyan weekly wrote:
After leading the way for the opposition, the NCCK was
now shepherding the opposition itself. Indeed the NCCK
and some of the opposition figures have fought parallel
battles against the government in the past six years. Some
of the clerics ... have, over the years tended to be more

critical of the government than many of the radical
politicians. (The Weekly Review, 19 June 1992, p. 4)
Ngugi’s classical understanding of religion cannot allow him

to appreciate the role played by the church in contemporary
politics. More importantly, he fails to accept the church as an
enduring form of popular organisation in which ‘the people’
take the initiative in interpreting and integrating their world
so as to gain some control over it. A complex reading of
religion should see it as a vehicle for cognition; as the space
for relating the self to the material and the spiritual being.
In conclusion, it seems fair to argue that the weaknesses
inherent in Ngugi’s sense of history in the later texts are in
fact attributable in a large measure to the weaknesses of
dependency perspective, which are manifested in the
suppression of specific and local conflicts and the privileging
of the centre–periphery approach.12 Thus, a single-track
theory which seeks to explain Kenya’s underdevelopment
only in terms of the centre as a block exploiting the periphery
fails to grasp the specific character of capitalist development
in Kenya and, subsequently, to lay down proper political
strategies for meaningful change. The point to reiterate is that
Ngugi’s ideological framework, underpinned by Fanon’s con-
ceptualisation of the ‘African revolution’ and dependency
perspective, tends to obscure the way in which classes
reproduce themselves and derive any relative autonomy of
politics in the class formations. It therefore obscures the par-
ticularities of different social formations. Ngugi is clearly
imprisoned within a static evaluation of classes and his
framework tends to be rigidly deterministic in locating
connections between the state and capital, in depicting the
national bourgeoisie as mere puppets or watchdogs of
Western capital, and in insisting that there is continuity
between resistance in the colonial state and resistance in the
postcolonial state. Indeed, evaluation is deterministic in its
espousal of a linear reproduction of the colonial class
formations into the postcolonial state.
The path to meaningful social change in Africa cannot
ignore the internal contradictions and the specific social
dynamics of the postcolonial state. And yet the fundamental

precondition for democratic transformation is that
unrelenting struggle to create space for political dialogue and
change. In this act of social transformation Ngugi has played
his part precisely because his narrative discourse, whatever
its limitations, ‘is dominated by its transformative “text” in
which the captive nation, overcome in recent history, awaits
its desired redemption’ (Gurnah 1993, p. 142).
2
The Changing Nature of Allegory
in Ngugi’s Novels
Recent studies on postcolonial theories have attempted to

redeem the notion of allegory from its traditional conception
as ‘a constrained and mechanical mode of expression’
(Slemon 1988, p. 157). Allegory, they argue, has been reap-
propriated by the postcolonial writers as a strategy against
the reconstruction of the colonised by the coloniser. It is a
reappropriation because allegory, in their view, ‘historically
meant a way of speaking for the subjugated others of the
European colonial enterprise – a way of subordinating the
colonised through the politics of representation’ (Slemon
1987, p. 8). It is because these theories challenge the
monolithic representation of the colonised that allegory has
been transformed into ‘a site upon which post-colonial
cultures seek to contest and subvert colonialist appropriation
through the production of a literary, and specifically anti-
imperialist, figurative opposition or textual counter-discourse’
(p. 10). Postcolonial allegory thus acquires a transformative
capacity in its attempt to subvert or challenge the imperial
myths and codes that make up the colonised peoples’ notions
of received history. Allegory, Slemon adds:
provides the post-colonial writer with a means of fore-

grounding such inherited notions and exposing them to
the transformative powers of imagination; and in doing so,
post-colonial allegory helps to produce new ways of seeing
history, new ways of ‘reading’ the world. (1988, p. 164)
As suggested in the previous chapter and in the introduction,

Ngugi’s texts fall under the rubric of counter-narratives to
colonial history. It seems to me that Ngugi, in trying to fulfil
the demands of an historical novel and the demands of
44
The Changing Nature of Allegory in Ngugi’s Novels 45
rewriting and giving alternative interpretation of Kenyan

history, has tended to fall back on the allegorical mode and
popular forms in his representation (see Chapter 4).
Taken from the Greek word ‘allos’, allegory means the
other, that is, in saying one thing you also imply something
else. It is writing that involves, as Stephen Slemon puts it,
‘doubling or reduplicating extra-textual material; and since
the allegorical sign refers always to a previous or anterior sign’
it will always draw our attention to the passage of time; it
will inevitably create an awareness of the past – a conscious-
ness of history and tradition (1988, p. 158). This has
frequently led to the drawing of links between allegory and
history. Allegorical writing, it is argued, concerns itself
primarily with ‘redeeming or recuperating the past, either
because the present pales in comparison with it, or because
the past has become in some ways unacceptable to the
dominant ideology of contemporary society’ (p. 158). The
allegorical text, it would seem from this argument, is bound
to the authority of the past and is often deployed in the
service of ordering historical narratives.
Walter Benjamin, in his study of Trauerspiel, has added
some illuminating dimensions to the theoretical assumption
that allegory is a popular mode for recuperating the past and
ordering history. According to Benjamin, in periods of frag-
mentation and displacement, allegory is often the mode best
suited for piecing history together. This is because allegory’s
tendency towards a linear typology would provide the writer,
in a situation of fragmentation and marginality, with a
coherent framework within which to rewrite history
(Benjamin 1977).
It is not difficult to see why Ngugi resorts to allegory in his
narratives. Ngugi grew under the shadow of colonialism and
was directly affected by it. His brother was killed in the Mau
Mau war and as a young man he worked in the settler farms
because his own parents had no land: ‘My father and his four
wives had no land. They lived as tenants-at-will on somebody
else’s land’ (Ngugi 1972, p. 48). Ngugi is a product of a settler
colony in which land alienation, dispossession of people, and
disruption of precolonial (read ‘traditional’) modes of
production became the central point in the nationalist
politics in Kenya. And in more recent times, Ngugi, as a writer

of praxis whose freedom of expression has constantly been
suppressed by successive postcolonial regimes, is always
dogged by conditions of fragmentation. Indeed, he was
detained for his writing by the authorities. Significantly, his
most obvious example of allegorical narrative, Devil on the
Cross, was written in prison. Like Bunyan writing The Pilgrim’s
Progress in Bedford gaol, Ngugi wrote Devil on the Cross in
Kamiti Maximum Security Prison in Kenya. Again, given
prison conditions – without proper writing material and in
isolation from the rest of society – Ngugi wrote out of exile;
he wrote from a situation of displacement and fragmenta-
tion.1 Ngugi’s recourse to allegory would seem to be a strategy
aimed at creating some sense out of a state of chaos; a way of
reclaiming Kenya’s history, once suppressed in the colonial
state and again in the postcolonial state. Allegorical writing,
for Ngugi, must have opened up the possibility of transfor-
mation – a means of rereading the imperial myths and their
social agents in the postcolonial state.
Allegory in Ngugi’s Earlier Texts

Ngugi’s return to the past is a common feature in his
narrative. The past is often evoked by Ngugi as a challenge
and at times a parallel to the present state of chaos. Where
colonialism denied histories and traditions, Ngugi seeks to
found a sense of self in a recovery of history, a recuperation
of tradition. This impulse to re-establish the vital link with the
past, Gikandi writes of East African novels, is underpinned by
the powerful evocation of land: ‘the vital link between man
and nature ... the principal means of production whose loss
signifies the disruptive and savage nature of imperial
conquest’ (Gikandi 1984, p. 235).
Ngugi’s earlier texts bear that powerful evocation of land,
both as a signifier of a glorious past in which man and woman
were in harmony with nature and thereby presupposing a
stable identity associated with landownership, and land as a
signifier of loss whose recovery would imply the recovery of
identity. The rooting of national identity in Agikuyu
mythology, as I have argued in the last chapter, highlights the
tensions between constructions of ethnic tradition and the

building of a modern nation-state. Ngugi uses allegory to
negotiate this tension and to suggest that if in the past
national identity was inscribed in the land designated by the
founders of the community, colonialism, in usurping the
land, disrupts this identity. Thus the myth of creation which
legitimises the claim to landownership by turning it into a
covenant between man and his creators transforms this land
into an inviolable and living entity; it transforms land into a
space for cultural and political contestation.
Nothing captures this flux better than the way the two
ridges and the valley of life are personified in The River
Between. Ngugi’s restoration project is ‘embodied by the land,
the novel’s larger-than-life character, which provides not only
the physical context within which the lives of the other
characters can be worked out, but also a force they can
identify with’ (Gikandi 1984, p. 237). The people’s past before
the ravages of colonialism is typified in Honia river, with its
healing powers. The river which united the people now
divides them under colonialism.
It is the land loss, occasioned by colonialism, that Weep
Not, Child explores. Ngotho, the patriarch of African heritage
and tradition, treats land with reverence and he is profoundly
alienated by the ensuing issues engendered by its loss. After
all, land provides the spiritual link to his ancestors: ‘He owed
it to the dead, the living and the unborn of his line, to keep
guard over it’ (Ngugi 1964, p. 31). This same land is viewed by
the colonial settler, Mr Howlands, as virgin and wild, only fit
to be conquered and tamed. For Mr Howlands Kenya ‘was a
big trace of wild country to conquer’(p. 30) and ‘[h]e alone
was responsible for taming this unoccupied wildness’ (p. 31).
Evidently, land, as the central metaphor in Ngugi’s texts,
serves a metonymic function, figuring the glorious past of
the community, now in ruins, and a past whose restoration is
only possible through land restitution. The most striking
anxiety of the people in Ngugi’s texts is land alienation. The
Kiama rejects Waiyaki because he cannot speak to the land
agenda, which as I have noted in the previous chapter, is
mystically associated with the purity of the community and
its genesis. Boro’s disenchantment with the elders and his

father in particular is because they cannot fight for the
restoration of the land. It is the same anxiety for land
restoration that pervades A Grain of Wheat on the eve of inde-
pendence: ‘Would Uhuru bring land into African hands?’
Gikonyo asks (Ngugi 1967, p. 208). And yet, in spite of the
strong sense of loss, there is also a strong sense of retrieval
paralleled by the desire for land restoration. And here land
not only means the physical space, but more significantly it
signifies the nation. As a physical space, Ngugi embraces the
rural topology as the signifier of genuine nationalism. The
urban area is associated with modern degradation. The
youthful radicals get their ideas from the city and they would
seem to have lost their humanity. The city, in A Grain of
Wheat, stands as an aberration, remote and away from the
peasants of Thabai. It is the city that hoards Uhuru from the
people. Nairobi is a place where post-independence
politicians disappear and meet with foreigners. The image of
the city as alienating, in the Marxian sense, continues to
haunt Ngugi’s later novels. However, to express his desire for
‘genuine’ nationalism, Ngugi conflates both allegory and
symbolism: land stands for nationhood rooted in the people’s
values while at the same time allegorising the state of the
nation – ‘a nation in turmoil’ as Kihika refers to it (Ngugi
1967, p. 15). It is the allegorical redemption of the nation
under colonial ruins that is embodied in the Moses figure,
the allegorical redeemer, that seems to cut across all works of
Ngugi. Ngugi’s allegory is therefore rooted in a certain type of
nationalism that seeks to fabricate a discourse of resistance
and liberation. Liberation and the reclaiming of history go
hand in hand, and are explored in a range of ways.
Ngugi’s nationalism works through an allegorical typology
of characters in which the coloniser is invariably portrayed in
grotesque images while the colonised is given normal and
realistic characterisation. The coloniser tends to be unnatural
while the colonised African is natural. Ngugi thus engages in
a reversal of the manichean structure which, JanMohamed
(1983) argues, following Fanon, characterises colonial
societies and rests on a racial allegory. Mr Howlands in Weep
Not, Child is not very different from Dr Henry Van Dyke in A

Grain of Wheat. They both have a sagging stomach that
becomes the predominant figure of exploitation and deflated
power in Ngugi’s later novels. The pot-belly signifies the
depraved picture of the petit-bourgeoisie in the postcolonial
state that Ngugi uses to laugh at power and authority in Devil
on the Cross. Mr Howlands is described as ‘a typical settler’ –
the man ‘with an oval-shaped face that ended in double chin
and a big stomach’ (Ngugi 1964, p. 30). He is the exact
opposite of Ngotho who is portrayed with depth and
complexity. Ngotho’s affinity to land is portrayed as natural
while Mr Howland’s smacks of an obsession, a disease in the
psyche of the colonial settler, to conquer land as a release
from a nervous condition and therefore irrational. This
association between insanity and land, irrationality and
violence, is, however, not confined to whites. When Boro
abandons the primary objective of land restitution in pursuit
of personal revenge, he can only degenerate into reckless
violence hitherto associated with the coloniser only. The
settler figure is, however, the stark antithesis of the colonised.
The settlers are associated with degenerate values, often
unfaithful in their marriages and leading hollow lives like
that of the Thompsons in A Grain of Wheat. The weaknesses
are specifically expressed in loose sexual behaviour and
drunkenness among the settler community.
Ngugi seems to intimate that personal narratives of the
settler community, characterised by moral degeneration and
frustrated life histories, allegorises the crisis of the Empire as
sick and decaying from within. It is an empire in search of
moral authority. This is contrasted by the ideal African
authority embodied in the patriarch figure, Ngotho. What
marks Ngotho’s household is peace and stability and the
family only breaks down due to colonial onslaught. Ngotho’s
household, accordingly, allegorises a glorious African past
threatened by a colonial regime presided over by
schizophrenic power brokers under whose authority the
African society can only disintegrate. The allegorical typology
employed by Ngugi here is both constraining and romantic
when it comes to the ideal African symbol and exaggerated
with reference to colonial figures, almost giving us ahistorical
structures. And yet one of the primary functions of allegory is

to constrain the ability of the reader to construct meaning
because allegory is, by definition, ‘a sign that refers to one
meaning and thus exhausts its suggestive potentialities once
it has been deciphered’ (de Man 1983, p. 188). Ngugi seeks to
turn the manichean principle of racial allegory on its head in
order to restore full humanity to the African. He sets out to
challenge, in a subtle way, the notes for a philosophical book
entitled Prospero in Africa, which Mr Thompson intends to
write – a book in which ‘primordial trees have always awed
primitive minds’ (Ngugi 1964, p. 55). Whether Ngugi is talking
here about what Said calls ‘idyllic meadows’ (1994, p. 253)
seems to be irrelevant. He is locating his discourse on a certain
type of nationalism that is rooted in a reversal of binary codes
of imperialism and this in itself is an important process in
reconstituting a shattered community.
One of the ways in which Ngugi achieves his anti-
imperialist nationalism is to give a voice to hitherto repressed
voices of the colonial subject and to compress the coloniser’s
voice into some isolated figures within a sociopolitical
landscape saturated by the native. In the The River Between the
conflict is essentially about creating a new mythos for the
community and at the heart of this struggle it is the privileged
voice of the Africans, with their tensions and contradictions,
that is heard. As one of the more influential thinkers of
Kenyan nationalism, Ngugi responds to the problems of using
history in the reconstruction of national identity through
modes that highlight the tensions between the constructions
of tradition and the implicit modernity of the nascent Kenyan
nation. Kabonyi and the Kiama represent a specific strand of
nationalism rooted purely in a static tradition that Ngugi
seeks to transcend. Waiyaki, on the other hand, while
accepting that identity is imperative, insists that it is not
enough to assert a different identity. One has to accept the
fact that he or she is part of an historical process that is
dynamic and one which opens up the possibilities for
development and growth. Waiyaki becomes the new symbol
of hybridity caught in between a tumultuous historical
process whose course he seeks to influence. Thus the alleg-
orising of historical consciousness as nationalist finds its
ultimate expression in the figure of Waiyaki. He heralds the
kind of consciousness, albeit more radical, that Matigari

embodies in the postcolonial Kenyan state. Later, in A Grain
of Wheat and in the subsequent novels, Ngugi seeks to further
problematise the nationalist consciousness found in The River
Between through an allegorical character typology of patriots
and traitors. This time Ngugi injects a basic class conscious-
ness in his narrative and suggests that the construction of the
Kenyan nation ought to be much more complex and more
discriminating than his previous discourses had implied. If
the previous discourses were premised on an anticolonial
agenda and unity of the colonised, now Ngugi argues for a
transcendence of undifferentiated community. It is this con-
sciousness that Kihika embodies: ‘“A day comes when brother
shall give up brother, a mother her son, when you and I have
heard the call of a nation in turmoil”’ (Ngugi 1967, p. 15).
The rejection of unity based on kinship bonds is at the
heart of Kihika’s statement. His consciousness eludes the
alienated Mugo and sets him apart from Karanja, the colonial
surrogate whose figure redefines the new relationships in the
colonial world. These characters now begin to reveal the
specific political unconscious behind their lives. The political
unconscious referred to here transcends the manichean
allegory of race because it reconfigures the colonised subject
as constituted through multiple identities and a range of
ideological matrices. The ‘tribal mythos’, which used to bind
all the Agikuyu, would seem to collapse in the face of those
forces of change and the new societal structures set in motion
by colonialism. For example, the homeguard figure,
embodied in the character of Karanja, is a product of
colonialism. Karanja is following in the footsteps of Joshua
and Jacobo before him, except now Ngugi is under no illusion
that there remains any possibility of crossing the divide
separating the traitors and patriots. Karanja in his position as
a collaborator allegorises a new consciousness, based on self-
interest as opposed to communal ethos, emerging out of the
womb of colonial and capitalist ideology. Ngugi is by no
means suggesting that the precolonial society was free of
personal pursuits at the expense of the society, but rather that
colonialism and the advent of capitalism exacerbated these
values. He seems to intimate that the real anti-imperialist
struggle was stunted by the betrayal and the subsequent

hanging of Kihika – the symbol of revolutionary values in the
novel. What now threatens Kenya’s freedom, which Kihika
symbolises, is rooted in this new consciousness that gestures
towards neocolonialism. In other words, the web of betrayals
that we encounter in the text are allegorical of betrayals in the
post-independence period – a warning to readers of the
possibility of disillusionment with Uhuru. The irony and
facade that surrounds Mugo’s heroism, the ineptitude and
arrogance of the MP of Thabai and Gikonyo’s narrow preoc-
cupation with new capitalist enterprise, all point to ‘an
allegory of the embattled’ nation, to use Jameson’s phrase
(1991, p. 86). This marks a definite shift away from the
traditional colonial model to a consciousness informed by
the capitalist perspective that is the target of Ngugi’s critique
in his later novels. As the colonialists recede in the
background, a new class consisting of the nationalist fighters
and the former homeguards emerges to the bewilderment of
the common men and women of Thabai. For them the future
holds no hope with the advent of new power relations of ‘the
local pro-foreigner comprador class’ (Ngugi 1981b, p. 31). It is
the ideological poverty of this new class that Ngugi caricatures
in his later novels through the grotesque images of the body,
while at the same time drawing attention to how the old
social relations are reproduced in the present; how colonial
relations of production reproduce themselves.
Allegory and Postcolonial Power Relations

As I have pointed out, Ngugi’s return to the past is one of the
constant allegorical markers in his narrative. Ngugi’s stubborn
return to the Mau Mau war and his constant use of the Mau
Mau as a symbol of inspiration is a good example. A number
of Ngugi’s themes also find their thematic antecedents and
parallels in the past of his characters. To do this Ngugi
explores a specific time scheme in which the narrative swings
from the past time of the action to the current time of the
telling or retelling. In each of the two time zones the
experiences of the action are not just lived and relived, but
the narrative experiences of the past are in themselves a
parallel and a commentary on the present situation. In his

narration of the colonial past, for example, reside certain
echoes of the postcolonial experiences in Kenya: narrative
meaning in the colonial context allegorises narrative meaning
in the postcolonial state. The two different time frames
(then/now; now/then) are connected by some kind of
development within ‘continuity’ and change within
‘permanence’. Thus Ngugi’s use of allegory would seem to
point both to continuity and permanence, a situation in
which, for example, the colonial configuration parallels the
postcolonial state. The colonial condition would seem to
reproduce itself in a linear fashion and the allegorical mode
works to highlight this relationship.
A good example is Abdulla in Petals of Blood, a character
who emerges as the reincarnation of Kenya’s colonial past. He
is a Mau Mau veteran who has nothing else to show for the
sacrifices made during the struggle for independence but his
stumped leg. Abdulla, through his reminiscences on the
colonial struggle, gives us a perspective on Kenya’s colonial
past. But Abdulla’s story is also presented as parallel to, and a
mockery of, the present postcolonial state which is but a
replica of the colonial past. Ordinarily, Abdulla’s name means
servant of Allah. But his real name is Murira (Ngugi 1977,
pp. 61, 910), meaning ‘the one who protects’. Having been a
forest fighter, he is the reincarnation of the spirit of Kimathi.
He is representative of the sacrifices made during the struggle
of which the stump of his leg is a physical reminder. Abdulla
links us with Kenya’s past and preserves the memories of the
unsung heroes of Kenya’s freedom. He is one of the many
heroes of Kenya’s freedom struggle constantly evoked by
Ngugi – heroes who have gained nothing from independence.
His survival now is a matter of a painful self-reliance in the
store and bar from which he ekes out a living. Like Wanja, he
is portrayed as a victim of what Ngugi calls the neocolonial-
ist forces of exploitation. It is these same forces of the
postcolonial state which order the closure of Abdulla’s ‘dirty
premises’ to make way for the Trans-Africa road and Kimeria’s
business houses. In the end, Abdulla is totally impoverished.
He turns into a tramp and a drunk, obsessed with revenge on
Kimeria who betrayed him to the colonialists and who

continues to hound him in the postcolonial state.
In Abdulla’s character Ngugi captures the enigmatic
allegorical time frames in which the past confronts the
present. Allegory here works through narrative duration, a
process through which distance is created between sign and
referent, past and present. What Ngugi creates is a philo-
sophical irony in which the past stands in judgement over the
present. Abdulla’s life parallels that of Matigari, the hero of
Matigari, written ten years later. Himself a former freedom
fighter, Matigari is forced into a second war of liberation
because not much has changed in favour of the oppressed
majority in the postcolonial state. Like Abdulla, he adopts
the young boy Muriuki who is symbolically poised to
continue with the struggle after his death. Again like Abdulla
who takes Wanja in the end, Matigari also takes Guthera, the
abused woman, into his custody. Matigari is a continuation of
Ngugi’s figure of authority, the patriarch who protects both
youth and womanhood.
Ngugi seems to be saying that if colonialism led to
degradation of black life and exploitation of the marginalised
groups in Kenya, then these forms of human degradation
repeat themselves in the postcolonial state, except with the
minor difference that in the colonial context the exploiters
were white, aided by black zombies, while now exploiters are
black working with their masters in Europe. For example,
Karega fought against a white headmaster at Siriana high
school and had him replaced by a black headmaster, Mr Chui.
Soon Karega and his schoolmates discover that Chui was no
different from the white headmaster he replaced. In the post-
colonial struggle against the owners of Theng’eta Breweries in
Ilmorog, Karega, as a trade union leader, is confronted by the
same Chui in partnership with foreign capital. Thus, in
Ngugi’s narrative discourse, the past is clearly parallel with the
present at all levels of society: educational, cultural, economic
and even personal. Wanja and Wariinga, in Petals of Blood
and Devil on the Cross respectively, are both victims of bad
educational leadership and a system in which children are
exposed to violent and sexual abuse by educators. They are
also victims of economic deprivation which leaves them
vulnerable to sexual exploitation by the rich. Wanja’s and

Wariinga’s present lives are but a repeat performance of their
past experiences. The past, whether public or private,
continues to repeat itself; the past remains an allegorical
reflection of the present. The emergent nationalists whose
greed had become apparent on the eve of independence now
flaunt their power in disgrace and openly. It is the absurdity
of their mimicry of the former colonial masters and the
turning of a postcolony into a theatre stage within which
power is performed that Ngugi caricatures in his later novels,
through the grotesque image of the body. What follows is an
attempt to place Ngugi’s use of the grotesque within the basic
concerns of the novel Devil on the Cross, where the features are
most glaring.
Allegorical Satire and the Grotesque Image of the Body

Achille Mbembe, in a paper entitled ‘Provisional Notes on
the Postcolony’, draws our attention to the nature of power
and its actual performance in a postcolony. He characterises
a postcolony simply as those societies which have recently
emerged from the experience of colonisation and exhibit the
violence which the colonial relationship par excellence
involves. He argues that the ‘post-colony is characterised by
a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to
excess and a lack of proportion ... [and] ... a series of corporate
institutions and political machinery which, once they are in
place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence’ (Mbembe
1992, p. 3). The postcolony in fact becomes some form of
stage on which ‘the wider problems and its corollary
discipline’ are played out (p. 3). It is this theatrical display of
power that Mbembe calls the banality of power in the
postcolony. He uses banality to mean ‘those elements of the
obscene and the grotesque that Mikhail Bakhtin claims to
have located in ‘non-official’ cultures but which, in fact, are
intrinsic to all systems of domination and to the means by
which those systems are confirmed or deconstructed’ (p. 3).
Thus the grotesque and the obscene would seem to be some
of the basic characteristics that identify postcolonial regimes
of domination.
The writing of Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross was in more than

one sense a product of the postcolonial violence to which
Mbembe draws our attention. It was written while Ngugi was
in detention. It marked the actual enactment of violence in a
postcolony through the capture and isolation of the body
under the guise of the Public Security Order inherited from
the colonial regime. In Detained, Ngugi confesses that the
novel was written ‘with blood, sweat and toil’ (1981a, p. 3).
Having failed to control Ngugi, the Kenyatta regime sends
him to solitary confinement which is, as Michel Foucault
reminds us, ‘certainly the most frenzied manifestation of
power imaginable’ (1984, p. 210). In writing this novel, Ngugi
seems to have refused to succumb to the dictates of violence
to which the Kenyan regime often resorts in silencing all its
critics. The novel became Ngugi’s weapon for preserving the
body and for overcoming the state of fragmentation imposed
by the regime. Wariinga, the heroine of toil and the harbinger
of freedom, whose image looms large in the text, was
conceived in cell 16 in 1978 (Ngugi 1981a, p. 3). If the
regime’s aim was to break Ngugi and to reconfigure his body,
in Devil on the Cross, he turns this attempt upside down.
Instead, it is to the obscene body of the postcolonial regime
weighed down by its ‘impotence’, that Ngugi directs our
laughter. But, first, the content of Devil on the Cross.
The novel deals with a group of six protagonists travelling
together in a matatu taxi to Ilmorog. The protagonists
discover that they are all mysteriously invited to a Devil’s
feast, where thieves and robbers of Kenya enter a competition
for the election of the seven cleverest thieves and robbers.
The characters are Wariinga, Wangari, Gatuiria, Muturi,
Mwireri and Mwaura the driver. The narrative operates at two
levels: the allegorical story illustrated by the competition or
feast organised by the Devil, and the story of Wariinga who
is the pivot of the plot. Like Petals of Blood, the novel takes
place mainly in Ilmorog and partly in Nairobi. The novel is
dedicated to ‘all Kenyans struggling against the neo-colonial
stage of imperialism’ (Ngugi 1987, p. 5). It is no wonder, then,
that the major trope in Devil on the Cross should be
neocolonial dependency, with the Devil on the cross as the
structuring symbol. This is best illustrated in Wariinga’s
nightmare in which the white colonialist Devil is crucified by

the masses, apparent reference to political independence,
only to be rescued by the local comprador. Significantly, ‘The
Devil had two mouths, one on his forehead and the other at
the back of his head. His belly sagged, as if it were about to
give birth to all the evils of the world. His skin was red, like
that of a pig’ (p. 13). This is significant because the physical
features of the Devil draw attention to his grotesque image,
the same image that he gives to those that rescue him and in
turn serve him. Significantly, again, the Devil rewards his
rescuers by fattening their bellies. It turns out that a ‘Devil’s
feast’ is arranged by the local ‘thieves’ to commemorate a visit
by foreign guests – ‘particularly from America, England,
Germany, France, Italy, Sweden and Japan’ – as part of ‘the
International Organisation of Thieves and Robbers’ (p. 78).
The creation of a Devil’s feast, where national robbers and
their foreign allies gather in order to reveal their tactics and
motives, provides Ngugi with the space for erecting or decon-
structing, through the grotesque and the obscene, the
banality of power in a postcolony. Ngugi uses the Bakhtinian
notion of the grotesque and obscenity by turning the rulers of
postcolony into objects of ridicule and in the process
transcends the limitations Bakhtin imposes on the two terms
by suggesting that the grotesque and the obscene are not
simply confined to the province of the ruled, but could be
extended to the rulers. It is to the local comprador
bourgeoisie, who boast about their cleverness and their
cunning on how to steal from the people as well as how to
bow to foreign control, that the grotesque is restricted. He
does this by exposing how state power – represented by the
local comprador – dramatises its own magnificence through
an absurd ceremonial display of their wealth as spectacles
worthy of emulation by the ruled. It is in this feast that Ngugi
erects the monstrous image of capitalism as a fetish. The
worshippers of the fetish gather to preach before it, ‘the
fiction of its perfection’ (Mbembe 1992, p. 21). Each and every
speaker that takes the stage demonstrates, in blunt
testimonies, that the postcolony has been turned into a stage
for bizarre self-gratification; an absurd display of buffoons,
fools and clowns in the feast of ‘modern robbery and theft’.
The feast becomes the privileged language through which

power speaks, acts and coerces. The speech by the leader of
the foreign delegation of thieves and robbers, in which he
arrogantly admonishes the local delegates ‘to drink the blood
of [their] people and to eat their flesh, [as the imperial powers
have done to the Africans over the centuries], than to retreat
a step’ (Ngugi 1987, p. 89), signifies greed and power
magnified to their full and logical extremes – reduced to their
essences. Yet the actual idiom of this display, its organisation
and its symbolism, focuses on the body: specifically the belly,
the mouth and the phallus.
Ngugi’s thieves display striking forms of deformity. His
portrayal of the local thieves at the cave foregrounds the
grotesque image of the body in which the belly and the
mouth stand out. One striking example is that of Gitutu.
Ngugi’s satire on the comprador class, his laughter at their
borrowed power, is best captured in the narrator’s graphic
description of Gitutu’s body:
Gitutu had a belly that protruded so far that it would have

touched the ground had it not been supported by the
braces that held up his trousers. It seemed as if his belly had
absorbed all his limbs and all the other organs of his body.
Gitutu had no neck – at least, his neck was not visible. His
arms and legs were short stumps. His head had shrunk to
the size of a fist. (Ngugi 1987, p. 99)
Gitutu’s body is a body in the act of becoming; ‘it is

continually built, created, and builds and [it in turn] creates
another body’ (Bakhtin 1968, p. 317). It is a body that, figur-
atively speaking, swallows the world and is itself swallowed by
the world. In the words of Bakhtin, the grotesque body
‘outgrows its own self, transgressing its own body, in which
it conceives a new, second body: the bowels and the phallus’
(p. 317). In this act of swallowing, Gitutu’s body becomes
monstrous – a typical grotesque hyperbole. His belly threatens
to detach itself from the body and lead an independent life.
His neck, arms, legs and head have been transformed into a
grotesque animal subject.
The realisation of the grotesque image of the body by

associating the parts or the whole body with the animal form
is best illustrated again in the body of Gitutu and, to a degree,
in the body of Kihaahu, whose grotesque feature is his mouth
rather than his stomach. To do this, Ngugi uses names which
are semantically fixed to the master code of the Agikuyu
people. The names are culturally positioned or grounded to a
‘pretext’ that is inherent in the tradition of the Gikuyu, and
in particular to some animal or inanimate object in the
Agikuyu cosmos whose traits the characters personify or
share. For the average Agikuyu reader the names are specific
signs which they could readily interpret because of the shared
typology of meaning between the signs and their interpreters.
The name Gitutu wa Gataanguru is a good illustration of
the use of this mutually intelligible typology of meaning
between the sign and its community of readers. Gitutu in
Gikuyu, Ndigirigi writes, refers to a ‘big jigger’, while
Gataanguru refers to ‘a belly infested with tapeworms which
produce a bloating effect’ (1991, p. 101). His physical form
resembles that of a jigger. Thus Gitutu’s name within the
context of the Agikuyu readership helps to concretise the
grotesque image of Gitutu’s body. There are clear grounds for
comparison in which the physical features of Gitutu – ‘pot-
belly’, ‘short-limbs’ and ‘tiny head’ are placed in stark
juxtaposition to the physical features of a jigger. But more
importantly, these features underscore the parasitic nature of
jiggers and by extension the parasitism of the ruling class in
the postcolonial state that Gitutu represents or parallels. As a
parasite, Gitutu finds his host in the lives of the workers and
peasants that he exploits. Characteristic of this class, Ngugi
seems to suggest, Gitutu eats more than he needs as he
shamelessly confesses that his ‘belly is becoming larger and
larger because it is constantly overworked!’ (Ngugi 1987,
p. 100).
But, as if Gitutu’s deformity is not a sufficient sign of the
elites’ greed, Ngugi’s thieves seek true monstrosity, as in the
case of Ndikita wa Nguunji who argues for additional human
parts (Ngugi 1987, p. 180). Ndikita desires a world in which
‘the rich few would ensure their immortality through the
purchase of spare organs of the human body, thus leaving
death as the sole prerogative of the poor’ (p. 100). Yet

Ndikita’s desire to have spare organs serves to expose the
insecurity of masculine authority: for when Ndikita’s wife
becomes enthusiastic about the prospect of having two female
organs, he is threatened. Ndikita expresses horror at the idea
of such equality between sexes and he urges his wife to
espouse, instead, ‘true’ African culture, to heed tradition,
which Ndikita would like to interpret as meaning inferior
status for women. As Eileen Julien writes: ‘Ndikita would seem
to need women as witnesses of his masculine prowess, yet he
fears them and their sexual demands’ (1992, pp. 149–50). It is
to serve his own masculine quest for privilege and power that
he invokes the authority of ‘tradition’. Thus, the uncondi-
tional subordination of women to the principle of male
pleasure remains one of the pillars upholding the reproduc-
tion of the phallocratic system which turns postcoloniality
into ‘a world of anxious virility, a world hostile to continence,
frugality, sobriety’ (Mbembe 1992, p. 9). Wariinga’s body, for
example, becomes the focus of a power struggle with far-
reaching ramifications. Masculine authority seeks to imprison
her body within the grip and grasp of the local thieves – the
ruling elite of the postcolonial state. But it is not until
Wariinga regains her agency as an active participant in the
process of history-making that she develops from the victim
type to the fighting type.
But it is not enough, in the postcolonial context, simply to
bring into play the mouth, the belly or phallus, or merely to
refer to them, in order to be automatically obscene. ‘Mouth’,
‘belly’, and ‘phallus’, when used in popular speech and jokes,
have above all to be located in the real world, located in real
time. In short, they are active statements about the human
condition, and as such contribute integrally to the making of
political culture in the postcolony. Every reference, then, to
mouth, belly or phallus is consequently a discourse on the
world – the postcolonial world. Ngugi’s use of the grotesque
and the obscene points to this world.
Ngugi’s use of the grotesque image of the body is very
much grounded in the ordinary politics of postcolonial
Kenya. It is the kind of politics whose primary objective is to
acquire power as the ultimate vehicle for economic success.
Most social struggles in Africa, Bayart is wont to remind us,

only become useful if they lead to the accumulation of power:
‘It is a truism that it is easier to get rich from a position of
power than from a position of dependency and penury’
(Bayart 1993, p. 239). When one acquires power and the
economic success that goes with it, one becomes honoured
and often one is not shy to perform one’s success. Thus, in a
postcolony, ‘material prosperity is one of the chief political
virtues rather than [the] object of disapproval’ (Bayart 1993,
p. 242). While writing Devil on the Cross Ngugi must have
been conscious of the fact that boasting about one’s wealth in
Kenya is part of the social norm. As Angelique Haugerud
reminds us: ‘Exuberant showmanship is one enduring face of
Kenyan political life’ (1995, p. i). It is not unusual to come
across politicians boasting about their wealth and with great
admiration from the people. In the early days of Kenya’s inde-
pendence, Jomo Kenyatta – the first president of Kenya –
ridiculed the radical nationalist opponent, Bildad Kaggia, for
failing to amass wealth for himself. ‘Look at Kungu Karumba,’
Kenyatta told Kaggia, ‘[h]e has invested in buses and has
earned money, but what have you done for yourself since
independence?’2 About two decades later, Mr Oloitiptip, one
of President Moi’s ministers, boasted to his political
opponents in parliament in sentiments very similar to
Kenyatta’s when he declared: ‘I’ve got money. I don’t sell
chickens ... I am able to spend 150 million shillings from my
own pocket for the marriage of my son ... I have six cars, two
big houses, twelve wives and sixty-seven children.’ Turning to
his opponents, he reminded them that they ‘are not small
men; they are men of big bellies like Oloitiptip (The Weekly
Review, 30 March 1984, pp. 1–2). Forty years later the populist
deputy J. M. Kariuki had absolutely no need to disguise his
wealth in order to win credibility with the citizens – the
‘wananchi’ (see Odinga 1992, p. 63). Thus the ‘politics of the
belly’, to use Bayart’s phrase, is very much in the imagination
of Kenyans and is not just a fictive creation of Ngugi.
Ngugi’s intervention lies in his insistence that the ‘politics
of the belly’ that he erects on the stage for us ought to be the
object of ridicule rather than emulation. The belly, which the
rulers in particular decode as a sign of success, ought to
expose the parasitic nature of the local comprador in a

postcolony. Thus, far from confirming their authority, the
grotesque image of rulers like Oloitiptip, should serve to
undermine the power of the rulers by turning them into
pitiable objects of ridicule. After all, ‘the body itself is the
principal locale of the idioms and fantasies used in depicting
power’ (Mbembe 1992, p. 7). If Kenyans in their ignorance
have associated ‘the big belly’ with power, then Ngugi is
forcing them to debunk the myth, and to realise that the
authority of the local rulers is borrowed.
It is, therefore, to the nature of the local comprador
bourgeoisie that Ngugi draws our attention by using the
grotesque mode in his depiction of them. Indeed, grotesque
characters, marked as they are by bodily deficiencies or
deformation, would seem to offer Ngugi a perfect means of
figuring the qualities that have tended to characterise either
the local comprador or the ruling elite in the postcolonial
state in Africa. The use of the grotesque mode draws the
readers’ attention to the body as a site upon which power is
contested. If the Kenyan government had intended to subdue
Ngugi’s body, he turns the butt on them. In Detained, he talks
of his objective:
I would cheat them out of that last laugh by letting my

imagination loose over the kind of society this class, in
nakedly treacherous alliance with imperialist foreigners,
were building in Kenya in total cynical disregard of the
wishes of over fourteen million Kenyans. (1981a, p. 10)
Yet, the full significance of the grotesque image in the text

only makes sense when linked to a couple of subnarratives in
Devil on the Cross.
The first of these subnarratives is derived from Wariinga’s
nightmare which was mentioned earlier in this chapter. In
the grotesque image of the Devil that Wariinga sees, Ngugi
seems to suggest a linear and continuing relationship between
the Devil (read colonialism) and the black elite (read
comprador bourgeoisie) that takes over at independence.
Ngugi further suggests that the desire of the comprador class
which rescues the Devil, thereby introducing a new form of
colonialism, is to inherit the Devil’s worst qualities. The

second subnarrative consists of three stories that Gatuiria
relates to his fellow passengers on their way to Ilmorog in a
matatu. Common to all the stories are the themes of avarice
and conceit. The first story is about the peasant farmer who
was turned into a beast of burden by an ogre (Ngugi 1987,
p. 62). The second story is about the black and beautiful girl
who rejected all the men in her country and took to the first
young man from a foreign country. The young foreigner
turned out to be a man-eating ogre who tore off her ‘limbs
one by one and ate them’ (p. 62). The third and last story that
Gatuiria relates is about an old man called Nding’uri who had
a soul that was richly endowed. He was well respected,
hardworking and displayed neither desire nor greed for other
peoples property until, one day, ‘a strange pestilence attacked
the village’ and destroyed all his possessions (p. 63). Nding’uri
was forced to turn to the evil spirits. ‘At the entrance to the
cave,’ we read, ‘he was met by a spirit in the shape of an ogre’.
We are further told that the ogre
had two mouths, one on his forehead and the other at the
back of his head. The one at the back of his head was
covered by his long hair, and it was only visible when the
wind blew the hair aside. (p. 64)
The thrust of the narrative is that Nding’uri surrenders his

soul to the ogre who demands it in exchange for riches.
Nding’uri is turned ‘into an eater of human flesh and a
drinker of human blood’ (p. 64). And in a typical Bakhtinian
conception of the grotesque image of the body – the body as
a site for defecation – both laughable and revolting, we read
that:
From that day on, Nding’uri began to fart property, to shit

property, to sneeze property, to scratch property, to laugh
property, to think property, to dream property, to talk
property, to sweat property, to piss property. (p. 64)
If the first story by Gatuiria relates directly to the burden of

colonialism on the colonised and points to the possibility of
liberation from the shackles of colonialism, the second one
relates to a colonial mentality – a form of cultural imperialism
that locks the colonised within the orbit of dependency and
leads to a fixation with all that is foreign. The third story
captures the advanced stage in which the colonised now
surrenders his or her being, integrity and pride to the
coloniser in order to receive the protection and be schooled
in the ways of the ogre. The third story is a narrative
expression of the stage that Ngugi has characterised as the
neocolonial stage of imperialism (1981b, p. 119–20). This is
the stage that he satirises in the Devil’s feast by focusing our
attention on the grotesque image of the comprador class that
has given up its soul and betrayed the nation for property.
There is, therefore, a parallel between Wariinga’s nightmare
and the story of Nding’uri. Just like the Devil’s rescuers in
Wariinga’s nightmare, Nding’uri also gives up his soul – his
freedom – in exchange for property.
Significantly, both the ogre and his worshippers, like Gitutu
and Kihaahu, seem to have a similar bodily deformation; they
both seem to share in the common traits of avarice and
conceit. Thus, every other layer of the narrative in the text
serves to draw our attention to the grotesque image of the
ogre, the Devil and his followers. The narrative layers serve to
reveal the nature and values of the capitalist ogre and the
comprador class that it gives rise to. The likes of Gitutu are
born out of the ogre’s womb and they continue to perpetuate
its legacy, the legacy of neocolonial dependency. A section of
the African elite, Ngugi seems to be saying, never contributed
in the struggle for independence, but were able to prosper
through sheer cunning and cheating, and by exploiting their
history of collaboration to their advantage. This class, Ngugi
suggests, cannot survive without the patronage of their
foreign masters. Part of their fundamental weakness is that
they are disposed to parasitism, selfishness, greed and naked
exploitation of workers and peasants through cunning rather
than creative entrepreneurship and hard work.
For Ngugi, then, the grotesque at its best exaggerates and
caricatures the negative, the inappropriate, the antihuman
that the comprador class has come to symbolise in his works.

To this end Ngugi is in agreement with Keorapetse Kgositsile’s
comment that black writers should deploy the grotesque to
portray ‘the undesirable, the corrupting, the destructive’
(1969, p. 147). But as Bakhtin argues: ‘A grotesque world in
which only the inappropriate is exaggerated is only quant-
itatively large, but qualitatively it is extremely poor,
colourless, and far from gay’ (1968, p. 308).
In concluding I want to argue that in spite of Ngugi’s
scathing exposure of the so-called borrowed power in a
postcolony, in choosing the comprador class as the sole object
of his butt, Ngugi fails to draw attention to how the masses
are themselves implicated in their own exploitation. By
confining the display of power to the elite, and suggesting a
hegemonic power structure controlled by foreign and local
compradors, he fails to rise above the binary categories used
in standard interpretations of domination. Within this
structure, the dominated can only collaborate with or resist
the rulers. And yet, as Bayart warns us,
the production of a political space [in a postcolony] is on

the one hand the work of an ensemble of actors, dominant
and dominated, and ... on the other hand it is in turn
subjected to a double logic of totalitarianising and detotal-
itarianising ... The ‘small men’ also work hard at political
innovation and their contribution does not necessarily
contradict that of the ‘big men’. (1993, p. 249)
A linear narrative of the rulers versus the ruled, the oppressor

versus the oppressed, which characterises Ngugi’s discourse in
a postcolony runs the risk of excluding ‘heterogeneity from
the domain of utterance and is thus functionally incapable of
even conceiving the possibility of discursive opposition or
resistance to it’ (Slemon 1987, p. 11). The point being made
here is that in order to have an effective understanding of
power relations in a postcolony, we need to realise that it
cannot simply be
a relationship of resistance or collaboration but it can best

be characterised as illicit cohabitation, a relationship
fraught by the very fact of the [rulers] and [the ruled]

having to share the same living space. (Mbembe 1992, p. 4)
This kind of relationship can only result in what Achille

Mbembe has called the ‘mutual zombification of both the
dominant and those they apparently dominate’ (1992, p. 4).
It is a relationship of conviviality in which both the ruled
and the rulers rob each other of their vitality and, in the
process, render each other impotent. But because a
postcolony is also a regime of pretence, the ‘subjects’ have to
learn to bargain in this market marked by ambivalence; they
have to have the ‘ability to manage not just a single identity
for themselves [which binarism reduces them to], but several,
which are flexible enough for them to negotiate as and when
required’ (p. 4). It seems to me that Ngugi’s otherwise brilliant
critique of the rulers in a postcolony deletes the ambivalent
relationship and crucial contradictions between the ruled and
the rulers. In a way, it also robs the ruled of any historical
agency outside the grand regime of resistance narrative.
Ngugi’s Textual Counter-discourse

What emerges in Ngugi’s novels is the fact that characters are
used as symbols of social classes and as representatives of
social groups. In the earlier novels character depiction is used
to enhance certain general values and qualities that are
expected to relate to some social groups in the society, while
in the later novels, they are used to show that conflict is not
waged among individuals or between individuals and a
community but among social classes or forces. The use of
the grotesque and of generic names, for example, become
ways and means of figuring, not an individual character, but
whole groups. The grotesque image of the body and names
become signifiers that draw our attention to the values and
norms of a social group or class as fixed. I have also shown
that the individual’s thoughts and deeds become represent-
ative of his or her class and are, therefore, a reflection of
what takes place in the wider society. Characters are,
therefore, an important aspect of the symbolic structure
within the narrative. They are allegorical to the extent that

they parallel what takes place in society.
However, Ngugi tends towards a purely schematic
allegorical portrayal that undermines any notion of
typicality. In his later novels, he is trapped in a binary
polarity within which the reading of the postcolonial
situation is always suspended on the determining structure of
the First World and Third World, the oppressor and the
oppressed. Allegory for Ngugi would seem to be a textual
counter-discourse, an anti-imperialist figurative opposition
which involves the contestation and subversion of colonialist
discourse and nothing more.
And yet, a counter-discourse such as Ngugi’s, which
positions itself as ‘other’ to a dominant discourse, runs the
risk of excluding ‘heterogeneity from the domain of utterance
and is thus functionally incapable of even conceiving the
possibility of discursive opposition or resistance to it’ (Slemon
1987, p. 11). The kind of discourse that locates itself in direct
opposition to the dominant ‘other’ tends to negate plurality,
diversity and specific contradictions that should characterise
the anticolonial narrative. Ngugi’s narrative reduces history to
broad analytical paradigms and figures history through static
and general symbols of cognition.
3
Character Portrayal in Ngugi’s
Novels
One of the major thrusts of the novel tradition has been

toward the creation of characters who appear to have motive
and free will, and for whom we as readers posit pasts and
futures which extend implicitly beyond the boundaries of the
narrative. If there is one thing that Ngugi’s novels, except for
Weep Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat, have in common is
that they do not fully partake of this tradition. Ngugi’s
characters tend to have a significance more typological than
psychological. Their motivation for action is more often than
not determined by the nature of the plot and circumscribed
by the requirements of the story. Ngugi’s The River Between,
Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross and Matigari could be said to
display an overdetermined narrative structure which tends to
develop around a predictable causal chain of events in which
plot, theme and character are invariably linked to what
constitutes the dominant discourse in the text.
Central to The River Between, for example, is the way both
oral prophecy of the tribe and the saviour myth direct the plot
in the narrative and in the process limit the choices available
to the hero of the novel, Waiyaki. The novel in its plot
structure and storyline is deeply indebted to the saviour myth.
This idea of the saviour follows closely, in the main, the story
of Christ: a chosen man, doing the father’s will, ignored by
most of his fellow men and sacrificed for the sake of others.
Like the biblical Messiah, Waiyaki also acquires a special place
because he comes from the lineage of great seers. If Christ
came from the house of David, Waiyaki is the son of
Chege,the man with the gift of magic and prophecy. People
believe that Chege is the voice of Mugo. Chege himself thinks
of Waiyaki as a saviour: ‘He lived in the son. If the prophecy
had not been fulfilled in him, well, there was the son. What
68
Character Portrayal in Ngugi’s Novels 69
was the difference? A saviour shall come from the hills’ (Ngugi
1965, p. 38). Waiyaki himself begins to see himself as a
saviour and a man with a mission. He has to be prepared for
his mission at Siriana. Indeed, Waiyaki is convinced that the
greatest mission to his people lies in the provision of
education. And although he sometimes feels oppressed by his
calling, he has a clear sense of messianic mission to save
through education. The myth helps Ngugi in articulating his
theme of public responsibility which is seen as an educated
man’s burden that Waiyaki must take on, a notion not very
far removed from the colonial sense of mission, duty and
noblesse oblige.
And yet Waiyaki’s political vision would seem to be
compromised by the overall limited vision inherent in the
saviour myth as a thematic and structural framework within
which Ngugi has to capture the nationalist desires of his
community. The problem with a myth such as the one of the
saviour is that it tells a story in such a predetermined fashion
that the narrator does not have the opportunity to
manipulate the plot or results. Again with such a myth, once
the protagonist fails, an atmosphere of social desperation and
spiritual dereliction takes over.
The narrative structure imposed by the saviour myth is
such that Waiyaki has very little personal agency outside that
cut out for him in nationalist rhetoric: as a modernising agent
of history. And yet the modernising project that Waiyaki
embraces is totally at variance with the desires of a
community polarised by the advent of colonialism. He has of
necessity to be constituted through a series of ambiguities
and ambivalences. On the one hand he embodies a type of
pure nationalism: ‘Kinuthia [Waiyaki’s friend] was convinced
that Waiyaki was the best man to lead people, not only to a
new light through education, but also to new opportunities
and areas of self-expression through political independence’
(Ngugi 1965, p. 118). Part of this project is to escape or free
himself from ‘the ritual demands of the tribe’ (p. 121), part of
it is to try and modernise the ‘tribe’ through education and
provide it with a more up-to-date form of information
broking than the reliance on rumour which is stressed
throughout the novel as a corrosive force. But Waiyaki also
has to try and inscribe his nationalism with some vestige of

ethnicity and his attempts to do so are couched in the
following form: ‘A people’s traditions could not be swept
away overnight. That way lay disintegration. Such a tribe
would have no roots, for a people’s roots were in their
traditions going back to the past, the very beginning, Gikuyu
and Mumbi’ (p. 141). But for us readers these sentences are
problematic precisely because we know that Waiyaki’s vision
is premised on a modernist project which gives very little
room to ‘tribal’ ways, even in its most radical form. Besides,
the narrative logic has of necessity to propel Waiyaki towards
his rejection by the community and utter alienation from
their ways.
Waiyaki naively believes that modern education, even
when it is imposed on a people, can lead to some form of
liberation and communal unity. In the novel Kabonyi asks
Waiyaki what he wants the people to do with the formal
education he is so zealous to cultivate. Kabonyi then asks the
rhetorical question: ‘Do you think the education of the tribe,
the education and wisdom which you all received, is in any
way below that of the white man?’ (Ngugi 1965, p. 95).
Whether or not we think that Kabonyi’s motivation is
suspect, because of his desire to be the saviour, is beside the
point. The fact of the matter is that he sees more clearly the
dangers of taking on the ways of the white man uncritically.
His position gestures towards Ngugi’s more recent discourses
on decolonisation and the restoration of community. It is
what Edward Said calls ‘the repossession of culture that goes
on long after the political establishment of independent
nation-states’ (1994, p. 257).
For all its pretensions to independent status, Waiyaki’s
school teaches what he has learned in Siriana. Kabonyi’s
argument is that to follow Waiyaki is to widen the gap that
already exists in the tribe by adding in general terms an alien
culture to the alien religion. Neither Waiyaki nor Ngugi can
give specific answers to Kabonyi’s questions. The possibility of
a syncretic culture can only lead them to a reversion to some
questionable tribal practice in the form of female circumci-
sion, a practice whose rejection by the missionaries and local
converts subverts the very unity that Waiyaki desires. Besides
how can education yield the desired unity in the face of

colonial encroachment and arrogance? Waiyaki’s friend and
fellow teacher, Kinuthia, seems to have a better understand-
ing of the prevailing mood in the society than him.
Yet he wondered if Waiyaki knew that people wanted

action now, that the new enthusiasm and awareness
embraced more than the mere desire for learning. People
wanted to move forward. They could not do so as long as
their lands were taken, as long as their children were forced
to work in the settled ridges, as long as women and men
were forced to pay hut-tax. (Ngugi 1965, p. 118)
Clearly, the connection between education and the politics of

the day that Kinuthia brings up, the burden of colonialism in
the form of land alienation, forced labour and forced
taxation, are all issues that are left undeveloped in the novel.
It is as if Ngugi is saying that ‘seek ye first the whiteman’s
Educational kingdom and all shall be added unto you’.
Kabonyi may be malevolent, but he has his pulse at the right
place: he is in touch with the demands and grievances of the
community.
In resigning from the Kiama, Waiyaki also makes a political
blunder because he creates room for Kabonyi’s political
intrigues. It is again his friend, Kinuthia who warns him of
the power of the Kiama. ‘Be careful, Waiyaki ... The Kiama has
power. Power. And your name is in it, giving it even greater
power’ (Ngugi 1965, p. 112). Clearly, it is in the Kiama that
one finds the seeds of the legitimate independence
movement, and yet Waiyaki thinks he can bypass it. We are
told that the Kiama is getting more and more power over the
people, and rightly so because it touches on their real
grievances. The more power the Kiama has the more isolated
Waiyaki becomes. Ultimately, every action in the novel would
seem to push Waiyaki towards his demise and total rejection
at the hands of his people.
The question is, does Ngugi provide his hero with a spectre
of choice? Could the writer manipulate the framework rooted
in the saviour myth to redeem his hero and to give him
greater agency? It seems to me that the inevitability of
Waiyaki’s fate at the end is embedded in the structure of the

narrative, and although Waiyaki in the end comes to the
realisation that he should have developed the political aspect
of his mission, the narrative voice is unequivocal in its con-
demnation of the people. In the end we are made to feel that
it is the people, and not Waiyaki, that have betrayed the tribe.
The people have rejected their saviour and they are ashamed:
‘Neither did they want to speak to one another, for they knew
full well what they had done to Waiyaki and yet they did not
want to know’ (Ngugi 1965, p. 152).
And yet, to be fair to Ngugi, he allows for no total narrative
closure. There is no pretence that the search for the right
idioms to name the nascent resistance culture has been fully
realised or deleted by Waiyaki’s rejection. And here Ngugi
subverts the messianic myth to an extent. Far from
threatening the people with the final judgement and far from
hiding in the delusion of a prophecy fulfilled, Waiyaki’s
internal conflict continues and as Edward Said puts it: ‘Ngugi
powerfully conveys the unresolved tensions that will
continue well after the novel ends and that the novel makes
no effort to contain’ (1994, pp. 254–5). This is what the
narrative voice is hinting at when we are told:
all at once Waiyaki realized what the ridges wanted. People

wanted action now. Now he knew what he would preach if
he ever got another chance: education for unity. Unity for
political freedom. (Ngugi 1965, p. 143)
It is the weight of this political action, the unresolved

tensions, that is at the heart of his subsequent novels, Weep
Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat, where Ngugi gives greater
spectre of choice and a much more complex character
portrayal of the major protagonists. In these two novels,
Ngugi is ‘clearly concerned as much with “psychological con-
sequences” as with “the theme of a people living and acting
within the Mau Mau period itself”’ (Nkosi 1981, p. 40). The
tensions that we encounter in The River Between, which lead to
simplistic polarisation of characters as traditionalists and
Christians, assume a much more complex reading in these
texts. And the principal vehicles for reading the contradic-
tions of the specific historical conjunctures are the characters

that serve to illuminate the ambiguities of the moment and
the historical dilemmas engendered by the anticolonial war.
Nationalism is anchored around real experiences of
characters. Both past and present experiences intermingle to
evoke our sympathies and to give a better understanding of
the characters and of their social milieu. All characters are
subjected to scrutiny and their roles assessed for what they are.
The key to Ngugi’s characterisation in the two novels is the
interplay he creates between repressive political structures
and the individual psychology of his characters, steeped in
their social background. I think it is in these two novels that
Ngugi resolves what he saw as the tension between individu-
alism and communal consciousness that plagues The River
Between. People get inserted into historic moments in society
which exact certain demands on them as part of the collective
or national experience, but they also have specific histories as
individuals which have a bearing on how they respond to
the demands of history. If authoritarian political structures in
colonial Kenya shape the perceptions of Ngugi’s characters in
Weep Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat, whether or not they
accept the structures, the specific histories of Ngugi’s
characters also significantly influence their conceptions of
political and social relations in a colonialist context.
Perhaps the most striking examples of Ngugi’s characteri-
sation are Ngotho and Howlands in Weep Not, Child. Both
carry a similar baggage into the emergency. Having fought in
the First World War, they are disillusioned with Britain and
loathe it. Significantly, Howlands now regards Kenya as his
home and, if anything, hates Britain more than Ngotho.
Again they both lost promising sons in the Second World
War for a country which had promised freedom and liberty
for all only to revert to its repressive structures in the colony.
And now both men, brought together by colonialism, have to
reckon with a new war – the Mau Mau war of independence.
The war thrusts new responsibilities on them, some of which
Mr Howlands in particular has been running away from.
The present that had made him a D.O. reflected a past from
which he had tried to run away. That past had followed
him even though he had tried to avoid politics,

government, and anything else that might remind him of
that betrayal. (Ngugi 1964, p. 76)
Ngotho, for his part, is faced with a crisis of authority in his

family and a basic loss of power. In the end when the two
men die, Mr Howlands at the hands of Boro, we are
profoundly moved by their tragedy. We are moved because
they are presented not just as typological figures, but more
importantly as human beings with personal histories with
which we can identify. And here Ngugi forces us to confront
the moral dilemmas engendered by a long history of
imperialism, not just in Kenya, but elsewhere in the world.
Imperial history is therefore judged not only by the way it
destroyed the colonised subjects but also by how it afflicted
psychological pain on its own people. It is the metaphor of
land, the ultimate signifier of imperial history, that creates
both the bond and divide between Ngotho and Mr Howlands.
The two have crossed paths in the broader geographic plane
of human history, but they are not just bloodless symbols of
this history, they are above all human beings.
The interplay between a repressive political structure and
personalised human experience acquires greater complexity
in A Grain of Wheat. The novel is built around a shared sense
of guilt and betrayal. The betrayals operate at two levels: the
public betrayals in response to a repressive political structure
and personal betrayals emanating from self-interest which is
further compounded, in certain cases, by personal histories of
fear and inadequacy. The betrayals range from the most
obvious case of Karanja who once flirted with the freedom
movement but later turned administrative chief for his area,
to Gikonyo who broke down during his detention and broke
the Mau Mau oath in order that he may come back to Mumbi,
and to Mumbi herself who at the false news of Gikonyo’s
release gives in to Karanja’s sexual advances and later bears
him an illegitimate son. Indeed, even the whites get involved
in one form of treachery or another. And yet, at the heart of
the novel lies an even greater treachery and a larger irony
which is that of Mugo: the man chosen to lead the Uhuru cel-
ebrations is actually Kihika’s traitor. These betrayals gesture
towards the possibility of betrayals of the ideals and goals of

Uhuru by those who have assumed the reins of power in
independent Kenya, and this is precisely because they are
motivated by self-interest, tragic personal histories and the
impact of a harsh colonial structure. Ngugi’s characterisation,
underpinned by the betrayal motif, is significant because it
not only renders his characters profoundly human, but it also
serves to undermine the false rhetorics of post-liberation
politics by calling for a thorough examination of the motives
and actions of our nationalist leaders.
The character through whom most of these ambiguities of
the historic moment and basic human inadequacies are
filtered is Mugo. Haunted by his own inadequacy, Mugo is
portrayed in terms that easily elicit our sympathy. An orphan,
having lost both parents at a tender age, Mugo has to remain
under the custody of a cruel aunt. At a very early age, he
emerges as a lonely soul, alienated from the greater
community and plagued by insecurity. His loneliness drives
him to escape into his piece of land, but when the emergency
is declared by the British, Mugo is detained in spite of the
fact that he was never really interested in the struggle. While
in detention, his land is taken away and Mugo comes out
devastated. As if this is not enough, the people of Thabai want
to impose political leadership on him in the absence of Kihika
and yet he knows that his heart is not in the struggle and he
has betrayed Kihika. It is the fear that his limited space is
increasingly being encroached upon that drives him to betray
Kihika. And yet strictly speaking it is the repressive colonial
structure that compounds Mugo’s life by disrupting the
lyricism that he had established between himself and his
piece of land and by imposing on him certain political
responsibilities that his fragile character cannot sustain. The
same political system forces him to buy into its ideology of
collaboration and to believe in the colonial myth that real
power resides in being in a position to inflict ‘pain and death
to others without anyone asking questions’ (Ngugi 1967,
p. 197). His confession in the end marks a process of personal
healing from his childhood inadequacies, but it also marks a
reversal in the conception of the workings of the colonial
regime. If betrayal is rooted in colonialist structures and self-
interest, then the custodians of independent Kenya must

reject these values. It seems to me that in his portrayal of
Mugo, Ngugi was in search of a national character – not a
primordial national character – but one that would be willing
to lay its soul bare for the nation and to avoid the trappings
of colonialist structures and personal ambition, all of which
had become most apparent at the time Ngugi was writing this
novel. What follows is a remarkable deviation from the
complexity of character portrayal that we find in both Weep
Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat. Ngugi reverts to the over-
determined narrative structure in his later novels.
The Overdetermined Narrative Structure and the Victim

Type in the Later Novels
This section explores Ngugi’s depiction of the victim type as
a character whose portrayal is predicated on and contrasted
with the exploiter type we saw in the previous chapter. Ngugi
relies on overdetermined narrative structure in his definition
and portrayal of the victim type. Thus the types of exploiter
(comprador class) and victim constitute the most important
binary opposites in Ngugi’s postcolonial narratives. While the
exploiter embodies the values of the comprador class and
capitalism, portrayed by Ngugi as serving it with religious
devotion, the victim type, by contrast, embodies the values of
the ‘wretched of the earth’ – the workers and peasants.
Between these extremes we have the artist type, the
vacillating intellectual. Torn between the values of his elitist
background and those of the oppressed, the artist type
ultimately succumbs to the bidding of the heart and betrays
the struggle. The vacillating intellectuals are, in the final
analysis, on the side of the oppressor. They are more individ-
ualised in their portrayal than the average Ngugi types of
exploiter and victim. They are characterised by rebellion,
idealism and escapism. They are also given greater latitude in
terms of the choices they can make as characters. In the end,
as I seek to argue, Ngugi still upholds a character typology
which invites allegorical reading of characters as symbolic
structures that stand for something larger than themselves.
An overdetermined narrative structure tends to develop

around a predictable causal chain of events in which plot,
theme and character are invariably linked to what constitutes
the dominant discourse in the text. In the case of Devil on the
Cross, class oppression by the comprador class within the broad
dependency perspective would seem to be the dominant text,
although this is also linked to gender oppression as a subtext.
In the delineation of Wariinga’s character as the main victim
of oppression in Devil on the Cross, the focus is on the
compounded effects of class and gender on Wariinga. And
this is achieved by means of an overdetermined narrative
structure, the kind that Daniel Scheiber argues, tends ‘toward
redundancy – the repetition or exaggeration of semic material
far beyond the discourse’ (Scheiber 1991, p. 265).1 Every
incident in the novel, for example, is securely linked in a
causal chain that compels our attention to class and gender
oppression as the source of Wariinga’s predicament. Each
narrative foray leads to a single point, the suffering of
Wariinga. Each detail in the novel contributes its own
resonance to Wariinga’s tragedy, at the level of plot or
symbolism.
From the beginning of the narrative, the writer focuses on
Wariinga as a victim2 whose life history demands narrative
ordering. We read that the Prophet of Justice was compelled
to ‘reveal what now lies concealed by darkness’ because ‘this
story was too disgraceful, too shameful, that it should be
concealed in the depths of everlasting darkness’ (Ngugi 1982,
p. 7). The compelling voice of revelation, Julien writes,
‘signals both the symbolic nature of the ensuing story, its
kinship to allegory and fable, and its moral authority’ (1992,
p. 147). For Ngugi, Wariinga’s narrative is allegorical of the
state of the nation; it is a narrative about the submerged
history of the oppressed which has always been suppressed in
the master narrative.
Wariinga is born of parents who fight for independence, are
detained and then released only to find that their land has
been sold to homeguards. When Wariinga moves to a neigh-
bouring town of Nakuru to study under the care of her aunt,
she becomes victim of the Rich Old Man – her uncle’s friend.
By enticing the innocent and pure Wariinga with gifts, the
Rich Old Man succeeds in thwarting Wariinga’s youthful

ambitions to go to university because she falls pregnant. She
is rejected by the man, attempts to commit suicide and is
saved by Muturi, the man that later turns out to be the leader
of the worker’s movement. She trains as a secretary and vows
never to be used again by the rich. When she joins Boss
Kihara’s company, she rejects the advances of Boss Kihara
who hits back by firing her. For the second time, Wariinga
falls victim of the rich, propertied class.
But what is perhaps significant in the narrative is the fact
that Wariinga is also rejected by her boyfriend, a university
student, whom she loves and on whom she spends all her
money. And in this incident, Ngugi exposes the African elite
as being in league with the propertied class in their exploita-
tion of innocent women. But in a direct reflexive satire, Ngugi
exposes the folly of women like Kareendi (Wariinga) who
surrender themselves to men like slaves and allow men to
take full advantage of them, while they remain silent and
behave ‘like a lamb cropping grass’ (Ngugi 1982, p. 20). She
attempts another suicide.
It is during the third suicide attempt in the streets of
Nairobi that, in a typical narrative strategy of coincidental
plots, Wariinga is brought into a forced relationship with the
man who rescues her, a student leader who invites her to the
Devil’s feast in Ilmorog. On her way to Ilmorog she enters
into a relationship with four characters, Gatuiria, Muturi,
Wangari and Mwireri wa Mukiraai, that will alter her life sig-
nificantly. Wariinga undergoes a metamorphosis during a
spiritual trial in which she encounters a voice: a roaming
spirit who opens up her whole life history and the social
struggle around her. She has to make the choice between
serving the Devil with all the material wealth that goes with
it or fighting against the ‘eaters’ (Ngugi 1982, p. 188). It is
after her encounter with Muturi’s ‘mob’ of workers and
students that another significant change takes place in
Wariinga. She is faced with the difficult choice of having to
take sides in the struggle. Muturi challenges both her and
Gatuiria to use their brains in the service of the people.
Indeed, it dawns upon Wariinga for the first time that as a
secretary, she had sacrificed four basic things that make a
whole woman: her hands, brains, humanity and thighs

(Ngugi 1982, p. 206). When Muturi entrusts her with the gun
– a rather ironic use of the phallic symbol as the expression of
liberated womanhood, given Ngugi’s self-confessed
‘progressive’ stand on gender politics – we are told:
she felt courage course through her whole body. She

thought that there was not a single danger in the world
that she could not now look in the face. All her doubts and
fears had been expelled by the secret with which Muturi
had entrusted her. (p. 211)
Wariinga decides to fulfil her lifelong ambition, trains as a

mechanical motor engineer and sets herself up in business.
She vows never to sell her soul to the Devil for money and
never again to be owned by another man. And yet, in a tragic
reversal of what should have been a happy ending, with the
perfect union between Gatuiria and Wariinga, Gatuiria’s
father turns out to be the Rich Old Man who exploited
Wariinga in her youth. In this bizarre encounter between
father and daughter-in-law, conceited lover and abused
woman, exploiter and victim, Gatuiria is the pawn and foe,
the vacillating arbiter in the complex drama of allegorical
romance. Gatuiria is helpless in these circumstances.
The delineation of Wariinga according to the victim type is
in keeping with the flat, projective characterisation that we
associate with overdetermined narrative structures. As I have
shown, Wariinga is portrayed initially as an innocent girl
beset by men who are intent on exploiting her sexually. Sig-
nificantly, she displays the seme of naïveté – a mark of
innocence – in her relations with the Rich Old Man and the
university boyfriend. But we also know that she has the semes
which point to ideal love and social ambition. She gets
involved with the university boyfriend and later with Gatuiria
because of that deep desire for the ideal love and not for
casual romantic exploits. Similarly, she trains as a mechanic
to realise her childhood ambition. Within the narrative, the
two semes are suppressed in favour of the naïve, innocent
and helpless victim, because if they are not suppressed they
would hasten her subversion or outright rejection of the
trappings of unscrupulous men. Indeed, when Wariinga

appears to be in control of her life as a motor-mechanical
engineer, she falls victim again to the educated Gatuiria who
opens up the possibility of her realising ideal love. When
Wariinga readily accepts her engagement to Gatuiria, even
before knowing the parents, the irony is stark – Wariinga’s
adaptation to her role as sexual victim still rings of innocence
and naïveté. She cannot marry Gatuiria and she cannot go
back to her work because the plot on which she worked with
other workers has been sold to none other than Boss Kihara
and his foreign friends. Thus the plot only progresses to
emphasise the spectre of the victim type. And as the narrative
voice confirms, Wariinga ‘knew with all her heart that the
hardest struggles of her life’s journey lay ahead’ (Ngugi 1982,
p. 254).
The nature of Wariinga’s story shows clearly how Ngugi
works to remove the spectre of ‘choice’ – traditionally
regarded as the prime source of character motivation – from
Wariinga’s actions. (In Chapter 4, I will show how Ngugi
resorts to dreams, the fantastic and the journey motif to
realise Wariinga’s character transformation.) The heroine’s
fate is tied to the demands of the discourse as Ngugi asserts
the inevitability of the plot’s movement in a predictable
direction. The plot points to the unresolved tragic conflict
between the victim type and the exploiter type; it is a tragic
conflict which the intellectual elite, the artist type, Ngugi
would have us believe, is incapable of resolving or providing
decisive intervention. Seemingly, independent agents like
Gatuiria and his unknowing implication in Wariinga’s
tragedy help to amplify Wariinga’s victimisation. The novel’s
highly directive structure relentlessly pushes us in two
directions: toward Wariinga as a victim and, as we have
already seen, toward the elite propertied class, as the source of
Wariinga’s tragedy. The immediate agent of Wariinga’s
suffering, Gitahi, is partially obscured, becoming just a foil in
the structural confrontation between the capitalists and
workers that Wariinga represents. That is the symbolic sig-
nificance of the confrontation between Gitahi and Wariinga
in which Wariinga dismisses the fatally wounded Gitahi in
images we have come to associate with the grotesque in the
narrative: ‘There kneels a jigger, a louse, a weevil, a flea, a

bedbug! He is mistletoe, a parasite that lives on the trees of
other people’s lives!’ (Ngugi 1982, p. 254).
But Wariinga’s act of revolt points to a release of a new
semic energy, the trait of resistance which now underpins
Wariinga’s desire to realise her social ambition, constantly
stifled by forces of capital and male oppression. Although the
revolt is contrived, it points to Ngugi’s hope in the victim
type and the possibility of regeneration. We can conclude
that the traits which define Wariinga’s character are in
complicity with the nature and the progress of the discourse.
We can only understand Wariinga’s character in relation to
her oppression, both in terms of class and gender. Her
character is contrasted to that of Gitahi or Gitutu. Gitahi, like
Gitutu, is denied any positive human values, while Wariinga
is endowed with positive values, but stereotypically
constructed as victim to elicit our sympathy. But because
Gitahi and Wariinga represent two binary polarities – evil and
good, exploiter and exploited, hunter and hunted – they are
both denied full humanity. They are mere symbolic structures
and have a significance that is more typological than psy-
chological: they are composed of traits which provide a
necessary ‘complicity’ with the requirements of the discourse,
and nothing more.
The Individualised Character: The Intellectual/Artist

Type
Vacillating between the collaborating type – the comprador
bourgeoisie – and non-collaborators – the victim type – are
the intellectuals who have failed to take sides with any one of
the two groups in Kenyan society. They constitute the
educated elite. As Muturi, the worker leader, asserts: ‘Those
educated people are often not sure whose side they are on.
They sway from this side to that like water on a leaf’ (Ngugi
1982, p. 211). Ngugi’s uncommitted intellectuals always
project the image of the artist figure who adopts the status of
internal exile. ‘These characters’, Gikandi writes of artist
figures, ‘exist in a world which always seems beyond their
practical abilities, so that understanding is no longer the
instrument of dealing with real-life experiences; they prefer to

withdraw from a world which they know only too well’
(Gikandi 1987, p. 74). The values to which they aspire are
often in direct contradiction with the values and demands of
their family or social background. For these reasons, Ngugi’s
artist type is always marked by rebellion, idealism and flight.
But unlike the other two types already discussed, the artist is
afforded some latitude of choice, a fundamental instrument
for character motivation that Ngugi denies his average type.
Two characters in Ngugi’s corpus of narrative stand out as
good examples of the artist type: Gatuiria in Devil on the Cross
and Munira in Petals of Blood.
Munira and Gatuiria, just like the teacher in Matigari who
prefers the culture of silence to active political engagement,
express Ngugi’s attitude and sense of disillusionment with
the intellectual elite in Kenya. Ngugi portrays Munira and
Gatuiria as rebels against the crass material obsession of their
parents. They are unable to do anything positive to change
things except for idealistic, spiritual and academic postures
which lead to no practical commitment to change the status
quo. Their characters are defined by the images of entrapment
and escape. Munira in Petals of Blood is similar to Gatuiria in
the way their portraits are drawn. Munira, although one of
the major protagonists and one of the narrators in Petals of
Blood, remains a detached intellectual like Gatuiria. He is a
confused rebel hating his father’s lifestyle on the one hand
and secretly wishing to be a lord, a master and owner on the
other hand. He is filled with feelings of failure and
inadequacy. He is detached, isolated and wants to remain
uninvolved and neutral. Munira is entrapped within the
classroom walls. He finds refuge in teaching and ultimately
takes to religion as a means to escape from reality. Gatuiria is
trapped in endless research and an escapist indulgence in the
so-called African music which he fails to relate to reality.
These characters also have associations with the heroes and
heroines of their stories which are tinged with tragedy.
Munira’s father turned Karega’s mother into a slave and drove
Munira’s sister, a girlfriend of Karega, to suicide. Gatuiria’s
father was Wariinga’s ‘sugar-daddy’ who destroyed her in her
innocent youth. Gatuiria’s portrait will suffice to illustrate

the nature and behaviour of this character type.
Gatuiria, whose name simply means ‘the seeker’ or ‘the
quester’, is portrayed by Ngugi as having some revolutionary
potential and to that extent much of the novel’s hope is
pinned on him. He is poised to take sides with the oppressed
majority when he rejects his father’s property in youthful
rebellion. Sent abroad by the father to study a ‘relevant’
degree in Business Studies, Gatuiria rebels again and studies
African music. On his return, he commits himself to the
restoration of African culture through research in African
music. Like Achebe the novelist, he sets out to find where
‘the rain began to beat us’ (Achebe 1973, p. 3) and to redress
the cultural inequities of colonial Kenya. The product of his
two years of research work in music is an oratorio which tells
the story of the nation. We are told that Gatuiria could
even visualize the audience surging out of the concert hall,

angry at those who sold the soul of the nation to foreigners
and babbling with joy at the deeds of those who rescued
the soul of the nation from foreign slavery. Gatuiria hopes
that above all, his music will inspire people with patriotic
love for Kenya. (Ngugi 1982, p. 227)
Apparently, Gatuiria intends the musical composition to be

his engagement gift to Wariinga. In an allegorical sense, this
act of love and passion would symbolise patriotism and
commitment to the nation. Thus Gatuiria’s romantic
commitment to Wariinga, the despised and abused woman,
is to be read as a patriotic commitment to the nation with
music which is part of Kenya’s heritage as the symbolic
expression of this commitment. Gatuiria’s involvement with
African music is his way of dealing with his alienation and a
way of reconciling himself to the roots of his peoples’ culture.
Music thus becomes an instrument for healing angst and a
form within which meaning can be realised in the fragmented
world that surrounds him. It is also his way of rejecting the
values of his background and the demands of his father,
which are steeped in the power of materialism and ignore the
spiritual processes that have shaped the destiny of his people

over the years.
What Gatuiria forgets is that he is himself caught between
the mortar and the pestle: the values steeped in African
heritage that he aspires to and the values acquired through
his elitist education which are steeped in Western values.
And indeed, right from the beginning, the narrator is at pains
to demonstrate that Gatuiria is in fact a hybrid of sorts,
always mixing English and Gikuyu words (Ngugi 1982, p. 38).
His ideas on Africa’s cultural life are but fragmented
memories of material cultures buried in the past of his
people. Gatuiria calls for a retrieval of cultural values he can
relate to only remotely; they are like the riddles he used to
listen to in the past and can no longer solve, even the
simplest of them (pp. 57–8). His search is therefore marked by
a sense of idealism that is not grounded in practical
experience. And herein lies Gatuiria’s ineffectiveness: he has
composed many songs, he tells his fellow passengers in the
matatu, but he has ‘not yet found the tune or the theme of
the music of [his] dreams’ (p. 59). Gatuiria’s self-conscious
acknowledgement of his dilemma is best captured in his
inability to come to Wariinga’s rescue or to do anything
concrete.
Gatuiria did not know what to do, to deal with his father’s
body, to comfort his mother or to follow Wariinga. So he
just stood in the middle of the courtyard, hearing in his
mind music that led him to nowhere. (p. 254)
Thus, Ngugi would have us believe, Gatuiria the intellectual

fails in love, fails in patriotism and fails in commitment at the
hour of need. He fails to take his logical place; he fails to take
sides with Wariinga the abused and deprived woman and
Ngugi’s true expression of nationhood. Gatuiria fails to
perform the music of his dreams. He fails to render the great
oratorio meant to be a celebration of his people’s culture, but
more importantly, he misses the opportunity to make a
statement against people like his father who had ‘sold the
soul of the nation to foreigners’ (p. 227).
But Gatuiria’s predicament is not as unproblematic as the

narrative seems to imply. It is also not correct to argue, like
Gichingiri Ndigirigi, that ‘Gatuiria fails because he undertakes
to write a revolutionary song as an academic pursuit without
immersing himself in the lives of those he writes about and
taking sides with them’ (1991, p. 105). Ndigirigi seems to
imply that Gatuiria’s composition is written for the oppressed
and not with them (as producers and consumers), a
problematic which would seem to point to Ngugi’s recent
shifts with regard to theatre, in which he argues for theatre
and cultural activity as a communal experience; a collective
process in which the workers and peasants are to be involved
in the production and consumption of artistic experience
(Ngugi 1986, p. 41).
Ndigirigi’s position, which echoes Ngugi’s recent rhetorics
on new directions in African theatre, rests on the complacent
assumption that the category of the intellectual elite is an
uninscribed and unproblematic space, whose only moment of
social agency is locked up with the struggles of the masses.
But it is important to deal with the African intellectual as a
unique and specific category that need not be understood in
relation to the struggles of the masses or judged purely in
terms of how best they articulate the broad issues of the
oppressed. In my view, Gatuiria’s indecisiveness and his so-
called lack of commitment to the struggle is more than an act
of reaction, but a tragic expression of a vacillating and
ambiguous attitude of intellectuals in Africa towards a system
in which they are both pawns and beneficiaries. This is the
savage irony of the position of the African intellectual in the
postcolonial state. Thus Gatuiria’s search cannot simply be
reduced to an ordinary academic quest as Ndigirigi and Ngugi
attempt to do. It is a genuine situation of conflict which
cannot be resolved by taking sides in some undefined
struggle, even when this is done in the name of the masses.
Besides, at a personal level, Gatuiria’s inability to act is in
many ways similar to that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In both
cases the protagonists are faced with extremely difficult
choices and the circumstances calling for partisan action
remain ambiguous and fraught with tragic consequences. The
ambiguities referred to here are both human and political.
Gatuiria is faced with the difficult choice of having to take

sides either with his girlfriend, or to abandon his mother at
this critical moment. Either way the choice is not easy.
Indeed, even the political struggle Gatuiria is called upon to
join hangs on a very thin thread, with only Muturi and
Wariinga as symbols of its tenuous presence.
There is no doubt that the portrait of the spineless intellec-
tual who is the artist type is the most well drawn of all Ngugi’s
characters. He demonstrates a deep psychological insight into
their lives and brings out their social circumstance in a
realistic manner. Their thoughts and actions, and the forces
which have conditioned them, are vividly painted. And more
than any other type, they have greater latitude in making a
choice that is not entirely subordinated to the demands of
the discourse. Gatuiria, like the seeker that he is, interrogates
the social processes and raises questions to a greater extent
than any other character in the matatu taxi and in the entire
narrative. Indeed, the stories of ogres that he relates to his
fellow passengers turn out to be at the heart of the text’s
central concern. Gatuiria is the embodiment of the contra-
dictions of a world of which he is barely in control, a world to
which he cannot give meaning or a harmonious tune.
Indeed, as Ian Glenn argues, the intellectual characters for
Ngugi play a mediating role in the postcolonial state and their
predicament ‘is structurally related to that of the élite whose
alienation is paradoxically their source of power’ (Glenn
1981, p. 63). Glenn argues that there is a homological rela-
tionship between the intellectual protagonists in Ngugi’s
novels and the intellectual elite in postcolonial Kenya. Thus,
one would conclude that Gatuiria and Munira are allegorical
figures, but more complex ones than the two types we have
discussed previously, which Ngugi uses to mediate the role of
the uncommitted intellectual in Kenya. In a way, Ngugi
understands them best because they are homologous to his
own position as an intellectual. But this, notwithstanding,
Ngugi’s characters remain fixed archetypes of social types:
the exploiter and the victim; the collaborator and the resister;
the robber and the robbed. Thus, Ngugi’s ‘homeguard’, his
spineless intellectual and his revolutionary heroine and
victim remain more or less the same in most of his novels.
4
The Use of Popular Forms and
the Search for Relevance
One of the most important developments in Ngugi’s narrative

in recent years has been his creative use of orality in his post-
colonial discourses in Kenya. Indeed, ever since his
publication of Petals of Blood, Ngugi has been troubled by the
fact that he could not readily communicate with his target
audience, the workers and peasants whose lives fed his novels.
‘I knew whom I was writing about’, he asserted, ‘but whom
was I writing for?’ (1986, p. 72). Ngugi’s dilemma has been
that the realist tradition within which most of his earlier
novels are steeped is both complex and alienating for the
purposes of his narrative, whose primary objective is to
present the marginalised groups in Kenya with an alternative
history.1 Through his experimentation with the Kamiriithu
popular theatre Ngugi came to believe that the answer to his
dilemma lay in the popular forms steeped in the traditions
and contemporary experiences of the Gikuyu: ‘In search of
the image that would capture the reality of a neo-colony that
was Kenya under both Kenyatta and Moi, I once again fell on
the oral tradition’ (1986, p. 80).
Ngugi therefore decided to write in his mother tongue2
and to use what he believes are oral narrative strategies and
authentic oral forms of the Gikuyu.3 However, the question
arises as to what exactly the nature of this oral tradition is.
Is Ngugi’s use of the oral traditions of his people entirely
new? A closer look at Ngugi’s earlier novels will show that
Ngugi has always been indebted to Agikuyu oral tradition
and his latest shift in the works written in Gikuyu should be
seen, at least in the sense of appropriating oral forms, not so
much as a rupture but a continuation and a more radical
development towards a syncretic use of both Gikuyu and
Western modes of creation.
87
This chapter will therefore attempt to show that although

Ngugi’s recourse to oral forms is more pronounced in his
works written in Gikuyu, his earlier works have always been
rooted in both popular mythology – the popular forms of the
Gikuyu – and a fusion of modern Western conventions of
writing. Thus, the fusion between oral and written forms is
not something entirely new in Ngugi’s writing. The
fundamental difference in the two phases in Ngugi’s writing
is that it anticipates different types of audiences at each phase.
In the earlier novels, Ngugi is addressing himself to the
English-speaking readers, both at home and abroad, while in
his latest novels he is targeting the Gikuyu readers. In regard
to his novels in Gikuyu, I make the point that although Ngugi
presents his use of oral forms as authentic, these forms are
clearly synthetic. In addition to the manifold written
influences on his work, Ngugi has hinted at the fact that he
was also influenced by oral traditions from other
communities in Kenya and by the written traditions of the
West. In Decolonising the Mind (1986, pp. 80–1), he mentions
the influence of the human-shaped rocks of Idakho, a sub-
ethnic group among the Abaluhia of western Kenya, whose
images fused with the ‘Marimu characters’ which are ‘the
man-eating ogres in Gikuyu orature’. The Faust theme – the
story of a man who surrenders his soul to evil as in Marlowe’s
Faustus, Goethe’s Faust, Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus and
Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita – all seem to have had
relevance for Ngugi’s novel enterprise (pp. 80–1). The
mythical redeemer who, like Matigari, could change his shape
into anything also has its equivalents among the Luos and the
Abaluhia ethnic groups in Kenya. But first I take a brief look
at the use of oral tradition in Ngugi’s earlier novels.
The Use of Oral Tradition in Ngugi’s Earlier Novels

The Agikuyu myth of origin is one of the most recurring icons
in Ngugi’s narrative. It seems to be the cornerstone of Ngugi’s
art and it occurs in virtually all his novels, although it is most
prominent in his earlier novels. In the second chapter I have
argued that Ngugi marshalls the Agikuyu oral mythology in
his nationalist imaginings. Indeed, the precolonial history is
The Use of Popular Forms and the Search for Relevance 89
constructed entirely through a religious myth of origin. The

Agikuyu myth of origin in Weep Not, Child, The River Between
and A Grain of Wheat is imbued with religious connotations
that represent cosmic forces that play a central role in the
creation and evolution of humanity from nothing to
something. Gikuyu and Mumbi also humanise a world that
would otherwise be the domain of abstract and inanimate
objects. The legendary Gikuyu couple has a close association
with Mount Kenya, possibly the small hill to which Chege
takes his son Waiyaki to reveal to him the secrets of the tribe.
This hill, Mount Kenya, is the resting place of their creator
and deity, Murungu – elsewhere called Ngai, Mwenenyaga.
Mount Kenya becomes the centre of the Gikuyu universe,
now under the threat of colonialism. The oral transmission of
the myth from generation to generation underscores its
historical significance to the community. If the belief
enhances communal and spiritual unity, the mountain
concretises it with a physical presence that defies time. The
mountain therefore symbolises the encapsulation of the
material and spiritual, the concrete and abstract, in the
people. In other words, it represents their life and its
continuity: after all, God, the creative essence, reposed there.
Thus, if the divine powers of God are permanent, then the
permanence of the mountain confirms its eternity. The myth
of origin therefore has history, legend, narrative and social life
all interlocked. For Ngugi, the weaving of all these genres
around Mount Kenya was part of an everlasting search for an
enduring moral centre.
In The River Between we are told that when he created
Gikuyu and Mumbi, the original parents of the tribe,
Murungu, the great God, told them: ‘This land I give to you,
O man and woman. It is yours to rule and till, you and your
posterity’ (Ngugi 1965, p. 2).
If Ngugi’s earlier texts can be said to be a fictional
examination of the consequences of the alienation of the
people from their land, then in a significant way they are also
an investigation into the people’s alienation from their
spiritual lives. This is because Murungu’s promise is
compromised by the coming of the whites, which has been
prophesied by Mugo wa Kibiro, a great Gikuyu sage: ‘There
shall come a people with clothes like butterflies’, he warned

(Ngugi 1965, p. 2). Mugo wa Kibiro was ignored by his people
in his own day just as his later-day heir, Chege, has been. It
is not until the Christian Siriana missionary centre is
established that Chege’s people accept the reality of the
prophecy. The colonial penetration of Gikuyu land in A Grain
of Wheat is also seen as a fulfilment of a local prophecy by
Mugo wa Kibiro who spoke of the coming of the iron snake.
In a significant way, it is Ngugi’s recourse to oral mythology
that helps to naturalise his nationalist discourses in the earlier
narrative. The myth of origin, while Gikuyu-specific, is a
staple of any nationalist framework and hence must be seen
to carry a double meaning. It is, for example, used here to
naturalise the birth of the Agikuyu nation, and by extension
the Kenyan nation. The phenomenon of a nation, instead of
being manufactured, a socially constructed idea, becomes a
natural process. Myth here becomes a legitimising ideology
which transcends historicity. Significantly, all the texts of
Ngugi, in spite of their obvious differences, tend to forge a
spiritual link between the people and the land. In Weep Not,
Child, Ngotho reminds his children that ‘God showed Gikuyu
and Mumbi all the land and 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 ...”’ (Ngugi 1964, p. 24).
This natural process of land acquisition, through a filial
bond with the spiritual guardians of land as the ancestral
spirits, is one form of creating a collective identity – a crucial
staple for nationalist discourse. Thus, in Ngugi’s earlier texts
the collective identity, as a template for nationalist politics, is
forged through the language and idiom of oral tradition,
specifically through the creation myth and ancient prophecy
of men like Mugo wa Kibiro. The texts allude to Mount Kenya
as the privileged carrier of nationalist meaning.
And yet it is not exactly correct to argue that Ngugi’s
nationalist moorings are entirely constituted around the
Agikuyu myth of origin. As early as his first novel, Ngugi was
already stretching the meaning of orality to embrace popular
forms, such as biblical allusions that had become part of the
contemporary culture of the Gikuyu and of Kenya in general.
And in appropriating both Agikuyu and Christian mythology,

Ngugi was striving for a hybrid form that remains the chief
characteristic of his works, including the later novels in
Gikuyu. His earlier novels in particular reflect the integral use
of biblical allusions and Christian mythology in the novel.
Significantly, Ngugi’s first novel in terms of its conception
and writing was originally entitled The Black Messiah. The
novel which was later named The River Between is significant
in the sense that it introduces the messianic vision which
dominates all his novels to date. It is also a novel that draws
attention to the relevance of cultural synthesis. It explores
the possibilities of creating a syncretic culture through a
fusion of Christian mythology (read Western culture) and
Agikuyu mythology (read African culture). Waiyaki stands
precisely between these two worlds as the symbol of this
syncretic possibility, offering a third discourse in the form of
African nationalism. The muted theme of sacrifice in The River
Between is developed better in A Grain of Wheat. This notion
of sacrifice is embodied in the character of Kihika who pays
the ultimate price when he is hanged by the colonialists.
Again Ngugi is quick to appropriate the Bible and in the very
first caption we read: ‘Thou fool, that which thou sowest is
not quickened, except it die.’ And the first two chapters
dramatise this sacrifice. The emphasis is on sowing of seeds
which would die in order to bear grain. Ngugi’s earlier
narratives are steeped in both traditional and Christian
mythology, with the tone often ranging from that of a biblical
prophet to a traditional oral Gicaandi player that we
encounter in Devil on the Cross.
Ngugi’s text is therefore about the forging of a new Kenyan
culture by moving away from organicist or essentialist
notions of culture. The new culture will of necessity involve
a process of appropriation and transformation of Western
mythology to serve the needs of a contemporary Kenyan
community. This is what Kihika does when he reinterprets
Christianity in order to encourage Kenyans to unite and to
fight, and if necessary die. He transforms the individualist
conception of Christ into a collective: ‘Everybody who takes
the Oath of unity to change things in Kenya is a Christ. Christ
then is not one person. All those who take up the cross of
liberating Kenya are the true Christs for us Kenyan people’

(Ngugi 1967, p. 95). As Caminero-Santangelo observes: ‘While
drawing on and reconfiguring the symbolism of Christ as a
figure who suffers and struggles for others, Kihika magnifies
the collectivity suggested in that symbolism. In doing so, he
is able to take a European religion and transform it into an
inspiration for the struggle for a free Kenya’ (1998, p. 148).
In A Grain of Wheat Ngugi seems to be suggesting that
Kenya is evolving a revolutionary culture whose development
is contingent upon the fusion between oral tradition of the
people and those from Europe as long as the local is not sub-
ordinated to Western cultural form. What Ngugi does is to
strategically appropriate those Western forms that have come
with colonialism and have become part of the people’s
popular culture. And even though the reception of the novel
is confined to a limited audience due to the English language
Ngugi uses, it is still the best medium for narrating the story
of the nation at this particular historical conjuncture because
a strictly oral story would not work.
Redefining Oral Tradition in the Agikuyu Novel

Writing about the reception of Devil on the Cross among the
Agikuyu peasant readers, Ngugi described the process as ‘the
appropriation of the novel into the oral tradition’ because
the book was read in groups and it generated comments and
discussions (Ngugi 1986, p. 83).4 Ngugi was, in fact, appro-
priating oral and popular forms into the novel and thus
striving towards a hybrid form because he still had to
reconcile oral discourse with the written form. In the process,
he is redefining orality and subordinating it to the demands
of the written form. But he is also stretching the meaning of
orality to embrace popular forms, such as biblical allusions
that have become part of the contemporary culture of the
Agikuyu and of Kenya in general. He is attempting to harness
other forms of popular discourse, such as rumour – a widely
accepted vehicle for expression in both oral and politically
oppressed communities where free speech is suppressed. For
Ngugi, then, orality is not just, in Eileen Julien’s words, ‘a
bulwark to inspire confidence or action by association with
a people’s past grandeur or wisdom and virtue’ (1992, p. 146),

but a contemporary vehicle for meaning. Orality for Ngugi is
a popular form; a medium that is accessible to his audience
(Ngugi 1986, p. 77). It is a medium ‘intelligible to the broad
masses, adopting and enriching their forms of expression,
assuming their standpoint’ (Jameson 1977, p. 82). This is
what Ngugi means when he talks of ‘oral tradition’. He uses
oral tradition to characterise a form that ‘is best understood
as a functional discourse which can legitimate or subvert the
existing power structures of society’ (Desai 1990, p. 66). Thus,
for Ngugi, oral tradition is not something quiescent, but an
expression of a dynamic culture embedded in the past and
present experiences of a community. It is inextricably bound
to popular culture – which as Tony Bennet argues is ‘a site –
always changing and variable in its constitution and organ-
ization’ (1986, p. 98). Thus, the pull towards oral tradition for
Ngugi was not just a narrow reversion to nationalist
aesthetics, as Brenda Cooper argues (1992, p. 173), but a
major political intervention. Ngugi was in search of a form
that would help him re-establish a link with his audience –
the majority of the Kenyan people for whom he was writing.
For Ngugi this link had been severed in part by colonial
education, which attempted to replace local forms of
aesthetic expression with a new tradition. Ngugi himself as a
Western-educated intellectual was heir to this colonial
literary tradition.5
By returning to popular forms, Ngugi hopes to transcend
his own literary reification and, more importantly, to use his
art as a tool for political pedagogy. He is attempting to
appropriate those elements of popular forms that lend
themselves to didactic writing: elements that would enable
Ngugi the writer and activist to capture the postcolonial
experience in Kenya, which in Ngugi’s own words is stranger
than fiction.6 Various possibilities are afforded to the writer by
his transposition of oral forms into written narrative: to use
a personal story, such as Wariinga’s in Devil on the Cross,
which is steeped in the popular culture of the Agikuyu; and
to have a fuller exploration of the postcolonial state in Kenya
within a larger narrative framework. It also affords him the
opportunity for rich intertextuality between the written
narrative and popular forms which the community still uses

to explain itself.
Ngugi’s use of orality draws our attention to the present,
and his recent texts, which are a product of his new
theoretical stance, would seem to deconstruct the notion of
orality as authentically African. It is in this sense of recon-
ceptualising orality that I find Eileen Julien’s recent study,
African Novels and the Question of Orality (1992), useful in
understanding Ngugi’s texts originally written in Gikuyu.
Julien argues that the use of oral narrative genres is not a
necessary or inherent feature of the African novel, but rather
a flexible tool in the hands of the modern African writer
which can be deployed to solve aesthetic and ideological
problems imaginatively. The value of Julien’s study lies in her
nuanced articulation of orality as a complex expression of
how narrative genres can be transformed in the service of the
author’s goals and his or her immediate sociopolitical agenda.
Commenting on Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross, Julien writes that
oral language for Ngugi ‘is a quality of Kenyan culture now’
and not a tool for decoding the past (1992, p. 143). She adds:
Oral language is thus not the object of representation that

can be read as quaint and passeiste [of the past]. Orality
here means the language and tradition in which this
narrative is articulated, the medium in which Ngugi’s
audience will hear this story. (1992, p. 145)
Although the narrative strategies which Ngugi uses are not

entirely peculiar to oral narrative, they are a hybrid form that
creates the illusion of orality. It is these putative oral narrative
strategies which open up both aesthetic and ideological pos-
sibilities for Ngugi and enable him to make a break with the
conventions of realism that have shaped his earlier narrative
without oversimplifying his subject and undermining the
quality of his message. Of particular interest in this chapter is
the way Ngugi uses apparent oral narrative techniques in
motivating and engendering social transformation in his
characters; and the way in which he uses oral narrative
strategies to enhance the credibility of his characters as agents
of change and to give force to the ideological message
embedded in his narrative. In this novel enterprise, Ngugi

deploys a number of putative oral narrative strategies and the
most outstanding of these elements include, among others,
the use of traditional seers or prophets or singer-musicians;
the use of the journey or quest motif, rumour and gossip and
fantastic and biblical allusions.
Following from Julien’s theoretical premise, I will argue in
this chapter that Ngugi uses the above hybrid elements with
deliberate aesthetic intent in the articulation of his characters
as the allegorical symbols of the dominant discourse in Devil
on the Cross and Matigari. I seek here to demonstrate that
although Ngugi’s characters are largely one-dimensional
beings, his invention of popular narrative strategies enables
him to reconcile the tension between the grotesque characters
and the realistic world which these characters inhabit; the
strategies enable him to portray the kind of characters which
mediate the absurdity of the postcolonial experience in
Kenya, while underscoring the moral imperative of his texts.
Ngugi’s characters in Devil on the Cross and Matigari straddle
the thin line between the real and the surreal.
The Interface Between Orality and the Written

Although in Petals of Blood Ngugi uses multiple points of view
in the narrative, in Devil on the Cross and Matigari he opts for
a common ground between oral and written narratives. He
employs the point of view that is commonly used in both
oral and written narratives, that is, third person narrative.
Ngugi adopts the narrative style of a master griot or the
traditional Agikuyu singer by using the authoritative voice of
a collective narrator in an effort to create an epic atmosphere
around his narratives. In Devil on the Cross, he assumes the
role of a village prophet, a Gicaandi player in the traditional
Agikuyu community. But the title ‘Prophet of Justice’ that is
also assigned to the narrator is reminiscent of the biblical
prophets whose teachings have been appropriated into the
local religious traditions of the Agikuyu. In Matigari, the writer
becomes the people’s story-teller, recreating and reinterpret-
ing a story that is steeped in the community’s experience and
tradition. But this story, which is otherwise part of the
popular tradition, is used to mediate the contemporary

Kenyan experience. Thus, in both Devil on the Cross and
Matigari, we have intimate narrators; they are close to the
situation precisely because they are part of the community
whose experience they are narrating. The stories in the two
texts are narrated by the extra-diegetic voice, who in turn
employs the device of a story-teller and in the process invokes
audience participation in the written narrative. What emerges
is a clear recognition on the part of Ngugi that the story-teller
shapes historical experience and that the narrator can
intervene in real life. Thus, when he tells the story of
Wariinga and Matigari, Ngugi is not just reproducing two oral
narratives as received intact, but he gives an analysis of the
woes of the postcolonial state in Kenya and the social
problems to which the postcolonial power relations give rise.
In other words, the experience of the Kenyan peasants and
workers in the postcolonial state are reconstituted within a
narrative framework which contextualises the experience for
the reader and transcribes what was otherwise common
knowledge, embedded in tradition and contemporary
experience, into the written form.
In both Devil on the Cross and Matigari, Ngugi opts for the
intrusive narrator because it enables him not only to report
but also to comment on the narrative events and characters
that inhabit his fictional world. Ngugi is so conscious of the
acts of telling and listening that he draws our attention to
how the two texts should be read. In Matigari he asserts the
story’s fluidity in time and space and compels the listeners to
accept his mode of reception before he can tell his story. The
story, Ngugi tells us, is ‘based partly on an oral story about a
man looking for a cure for an illness’ and in his quest for the
healer Ndiiro, he ‘undertakes a journey of search’ (1987,
p. vii). Ngugi deliberately sets the tone for the quest motif
which underpins the story of Matigari while at the same time
pointing to the centrality of the oral medium in his latest
narrative. In Devil on the Cross the narrator asserts the
authority of his message by calling himself the Prophet of
Justice, a Gicaandi player and therefore the voice of the
people which is the voice of God. Julien writes that ‘the
narrator’s voice is mobilized both in response to the call of
other human voices and in response to a deeper spiritual

impulse’ (1992, p. 147). As a prophet, the burden of prophecy
forces him to narrate the story of Wariinga and to ‘reveal all
that is hidden’ (Ngugi 1982, p. 7). In Matigari the writer
becomes the people’s story-teller, retelling and reinterpreting
the age-old story that has been passed from one generation to
another. The story has a primary text, but Ngugi also creates
and wills new meanings out of it and calls upon his audience
to stretch the story out and to break the boundaries of its
creation: ‘Reader/listener: may the story take place in the
country of your choice!’ (Ngugi 1987, p. ix). Thus Ngugi
intimates that the story-telling is a weaving process that
involves both the narrator and the target audience. As with
most oral narratives that seek to put forward a moral
standpoint, the accent is on the story as a complex process
with layers of meaning rather than the narrative as the artic-
ulation of characters and their complexity. The only
difference here is that the oral performance affords the par-
ticipants understanding because of visual presentation which
is eliminated in the written narrative. And yet Ngugi stylises
after the oral narrative in an attempt to create the illusion of
orature in the novels – an illusion that would be impossible
within the framework of a conventional novel. Thus, in
Ngugi, the written narrative is presented as if it were an oral
narrative with an imaginary listening audience. In other
words, in Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross and Matigari ‘[t]he story
intimates a telling between the speaker–writer and the
listener–reader, and inside that telling–listening there are, as
Bakhtin would have it, other tellers and listeners’ (Julien
1992, p. 145). Thus, in deploying this oral mode, Ngugi would
seem to be more interested in the story and his audience’s
emotional involvement with the story rather than with
character delineation. Within this problematic, Ngugi seems
to have abandoned the collective narrator, the ‘we’ voice that
mediated the experience in Petals of Blood. Ngugi’s apparent
assumption is that the traditional singer–story-teller, as the
omniscient narrator, stands for the collective; he or she
narrates and dramatises the communal experience. After all,
as in the case of Devil on the Cross, the narrator’s authority has
been established; as reader–listeners we cannot question his
moral authority nor his social credibility, which is shown to

be beyond reproach at the beginning of the narrative.
Ngugi also uses the third person narrative to explore the
lives of the major protagonists whose experiences are repres-
entative of a community’s history. In doing this, he resorts
again to the traditional oral narrative technique of the
journey to foreground the trials of the characters and to
explore the process of social transformation in their lives. The
journey motif has been used in a whole range of texts which
are allegorical in nature and are aimed at serving a didactic
purpose, such as Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. In such texts
the journey provides the structure within which characters,
particularly the main protagonist, come to social awareness
and accept the burden of their moral responsibility; it is a
moment of recognition and knowledge that comes with
growth. Although the journey motif has been incorporated
into many written narratives, it has always been associated
with oral tales in its generic use. According to Ngugi (1986,
p. 77), the concept of a journey would be familiar to many
ordinary Kenyans and lends itself to a simple structure. The
journey motif is, therefore, transformed into a contemporary
medium in Ngugi’s postcolonial narratives.
The traditional use of the journey motif is normally marked
by three major phases: the initiatory phase; the transforma-
tion phase; and the phase of return. Ngugi’s use of this literary
element can be traced back to Petals of Blood. Karega’s
initiation takes place at Siriana, where he leads a strike as a
neophyte, and he continues with this phase as a teacher in
Ilmorog. Karega’s transformation does not take place until he
undertakes the long, winding journey across Kenya. When
he returns to Ilmorog, he is mature, his politics have changed.
He is now able to articulate his vision for the future and to
provide leadership for the workers who discover in him good
leadership qualities.
Wariinga’s narrative, in Devil on the Cross, is also conceived
in terms of a journey. Wariinga, as Ngugi himself has
observed, undertakes two ‘main journeys over virtually the
same ground’ (1986, p. 77). She moves in a matatu taxi from
the capital city Nairobi to the fictional rural outpost of
Ilmorog. Wariinga also makes a second journey in a car from
Nairobi to Ilmorog and to Nakuru. But a gap of two years

separates the two journeys which parallel the stages of trans-
formation in the life of Wariinga. And by the time we meet
Wariinga in the final phase she has gone through a number
of experiences which have transformed her life drastically. As
the narrator observes: ‘This Wariinga is not the one we met
two years ago’ (Ngugi 1982, p. 216). She is not Wariinga who
was secretary and victim of Boss Kihara; she is not the
innocent schoolgirl cheated and ravaged by the Rich Old
Man; she is not dependent on anyone; she is ‘Wariinga, our
engineering hero!’; she is ‘Wariinga, heroine of toil’ (p. 217).
And as the narrator adds, her heroism was discovered ‘in the
battle of life’ (p. 217). She has learnt to act on her own; she
has grown ‘into a lucid, decisive woman’ (Julien 1992, p. 151).
Matigari’s quest runs at two levels. The initial movement is
away from home into the forest in search of freedom and his
subsequent journeys to a foreign land from where he returns
to claim his house and land. Having fought colonialism, he
returns to discover that injustice still exists, albeit in the form
that reflects the harsh realities of the postcolonial state – a
pale shadow of what he fought for. At any rate, Settler
Williams and his servant John Boy whom he had fought to
the death in the forest have been replaced by their sons, now
partners in a leading business enterprise that exploits workers.
Inspired by his experience, Matigari returns with a spiritual
quest for ‘Truth and Justice’. During this new quest he meets
a number of allegorical figures: Guthera and the orphaned
boy Muriuki, the police, the absurd Minister of Truth and
Justice, the worker leader Ngaruro wa Kiriro and the people.
Matigari’s quest leads him to the conclusion that ‘[t]he enemy
can never be driven out by words alone, no matter how sound
the argument’ (Ngugi 1987, p. 138).
It seems to me that the journey motif helps Ngugi to
achieve two things: it enables him to move freely within time
and space and still manage to work within a simple plot
structure. It also enables him to effect social transformation in
the character of his protagonists without having to provide
sufficient motivation for them. As Gay Clifford says, the
journey, quest or pursuit in the allegorical narrative is the
‘metaphor by which a process of learning for both protagonist

and readers is expressed’ (1974, p. 11). Thus, the journey
provides a structural framework for growth and development
of character and theme within Ngugi’s narrative. Character
here becomes important only in so far as it elucidates the
theme and mediates meaning. The growth and development
of character also becomes linear and less complex in keeping
with the simple plot structure within which interiority is
impossible.
Thus, different phases of the journey point to important
moments in the life of characters, moments which in
themselves serve to illuminate not just the changes taking
place in the life of individual characters, but more
importantly, are a pointer to the writer’s theme and a
celebration of the ideal moment in a community’s life. The
ideal is always the hero’s homecoming to liberate and gather
the family together. This struggle is initiated by Karega during
his return to Ilmorog where he organises the workers. It is
also marked by Wariinga’s return to Nakuru where she lost
her virginity and where she takes her revenge on Gitahi.
Matigari also returns after years of struggle in the forest to
reclaim his house and land. Symbolically, Matigari’s actions
point to the possibility of a national rebirth and to the
emergence of a new nation from the ruins of colonial and
subsequent neocolonial plunder. Ngugi celebrates this
possibility of the new nation, still subterranean, when
Matigari marries Guthera and takes the orphaned boy,
Muriuki, into his care. Coming with greater awareness from
his journeys, Matigari gives Guthera and the young boy
something to live for. He creates in them the vision for a
better society, free of exploitation and human degradation.
He gives them basic awareness and plays a crucial role in the
transformation of their characters.
To encapsulate, the journey motif is an important element
in an allegorical narrative such as Ngugi’s. Its central function
is to transport the protagonist or the character from one level
of awareness or state of ignorance to a higher level of under-
standing and clarity of social vision. Linked to the element of
movement in the development of character is the use of the
fantastic, rumour and biblical allusions in character

motivation. I will now discuss these elements in brief.
The Fantastic, Rumour and Biblical Allusions

Daniel Kunene, in his discussion of Mofolo’s use of the
fantastic, defines this device as the expression of anything
‘ominous’; as something which defies our sense of the
ordinary and ‘our accepted system of logic’ (1989, p. 186).
The fantastic in life is not predictable and neither are we
capable of manipulating and controlling it. Kunene
continues:
In the wake of a fantastic or miraculous event, man’s role

is to decode, to listen and obey. For this is knowledge
revealed by that greater power, as against naturally acquired
knowledge, with the express intention that it shall move
those who experience it to certain types of behaviour.
(p. 186)
The fantastic, as Kunene argues, is used a great deal in didactic

writing ‘in order to add to the persuasive power of the message
or to enhance the dramatic impact of the words, or both’
(p. 180). But, as Kunene adds, the fantastic ‘is often regarded
as being more persuasive in motivating a character to action
than the ordinary logic of events’ (p. 187).
Ngugi deploys the extraordinary to motivate and create
awareness in the characters where the ordinary logic of events
within the narrative cannot provide for either character
motivation or development or both. In Devil on the Cross,
Ngugi uses voices and dreams in the character portrayal of
Wariinga. Ngugi starts by establishing the postcolonial
context on which the narrative structure hinges, through
Wariinga’s dreams and visions. First, Wariinga, in her dream,
sees the murder of Mwireri wa Mukiraai which foreshadows
the elimination of the national bourgeoisie by forces of inter-
national capital in collaboration with the comprador
bourgeoisie. Second, and more importantly, Wariinga sees in
her dream the Devil’s death and resurrection, an ‘extended
parable of neo-colonial dependency’ (Cooper 1992, p. 52).
The heroine’s experiences are thus explored within the

specific historic and structural frame of neocolonial
dependency in Kenya; a framework that is established in the
first instance through Wariinga’s dreams and visions. In
Wariinga’s case, the voices manifest themselves on the
threshold of her consciousness and lead to basic choices that
she makes; choices which help in the advancement of her
social awareness and involvement with what the writer
considers to be a crucial moment in the thematic
development of the narrative.
The voices appear to Wariinga whenever she is in a state of
confusion, but on the threshold of a ‘new’ life. The first voice
appears to Wariinga when she is about to take her life, having
been fired by Boss Kihara and abandoned by ‘her sweetheart,
John Kimwana’ (Ngugi 1982, pp. 10–13). At the door of the
saloon, she sees her first vision of the Devil. Clearly, Ngugi
associates the woes of Wariinga with the workings of the
Devil (read the woes of capitalist Kenya). Indeed, when
Wariinga is evicted from her house, the eviction is carried
out by the ‘Devil’s Angels’ (Ngugi 1982, p. 10). But for every
group of the Devil’s Angels there is also one single voice, one
‘good Samaritan’ who seeks to redeem those tormented by the
Devil and its angels. At this critical moment of pain and
indecision, the student leader turns out to be Wariinga’s
redeemer. He saves Wariinga from being hit by a car, collects
her bag and waits upon her until she regains consciousness.
What Ngugi does is to appropriate the Christian notion of
good and evil and use it in the explication of Wariinga’s social
problems. By borrowing from the Christian ethical beliefs,
Ngugi hopes to appeal to the ordinary Gikuyus who are
familiar with the Bible7 while remaining steeped in the
agnostic world of vice and virtue. The Devil’s attempts to woo
Wariinga with earthly splendours may be a raw parallel to
the trials of Christ in the Bible, but the ultimate moral thrust
of the trial is the triumph of vice over virtue which is at the
heart of all oral tales. In spite of the apparent material gain
offered by the Devil, its ultimate objective is to imprison
innocent lives like that of Wariinga. The Devil thus works
through materialism to entice its victims. The Devil is like
the gleam, in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,
which imprisons all those who would move within its orbit.
The voice of good on the other hand seeks to redeem the
tormented souls. It is significant that after the vision of the
Devil in her dreams, Wariinga comes to consciousness to
listen to the voice of sanity, the voice of truth in the person
of the student leader; the man who literally saves her life. At
the end of the student’s talk we are made aware that Wariinga
has been touched positively:
She did not understand all the things that were hinted at in
the arcane language of the young man. But here and there
she could sense that his words approached thoughts that
she herself had had at one time. She sighed and said: ‘Your
words have hidden meanings. But what you say is true.
These troubles have now passed beyond the limit of
endurance. Who would not welcome change in order to
escape from them?’ (Ngugi 1982, p. 16)
It is the student leader who helps Wariinga to translate her

vision into concrete reality; he guides her from a position of
passivity to one of active resistance to change her situation.
The student’s voice seeks to influence every step that
Wariinga has to take while the Devil seeks to lure her into the
things that destroy the soul and body and degrade her
humanity. When later in the narrative a voice confronts
Wariinga after the incident at the cave and tells her that ‘there
is a third, a revolutionary world’, it turns out that these very
words were used by Muturi in Mwaura’s matatu (Ngugi 1982,
p. 184).
Wariinga’s growth towards awareness is fought in the
mind. Ngugi substitutes a realistic growth and development
of character with the kind of mental growth that takes place
after a spiritual trial – a process of soul searching that leads to
clarity of vision. The clarity of vision is, of course, a product
of weighing and thinking; it is the result of a delicate process
of discrimination that leads to informed and democratic
growth. Wariinga must learn to draw a distinction between
the ways of the Devil and those of good; between the ways of
the oppressor and the third voice that seeks to redeem
humanity from all forms of slavery. Since much of Wariinga’s
woes have taken place in the past, it seems to me that Ngugi

cannot readily provide for Wariinga’s character transforma-
tion and so he resorts to the use of the fantastic. The Christian
ethic of good versus evil lends itself to the didactic writing in
which Ngugi is engaged here in order to persuade his
audience to see things from a specific moral persuasion. The
strength of the narrative therefore lies in the sheer weight of
its moral power.
According to Ngugi, to heed the voice of the Devil is to
take sides with the forces of oppression and human
degradation. It is significant that when Wariinga’s final trial
from the Devil takes place and she is faced with the difficult
choice of having to take sides with the workers, Muturi
challenges her and Gatuiria to choose their side in the
struggle. By the time Wariinga joins the workers at the cave,
she is mentally prepared to take sides with the workers. It is
at this stage that she gets a gun from Muturi; a gun which she
later uses to kill the Rich Old Man. Two years later, the
narrative voice tells us, Wariinga is a changed woman (Ngugi
1982, p. 215).
The voices that come to Wariinga come to her in dreams in
which she is presented with both visual images and verbal
communication. One of the basic usages of dreams in
moralistic writing, as Kunene argues, is to use them as ‘a
convenient deus ex machina to make up for lack of convincing
motivation of characters’ (1989, p. 193). It seems to me that
Ngugi’s use of voices and dreams in Devil on the Cross corrob-
orates this thesis because in the dreams the protagonist is
transported into the realm of fantasy from where her soul is
purged through a series of trials. The dreams therefore provide
a framework for change and action on the part of the
protagonist; which is not possible outside the dreams.
Wariinga’s dreams are essentially one-dimensional and
fashioned after the biblical visions whose primary purpose
was to compel the dreamer to take a specific moral position.
Indeed, if it is not feasible to account for the growth and
development of Wariinga from the general narrative
structure, it is possible to do so through her dreams. Within
the framework of characters coming to social consciousness
through dreams and voices, Ngugi underscores the triumph of
good over evil – the victory of forces that seek to build our
humanity over those forces that seek to destroy it – but more
importantly, he achieves the structural feat of character trans-
formation within a simple narrative plot structure.
In Matigari, Ngugi weaves fantasy together with rumour.
The narrator forcefully harnesses the technique of rumour-
mongering in the portrayal of Matigari. The power of rumour
lies in the fact that each individual is free to choose what
type of information to take or leave, and also what to add to
it to create a new text. Ultimately, language is manipulated to
give rumour a specific angle or flavour and to generate other
layers of meaning that one does not have to prove because
rumour is inexhaustible – it has no end or beginning. Thus,
rumour thrives in secrecy and the absence of an authentic
source or primary text. Every other layer of rumour is always
new and refreshing. In fact, it is the generative power of a
given rumour that influences our responses or attitudes
towards the rumour. ‘By the time one acts in response to a
rumour’, Peter Amuka asserts, ‘the understanding is that the
very rumour has exerted its powers and yielded results and
answers’ (1993, p. 6). Yet rumours multiply and thrive better
in a repressive society where open discourse or voices of
dissent are eliminated through ideology of order.8
Ngugi must have been conscious of the power of rumour-
mongering in Kenya when he decided to deploy this popular
vehicle in his portrayal of Matigari. Rumour is such a popular
and potentially subversive vehicle that President Moi is
frequently compelled to warn Kenyans against rumour-
mongering and to emphasise that it is treasonable.9 Ngugi
chose a vehicle that is widely accepted among his target
readers and highly loathed by the Kenyan establishment.
Matigari’s stature as a mythical redeemer is built through
rumours; the word of mouth with seamless weaves which can
be stretched in all directions. He is mythologised through
rumours and his identity is constructed through the rumours.
He is represented by stories invented and woven around his
life and adventures. When the children hurled stones at him,
we read, ‘[n]ot even one stone touched him’, and ‘[w]hen the
stones reached him, they changed into doves’ (Ngugi 1987,
p. 73). The women visualise him both as ‘a tiny, ordinary
looking man’ and as a giant who could touch the sky

(pp. 75–6). Apparently, the women are not bothered by the
conflicting versions of Matigari’s physical character. The
point is that Matigari’s presence becomes a verbal conjecture
from mouth to mouth, ear to ear and of course eye to eye as
he is visualised through the language of rumours. The
rumours acquire mythical dimensions when Matigari escapes
from jail. The word goes that he brandished a flaming sword,
and the doors of jail opened. He had a voice like thunder, and
when he spoke smoke gushed from his mouth (p. 77). And at
the time of his imprisonment he is reported to have said:
‘you’ll see me again after three days’ (p. 79). And people
believe that ‘he’s the one prophesied about’ (p. 81).
Although Matigari himself does not claim Christ-like status,
Ngugi gives detailed circumstantial evidence that keeps the
comparison alive in the readers’ minds. The fantasy of this
miracle-working redeemer is desirable, if only for its appeal to
the justice and truth that are grossly missing in the land. And
although the Matigari myth is sustainable only as a rumour,
because when the people see him they reject him, his
portrayal serves to underscore the writer–narrator’s objective:
to tell and sustain a story through suspense and fantasy until
the truth about Matigari is revealed and the reader–audience
is forced to look beyond the mythical redeemer. In the end,
Matigari’s rumour is incorporated into the social struggles of
the people and the rumour is wrenched from its mythology
because it has become a means of cognition; a way of under-
standing social processes hitherto unclear. But the myth also
turns the heat on the prophet or protagonist, because it is
only when the people have rejected Matigari that he is forced
back into the wilderness where he interprets his failure
according to the wisdom of old. Matigari’s lesson is that
vision – the might of words alone – is not enough. In the
end, he returns for his guns and is ready to lay down his life
again to reclaim his house and land.
In his portrayal of Matigari, Ngugi combines rumour and
the fantasy of a redeemer after the Christian tradition, the
two forms that are contemporary and belong to a known
tradition. And by juxtaposing fantasy with the material
experience, he is able to transport Matigari and the audience

from one level of experience to another: from a lower level of
social awareness to a higher level of social understanding of
the postcolonial absurdity. In the end Matigari gives his life
to the land – again pointing to the Christ metaphor – sacrifice
being the ultimate price that true patriots have to pay for the
birth of a new nation. Again, the moral persuasion is keen
here; it is Matigari’s moral stature and what he symbolises
that counts, rather than our ability to relate to him at a
human level. This new moral vision is persuasively and
metaphorically rendered, simply because the narrator has to
carry his audience along, in the struggle for the new nation.
In this new struggle, Matigari’s legacy continues as
symbolised in Muriuki when he unearths Matigari’s weapons,
but more significantly, because Matigari’s rumour continued:
‘Everywhere in the country the big question still remained:
Who was Matigari ma Njiruungi? Was he dead, or was he
alive?’ (Ngugi 1987, p. 174). In real life in Kenya, Matigari’s
rumour as a subversive political character continued. As the
author’s note informs us:
Matigari the fictional hero of the novel, was himself

resurrected as a subversive political character. The novel
was published in the Gikuyu language original in Kenya in
October 1986. By January 1987, intelligence reports had it
that peasants in Central Kenya were whispering and talking
about a man called Matigari who was roaming the whole
country making demands about truth and justice. There
were orders for his immediate arrest, but the police
discovered that Matigari was only a fictional character in a
book of the same name. (p. viii)
Evidently, this is a good instance of a literary text – a written

text – entering both oral and contemporary political
discourse. As an intervention in Kenya’s oral discourse,
Matigari was now open to new layers of meaning through
rumour and the spoken word. The text was throwing up new
and seamless oral narratives and in the process turning a
fictional hero into a subversive political character. Yet,
Ngugi’s later narratives written in Gikuyu still occupy an
ambiguous literary space in spite of Ngugi’s attempt to

mythologise his own hero, Matigari, as reflected in the
statement above. The readership still remains a literate,
distant audience and not necessarily the peasantry and the
workers that Ngugi has in mind as his target audience. A
survey carried out by Ngugi’s publisher, Henry Chakava
(1993, p. 73), shows that the two novels in Gikuyu have
attracted very limited readership and there is no guarantee
that the limited readership reflected through the sales comes
from the workers and peasants.10
Ngugi’s Achievement
Within the framework of the popular genre, however, one
can conclude that Ngugi is able to transform our traditional
understanding of character in the novel by drawing our
attention to the story – the central discourse in the narratives
– thereby moving away from the traditional notions of
character delineation. The use of popular forms has enabled
him to provide motivation for his characters’ actions and to
effect their social transformation: if not always convincingly,
still within a simple plot structure. In a way, Ngugi validates
Barthes’s theoretical supposition that characters are in fact
mere tropes in the narrative (Barthes 1974, pp. 178–9). To
this extent Ngugi is challenging the traditional notions of
complex characters as the hallmark of a good narrative. He
attaches great value to the story and to how the same
narrative could be rendered persuasively in the postcolonial
narratives originally written in Gikuyu. Thus, elements that
are traditionally considered central to the novel form, such as
credibility of character and complexity of plot structure, are
inevitably subordinated to the dominant discourse in his
narratives – the absurd drama of the postcolonial state in
Kenya. However, Ngugi’s characters remain mechanical
allegorical symbols; they are mere signs that draw our
attention to Ngugi’s sense of Kenyan history and not to other
competing versions of the nation’s history and the politics
which underpin its multifaceted layers.
5
Allegory, Romance and the
Nation: Women as Allegorical
Figures in Ngugi’s Novels
Romantic Relationships as Allegorical Tropes

Ngugi uses allegory in most of his works to explore romantic
relationships as symbolic representations of what takes place
in the wider society. One of the most intriguing features of
Ngugi’s writing is the way he places the female protagonists
in romantic relationships which readily pass for allegorical
tropes. Romantic relationships form a recurring subject in
virtually all Ngugi’s works. His female archetypes are quite
similar to the extent that they become sites for contesting
the desired nation.
In his earlier texts the portrayal of women owes something
to a long-standing iconography of women in nationalist
literature which inevitably mobilises women as the central
metaphor for the nation. Ngugi’s women protagonists in
these novels fulfil something of this function by becoming
primary sites for testing the reconciliation of ethnicity and
the nation, tradition and modernity, betrayal and hope and,
indeed, the possibility of rebirth. In the latter texts, however,
the women protagonists become an index, a reflection of the
state of the nation. In their portrayal they often stand for the
state of degradation in a postcolony and in their striving
gesture towards the possibilities of redemption and the birth
of a nation free of class exploitation in the first instance and
free of gender inequality in the second. In other words, if
Ngugi enlists women as carriers of tradition and nationalism
in his earlier texts, in his later texts he mobilises them as
metaphors of a class war.
The Portrayal of Women in the Earlier Novels

In Chapter 2 I mentioned that one of the basic concerns of
Ngugi in his earlier narratives is his attempt to reconcile the
109
apparent contradiction between ethnicity and nationalism.

The tensions associated with ethnicity and its meaning are, as
we have already noted, numerous. Ethnicity must bear the
weight of being ossified and backward-looking, it must also
refract a sentimentalised construction of precolonial society as
an organic whole. And, finally, ethnicity in certain parts must
stand for itself and the nation simultaneously. The strand of
investing the ‘tribe’ with the nation is perhaps not
pronounced but is mediated obliquely through the Gikuyu
myth of origin as we saw in Chapter 4. Significantly, the
portrayal of the tribe as an organic whole and Ngugi’s gesture
towards a reconciled nationhood are mediated by women. In
The River Between women are the repositories of ethnicity.
Miriamu, Joshua’s wife, despite her Christianity is seen as
essentially Gikuyu: ‘one could still tell by her eyes that this
was a religion learnt and accepted; inside the true Gikuyu
woman was sleeping’ (Ngugi 1965, p. 34). And although
Muthoni’s death is meant to gesture towards the possibility of
reconciling the traditional ways of the ‘tribe’ and Western
culture in the form of Christianity, Muthoni’s body remains
a site upon which the purity of the tribe is encoded. When
Muthoni tells Waiyaki that ‘[she] want[s] to be a woman
made beautiful in the ways of the tribe’ (p. 44), she is
confirming her role as the custodian of tradition and purity
of the community. Womanhood here acts as the buffer zone
for ethnicity and the implied ‘fixed’ identity of the tribe
which is crystallised in female circumcision. Ngotho’s wives
in Weep Not, Child also seem to have no voice and have learnt
to live in harmony within an obviously acrimonious
polygamous structure. Like Miriamu and Muthoni, they cling
to the ways of the tribe passively and uphold the patriarchal
structure unchallenged.
If the burden of carrying the ethnic agenda rests with
Muthoni, Ngugi resorts to a romantic affair between Waiyaki
and Nyambura to articulate nationalism as the ultimate
alternative to ethnicity. Although Waiyaki’s private inclina-
tions are particularised in this romantic love, which is posed
as mutually exclusive to public commitment, the romance is
undoubtedly Ngugi’s vehicle for the ideal nationhood. Just
when the themes of reconciliation and unity seem to be
Allegory, Romance and the Nation 111
fading, they are replaced by the theme of romance as a trope

for achieving communal redemption. Where the rhetorics of
modern nationalism such as education, unity and reconcil-
iation have failed, Ngugi inserts romance. Significantly, it is
only after the relationship with Nyambura is established and
made public that Waiyaki is able to articulate, even if only in
very general terms, the nature of his mission: ‘all at once
Waiyaki realized what the ridges wanted. People wanted
action now. Now he knew what he would preach if he ever
got another chance: education for unity. Unity for political
freedom’ (Ngugi 1965, p. 143).
The use of romance as a figure for the ideal nationhood is
also captured in the relationship between Njoroge and
Mwihaki in Weep Not, Child. The young Mwihaki and
Njoroge, caught between their warring families, represent in
their romance the possibility of unity and reconciliation
threatened by the Mau Mau war. Mwihaki’s father, Jacobo, is
a homeguard fighting on the side of the colonial government
and Njoroge’s father is an ahoi whose sons have been enlisted
in the Mau Mau resistance to the colonial regime. Thus the
moral dilemma facing the fighting sides and the tragedy that
seems to threaten the Agikuyu community and by
implication the imagined Kenyan nation is encapsulated in
this tragic romantic affair. Tragic because this innocent love,
symbolic of the nascent Kenyan nation-state growing out of
the womb of colonial experience, is shattered by the violence
of the emergency period. Ngugi seems to have been so keen
on the disruptive nature of the emergency that he picks up
this theme again in A Grain of Wheat. The conditions of the
emergency almost disrupt the love and marriage between
Gikonyo and Mumbi. Detained for his part in the struggle,
Gikonyo capitulates to the authorities because he wants to
come back to Mumbi. When he returns, he discovers that
Mumbi has had a child with Karanja and he is distraught. In
a major development to the sequel of romances in his first
two novels, Ngugi transforms this romantic relationship that
is fraught with tragedy into a symbol of regeneration, hope
and reconciliation. In the end Gikonyo is carving a stool for
Mumbi and Mumbi is expecting Gikonyo’s child. Their recent
self-rediscovery in forgiveness and reconciliation lifts the
burden of guilt from their hearts and shoulders and they are
used to point to the possibility of renewal and the birth of a
new nation. As characters whose names echo those of the
founders of the Gikuyu nation, Gikonyo (Gikuyu) and
Mumbi stand for change in permanence and hope in the
future of the community. Their romance also anticipates the
struggles and triumphs that Wanja of Petals of Blood goes
through in the postcolonial state. In a significant sense,
romance and the trials of womanhood in A Grain of Wheat act
as major indicators of the things to come; they herald Ngugi’s
transition from nationalist rhetorics to the radical class
perspective that we encounter in his later texts. This radical
shift is most evident in Ngugi’s choice of female protagonists
who are invariably drawn from the marginalised groups
within the society. The female protagonist in Ngugi’s later
novels is either from a peasant or working-class background,
made pregnant by a wealthy old man who destroys her life
and later rejects her. They include Beatrice in ‘Minutes of
Glory’ (Secret Lives), Wanja in Petals of Blood, Wariinga in Devil
on the Cross, and Guthera in Matigari.
Romance and the Portrayal of Women in the Later

Novels
If class perspective remains the ideological hallmark of
Ngugi’s later novels, this ideological shift is best captured in
the romantic relationships that have remained a major
feature of his later novels. On the one hand, we have those
relationships that express what Ngugi considers to be the
impossibility of romantic affairs between rich and poor, elite
and working class; and on the other, we have those relation-
ships that offer the working class the possibility of
harmonising or consummating the interests of marginalised
groups within society. In these two types of relationships
Ngugi explores the antagonism, which he shows as irrecon-
cilable, between the oppressor and the oppressed, and the
possibility of patriotism among the workers in their struggle
to realise the ideal nation. The affairs of Wanja–Kimeria,
Wariinga–Gatuiria, and Matigari–Guthera, are presented as
different kinds of romantic tropes.
Wanja is depicted as a young schoolgirl who falls victim to

a wealthy former homeguard, Kimeria, who seduces her with
gifts, confuses her and makes her pregnant. When Kimeria
fails to marry her, she escapes from home and becomes a
barmaid. Wariinga, in Devil on the Cross, is also a schoolgirl
who becomes a victim of the Rich Old Man, and as a secretary
to Boss Kihara she is sexually harassed by him. She is also let
down by her university boyfriend, and at the end of the
narrative she is abandoned by Gatuiria. One meets similar
failed romantic relationships in Ngugi’s I Will Marry When I
Want. Here the marriage between the poor Kigunda’s
daughter, Gathoni, and John Muhuuni, the son of the
wealthy Kioi, cannot succeed because of the socioeconomic
differences between the two families.
All the relationships above have similar features. In each
case we have a situation in which the rich and propertied
elite attempts to take advantage of poor women. We have
relationships characterised by exploitation and hypocrisy.
The rich men turn the poor women into sexual objects for
male pleasure and the elite men cannot commit themselves
to genuine relationships with the poor women. Thus, Kimeria
and Gitahi, by taking advantage of Wanja and Wariinga
respectively, destroy their futures. Similarly, the educated elite
represented by Gatuiria and the university student both let
Wariinga down at her most critical hours of need. Here Ngugi
pushes us to read romantic intrigues as metaphoric parallels
to social relations in the society. Romantic relationships
between the rich and the poor, Ngugi would seem to suggest,
have no social legitimacy and are doomed from the start by
the antagonistic and contradictory relations of exploitation
between these two broad social groups. The vacillating elite
are also caught up within these failed relationships and
tragically find themselves torn between their class interests
and the interests of the marginalised groups with whom they
enter into relationships. Thus the working class and the
propertied cannot have a viable relationship without conflict
and tragedy, in the same way that these two classes cannot
forge a mutually beneficial economic relationship in social
life. Thus, the characters involved in these relationships are
portrayed in such a way that they become social symbols;
they become illustrative figures of broad social relationships

within Kenyan society.
The type of romantic relationship described here is
contrasted with a relationship in which we have a metaphoric
parallelism between passion and patriotism, such as the rela-
tionship between Guthera and Matigari. Like Wariinga,
Guthera’s father was a patriot who supported the liberation
struggle. Guthera’s father ‘was found carrying bullets in his
Bible’ and he was killed by the colonial government, leaving
Guthera and the other children destitute (Ngugi 1982, pp.
35–6). She is portrayed as a morally upright girl who refuses
to yield to the sexual demands of a police superintendent to
get her father released from prison. Finally, it is economic
deprivation which drives her to prostitution. Guthera is
initiated into the struggle when she breaks her vow that she
would never give her body to any policeman; she sleeps with
a prison guard in order to help Matigari escape. But perhaps
more importantly, just before the climax of the narrative, she
subordinates herself to Matigari – the ‘noble patriarch’ – in a
symbolic marital union of comrades, with Muriuki as their
adopted child. It is apparent here that Matigari behaves like
a patriarch, and Guthera in her joyful submission to him
merely serves to reinforce the popular image of women as
docile – ironically, the very image Ngugi seems to be fighting
in all his narratives. The union between Matigari and Guthera
is contrived and simplistic and it does not enhance the
thematic concerns of the narrative, but rather undermines
the well-known image of Ngugi’s characters as all-powerful
and resourceful.
In their romantic relationship, Guthera and Matigari find
common ground in their background of poverty, in their
common goal never to prostitute their bodies for the
oppressor’s money and in their common vision to liberate
their society. Every obstacle that the lovers encounter
heightens not only their mutual desire to be a couple, it also
heightens their love for the potential nation in which the
affair could be consummated. It would seem to me that this
is the ideal romantic relationship, according to Ngugi, a
romantic relationship which becomes a celebration of the
ideal nation’s hope.
We encounter a similar relationship between Wanja and

Abdulla which, as Stratton writes, ‘signifies the regeneration
of potency in the struggle for freedom from oppression and
exploitation in present-day Kenya’ (1994, p. 50). Stratton
continues to assert that Wanja’s pregnancy, ‘preceded by an
act of infanticide on the eve of independence and followed by
years of barrenness – is the promise of the rebirth of the
nation’ (p. 50). It is a relationship that parallels patriotism
because it is based on mutual class interests and hostility to
those forces that seek to exploit and degrade man and
woman. Thus, real passion, for Ngugi, would seem to parallel
patriotism; and the consummation of a romantic relation-
ship as a marriage is a symbolic celebration of the ideal nation
still subterranean – the ‘kingdom of man and woman ...
joying and loving in creative labour’ (Ngugi 1977, p. 344).
However, the reappearance of similar female characters in
different novels suggests that Ngugi has a formula regarding
the exploitation of women. For example, he would have us
believe that it is only the wealthy bourgeois class that exploits
and oppresses women from the worker and peasant classes,
while working-class or peasant men never exploit women. A
critical analysis of Wanja’s portrayal serves as a good illustra-
tion of Ngugi’s contradictions on feminist discourses in Kenya
and as a way of examining the male-bourgeois domination
and capitalist entrapment of Ngugi’s heroines.
The Problem of Women as Victims: Wanja in Petals of

Blood
The significance of Wanja lies in the fact that she expresses
Ngugi’s ambivalent position on feminist discourses in Kenya.
On the one hand, Ngugi portrays Wanja as a woman who
transcends traditional limitations and, on the other hand,
she is portrayed as the victim of colonial capitalist society.
For example, as a primary school pupil, Wanja was referred
to as Wanja Kahii (a boy) and she is good in things which are
considered to fall specifically within the male domain such as
freewheeling, tree-climbing and maths. Wanja’s apparent
disposition to ‘masculine’ values is not explored fully by
Ngugi to shed light on gender relations within traditional
Gikuyu society and instead there seems to be an unspoken

approval, at least from the narrative point of view, that
certain things belong to the domain of men. A woman like
Wanja who can do the things assigned by society to men is
seen as unique and, in a sense, naturally predisposed to
subverting gender stereotypes. The narrative is silent on the
impact of patriarchy which socialises both men and women
to accept certain roles in society as gender-determined. To
imply – as the narrative does – that to be liberated a woman
must struggle for the so-called ‘male’ subjects like
mathematics, in the case of Wanja, and engineering, in the
case of Wariinga in Devil on the Cross, is an oversimplification
of gender discrimination and the process of mental liberation
that it requires. Wariinga’s fantasy and change may be
credible given her past experiences, but her dramatic trans-
formation into an engineer, independent and contented in
her new social role, is most incredible. Ngugi is totally
oblivious to the possible social constraints that frustrate most
women and young Kenyans from acquiring formal education
and taking up meaningful careers. According to Ngugi all that
is needed is the willpower and the natural zeal to conquer ‘the
Devil’s empire’ which is the male-dominated capitalist world
– and all shall be added unto you. What Ngugi does is thus to
reverse or simply convert ‘stereotypical feminine qualities
into equally stereotypical masculine ones’ (Stratton 1994,
p. 162). The point is that women’s liberation requires more
than just the acquisition of masculine values, even with the
best intentions on the part of the writer.
Women can still enter all the male-dominated areas and
still remain entrapped within the male-constructed identity of
women as mere objects of sex and as naturally inferior.
Wanja, in spite of her strength and success as a woman, still
considers her sexual organs as a curse – a source of slavery: ‘If
you have a cunt ... if you are born with this hole, instead of
it being a source of pride, you are doomed to either marrying
someone or else being a whore. You eat or you are eaten’
(Ngugi 1977, p. 293).
Evidently, Wanja is confusing issues here, because it is not
so much the possession of the ‘cunt’ in itself that enslaves her,
but rather the social attitudes that the society attaches to
womanhood and the construction of women’s identity as the

weaker sex and therefore the object of male sexual gratifica-
tion. For all her power and strength, Wanja is still objectified
by Ngugi and often portrayed as having that irresistible charm
that is needed to seduce men.
The dominant image of Wanja that emerges in the
narrative is that of a victim of male bourgeois domination
and capitalist forces engendered by colonialism. We have
already seen that her exploitation by a wealthy former
homeguard, Mr Kimeria, drives her to prostitution in the first
instance. She tells Munira of how she had no choice but to
become a bar-attendant – a job description which is
synonymous with prostitution in Kenya.
When Wanja finds city life difficult, she runs back to
Ilmorog to join her grandmother in the hope that she can
start the kind of life where she could earn a decent living and
at the same time be useful to others. But the combined blow
of her grandmother’s death, Karega’s escape and the advent of
the new economic and social order in Ilmorog sends Wanja
back to whoredom. This time round, Wanja has acquired a
new dictum – ‘Eat or you are eaten’ (Ngugi 1977, p. 293). Sig-
nificantly, Wanja becomes a victim of local capitalists acting
in conjunction with international capital in Ilmorog. She is
forced to sell their house to Mzigo and she cannot continue
with her grandmother’s business because the licence has been
cancelled and subsequently awarded to the multinationals.
Through his depiction of Wanja’s trials, the writer attempts to
make us appreciate the forces that send Wanja to prostitution.
Ngugi would want to portray Wanja as a typical reflection
of the material conditions of the exploited majority of women
in Kenya. Wanja shows the upward mobility of only a select
few to the top levels of the economic and social echelons,
made possible through prostitution. For Wanja to rise she is
forced not just to ‘prostitute’ her body, but also to put those
of other women into her service. Thus, for Ngugi, prostitution
becomes a symbol of degradation rather than liberty.1 Ngugi
sees it as a path to entrapment and slavery. But as Luise White
(1990) has shown, women sometimes seized niches in the
expanding and poorly organised urban economy, as
prostitutes and landlords, providing essential services to male
migrant labourers. But more importantly, White’s study also

brings out the basic ambiguity in colonial relationships in
which the women were both subverting the cultural project
of colonialism and subsidising the economic one. This
ambiguity is best captured in Wanja’s character, although the
writer ultimately condemns her for prostitution. She was able
to seize niches within the nascent capitalist economy, while
subverting the colonial enterprise through her social networks
with her call-girls, and her relationships with the working-
class leaders and the African shareholders in the new capital
engendered by colonialism. And although prostitution is
portrayed as a degrading occupation, it is the main source of
capital accumulation available to women in the postcolonial
state. ‘What is the difference whether you are sweating it out
on a plantation, in a factory or lying on your back, anyway?’,
Wanja asks (Ngugi 1977, p. 293). Prostitution is thus
presented, at another level, as an indicator of the state of the
nation in Kenya. Kenya’s position of dependency in the world
economy is likened to prostitution as a social institution. It is
a mirror to the economic prostitution of postcolonial Kenya.
As Karega – the hero of Petals of Blood – asserts, ‘a man who
has never set foot on this land can sit in a New York or
London office and determine what I shall eat, read, think, do
only because he sits on a heap of billions’. ‘In such a world,’
Karega tells Munira, ‘we are all prostituted’ (p. 240). Thus,
postcolonial Kenya is represented as a country in a state of
degradation. And as Stratton rightly argues, Wanja is the
‘index of the state of the nation’ (1994, p. 48) because she
represents the nation’s moments of degradation in her
portrait as abused womanhood and an allegorical parallel to
the postcolonial state in Kenya.
Ngugi depicts Wanja as a victim and as subject to some
kind of cast-iron fate. On the march to the city she meets
Kimeria who corrupted her in her youth and the same
Kimeria becomes one of the black directors of Theng’eta
Breweries. As Wanja herself observes:
I could hardly accept this twist of fate ... Kimeria, who had
ruined my life and later humiliated me by making me sleep
with him during our journey to the city ... this same
Kimeria was one of those who would benefit from the new
economic progress of Ilmorog. (Ngugi 1977, p. 293)
Wherever Wanja turns she is confronted by her destroyers.

And although in the new Ilmorog she becomes larger than life
– fabled as the founder of the town – she remains a victim
trapped in a vicious circle from which there is very little hope
of escape. In an interview with Anita Shreve, Ngugi
emphasises the entrapment of Wanja in the system. ‘There are
always possibilities of renewal and growth’, he says of Wanja;
‘[b]ut’, he adds, ‘only in a different kind of system’ (Shreve
1977, p. 36).
Ultimately, Ngugi, without saying so, succumbs to the
traditional male stereotypical image of the prostitute woman
as degenerate and immoral. The narrative voice calls prosti-
tution ‘a career of always being trodden upon, a career of
endless shame and degeneration’ (Ngugi 1977, p. 329). This
is what Karega is getting at when he refers disparagingly to
Wanja’s way of dealing with her predicament as a form of
‘static vision’ and as perverted worship of a degraded ‘world
in which one could only be clean by wiping his dirt and shit
and urine on others’ (p. 303).
Ngugi is moralising the issue by questioning Wanja’s pros-
titution as a method to free herself and ultimately he rejects
the possibility of any form of struggle within the limits of a
repressive patriarchal society. We feel for Wanja when the
‘morally upright’ Karega condemns her and, in anguish, she
dismisses his ideological arrogance by telling him that she
too has tried to fight her exploiters in the only way she can,
and that is by using her sexual powers (Ngugi 1977, p. 327).
The implied ideological position that women must wait for
their liberty in the ‘kingdom of man and woman’ (p. 344) is
both simplistic and idealistic as it privileges class struggle over
gender issues. For Ngugi, the ultimate moral test is the side
one takes in a class war, and since Wanja has not taken sides
with the struggling masses, the prostitutes and the workers,
she is condemned to capitalist doom. There is no doubt that
Ngugi shares in Munira’s puritan attitude towards Wanja.
According to Munira, Wanja as a prostitute is a symbol of
‘Jezebel’ (p. 332) and it is significant that the so-called change
that takes place in Wanja comes after the burning of Wanja’s

whorehouse by Munira. Ngugi’s moral purging leads logically
to political activism on the side of the oppressed. And
accordingly, it is not until Wanja decides to take a stand in
the struggle that we are made to understand that she begins
to feel ‘the stirrings of a new person’ (p. 328). She decides to
give up prostitution and she falls pregnant. If prostitution is
allegorical of the decadent state of the nation, then
motherhood is allegorical of national rebirth and regenera-
tion: ‘the movement of the springs of life ... the world’
(p. 315).
Although Ngugi’s use of the image of the prostitute for the
character of the most liberated woman in the novel is
significant, it raises a number of contentious issues in gender
studies that Ngugi fails to resolve. The first such issue is the
debate over the role of colonialism and in turn the capitalist
system in the liberation of women. The second issue is
whether prostitution offers women any form of liberation
within a patriarchal society, and ultimately what the
prostitute’s identity means to one’s material position in Kenya.
From Ngugi’s portrayal of Wanja one is tempted to
conclude that colonialism both empowered and disempow-
ered women. The development of capitalism in Ilmorog
makes it possible for Wanja to free herself from male
domination to the extent that the new Ilmorog provides
scope for unconventional female behaviour and the nascent
capitalist forces permit a degree of female economic inde-
pendence. Wanja becomes a prostitute as a means to fight
male domination and the system, something she could not
have done in the traditional context. And yet Ngugi’s
insistence that Wanja’s ultimate move to large-scale prostitu-
tion is some form of degeneration and entrapment can only
serve to expose his ambivalent attitude towards the stereotype
of the degenerate prostitute that is often found in African
literature.
Ngugi’s portrayal of the character of Wanja is even more
disturbing because Ngugi has loaded too many traits on this
one character and failed to reconcile all these traits within the
narrative in a credible manner. Wanja represents too many
types of women at once. She is the schoolgirl ravished by a
sugar-daddy, a barmaid, a prostitute in various forms, a busi-

nesswoman, a visionary and at times she represents the
peasant woman. If we examine even the dialogue Ngugi gives
Wanja we find her a ‘complex’ character. When, for example,
she states that ‘we all carry maimed souls and we are looking
for a cure’ (Ngugi 1977, p. 73), we ask ourselves in what
language a barmaid would be making such a profound
statement. The whole novel and the other characters appear
to revolve around Wanja and she has had an affair with
virtually all the male characters in the narrative: Karega,
Munira, Abdulla, Kimeria, Chui and Mzigo.
Wanja’s vision and awareness of the forces that lead her
into prostitution and her practice are contradictory from the
point of view of the narrative. Her understanding of the
destruction and exploitation of poor women under capitalism
seems to concur with that of the author. Wanja’s argument
that there is no ‘difference whether you are sweating it out on
a plantation, in a factory or lying on your back’ would seem
to tally with Ngugi’s position that sexual exploitation of
women is not any different from the exploitation of workers
in factories or plantations; they are all victims of capitalism.
Wanja, however, seems to suggest that women are doomed to
exploitation because of their sex. And yet she becomes a
manipulator and lives off the bodies of other women. The
writer seems to be interested more in using her to illustrate his
thesis on the exploitation of women in the postcolonial state,
than in using Wanja’s experiences as a study into the position
of women at a specific historical juncture in Kenya. Wanja
herself conceives of her life in images of entrapment: ‘She
decided that maybe everything was simply a matter of love
and hate. Love and hate – Siamese twins – back to back in a
human heart. Because you loved you also hated’ (Ngugi 1977,
p. 335).
Wanja’s ‘liberation’ or conversion to the struggle is sudden
and it comes after a self-righteous ideological diatribe from
Karega who accuses her of complicity with the system of
destruction. The sudden change, however, does not help
Wanja to come to terms with her predicament – her
entrapment – as a woman. Instead, Wanja is guilty because
she has been an exploiter – a woman who has lived off the
blood of other women and abused her own body in capital

gain. She has been a traitor to the struggle of the oppressed.
All her tragic life would seem to count for nothing, but a
bizarre attempt to abdicate her moral and political respons-
ibility. We are made to understand that she had undergone an
abortion after falling pregnant as a schoolgirl and she is still
haunted by guilt. Politically, she has succumbed to the values
of capitalist exploitation instead of throwing in her lot with
the people’s struggle in Ilmorog and is, therefore, a traitor.
When Wanja’s final salvation comes, it is through the
mystery of fire which remains a dubious motif in her life. In
the end her change is clouded with fear, mystery and lack of
a conviction that comes out of clear understanding – even in
Ngugi’s materialist terms. And yet we are told that in her
moment of reawakening ‘she felt the stirrings of a new person
... She had after all been baptized by fire’ (Ngugi 1977, p.
337). For Ngugi, fire is a purifying force, a strengthening
force. Munira refers to Wanja as the mythical Phoenix bird
that is reborn after fire. Munira himself believes in this
purifying force of fire. After his first sexual encounter with a
woman he burns an imitation of the woman’s house after
which ‘he felt truly purified by fire’ (p. 14). Fire here has an
abstract ethereal quality to it. It is a mysterious power whose
effects are not visible but are felt inwardly by Munira and
Wanja.
Fire, in Petals of Blood, is also seen as an agent of
destruction. And yet, even on this level the destruction by fire
is connected to the idea of sin and punishment. Wanja’s first
house is burnt down by ‘tribal’ chauvinists who do not want
her to have an affair with her Somalian lover. Munira seeks to
destroy Wanja’s house because to him she is evil. When her
house is finally burnt down, Munira is thrilled that God’s will
has been accomplished. The four directors of Theng’eta
Breweries meet their deaths through fire, again apparently
for the sins they have committed against the people of
Ilmorog, the Kenyan people.
Wanja is haunted by fire on both levels. She is terrified of
fire yet at the same time attracted to its ‘cleansing’ power.
Her aunt, a freedom fighter, was destroyed by fire. With these
two levels of fire in Petals of Blood Ngugi is suggesting that
Wanja needed purification and, if so, from what does she

need purification? And if it involves punishment, for what
was she being punished? Wanja’s own words on the burning
of her aunt do not make the mystery any clearer:
I have liked to believe that she burnt herself like Buddhists

do, which then makes me think of the water and the fire of
the second coming to cleanse and bring purity to our earth
of cruelty and loneliness ... (Ngugi 1977, p. 65)
In the same paragraph, Wanja talks of her desire to set herself

on fire with the aim of purifying herself.
Ngugi is obviously trapped in the Christian moral vision
that he has appropriated to explain the nature of the capitalist
world. This moral stance also agrees with his epistemological
outlook and historical sense, which defines people in terms of
good and evil, patriots and traitors, fighters and liberators. At
a symbolic level then, Wanja has to purge herself from her
immoral past and a past of political betrayal. Only then can
she be liberated. This process of purification ought to lead
her to take sides with the oppressed in the battle to usher in
a new social order, ‘bringing to an end the reign of the few
over the many ... Then, only then, would the kingdom of
man and woman really begin’ (Ngugi 1977, p. 344).
Ngugi’s position lends itself to moralising. For Ngugi, there
is no borderline between personal morality and political
engagement. It is one’s involvement in the political struggle
that defines one’s moral position. Wanja’s moral integrity
can only be realised within the context of class struggle for
justice and equality. No other struggles exist outside class war.
This logically leads to an ideological absolutism in which
other forms of democratic struggles are repressed in favour of
rigid class parameters as the only litmus test for change within
society. No democratic spaces exist for women outside class
struggle. As a result Wanja loses the more human and
personal conflicts that we tend to associate with characters
who represent an historical moment.
The image of the prostitute is a cypher for the evils of
colonial and postcolonial capitalism in Ngugi’s narrative.
The modern capitalist system enslaves women and
compounds their domination by men. In Ngugi’s view the

acquisitive spirit of capitalism twists the relationship between
man and woman into a relationship of ownership and
domination.
Conclusion
I have argued that although Ngugi is sympathetic to women
as subjects of oppression, he is primarily interested in women
as exploited workers or producers. He shows little interest in
the constraints placed on women by patriarchy and religion,
for example. Ngugi’s women are basically victims of capitalist
male-bourgeois domination. Their exploitation is therefore
not very different from that suffered by the oppressed male
and this tends to obscure the interaction between gender and
other social institutions that a whole ‘clan’ of women may
suffer from in spite of their class background. It also creates
the impression that there are no essential differences between
working-class women; let alone implying the view that
working-class men do not oppress women.
Although Ngugi displays the awareness that Kenyan
women are subject to double oppression both as women and
as workers he tends to suggest that what is urgent is the
liberation of women as workers rather than women qua
women. This position tends to obscure a number of issues.
For example, by reducing the oppression of women to that
of class interest, Ngugi tends to gloss over patriarchal issues.
He is silent on the socialisation of women that prepares
them to accept their inferior status and ignores the subord-
ination of women in precolonial Kenya. Ngugi would seem
to imply that female exploitation is essentially a colonial
evil; indeed, that the status of women only worsened with
the advent of capitalism in Africa. It is for this reason that
the struggle for women’s liberation remains, for Ngugi, a
class war against imperialism. It is also not surprising that
Ngugi is silent on women’s domestic struggles – the struggle
within the home. By overlooking this area, he privileges
political struggle over and above other forms of social
struggles that women are engaged in. It is clear that, for him,
the domination and exploitation of women can be

conceived of only in class terms. Ngugi seems to suggest that
women, together with the male working class, should fight
for the freedom of all by working towards the dismantling of
the oppressive capitalist structure.
6
Ngugi’s Portrayal of the
Community, Heroes and the
Oppressed
Narrating the Community and the Elite in Ngugi’s

Earlier Novels
One of the most striking features of Ngugi’s narrative over
the years is the central role that the elite play within it. In
virtually all his novels, Ngugi constitutes the educated elite as
the shapers of the new nation-state and its modernist
ideology, whether this ideology is rooted in the emergent
nationalist discourses of his earlier novels or in the radical
socialist vision of his later novels. It is safe to argue that the
educated elite play a mediating role between the colonial
structures and quest for freedom, between the neocolonial
structures and the struggles of the people for a new social
order. It is this role as brokers of the modernist ideology that
shapes the imagination of protonationalists, like Waiyaki,
and forms the basis of the anticolonial struggle in Weep Not,
Child and Kihika’s call for national sacrifice in A Grain of
Wheat. In The River Between, Waiyaki’s heroism is celebrated
and the emphasis is on his estrangement from the
community. His role as a mediator between the antagonistic
groups in his community becomes both his source of power
and marginalisation – and indeed Ngugi’s expression of the
ambivalence which characterises nationalism.
The position of Waiyaki in the text as a mediator seems to
tally with the ambiguous role of the elite within the decolon-
isation project in Africa. As we saw in the introductory
chapter, restoration of the community to itself is a precondi-
tion for the processes that culminate in the building of a
nation. And, as Stuart Hall argues, nations are symbolic
communities whose full materialisation depends on the
126
Ngugi’s Portrayal of the Community, Heroes, Oppressed 127
ability to weave together a narrative that will win the

sympathy of the intended subjects (Hall et al. 1992). This is
precisely what Ngugi seeks to do through Waiyaki: that is, to
create a nationalist discourse through the creation of
independent schools around which the Gikuyu people would
be mobilised as a unitary community. Ngugi says that, ‘in the
novel itself there is physically a river between two hills that
house two communities which keep quarrelling but I
maintain, you know, that the river between can be a factor
which brings people together as well as being a factor of
separation. It can both unite and separate’ (cited in Duerden
and Pieterse 1972, p. 125). It is Waiyaki who encapsulates the
possibility of this unity in his role as a political broker of the
modernist nationalist project that Ngugi desires for his
people. Edward Said has argued that in The River Between
Ngugi rewrites the colonialist discourse ‘by inducing life into
Conrad’s river [in The Heart of Darkness] on the very first page’
(Said 1994, p. 254) of The River Between:
The River was called Honia, which meant cure, or bring-

back-to-life. Honia river never dried: it seemed to possess a
strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes.
And it went on in the very same way, never hurrying, never
hesitating. People saw this and they were happy. (Ngugi
1965, p. 1)
Whatever the limitations of Waiyaki, he stands for the new

mythos that Ngugi seeks to generate in order to heal and
restore the community to itself. Waiyaki’s separatist
education is one of the very first attempts to legitimise anti-
colonial discourse in Ngugi’s narrative. It was, in a way, in
spite of the contradictions I raised earlier, a major attempt to
wrest the discursive space from the coloniser and to restore
agency of sorts to the colonised subjects. For them, this was
only possible through a forging of a sense of community
among the Africans, the struggle for unity which was at the
heart of most nationalist discourses. And yet one cannot help
but notice the moral dilemma that confronts Waiyaki as the
‘nation builder’. The dilemma that Waiyaki faces is
homologous to Ngugi’s own class position as a member of
the Kenyan elite at the time of the text’s writing in the early
1960s. Waiyaki’s choice to distance himself from the Kiama,
a movement which was struggling for land, and in its place
push for political emancipation through education, has a
great deal to do with the ambivalence of the Kenyan elite
towards the Mau Mau that the Kiama represents in the text.
Soon after Kenya’s independence the majority of the
Kenyan elite, chiefly represented by Kenyatta, saw the Mau
Mau as a discredited organisation whose role in the struggle
for independence had to be repressed. After all, the Kenya
African National Union (KANU) leadership was openly calling
for people to forget the past, eschew violence and rally behind
Kenyatta, who was increasingly beginning to replace the Mau
Mau as the central force behind Kenya’s independence. It is
Kenyatta’s detention and sacrifice that was constantly
emphasised. Just a year before Kenya’s independence,
Kenyatta had warned: ‘We are determined to have indepen-
dence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule
Kenya. We must have no hatred towards one another. Mau
Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never
be remembered again’ (Kenyatta 1968, p. 189). Strong words
to come from a leader who was seen as the main source of
inspiration for the freedom fighters, and yet this was the
popular line taken by a broad section of the Kenyan elite in
the period leading to independence and after. Although it
seems unlikely that Ngugi would have displayed similar
sentiments and loathing for the Mau Mau, his portrayal of
Waiyaki and his position in relation to the warring factions in
the text speak to the nationalist agenda of the time. Ian Glenn
is therefore right in saying:
Waiyaki’s relationship to the Kiama is marked by ambiva-

lences that recall Kenyatta’s to the Mau Mau: he is the
source of its strength, distances himself from it
haphazardly, and is innocent of its violent intentions.
Though he realises the justice of their claims and concerns,
his version of the correct method of political emancipation
is that of education for unity. (Glenn 1981, p. 55)
The point being made here is that the elite positioned

themselves as the brokers of Kenya’s nationalist agenda and
national unity was being erected as a repudiation of anything
that would threaten this agenda. Buitenhuijs is therefore
right, in part, in saying that the need for national unity and
reconciliation between the Mau Mau fighters and the loyalists
influenced the post-independence attitude towards the Mau
Mau (1973, pp. 50–9). To privilege the role played by the Mau
Mau fighters would have been tantamount to suggesting that
only the Gikuyu, and indeed only a small section of the
Gikuyu, fought for independence, a position that would have
alienated those ethnic groups not involved in the armed
struggle. Kenyatta positioned himself as the ultimate archi-
tecture of this national unity: ‘The most essential need which
I have constantly sought to proclaim and fulfil in Kenya has
been that of national unity; nationhood and familyhood
must and can be contrived out of our many tribes and
cultures’ (Kenyatta 1968, p. ix). Ngugi, too, as I have argued
in the introductory chapter, was grappling with the issues of
ethnicity and nationalism. ‘To look from the tribe to a wider
concept of human association is to be progressive. When this
begins to happen, a Kenya nation will be born’ (Ngugi 1972,
p. 24). Ngugi wrote these words in his collection of essays
which have been read as an integral part of the fictional world
of The River Between, Weep Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat.
Significantly, Ngugi’s article was entitled, ‘Kenya: The Two
Rifts’, a title reminiscent of the title and issues raised in The
River Between in particular. Clearly, Ngugi, like many of his
peers in the early 1960s, saw nation-building as the
fundamental mission of the elite at the time. But it was a
mission that was fraught with contradictions and ambiguities
that Ngugi had to distance himself from in his later works.
One such contradiction was the orchestrated attempt within
the mainstream politics in Kenya to downplay the heroic role
of the Mau Mau and to replace it with the Kenyatta myth ‘as
the sole, single-handed fighter for Kenya’s independence’
(Ngugi 1981a, p. 89), that Maughan-Brown (1985) has written
about so eloquently. It seems to me that the celebration of
Waiyaki, his tensions and uncertainties when it comes to the
place of the Kiama in the anticolonial struggle, must be
located in the ambivalent sociopolitical climate in Kenya in

the 1960s when The River Between was written. As Ian Glenn
has suggested, the nationalist perspective privileged in the
text points to ‘the problems Ngugi faced: how to produce a
“nation-building” text that would do justice to all, but
primarily suggest, as K. A. N. U. was suggesting, that the valid
choice is through unity and education rather than violence
aimed at restitution of the land’ (Glenn 1981, p. 55).
The ambivalence towards the Mau Mau war and the
violence associated with it persists in Weep Not, Child. Once
again the politics of the day are mediated through the eyes of
Njoroge who embodies the aspirations of the elite and
cherishes the ideals of unity that transcend both racial and
ethnic barriers. And yet in this text Ngugi is painfully aware
of the impossibility of reconciliation due to the repressive
colonial structures that have driven the youth into the forest.
It is the same repressive structures that destroy Ngugi’s young,
but naive hero, driven gradually towards self-destruction. In
the circumstances, Ngugi seems to be suggesting that the
nationalist dream is but an illusion. The community cannot
reconstitute itself purely on the basis of a modernist vision
such as Njoroge’s who, like Waiyaki before him, privileges
education over land restitution: a process which Ngotho, like
his son Boro, comes to realise is only possible through
violence. Ngugi was gradually becoming critical of the kind of
nationalism that was framed in unitary idioms of nationhood
and common destiny, but one which deleted any violent
struggle from its vocabulary. He was beginning to realise that
unless the elite identified with the struggles of the people,
unless they abandoned the pursuit of status the way Njoroge
does, they ran the risk of being irrelevant. He was also
beginning to realise that the elite could not be trusted with
the destiny of the nation, and that the kind of heroism that
he celebrates in the character of Waiyaki had to be re-
examined. This is the point Abdulrazak Gurnah is hinting at
when he writes: ‘If Boro’s bitterness has a histrionic quality,
it is because this is part of the ambivalence about the portrayal
of the heroic voice’ (1993, p.151). Gurnah correctly asserts
that ‘[t]he heroic privileged voice of the visionary in later
fiction is handled with suspicion in the earlier novels’ (1993,

p. 151), and particularly in A Grain of Wheat in my view.
In A Grain of Wheat, it would appear that Ngugi seeks to
redefine heroism and the role of the intellectual political
brokers. Although Kihika is one of the most positively
portrayed characters in the text, and although his spirit looms
larger than the rest of the protagonists, he is certainly not
central to the action in the novel. Like Boro in Weep Not,
Child, Kihika is treated with ambivalence: they are both
dismissed as mad (Ngugi 1964, p. 30; Ngugi 1967, pp. 166–7).
It is the community of Thabai that is at the centre of A Grain
of Wheat and every action in the text works to give us some
basic insight into this community: its pain and fears of the
visible effects of colonialism and possible neocolonialism on
the lives of the community; its celebration of the possibility
of the birth of a new nation and, indeed, an exploration of
the impact of capitalist ideology on the community of Thabai
and, by implication, on the Kenyan consciousness. In this
text Ngugi locates the political leadership within the vexed
relations of the nationalist ideology of the time and the
emergent capitalist ideology. Within this context the elite are
very much part of a social process whose contradictions and
achievements they share with the rest of the community.
They are ordinary participants in the community’s struggles
as opposed to being presented as the sole political brokers
whose vision transcends the materiality of the moment and
gestures towards a just political dispensation in the future.
One of the reasons why Ngugi makes this shift is because he
has come to realise that a liberated Kenya would not escape
betrayal and disillusionment embedded in the colonial and
neocolonial structures of the country. In one of the captions
to the novel Ngugi warns that ‘the situation and problems are
real – sometimes too painfully real for the peasants who
fought the British yet who now see all that they fought for
being put on one side’. It was becoming increasingly evident
that the complementary roles that the writers and the
nationalist politicians enjoyed could not be sustained in the
immediate aftermath of independence. As Neil Lazurus
reminds us:
It did not take long, after independence, for radical writers

to realise that something had gone wrong. They had
experienced decolonization as a time of massive transfor-
mation. Yet, looking around them in the aftermath they
quickly began to perceive that their ‘revolution’ had been
denied ... they came to see that the ‘liberation’ they had
celebrated was cruelly limited in its effects. (1992, p. 18)
This apprehension about Uhuru is best captured in the text by

Gikonyo, who during the race that takes place on Uhuru day
actually asks himself whether independence is going to make
life better for the common man: ‘“As he ran, Gikonyo tried to
hold on to other things ... Would Uhuru bring land into
African hands? And would that make a difference to the small
man in the village?”’ (Ngugi 1967, p. 180). Thus, despite
Ngugi’s celebration of Uhuru, he cannot hide his displeasure
at the imminent betrayal. His apprehension about the
decolonisation project is most evident at the scene of Uhuru
day celebrations which is marked by gloom and an ominous
cloud: ‘The morning itself was so dull we feared the day would
not break into life’ (p. 178).
By casting doubts on Kenya’s liberation, Ngugi is moving
away from the kind of organic nationalism whose traces we
saw in The River Between. The attainment of independence, far
from leading to an undifferentiated nation-state, threatens to
usher in a new form of discrimination that is likely to
undermine the interests of the majority of its citizens. The
kind of racial identity that informed oppressive political
structures in the earlier novels is reversed, if not entirely, in
A Grain of Wheat. This is not to suggest that Ngugi deletes
colonial experience and its debilitating effects from the heart
of his most accomplished text. On the contrary, it is his acute
awareness of the impact of colonial ideological structures that
enables Ngugi to warn against ‘the danger at the moment of
decolonization ... that despite the departure of the British,
colonial and capitalist structures and ideology will continue
to shape Kenyans’ perceptions. Colonialism will continue
under black colonial masters working with white settlers and
European powers’ (Caminero-Santangelo 1998, p. 144).
Ngugi’s insistence that the betrayal which we witness in

the body of his text has to be read as a feature inherent in the
deep-rooted colonialist structures of oppression and self-
interest is significant. It renders all acts of heroism suspect due
to a lingering danger of a colonial ideology on the
imagination of our would-be heroes of the struggle. What
this ideology privileges is individualism and self-interest. It
also constructs power around fear and terror as opposed to
public accountability. It is Mugo’s self-interest and his
perceptions of authority as having the capacity to inflict pain
that drive him to betray Kihika. Similarly, Gikonyo’s
alienation from the struggle drives him towards some modest
capital accumulation. Gikonyo heralds the emergence of a
national bourgeoisie seeking to take advantage of the new
money economy and Ngugi’s celebration of capital and
industry is evident in his admiration of Gikonyo’s
entrepreneurial qualities:
At Thabai and villages around Rung’ei, most families

finished their harvested food by January. Then there always
followed one or two months of drought before the long
rains started in March ... that was the time Gikonyo gave up
hack-work as a carpenter and entered the market. He went
to the market very early in the morning, bought one or
two bags of maize at wholesale price from licenced, and at
times black-market, maize supplies from the Rift Valley ...
With the money obtained, Gikonyo would again haggle
for another bag and the two women did the retail selling.
(Ngugi 1967, p. 58)
We continue to read that through service and humility,

Gikonyo ‘coaxed in money’ (p. 58). His significance lies in
the fact that he is the perfect embodiment of capitalist accu-
mulation. He buys, hoards and manipulates his people’s
needs to his advantage. In the village he becomes the symbol
of capitalist ideology: ‘The story of Gikonyo’s rise to wealth,
although on a small scale, carried a moral every mother in
Thabai pointed out to her children’ (p. 59).
Ngugi seems to make a distinction between Gikonyo’s type

of accumulation which is played according to basic capitalist
rules of demand and supply and that of the MP of Thabai
who undercuts his constituents in a deal to buy up the farm
of a settler who is leaving for England. The difference also
lies in the fact that Gikonyo rallies with other members of the
community to form a cooperative, while the MP buys the
farm for himself and through unscrupulous means. Gikonyo’s
cooperative project also gestures towards a more egalitarian
form of land ownership which was a popular alternative for
land restitution in the 1960s. The system was, however,
abused due to the greed of the emergent petit-bourgeoisie who,
like the MP, were beginning to define themselves by their
arrogance and general alienation from the masses on whose
behalf they had captured power. This group showed greater
loyalty to their foreign masters than to the people who
elected them. The MP, for example, fails to join his con-
stituents at the Uhuru celebrations because he is entertaining
foreign dignitaries in the capital: ‘You see, we have so many
foreign guests to look after. So apologise to the people for me
and say I can’t come’, the MP tells Gikonyo (Ngugi 1967,
p. 63). We also read that ‘[f]ew MPs had offices in their con-
stituencies. As soon as they were elected, they ran to Nairobi
and were rarely seen in their areas, except when they came
back with other national leaders to address big political rallies’
(p. 60). This kind of isolation of the leadership from the
masses of the people can only kill the cooperative spirit and
the creation of a sense of community that colonialism had
fractured.
The significance of Ngugi’s text lies precisely in the fact
that it seeks to restore the sense of community and to warn
against false heroism based on self-interest. To transcend the
contradictions embedded in the postcolonial structures of the
new nation-state Ngugi posits a process of introspection and
the forging of a communal consciousness based on honesty
and integrity. These are the qualities that virtually all
characters in the text lack. To avoid the reproduction of
degraded values and abuse of trust epitomised in the character
of the MP, the people of Thabai must be reconnected to
themselves. And here Ngugi is not talking about an organic
return to the source, but a realistic acceptance of multiple

histories that the people of Thabai share as a precondition for
its regeneration. Gikonyo and Mumbi, the erstwhile founders
of the Agikuyu community, lead this process of healing
through the sharing of their personal histories. It is Mumbi’s
confession in particular that eventually inspires Mugo to lay
his soul bare to the couple and later to the community of
Thabai. We are told that ‘[s]he had sat there, and talked to
him and given him a glimpse of a new earth. She had trusted
him, and confided in him. This simple trust had forced him
to tell her the truth’ (Ngugi 1967, p. 234). The ‘new earth’ has
a double meaning in this context. The new Kenyan state
seems to be poised between a society that seeks to perpetuate
the values of the old colonial order and that which seeks to
reconstitute itself by enforcing the virtues of communal
responsibility. If the nationalist elite have betrayed the
emergent Kenyan nation through selfishness and corruption,
then the rest of the community must cling to the vision of a
‘new earth’ that inspired the liberation struggle in the first
place. That is why the last section of the novel entitled
‘Harambee’ – pulling together – is ironic. Ironic because the
Kenyan leaders who created the slogan at the moment of
liberation have failed to live up to its meaning. And yet Ngugi
insists that the communal spirit celebrated in the slogan
remains relevant. The section represents the possibility of
rebirth because it dramatises the healing process that Gikonyo
has initiated with his estranged wife, Mumbi. To do this
Gikonyo must shed the values of self-interest and begin to
pull along with Mumbi in the restoration of the Agikuyu
community and the broader Kenyan nation that it
symbolises. It is these communal values, humane and people-
oriented, that become the centre-piece of Ngugi’s later novels.
However, in Ngugi’s later texts, whose rhetorics would seem
to privilege the voice of the people – the marginalised workers
and peasants – the role of the elite changes. As opposed to
being the voice of the nationalist project, the elite continue
to be the mediating figure between the class aspirations of the
oppressed and the exploitative ideology of the neocolonial
petit-bourgeois class. In other words, if alienation and self-
interest of the elite undermined the agency of the ruling elite,
if they made heroism suspect, Ngugi seems to be suggesting

that a new form of heroism, which would put the interests of
the people at the centre of his narratives, is required. And,
indeed, the socialist alternative to capitalism would seem to
have offered Ngugi the intellectual return to the importance
of the elite, except this time round Ngugi draws a distinction
between the progressive elite – the revolutionary ideologue of
the people – and the retrogressive elite, which has joined
hands with the former colonial masters to exploit the people.
Ngugi seems to imply that the elite cannot be constituted as
an undifferentiated group. And yet Ngugi’s return to heroism
that he deflates in A Grain of Wheat is not without its contra-
dictions, as I will attempt to show in the section that follows.
The celebration of the communal spirit that is central to the
critique of the colonial and neocolonial presence in A Grain
of Wheat is undermined by his return to a Waiyaki-type of
ideologue and the deleting of the community from the
centre-stage of his narrative.
The Return of Heroism and the Crisis of the African

Revolution
So it is that after the poisoned gift of independence, radical
African writers like Ousmane, or like Ngugi in Kenya, find
themselves back in the dilemma of ... bearing a passion for
change and social regeneration which has not yet found its
agents. I hope it is clear that this is also very much an
aesthetic dilemma, a crisis of representation: it was not
difficult to identify an adversary who spoke another
language and wore the visible trappings of colonial
occupation. (Jameson 1991, p. 98)
When in 1981 Ngugi lamented the absence of positive heroes

in African literature, heroes who would ‘embody the spirit of
struggle and resistance against exploitation’ (1981b, p. 24), I
believe he was admitting, albeit unwittingly and uncon-
sciously, that there was no strong tradition of the working
class in Africa and, indeed, no revolutionary leadership that
would lead Africa out of its political and economic crises. The
absence of positive heroes in African literature, I would argue,
was ample evidence of a basic lack: not necessarily of heroes

that would embody the spirit of struggle and resistance as
such, but rather a good indication of the absence of the
working-class heroes that would champion the type of
socialist transformation that Ngugi had in mind when he
made the lament.1 It was an expression of a desire to bring
about the kind of radical change, ‘the upward thrust of the
people’ (Lazarus 1992, p.15), that Fanon had anticipated,
moving historically toward self-determination and bringing
into completion the African revolution that independence
had failed to deliver. But as Neil Lazarus argues, ‘the historical
fact that the ‘upward thrust of the people’ was not maintained
in the post-colonial era, points to the conclusion that it was
never really present as a revolutionary force in the first place’
(p. 15).
And herein lies the dilemma of a radical writer in Africa
that Jameson draws our attention to. This was a dilemma
because this group of radical African intellectuals, having cast
themselves as revolutionaries, ‘became convinced’, writes
Lazarus, ‘that they, not the rest of their class, had history on
their side. This imbued them with a new sense of purpose,
since they saw themselves as representing the voice of the
revolution’ (1991, p. 11). But as Jameson correctly points out,
it was not enough simply to have a passion for change and
regeneration in a postcolonial space which had not nurtured
agents for social change or for the radical social transforma-
tion that writers like Ngugi had hoped for.2
It seems to me that nothing illustrates Ngugi’s dilemma
and uncertainties better than his portrayal of the so-called
forces of regeneration or agents of transformation. One of the
major rifts in Ngugi’s postcolonial narrative is the romantic
portrayal of the working-class leaders and his inability to give
workers and peasants a concrete representation in his
narrative. In his postcolonial novels, Ngugi demonstrates that
there is resistance by workers and peasants against their
oppression which creates the conditions for an imminent
revolution. The revolutionary possibilities are embodied in
the workers led by Karega in Petals of Blood, Muturi in Devil on
the Cross and Matigari in Matigari.
I intend to examine the portrayal of Ngugi’s heroes and

the oppressed workers and peasants against the background of
fragmentation. I will attempt to show that his portrayal of the
working-class heroes and the workers that they lead is both
romantic and abstract. I will further show that Ngugi’s
creative dilemma manifests itself in a crisis of aesthetic rep-
resentation of heroes in which Ngugi’s typical hero is invested
with positive qualities, presented as faultless, selfless and
courageous. The heroes are highly schematic and stereotyped:
they are always the embodiment of a tradition of struggle and
sacrifice. Ngugi’s crisis also tends to manifest itself in the
abstract construction of workers and their struggle. Ngugi’s
workers experience monopoly capitalism and imperialism,
not concrete lived experiences. This portrayal, I will argue,
reduces them to abstract concepts rather than ‘specific
individuals and groups’ with ‘specific conflicts and struggles’
(Scott 1985, p. 43). The chapter will attempt to give a brief
comparison between Ngugi and Sembene Ousmane. I will,
for example, argue that in Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood, the
workers feel the direct impact of the machines on their lives
and they have concrete grievances. The actual transforma-
tion of workers in Sembene’s text takes place within the
context of their struggle, a struggle in which various groups
across gender, class and age come to terms with the weight of
the historic moment and how they are implicated in it.
Ngugi’s Heroes: The Example of Karega in Petals of Blood

One of the major defining features of Ngugi’s narrative, par-
ticularly in the later novels, is its highly schematic and
predictable portrayal of heroes and heroines. They are, like
most of Ngugi’s characters, socially determined character
types which follow a special scheme within the narrative.
They often come from a family and social background of
deprivation, poverty and endless suffering which they are
always battling to change for the common good of humanity.
To this extent, their lives are also marked by rebellion and
resistance to domination. We have Matigari in Matigari,
Muturi in Devil on the Cross and Karega in Petals of Blood.
Karega, in Petals of Blood, is a good example. His name

translated means ‘the one who refused’ or ‘the rebel’. As a
youth he took part in the strike against Mr Fraudsham at
Siriana High School and he also masterminded the strike
against Chui, the first black headmaster of Siriana. Munira
describes him as a young man full of idealism, hope and
vitality – a man with a ‘glowing faith in the possibilities of
heroism and devotion’ (Ngugi 1977, p. 46). Karega’s idealism
and search for truth and justice dominate the text. This
search, we read, ‘made him a wanderer all over Kenya, from
Mombasa to Kisumu and back again to Ilmorog’ (p. 46). There
is a definite interplay between quest and rebellion in Karega’s
character.
The interplay between quest and rebellion is best played
out when Karega takes up his teaching post in Munira’s
school and he seeks to transform the school syllabus, almost
on his own and without the involvement of Munira. Karega
sees his first duty at school as that of raising the consciousness
of the children by teaching them the history of Ilmorog and
showing them its interconnectedness to the broader Kenyan
society, and to Africa in general. He soon comes to the
realisation that his lessons are abstract, given the disquieting
silence of the pupils. He discovers that his approach to
teaching raises more questions than answers and opens up
numerous silences and rifts within his own educational
heritage from Siriana. Karega is eager to evolve a syllabus that
has a strong bias toward the ‘African continent’ without being
conscious of the limitations and strengths of such a syllabus.
When the lawyer sends him history books by black intellec-
tuals, he discovers that it is not enough to be black in order
to write objectively on the history of the blacks. The
production of knowledge, Karega discovers, is not neutral,
but serves specific interests and groups. As the lawyer tells
him: ‘In a situation of the robber and the robbed, in a
situation in which the old man of the sea is sitting on Sinbad,
there can be no neutral history and politics. If you would
learn look about you: choose your side’ (Ngugi 1977, p. 200).
By playing on Karega’s quest for truth, Ngugi takes us through
a predictable path of knowledge for those of us who are
familiar with Ngugi’s discourses on Kenyan history. Karega is
gradually forced to come to terms with history as a contested

terrain between the robber and the robbed (see Ngugi 1981b,
pp. 123–9). Predictably, Karega’s ideological outlook begins to
change when Munira dismisses him unceremoniously from
his teaching post at Ilmorog Primary School and he decides
that he has a contribution to make towards the struggle of
workers to come.
It is, however, after his struggles as a worker all over Kenya,
we read, that Karega is radically transformed. When he
returns to Ilmorog after five years of self-imposed exile he
starts a trade union as a vehicle for raising the awareness of
workers in Theng’eta Breweries where he works as an
accounting clerk. The formation of a trade union which leads
to the worker’s strike, which we encounter at the beginning
of the novel, would seem to be a culmination in a linear
process in Karega’s character development, a development
directed by the twin semes of quest and rebellion which cut
across his life again and again.
And yet Karega’s coming to consciousness, his apparent
transformation from a black nationalist to a trade union
leader embracing the socialist vision, remains unconvincing.
This is largely because as a character most associated with the
mass movement, indeed as a character who, in the words of
Gikandi, ‘mediates between the inner reality of the novel and
the author’s ontology’ (1987, p. 138), his impact on the
narrative as the centre of consciousness remains contrived
and abstract. For one, much of what we are told about Karega
is filtered through the character of Munira whom the writer
discredits as weak in mind, jealous and unreliable. In fact,
the narrative voice, the omniscient narrator, is constantly
and deliberately pushing us to see things from Karega’s
perspective because the other protagonists cannot be trusted.
Karega is revealed through the rhetoric of the narrative which
asserts his heroism now and again, and through his
unmediated polemical speeches which set him apart from the
rest, as a man with a mission. When, for example, Munira
calls Wanja a prostitute, Karega is enraged and rebukes him in
a speech that Munira correctly describes as ‘sermons and
moral platitudes’ (Ngugi 1977, p. 240).
The moral sermonising goes on and on and, in the end, the

narrative voice concurs and we are told: ‘There followed
another moment of silence embarrassing to Munira because
once again he felt on trial, that he had been placed on a moral
balance and had been found wanting’ (Ngugi 1977, p. 241).
Within this deliberate scheme, the authorial voice under the
guise of the narrator systematically undermines the moral
stature of the other protagonists close to Karega, while at the
same time underscoring Karega’s moral superiority. Karega
becomes a tool for political mediation in the narrative in the
hands of the writer, and yet what Karega says reads like
abstract philosophical reflections on an individual’s turbulent
consciousness. We do not seem to come to grips fully with
what shapes this consciousness. This is further compounded
by the fact that much of what happens in the life of Karega is
neither dramatised nor given adequate representation in the
narrative. His journeys across the length and breadth of Kenya
are reported in very general terms and yet they form the basis
of Karega’s social transformation. For the best part of the
narrative Karega is not centre-stage and yet his consciousness
rules the narrative. I think the basic weaknesses with Karega’s
portrayal, which set him apart as a highly romanticised figure,
are the writer’s failure to anchor Karega’s struggle in Ilmorog
where the text is set and also the failure to give a concrete rep-
resentation to the peasants and workers whose lives Karega
seeks to influence. In many ways, he is larger than life and
isolated or simply overshadows the experiences of those
people that he ought to be leading.
When an author chooses a particular setting for his or her
novel, it shows they believe that the physical setting of the
narrative has an important function to play in the novel. I
believe Ngugi chose the village of Ilmorog as the centre-stage
to re-enact Kenya’s history and to show how imperialist
domination has ravaged colonial and postcolonial Kenya.
Ilmorog is therefore a microcosm of Kenya; it is supposed to
represent the larger Kenyan setting. Within the context of
the African narrative where the rural peasants are often
marginalised or simply ignored, Ngugi’s choice of a rural
village signals an attempt to place Kenyan peasants at the
centre of his narratives. And indeed, as a physical entity,
Ilmorog village looms large in the narrative, as something

close to a living character, with its moments of misery and
joy, with its epochs of sterility and fertility which have
profoundly affected the lives of its inhabitants. As the
narrative has it, the peasants of Ilmorog always made history
by ‘taming’ nature’s resources, fighting the vagaries of nature
and celebrating their moments of joy and triumph through
dance and song, in praise of their ‘founders’ (Ngugi 1977,
p. 120).
The graphic picture of the old and new Ilmorog, with its
glorious past and degraded present, is not fully utilised in
character development or even in depicting the dynamics of
social struggle within Ilmorog as the centre-stage. I do not
concur with Gikandi’s conclusion, in an otherwise illumin-
ating piece on ‘Character and consciousness in Petals of Blood’,
that ‘Karega’s relationship with Ilmorog is active’, because ‘he
relates to the town and its people in such a way that they
shape his vision and understanding of the neo-colonial
situation’ (Gikandi 1987, p. 138). Surely Karega’s first
fundamental change comes as a result of a letter written to
him by the lawyer, an outsider to Ilmorog, whom Gikandi has
correctly described as an ‘authorial puppet ... a thinly
disguised instrument of authorial consciousness whose failure
as a fictional persona has serious implications on character
and consciousness in the political novel’ (p. 140). The second
and most profound change in Karega’s character takes place
outside the narrative after a five-year period of self-exile from
Ilmorog. Where is the active relationship between Karega and
the people of Ilmorog, one may venture to ask? And who are
the people of Ilmorog?
Throughout the novel, except for Nyakinyua, the people of
Ilmorog are merely on the periphery as onlookers. Karega is
presented as the silent primary mover, breaking the barriers of
ethnic enclaves and of subservience to capital which have
prevented the workers from uniting for their rights all along.
And in all these, not a single worker is mentioned and yet the
impact of Karega’s crusade was so great that Karega himself
was elected as the Secretary General of the Union, and ‘the
victory of the Breweries Workers’ Union had a very traumatic
effect on the hitherto docile workers of Ilmorog’ (Ngugi 1977,

p. 305).
Like the workers and peasants of Ilmorog, the employers are
equally invisible. The only time we have a superficial
encounter with the directors of Theng’eta Breweries is when
they are locked in a perverse sexual struggle over Wanja in
which they are manipulated to their death. Thus the struggle
in Ilmorog, which should be a communal experience and a
dramatisation of the conflict between labour and capital,
remains an abstract experience in which the relationship
between the communal ideologue, Karega, the workers and
the rest of the marginalised groups is not given adequate
expression. The failure to give concrete expression to social
conflict and the building of worker consciousness intimated
in the text undermines the dialectical interplay between the
forces at work.
In contrast, in Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood we see
workers, who hitherto had been very passive, becoming active
and organising themselves to confront the owners of the
machine which had for so long dominated their lives. Their
ability to organise themselves and engage in an active
struggle, thereby bringing to a halt the machine, transforms
them. In the process of the strike they regain their human
worth when at last they discover their strength in the
collective endeavour and their dialectical dependence on the
machine. In talking about the social transformation of the
workers, the narrative voice tells us that ‘they began to
understand that the machine was making of them a whole
new breed of men. It did not belong to them; it was they who
belonged to it’ (Ousmane 1970, p. 52).
The significance of Sembene Ousmane’s text lies in the fact
that although it attempts to negotiate the relationship
between trade union recognition and anticolonial agitation;
between class consciousness and the organisation of a nation;
it is steeped in the concrete experience of workers. As Craig
Smith (1993, pp. 51–6) writes, Ousmane is able to explore
‘the impact of technology on African life’ as a force that not
‘only alienates the workers from their traditional labour, ...
[but] shapes them into modern individuals who can
participate in the modern discourse of technology’ (in this
case the railway) that the French capital had always denied
them. At the same time, the machine enables them to become
aware of themselves as a new class with a new measure of
agency in the larger discourse of money economy which now
organises their lives. I believe the quality of Ousmane’s text
rests on the fact that he recreates a railway workers’ strike
which occurred between October 1947 and March 1948 on
the Dakar–Niger railway line and in the process he examines
how various institutions, classes, people and individuals are
affected by this singular experience. It is also Ousmane’s
ability to render visible the basic lives of his characters, their
experiences and contradictions, without losing sight of the
collective strike through which the concrete experiences are
unveiled, that endears us to the significance of the historic
moment of the narrative.
It seems to me that Ngugi’s central characters, particularly
Karega, are linked to the setting and the central subjects of the
narrative – the workers and peasants of Ilmorog – by a very
weak cord. There seems to be a contradiction between the
collective and the individual character experiences since the
individual experiences appear to overshadow the collective
experience. And yet, the narrative clearly points to the fact
that Ngugi is seeking to dramatise and to mediate the
collective struggle of the people of Ilmorog. The story of Petals
of Blood is therefore the story of Ilmorog, its growth and
development. Yet the peasants of Ilmorog are not at the
centre of the story. Neither are the workers at the centre of the
new Ilmorog. And although the writer is constantly evoking
the collective through the ‘we’ narrative voice, it is nothing
less than a ploy for authorial intrusion; a strategy for asserting
the ideological authority of the writer in the narrative. Even
Gikandi – a critic sympathetic to Ngugi’s characterisation –
concedes that the authorial ‘intrusiveness is even apparent
in some of the characters’ thoughts and words’ and that occa-
sionally ‘the novelist misuses his omniscient authority,
becomes unequivocal and forces situations and characters to
fit into a predetermined ideological position’ (Gikandi 1987,
p. 146). A good example of a crude ideological imposition on
a character’s consciousness is to be found in the last scene of
the narrative focusing on Karega’s reflections in the cell. In
this passage, in which ‘Imperialism’ and ‘capitalism’ are slated

in the most grotesque terms as systems ‘that bred hordes of
round-bellied jiggers and bedbugs with parasitism and
cannibalism’ (Ngugi 1977, p. 344), Ngugi’s voice is
undisguised. Coming as it does at the end of the narrative, the
passage also gives Ngugi the last chance to reiterate the
ideological perspective that he has been trying to push
through the character of Karega. The veiled voice of the
omniscient narrator replaces that of the character and gives
the writer the liberty to jar our imagination as readers with
authorial ideology under the guise of a character’s conscious-
ness. Again, the reference to workers and peasants is deprived
of any concrete expression because they are conspicuously
absent in the narrative. Akinyi, the woman worker who
appears briefly at the beginning and at the end of the
narrative with a message of solidarity, is a poor attempt to
cover up for the workers’ absence. She stands for the
undramatised heroism of the workers that the narrative voice
intimates.
Karega’s portrayal isolates him as a romantic figure who
shoulders the burden of the community and works towards
its transformative hour of redemption. In this transformative
process championed by the selected few, the marginalised
groups are not part of the central discourse. This brings me to
the second major issue in this chapter: a critical assessment of
Ngugi’s portrayal of the workers and the oppressed in general.
Imagining the Subaltern Under Conditions of

Marginality and Displacement
No one doubts Ngugi’s commitment to a complete overhaul
of the postcolonial state. The author’s dilemma lies precisely
in the fact that Kenyan society does not afford him a tradition
of a working-class struggle or a literary tradition directed
primarily at bringing about socialist transformation. Instead,
we have workers’ and peasants’ struggles in Kenya scattered
across its historical landscape. These struggles were by no
means representing uniform goals and interests, and certainly
not a socialist transformation in such absolute terms as
Ngugi tends to suggest. Ngugi’s predicament lies in the
impracticality of trying to forge a coherent vision for change

in the face of fragmentation, displacement and a basic
absence of models to inspire his writing. This leads Ngugi in
two directions which have become predictable in his
narrative. First, Ngugi projects unity and a coordinated
political will onto the masses by creating in them a voluntary
awareness of their plight, and he endows them with a revo-
lutionary consciousness that is not fully anchored in their
material reality, even as they work towards a revolution that
is imminent. Second, the workers are conceptualised in
abstract terms.
In both Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross the workers
and the management are faceless. We do not have a visible
representation of workers other than the mass of people
chanting anti-imperialist slogans. The management is known
simply as imperialist exploiters and the workers as the
producers. If the slogans of enraged workers at the beginning
of Petals of Blood are anything to go by, then we ought to
know these workers better. We need to live with them
through their experience beyond the slogans and feel with
them the brutality of the management that has brought about
the tragic encounter at the start of the narrative.
Ngugi’s workers do not seem to go through tangible
experiences which affect their lives directly. They experience
capitalism and imperialism, two concepts that they do not
appear to be fully capable of conceptualising. The strike in
Petals of Blood which takes place at the brewery seems to be
directed at a faceless management. The workers’ coming to
awareness is also the sole work of an individual character,
Karega, in spite of his silence and withdrawal. In Devil on the
Cross we have Muturi, the one character who promises to
approximate the ideal portrait of a worker, at least from his
background and experiences with Wariinga, but the writer
abandons the more personal and individualised line of char-
acterisation of Muturi and falls for abstract representation.
Like most of Ngugi’s revolutionary heroes Muturi remains
extremely one-dimensional. He has a good disposition and is
kind by nature. He rescues Wariinga from two suicide
attempts, and helps the old woman, Wangari, with the fare
for the matatu taxi. When we encounter him in the text, he
displays the confidence and insight of a seasoned activist.
And yet, all we know about him is that he has travelled widely
all over Kenya and that he is a carpenter. And although
Muturi is said to belong to a secret workers’ organisation, we
hardly feel the presence of these workers, even in their
underground world. The only glimpse we get of them is when
they join the students’ demonstration against the thieves in
the cave. The ‘great organization of the workers and peasants’
(Ngugi 1982, p. 204) that we read of is hardly dramatised.
The portrayal of Ngugi’s worker-leaders like Muturi leaves
one with very little room for critical insight into the situation
of their lot. Muturi’s position is predictable – employers are
parasites and workers are producers; employers are the devil
and workers are the angels who must drive the devil out of
this earth. The workers produce guns, only to be used by the
capitalist exploiters to kill workers (Ngugi 1982, p. 211). This
moral position is repeated over and over again. Njabulo
Ndebele describes this type of representation as being
underpinned by ‘moral ideology’ which, he rightly observes,
‘tends to ossify complex social problems into symbols which
are perceived as finished forms of good or evil, instead of
leading us towards important necessary insights into the
social processes leading to those finished forms’ (1991, p. 23).
The weakness of Ngugi’s characterisation scheme in which
oppressors are portrayed as evil and workers as good is that it
tends to obscure certain contradictions among the workers
themselves. One tendency is to portray workers as absolutely
humane and generous in spirit, as in the case of Muturi. The
other tendency is to take the workers’ consciousness as a
given, with the end result that their struggle is often roman-
ticised. The romantic portrayal of workers becomes obvious,
precisely because of their conspicuous absence at the centre-
stage of Ngugi’s narratives. The vacuum is often filled by the
positive heroes who are larger than life and apparently
embody the spirit of struggle, but of a struggle which finds
little backing from workers within the narrative. In striking
contrast, Ousmane’s depiction of the collective struggle in
God’s Bits of Wood is far from romantic. The striking workers
have their own contradictions which threaten the spirit of
the strike. There are those who put their personal interests
first and threaten the strike. Diara is the first casualty. He
takes his share of the money from the strike committee but
goes back to work. Beaugosse, who for quite some time is an
official of the workers’ union and a respected leader of the
delegates from Dakar at the union’s first meeting with the
railway officials, abandons the struggle and takes sides with
the oppressors. Sounkare, the oldest worker in the company,
cannot join the strike for legitimately human reasons and his
profound human tragedy touches us the more when he dies
like a neglected dog. Even leaders like Doudou and Tiemoko
are for some time driven by their personal egos more than the
general good of the society, although they learn to
subordinate their selfish drives to the greater struggle of the
community. Indeed, even the much revered worker-leader,
Bakayoko, by participating in this heroic struggle, transforms
his family relations and begins to rethink the trappings of
patriarchy in the form of polygamy. Unlike Ngugi, Ousmane’s
depiction of the striking workers draws attention to the subtle
experiences that inform their lives beyond the theoretical
jargon. He is able to show how people change through
struggle, and also to draw attention to the fact that people
respond to the concrete realities of their situation rather than
some abstract phenomenon. What is celebrated is the
workers’ self-taught radicalism, born out of their suffering
and awakening of the workers themselves. In the words of
Piven and Cloward, workers like all human beings:
experience deprivation and oppression within a concrete

setting, not as the end product of large and abstract
processes, and it is the concrete experience that moulds
their discontent into specific grievances against specific
targets. Workers experience the factory, the speeding
rhythm of the assembly line, the foremen, the spies, the
guards, the owner, and the pay cheque. They do not
experience monopoly capitalism. (cited in Scott 1985, p. 43)
Piven’s and Cloward’s point is at the heart of Ngugi’s

dilemma because Ngugi denies his workers the kind of
concrete portrayal that would situate their lives and
experiences within a specific context of work, of daily routine
and of conflict and struggle. It is within a concrete setting that
we come to terms with the forms of resistance that mark

people’s lives. It is at the level of practical experience, rather
than the philosophical level, that class struggle is waged.
Again, Ousmane’s portrayal of the railway workers and their
strike is relevant here. The workers strike because of specific
grievances: better wages, pensions and allowances for their
families. They identify the French management of the railway
line as their immediate enemy. Significantly again, both
‘worker and manager share and contest one discursive space’
(Smith 1993, p. 55) as reflected in the physical proximity of
the worker and manager, thereby heightening the awareness
of difference. In this confrontation, ‘they have to
acknowledge one another in the same discursive space’
(p. 55). He shows how the nature of French colonialism
manifests itself best in the specific confrontation between the
railway management and workers. In the process Ousmane
restores agency back to the colonised subject through the
workers’ struggle around which the whole society is mobilised
to fight injustice and colonial oppression.
In Petals of Blood, the journey to Nairobi, organised by the
Ilmorog community when they are afflicted by drought, also
comes close to the idea of a social struggle located within a
practical experience to which I am referring. The march is
one of those very few compelling moments in the narrative in
which the people of Ilmorog demonstrate their discontent
with authority. The people are mobilised around a concrete
problem. And when they arrive in Nairobi, they go to their
local MP, and not the government or some imaginary enemy.
Significantly, it is a march about a phenomenon that is
currently affecting their lives in a very direct way; it is a march
for survival of the people, of their animals and an expression
of the value they attach to the now scorched land of their
ancestors. It is therefore proper that the elders should see this
march as a continuation of their historical struggle. More
than any other event in the narrative, this journey affects the
lives of the characters and the whole community of Ilmorog.
Except for Nyakinyua, it is the only time that we meet the
other peasants like Muriuki, Njuguna, Ruoro, Njogu and
Muturi. Similar experiences that depict the direct
involvement of the people are hard to come by in the text.
To encapsulate, Ngugi’s Petals of Blood resembles Sembene

Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood both in its ideological concerns
and, to a large extent, in its subject. But in contrast to Ngugi’s,
in Ousmane’s novel there is a relationship between a specific
sociohistorical subject and the individual character
experiences, to the extent that the individual experiences and
consciousness are shaped by the ongoing social struggle.3
Even the sense of alienation displayed by certain characters is
related directly to the central and political action of the novel.
Neither in Petals of Blood nor in Devil on the Cross do we come
across workers or even peasants who are directly linked to
the political action of the novel.
There are two possible reasons for Ngugi’s inability to
dramatise the working-class struggle. One is that Kenya has
not developed a class-conscious and organised working class
and so Ngugi has nothing to fall back on. In the absence of an
organised working class he creates his ideal working class to
fill the gap and in the process deals with it at an abstract level.
The second is that Ngugi, as a political activist, desires and
wills a revolution that would lead to a total overthrow of the
capitalist system in Kenya and he therefore uses the narrative
form to negotiate the possible revolutionary strategies that
he would wish to see used by the oppressed in Kenya. In
doing so, he is forced to create an imaginary revolutionary
working class modelled after the socialist revolutions.
Although the two factors may both have something to do
with Ngugi’s aesthetic dilemma, I find the first point more
compelling than the latter because it concerns the legacy of
colonialism and, by extension, the crisis of the postcolonial
state in Africa. Indeed, the dominant text in much of the
postcolonial narrative in Africa would seem to trace the
present social and economic crisis in Africa to the conditions
of displacement and fragmentation that were engendered by
colonialism on the continent. At the heart of the crisis is the
stark reality that colonialism left backward economies that
could hardly nurture an advanced proletariat. The nascent
working class still had roots in the peasantry: it was a class
that never saw itself as a social group with a historical mission
to bring about the kind of fundamental social transformation
that Ngugi tends to thrust upon them in his narrative. The
burden of ensuring historical transformation had never been

taken seriously and consciously by the working classes in
Africa, precisely because the colonial economy and its
structures, which were inherited almost intact at indepen-
dence, never encouraged or prepared them for such a mission.
The new political leadership – the African elite created out of
the colonial womb – was equally ill-prepared for political
governance. It was a class of bastards which had no identity
of its own, but had to take up leadership at independence,
torn as it were between its desire for continuity and the
interests of the masses on whose behalf it had claimed power.
Born out of the ruins of colonial history, the postcolonial
state was a society whose agents of change lacked a coherent
vision, whether from the point of view of the working class or
from the ruling elite that were shepherded into power at inde-
pendence.
Conclusion
Ngugi’s response has been to give form to this state of ‘chaos’
by attempting to reconstitute history out of fragmentation; to
reconstruct this history out of the colonial ruins. And yet the
dilemma of the radical writer in Africa, the writer of praxis
that Fredrick Jameson so aptly alludes to in his controversial
article on Third World literature, is evident in Ngugi’s writing.
Ngugi, like many African writers, is groping for a vision that
would give expression to the state of displacement and frag-
mentation on the continent. The predicament of radical
writers is compounded by the fact that they have no models
of radical transformation or class war in the postcolonial state
to inspire them. The crisis of African nationalism and the
failure of the African revolution that Fanon has written so
much about is a pointer to the continuing state of fragmen-
tation in Africa (Fanon 1967, pp. 116–65).
The problematic of Ngugi’s revolutionary theory – his
strategies for transformation – has to be located in the
difficult task of trying to create sense out of the state of frag-
mentation. This process of trying to piece together history out
of broken fragments, as I have pointed out following Walter
Benjamin, always leads to an allegorical return to the past.
Ngugi’s constant return to the past – to the Mau Mau war –

could be linked to his attempt to reconstitute the ideal agents
of change. Indeed, his superficial portrayal of the peasantry
and workers, and his tendency to project a unity and
coordinated political will upon them from above, could also
be traced to the state of fragmentation and the writer’s
inability to forge a coherent transformative vision in the face
of social displacement.
Conclusion
History is Subversive
... it is precisely because history is the result of struggle and

tells of change that it is perceived as a threat by all the
ruling strata in all the oppressive exploitative systems.
Tyrants and the tyrannical systems are terrified at the
sound of the wheels of history. History is subversive. And
it is because it is actually subversive of the existing
tyrannical system that there have been attempts to arrest it.
(Ngugi 1993, pp. 96–7)
Ngugi’s belief in the supremacy of historical change and the

use of narrative as a tool for ordering and shaping history is
evident in all the texts studied in this book. Ngugi believes
that the narrative provides a space within which an historical
meaning can be contested. And because narrative provides
space for contesting meaning, it is an important tool for
teaching and mobilising people; a tool for drawing people’s
attention to social meaning, their role and function in the
process of shaping and making history. By implicating people
– and by ‘people’ I mean the marginalised classes of Africa
denied historical agency by imperialism and its agents in
Africa – Ngugi is challenging the linear historiography that
has tended to repress the voice of the ruled while privileging
the debilitating narratives of colonial conquest in Africa. He
does this in two significant ways: one, by insisting and
showing that the fundamental substance of history is change
and, two, by positing historical movement as a threat to
absolute power. In both senses, Ngugi challenges those
historical readings which seek to freeze history and to turn it
into official dogma for control and submission. This is what
Ngugi means when he asserts that ‘history is subversive’
153
(Ngugi 1993, p. 97) because it undermines relations of

domination by restoring agency to the ruled and exposing
the rulers for what they really are. At the heart of Ngugi’s
narrative, as I have argued, is an assertion of his people’s
history beyond the simplistic cultural contestation that we
tend to associate with literary artefacts.
In his earlier texts, I have shown that Ngugi is keenly
concerned with how colonial categories of knowledge
flattened the complex experiences of the African people and
he therefore sets out to put the record straight. Attempts at
recovering African gnosis by evoking the Agikuyu mythology,
while striving for a new mythos rooted in contemporary
experience engendered by colonialism, is at the heart of
Ngugi’s earlier novels. For Ngugi, the reconstruction of
African knowledge involves, as Edward Said puts it, ‘the
rediscovery and repatriation of what had been suppressed in
the natives’ past by the processes of imperialism’ (1994,
p. 253), as well as the appropriation of those intellectual
protocols and the social institutions that came with
colonialism. Thus, when Ngugi agonises over the idea of a
nation-state called Kenya, he is agonising over a geographic
space ‘designed and redesigned by explorers from Europe for
generations’ (p. 253). This, Edward Said reminds us, ‘is the
partial tragedy of resistance, that it must to a certain degree
work to recover forms already established or at least
influenced or infiltrated by the culture of the empire’ (p. 253).
Ngugi’s earlier narratives, I have argued, involved a process of
reimagining a new geographic and political space. His
writings were contingent upon the social and political
exigencies of the time which demanded the urgent invention
of national identities. This process was multifaceted and
complex because it involved not only the act of reconstitut-
ing Africa from the ruins of colonial plunder, but also a
critical engagement with those discursive practices and
political structures that came with colonialism. This process
of social engineering, I have argued, was both backward- and
forward-looking because it was neither a total rejection of
tradition nor an outright condemnation of those aspects of
colonialism that had given the necessary impetus to the
modernist projects. The uneasy relationship between inward-
Conclusion 155
looking nationalism and the modernist project rooted in

colonialist ideologies and structures that I have explored in
Ngugi’s earlier novels has a lot to do with the complexity of
the issues that confronted African writers in the decade before
and during the immediate aftermath of independence. And
whatever one might think of Ngugi’s earlier texts, it is clear
that in these texts the Kenyan writer positions himself as part
of that process of history-making in Africa. His attempts to
reconcile ethnic and national identities, individualist and
communal interests, were all part of that imaginative process
to redefine the historic destiny of the continent and find
one’s place within it.
In the process of this search for historical relevance and
the remapping of Africa’s historical contours, Ngugi, in his
later texts, revises the metanarrative of nationalist ideology of
the period before and after independence. In its place, Ngugi
reconstitutes the nationalist struggle as the heroic narrative of
workers and peasants. The theme of ‘resistance’ to
imperialism remains the basic plot element, but he rewrites it,
particularly in his later novels, as the concerted struggle of the
colonised subjects operating on the margins of power. Ngugi
is doing what his ‘progressive’ counterparts in history have
called ‘history from below’, that is, the restoration of voice to
the ruled classes in Africa, voices that had been submerged in
the colonialist reconfiguration of the continent and the meta-
narratives of the nationalism. The allegorical resurrection of
the Kimathi figure in virtually all his novels and the mythical
return of Matigari – the Mau Mau remnant that survived – in
his more recent novel of the same title, underpins this
narrative of sacrifice and redemption by the oppressed of
Africa. And on this Ngugi is unequivocal: ‘If there is one
consistent theme in the history of Kenya over the last four
hundred years or so (since the sixteenth century), it is surely
one of the Kenyan people’s struggle against foreign
domination’ (Ngugi 1993, p. 97). This theme is, Ngugi avers,
‘the real living history of the masses’ as opposed to ‘the
approved official history’ (p. 98). The theme is unambiguously
African resistance to imperialism.
It is no accident, therefore, that Ngugi should, in his later
novels, place great emphasis on resistance as the major plot
element in a continuous narrative of African history. Specif-

ically, as I have shown, he argues for a connection between
‘primary resistance movements’ in the early days of colon-
isation and ‘modern mass nationalism’ that followed in the
later days of colonialism. The linear connection, as I have
attempted to show, is captured best in Ngugi’s constant
display of anticolonial war heroes from Africa and the black
diaspora, ranging from Chaka, Toussaint, Nat Turner, Laibon
Turugat, to Nkrumah and Cabral (Ngugi 1977, p. 137). The
grand narrative of African resistance, the great refusal as
Frederick Cooper is wont to call it, is crystallised in the Mau
Mau war in Kenya. For Ngugi, it is the Mau Mau resistance
movement that broke the back of British colonialism because,
as an armed struggle to reclaim land appropriated by the
British, it was a radical rejection of British occupation in
Kenya. And yet, as I have argued, Kenyan historiography has
turned around the debate and attempted to draw attention,
instead, on how various meanings of Mau Mau have been
shaped in the production of knowledge in colonial and post-
colonial Kenya. And whether one agrees with those debates
which challenge and support the interpretation of Mau Mau
as a truly nationalist movement is beside the point. For Ngugi,
the Mau Mau war provides a template upon which the
disparate segments of Kenyan history are brought to order.
Mau Mau was the beginning of a moral and material struggle
for self-definition by all those oppressed by tyrants
throughout the continent.
What Ngugi has done is to turn Mau Mau into an icon, a
central symbol around which the allegorisation of Kenyan
history is built and given shape. If British colonists turned
the Mau Mau war into a figure of degeneration and a reversal
to atavism, Ngugi turns the debate on its head and appropri-
ates the Mau Mau war in his subversion of colonial and
neocolonial power structures in modern Kenya. Through his
allegorisation of Kenyan history, the present struggle against
neocolonial structures reconfigures earlier movements for
social justice and gestures towards a future Kenya free from
the oppression. This, in turn, has meant that Ngugi adopts a
linear historical perspective which is in part determined by a
linear typology which allegory generally imposes to constrain
Conclusion 157
the reader’s ability to construct meaning beyond that which

is given. I have argued that Ngugi’s recourse to allegory could
be traced to the state of fragmentation engendered by the
crisis of the so-called African revolution and the political
paralysis after independence and, indeed, to the fact that
Ngugi, as a writer of praxis and political activist, has suffered
at the hands of two successive regimes in Kenya. He was
detained and he has spent close to two decades in exile. And
yet, these notwithstanding, Ngugi’s project of historical
subversion, I argue, runs the risk of flattening the lives of the
colonised subjects in Africa due to this linearity of vision.
What emerges in my analysis of Ngugi’s later novels is a
broad binary opposition between forces of oppression on the
one hand and forces of resistance on the other. The
complexity of social relations that we find in A Grain of
Wheat, for example, is abandoned in the later novels and
instead of capturing the ambivalent relationship between the
colonial state and the so-called collaborators on the one hand,
and the ambivalent relationship between the comprador
bourgeoisie, the postcolonial state and the forces of global
imperialism on the other, Ngugi succumbs to linear presen-
tation of the collaboration/resistance dyad which deletes any
possibilities of subversion and deflection of power within
those structures established by colonialism. I have also argued
in the same vein that Ngugi’s understanding of class conflict
in Kenya is too deeply embedded in dependency theory to
allow for a nuanced understanding of the complex colonial
and postcolonial experience in Kenya.
It is difficult to believe that response to colonialism did not
rise beyond the collective or grand resistance to imperialism.
And yet one of the impressions created in Ngugi’s more recent
narratives is that Africans did not have any lives outside the
parameters set by colonial power structures; that Africans
were virtually reduced to either resistors or collaborators in
the face of colonialism. The point I make is that the
complexity of the nationalist metanarratives can only be
grasped effectively when one transcends the binary categories
of the oppressors and the oppressed, the dominator and the
dominated, that colonialism itself had imposed. Otherwise
any analysis which locks social relations into binary categories
is likely to delete the complex engagement with how power

was mobilised and contested within Africa. Frantz Fanon
hinted at a more multivalent and nuanced approach to
African conceptualisation of the people’s culture and the
general historical movement to which they were giving shape.
This complex process, Fanon argued, resided neither in the
people’s past nor in the basic manichean relations that
colonialism had imposed through its racist logic, but in the
‘fluctuating movement which they [the people] are just giving
shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the
signal for everything to be called in question’ (Fanon, 1967,
p. 183). He adds: ‘Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this
zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must
come; and it is there that our souls are crystallized and that
our perceptions and our lives are transfused with light’
(p. 183, my emphasis). I think Fanon’s split space of ‘occult
instability’ opens up the possibilities of seeing how deeply
the colonised subjects were implicated in the modernist
project that was engendered by colonialism and how elusive
– and difficult to police – the boundary between colonisers
and colonised was. It forces us not simply to assert that
Africans had history, but rather, to ask how Africans were
implicated in establishing or contesting power. Such
questions are not easily resolved within the restrictive
framework of binarism, even if it may be useful in unlocking
power relations in general terms. And to that extent, Ngugi
tends to undermine his positive project of restoration and
historical contestation due to his recourse to a linear typology
of the ‘robber and the robbed’ that has become the hallmark
of his more recent texts.
The implications of Ngugi’s historical sense on his charac-
terisation are most evident. For example, for Ngugi the native
bourgeoisie in Africa is doomed to decadence and parasitism
and is therefore incapable of positive and objective self-
reflection. Clearly, this is a social deterministic principle built
on the speculative axiom that the bourgeoisie is rigid and
unable to regenerate itself and the only class capable of
providing the true moral guidance is the working class. The
oppressors are denied any form of humanity – they are the
embodiment of evil – while the oppressed are the
Conclusion 159
embodiment of good. Thus, all negative values are vested with

the oppressor class, while all positive values are given to the
oppressed. Ngugi’s characters serve to illustrate this simple
thesis of broad class conflict which he posits as historical
subversion and the essence of Kenyan history. What we
discern in Ngugi’s historical sense are immutable social classes
defined once and for all ages. But social classes, as Fredrick
Jameson reminds us, are dynamic and diverse in character; it
is impossible to imagine a fixed archetype of social types
because any social class ‘is always characteristic of a given
period, of a given decade’ (1971, p. 195). Yet Ngugi’s Mau
Mau fighter in the colonial state (e.g. Kimathi) is not any
different from a Mau Mau fighter in the postcolonial state
(e.g. Matigari); his revolutionary intellectual and the national
bourgeoisie remain the same in all his novels set in entirely
different historical moments. By creating the impression that
social classes are immutable and fixed for all ages Ngugi again
undermines the very dialectics of restoration, that is,
historical movement, which is at the heart of his narratives.
However, as I have also attempted to demonstrate in this
book, Ngugi is acutely aware of the contradictions inherent in
trying to use narrative as a vehicle for illustrating a thesis
while attempting to relate the text to the contemporary
world. To resolve this contradiction Ngugi has fallen back on
the literary modes of didactic narrative. He uses the allegorical
mode and a range of popular forms. By returning to the
popular forms of his people, Ngugi hopes to transcend his
own social and literary reification and to use his art as a tool
for political pedagogy. This move is at the heart of his radical
shift to write in his indigenous language, Gikuyu. It is, in his
words, ‘an ever-continuing struggle to seize back creative
initiative in history through a real control of all means of
communal self-definition in time and space’ (Ngugi 1986,
p. 4). His use of allegorical typology of characters in which the
oppressors are portrayed in grotesque images is a devastating
reversal of a manichean class structure, but also a pointer to
continuity in change. Whereas in his earlier novels the
grotesque image of the body is used to satirise the colonists,
in the later novels bodily deformity serves to expose the
naked mimicry of Western values and borrowed power of the
African bourgeoisie. It is a pointed satire of those who have

turned the postcolony into a theatre stage upon which they
enact the absurd dance of death and slavery. And although
Ngugi shifts from the more complex allegorical methods in
his earlier novels to inflexible ones in the later works, the
strategies succeed in transforming his later narratives into
national allegories, even if the complexity of their liberating
potential may be contested within limits.
Ngugi’s problematic, in my view, emanates from his
divided desire to steep his narrative in the contemporary
world of Kenyan politics – a project which invites a realistic
portrayal of society – while at the same time seeking to use the
narrative as a mute tool for social transformation – a static
form of narrative in which characters are either agents of
transformation or repression and stasis. This tension could
also be said to be between Ngugi the writer and Ngugi the
political activist and mythologiser. In this struggle, especially
in his postcolonial narratives, it is Ngugi the activist with his
ideological warheads of right and wrong, the oppressed and
the oppressor, that triumphs over a deliberate creative
imagination that we have tended to associate with Ngugi’s
earlier narratives.
Notes
Introduction
1. I make exception to Maughan-Brown (1985), Land, Freedom
and Fiction: History and Ideology in Kenya, which in my view
is a pioneering work in the kind of approach I have in mind.
Maughan-Brown’s otherwise brilliant text is limited to
Ngugi’s earlier narratives and to Mau Mau historiography.
Sichermann (1989) is also a fascinating but limited study of
Ngugi and Kenyan historiography.
2. Arthur Marwick (1995) has forcefully challenged White’s
position. Although Marwick argues correctly that history is
not a branch of literature, his casual dismissal of narrative
elements in history is hardly convincing. It seems to me
that Marwick’s otherwise brilliant article is nothing but a
return to the empiricist conception of the past – history as
‘the study of human past, through the systematic analysis of
the primary sources, and the bodies of knowledge arising
from that study’ (Marwick 1995, p. 12). I take the view here
of the past as a discursive construct which does not preclude
Marwick’s principal methods of retrieving the past, but
throws it open as an arena for competing versions of
historical recovery. In this sense, the place accorded to
literary texts (in relation to other components of the
historical record either within the procedures of literary
scholarship or within those of historical inquiry), need not
be seen as privileging one discipline over the other, but as
part of the total project of historical recovery.
3. For me the article has two major problems: first, Glenn’s
conceptualisation of the ‘elite’ seems oversimplified and
smacks of ‘the men of two worlds’ approach and second, he
tends to see the ‘educated elite’ as an homogeneous
grouping without taking into account the contradictions
that exist between various strata of this ‘elite’.
4. See for example Tom Nairn (1981); Geoff Eley (1981);
J. Sheeban (1981) and Benedict Anderson (1983).
5. Ngugi argues that the colonialist writers like Robert Ruark
(1955) and Elspeth Huxley (1961) have tended to give a very
161
biased account of Kenya’s nationalist history, particularly in

their portrayal of the Mau Mau war. The suppression of Mau
Mau history and the marginalisation of workers and
peasants, Ngugi asserts, has also been a major feature of
works written by Kenyan historians such as Bethwell A. Ogot
(1972), William R. Ochien’g (1972), and Godfrey Muriuki
(1974), among others. David Maughan-Brown (1985,
pp. 206–29), seems to agree with Ngugi that a definite line of
interpretation aimed at discrediting Mau Mau as a nationalist
movement was followed by many Kenyan scholars.
6. The subaltern is used here in a double sense. First, it means
the dominated and the marginalised groups such as
peasants, workers and women in the postcolonial state.
Second, it is used also as an analytical category to embrace
the colonised subjects, defined solely by their common sub-
ordination to the coloniser. In its conception of colonialism,
subalternity assumes colonialism’s ability to coerce, coopt,
and categorise challenges into its own structure of power
and ideology. Although not Ngugi’s terminology, I use it
because it best describes the dyad of resister/oppressor which
is central to Ngugi’s discourses in Kenya: his tendency to
evoke a simple binary opposition between the oppressed
and the oppressor, and to isolate it from its context. Thus,
the concept of subalternity best sets the limits of Ngugi’s
discourses on postcolonialism and opens his assumptions
to challenge by forcing us to argue ‘for the complexity of
engagement of Africans with imported institutions and
constructs’ (Cooper 1994, p. 1534).
7. The radical shift is captured poignantly in his portrayal of
the Mau Mau war. In the early novels, including A Grain of
Wheat, Ngugi gives a more complex picture of the moral
dilemma that faced both the loyalists and the fighters during
the violent period of the 1950s, while in his postcolonial
novels one gets a fairly linear history of the movement in
which we have neat camps of the abhorred collaborators on
the one hand and the patriotic fighters on the other.
8. For Ngugi’s biographical details see Simon Gikandi (1989,
pp. 148–56) and David Cook and Michael Okenimpke
(1983, pp. 205–8).
9. Ngugi (1993, p. 63) himself acknowledges the centrality of
these books in the understanding of African literature.
Chapter 1
1. Mazrui 1972, pp. 17–18, quotes similar attitudes towards
ethnicity.
Notes 163
2. According to Fanon, the African revolution has to be

powered by the peasants because the African elite has been
absorbed in mimicking the culture of the coloniser, while
the working class, in Fanon’s thinking, has become some
kind of labour aristocracy clamouring for the privileges of
white workers. It is the peasants and the lumpenproletariat,
by contrast, who are the true liberationists. See Fanon (1967,
pp. 166–99). A detailed summary of Fanon’s theories on the
African revolution is to be found in the section dealing with
the possible influences on Ngugi’s radical shift in the intro-
ductory chapter.
3. Ever since the publication of Homecoming, in which he
declared his support for Mau Mau violence as revolutionary
and cleansing, Ngugi has continued to support this position
in all his subsequent creative and critical works. In Barrel of
a Pen he went further to give it a baptismal name, ‘Mau
Mau Land and Freedom Army’, to underscore its revolu-
tionary and libertarian role. In his most recent text, Moving
the Centre, Ngugi has gone a step further by suggesting that
it was ‘the Mau Mau armed struggle from 1952 to 1962
which captured the imagination of all East Africa and best
symbolized the determination of the African people to be
free’ (1993, p. 171).
4. Maina wa Kinyatti, who in the past supported the thesis of
class consciousness among the Mau Mau fighters, has since
changed his position. He writes: ‘there was no ideological
struggle within the Mau Mau movement to transform
nationalist consciousness into class consciousness, nor was
there a serious systematic analysis of imperialism, the class
struggle, and the relation of socialism to the Kenyan revo-
lutionary process’ (1987, p. 131).
5. Bethwell A. Ogot (1972, pp. 134–48) has also dealt with the
moral complexity of the Mau Mau.
6. Atieno Odhiambo, in an unpublished paper (1992,
pp. 12–15), has also emphasised how the idea of progress
was a very important component of African political
thought at this time.
7. For Ngugi’s elaboration of this binary opposition, see his
seminal work (1972, pp. 22–5) and for the more compre-
hensive treatment see Ngugi 1981, pp. 123–38.
8. Whatever the merits and demerits of the 1992 general
elections in Kenya, the results showed a clear pattern of
voting on ethnic lines. (See ‘Fresh Mandate: President Moi
Beats His Opponents in the Race for the Highest Seat in the
Land’, The Weekly Review, Nairobi, 1 January 1993.)
9. The importance of language in defining ethnicity has

received attention recently (Hofmeyr 1987, pp. 95–123;
Fabian 1983, pp. 165–87).
10. The independent church movements which became the
pillar of independent school movements attempted to offer
alternatives to missionary education and therefore became
major vehicles for political mobilisation among the Gikuyus
in the period between 1920 and 1960. Incidentally, Ngugi
has tended to suppress the role of independent church
movements in Kenya’s political struggle, even in works set
in the colonial period. For information on the independent
school movement see John Anderson (1970, Chapter 8), and
Terence Ranger (1965, pp. 56–85).
11. The NCCK is an umbrella body which represents the
mainstream protestant churches in Kenya including, among
others, the Anglicans.
12. Writers like Leys (in his later work, 1978, 1982); Cowen
(1979, 1982a), and Swainson (1980), have cast a great deal
of doubt over dependency theories that sought to explain
Kenya’s underdevelopment purely in terms of a weak
periphery solely dependent on a dominant centre. Thus, the
theory that the national bourgeoisie is almost nonexistent,
and that even the small comprador bourgeoisie that exists
works only for and in tandem with the international capital,
can no longer hold sway in the face of increasing evidence
of the long history of an indigenous bourgeoisie which
enjoys the support of the state.
Chapter 2
1. In his prison diary, Detained, Ngugi talks of prison
conditions as a kind of ‘[c]olonial Lazarus raised from the
dead: this putrid spectre of our recent history haunted us
daily at Kamiti prison. It hovered over us, its shadow
looming larger and larger in our consciousness as days and
nights rolled away without discernible end to our
sufferings. We discussed its various shades and aspects,
drawing on our personal experiences, often arriving at
clashing interpretations and conclusions. Who raised
colonial Lazarus from the dead to once again foul the fresh
air of Kenya’s dawn?’ (1981a, p. 63). Evidently, the past
was very much a parallel to the present. In the same diary,
Ngugi recounts to us the difficulties he faced while writing
Devil on the Cross, often resorting to using a toilet roll as
writing paper (1981a, p. 164).
Notes 165
2. The Times, Nairobi, 11 April 1966, as quoted in Odinga

(1967, p. 310). See also Ngugi (1981a, p. 89) and his
reference to Kenyatta’s upbraiding of Kaggia.
Chapter 3
1. See Andrew Scheiber, who contrasts the redundant form of
overdetermination with the more complex one, particularly
in the realistic novel, which he calls ‘semic variegation, in
which characters are made more complex through the
number and diversity of connotations conferred on them’
(1991, p. 265).
2. Of the victim type we have those characters who opposed
colonialism or whose parents were involved in the struggle
for independence but continue to suffer after independence.
These characters go through a stage of disillusionment with
independence and ultimately come to the awareness that
the struggle has to continue in the postcolonial period. In
Petals of Blood we have Karega, Abdulla, Wanja, Nyakinyua
and Joseph. In Devil on the Cross, apart from Wariinga, we
also have Wangari and Muturi. In Matigari we have Matigari
wa Njiruingi, Guthera, Muriuki and worker-leader, Ngaruro
wa Kiriro. These are the characters in whom Ngugi invests
positive values; characters with whom he sympathises.
Chapter 4
1. In Decolonising the Mind Ngugi argues that the African novel
has been ‘impoverished by the very means of its possible
liberation: exposure of its would-be-practitioners to the
secular tradition of the critical and socialist realism of the
European novel and the entry on the stage of commercial
publishers who were outside the colonial government and
missionary control’ (1986, p. 70).
2. Devil on the Cross (1982) and Matigari (1987), were first
published in Gikuyu and translated into English only much
later.
3. For Ngugi’s views on the use of popular forms of his people
see his chapters on ‘The Language of African Theatre’ and
‘The Language of African Fiction’ in Decolonising the Mind
(1986).
4. One has to admit here that the veracity of Ngugi’s claim has
not been tested by any independent research into Ngugi’s
readership. However, statistics from Ngugi’s publisher
indicate that very few copies of the text were sold and, given
the record of a poor reading culture among Kenya’s lower

classes, it is unlikely that the book was read by Ngugi’s target
audience. See Henry Chakava (1993, p. 73).
5. Although mission education in certain cases encouraged the
use of local ‘folktales’ and vernacular in education, this
policy was not always pursued consistently. In Kenya,
between 1900 and 1940, the British government was hostile
to the teaching of English for fear that radical literature
might become accessible to Kenyans and emphasis was put
on the use of vernacular languages. Significantly, this policy
was later changed by Sir Philip Mitchell so that the teaching
of English could be a tool for ‘establishing British values and
standards in Kenya’. Ngugi was a product of this generation,
subjected to English literary heritage as ‘the Great Tradition’.
Recently, Ngugi has written of his alienation: ‘Thus language
and literature were taking us further and further from
ourselves to other selves, from our world to other worlds’
(1986, p. 12).
6. See Ngugi 1986, pp. 78–86. In the same text Ngugi also refers
to the difficulty that a writer like him is likely to face in
trying to satirise what he calls the ‘neo-slaves’ – the African
petit-bourgeoisie – ‘when their own words beat all fictional
exaggerations’. In his view, Moi’s ‘Nyao’ philosophy, in
which Moi calls on all Kenyans, particularly his cabinet
ministers, to sing like parrots after his tune, ‘beat the most
satiric genius’.
7. In Decolonising the Mind (1986, p. 78), Ngugi acknowledges
that he has appropriated certain Christian elements that
would help root his works within a known tradition.
Evidently Ngugi is also broadening the scope of the popular
to incorporate the more recent influences introduced by
colonialism, but influences which have impacted on
popular discourse among peasants and workers in Kenya.
8. Atieno Odhiambo (1987, pp. 177–201) argues that the
‘emergent wisdom was that the strong state was a prerequis-
ite for law, order, good government, and nation-building’,
but one in which dissent or any form of political discordant
was not allowed. He argues that this has been the experience
of the postcolonial state in Kenya, leading to a situation
where the masses have sought to create their own
democratic space – through popular forums such as funerals,
matatu taxis, football crowds – in which rumour-mongering,
‘the highly respected institution ... against which authorities
high and low are continually warning’, is the most popular
vehicle for political discourse.
Notes 167
9. As recently as January 1992, a Kenyan weekly recorded that

a strongly worded government statement released by the
office of the president condemned the coup rumours and
warned that the police were under instructions to take firm
action against anyone ‘spreading unfounded and malicious
rumours whose intention is to cause and spread worry,
unrest, fear, despondency and alarm among law-abiding
citizens, contrary to Chapter 63, Section 66 (1) and (2) of the
Penal Code’, The Weekly Review, Nairobi, 17 January, 1992,
p. 5.
10. According to this survey, Chakava recorded a sales figure of
2,445 in 1986 and a drop in sales to 901 in 1987 for the
Gikuyu version of Matigari. And for the Gikuyu version of
Devil on the Cross, he recorded an average sales figure of 334
per year between 1985 and 1987. These figures are extremely
low and they can serve only to highlight the ambiguous
position that Ngugi’s narrative continues to hold, in spite of
the writer’s recourse to the Gikuyu language and appropri-
ation of popular forms.
Chapter 5
1. Ngugi’s image of the prostitute archetype could be
contrasted with Buchi Emecheta’s attempt to redeem the
image of the degraded prostitute and to present it as a viable
avenue of escape and liberty for women entrapped within
the ‘shallow grave’ of patriarchy. See, for example, her novel,
The Joys of Motherhood (London: Heinemann, 1979), in
which she gives us a clinical assessment of the plight of
women in Nigeria, and demonstrates that the joy of women
does not reside in motherhood, and mothering male
children for that matter, but rather in rebelling against all
forms of patriarchal constraints, even if this entails living by
prostitution.
Chapter 6
1. In ‘Literature and Society’, Writers In Politics (Heinemann,
1981, p. 31), where Ngugi laments the absence of positive
heroes in African literature, he goes on to show his
commitment to socialist transformation when he writes:
‘Literature, and our attitudes to literature, can help or else
hinder in the creation of a united socialist Black Power in
Africa based on the just continuing struggle of peasants and
workers for a total control of their productive forces.’
2. Ngugi’s idea of ‘radical’ transformation and resistance is at

variance with the less spectacular, less abstract and the more
informal forms of resistance which writers like James Scott
(1985, pp. 28–47) argue tend to characterise the
marginalised groups in society. Scott argues that most
subordinate classes throughout history are rarely afforded
the luxury of open and organised political activity, but they
have continued to express their resistance through forms
which are covert, subtle, but effectively subversive.
3. In his last two major works, Xala (1976) and The Last of the
Empire (1983), Ousmane seems to give recognition to the
ambivalent nature of the postcolonial state and to draw
attention to the fact that the forces of regeneration are never
constant, but shifting; that they are multifaceted and spread
across class barriers – ranging from street beggars to the
reformed patriotic petit-bougeoisie as in Xala; to the students,
the radical journalist, the man of moral force and even to
the patriotic army in The Last of the Empire. There is a radical
shift away from the workers as the only agents of change,
therefore, gesturing towards alternative locus of agency
within the postcolonial African society.
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Index
Abaluhia 88 binarism 65–6, 67, 157, 158–9

Abdulla (Petals of Blood) 29, 30, body see grotesque images
31, 53–4 Boro (Weep Not, Child) 24–5, 48,
Achebe, Chinua 1, 83 49, 130, 131
African ruling class see elite; Brett, E.A. 11–12, 27
national bourgeoisie Breweries Workers’ Union 142
Agikuyu community 16, 135 Brother Ezekiel (Petals of Blood) 29
identity 41 Buijtenhuijs, R. 129
isolation 20
land ownership 19–20, 21 Cabral, A. 156
meaning of names 59 Caminero-Santangelo, B. 22, 92,
myth of origin 7, 17, 18, 21, 132
47, 88–90, 110 capitalism
mythology 14, 23, 46, 51, and Devil’s feast 57
88–91, 154 and Kenya 12, 27
nationalism 7 and self-interest 51
oathing 41 and women 120, 121, 123–4
allegory 44–67, 76, 77, 109–25, Chaka, 156
157, 159–60 Chakava, Henry 108
definition of 45 characters 68–86
of race 50, 51 allegorical symbols 99, 108,
romantic relationships 109, 159
110–15 motivation and free will 68–9,
as textual counter-discourse 67 71–2, 75, 80, 108
women as victims 113, 115–24 and narrative 68, 100, 108
see also grotesque images; as symbols of social classes
symbolism 66–7, 86, 113–14
Amuka, Peter 105 Chatterjee, Partha 7–8
Anderson, Benedict 5–6 Chege (The River Between) 18, 68
Armah, A.K. 102–3 choices 82, 84–6
artist type 76, 81–6 Christian Siriana missionary
audience 87, 88, 97, 108 centre 90
Christianity 6, 110
Bakhtin, Mikhail 55, 58, 65, 97 and loyalists 37
Barthes, Roland 108 morality 102, 123
Bayart, J-F. 61, 65 mythology 91
belly, politics of 49, 58–9, 60, and oppression 29, 41
61–2 and politics 41–2
Benjamin, Walter 45, 151 reinterpreted 91–2
Bennet, Tony 3–4, 93 see also good and evil
Berman, B.J. 36, 38, 40 Chui, Mr (Petals of Blood) 54, 139
biblical allusions 90–1 circumcision, female 16, 70
176
Index 177
city, and degradation 48 journey motif 98–9

class dynamics 38–43 narrator 95, 96, 97–8
Clifford, Gay 99–100 nationalism 7
Clough, Marshall 36 oral language 94
Cloward, Richard A. 148 overdetermined narrative
collaboration 64–5, 81 structure 68, 77–80
and resistance 35–6, 157 past and present 54
collective identity 90 plot 56
colonialism subnarratives 62–4
and comprador class 57, 62–3 workers 31–2, 137, 146
and conflict 27–8 didactic writing 101, 159
continuing 28, 35–6, 53, 132–3 displacement, social 30, 151–2
corrosive effects of 18 dispossession 17, 28–30, 37, 45
dependency 64
history distorted by 1, 2, 8, 154 education
legacy of 150 and black history 139–40
portrayed as Devil 57, 62 and loyalists 37
response to 157 and salvation 69
and self-interest 51 for unity 21–2, 72, 111, 127,
and women’s liberation 120 128, 130
coloniser/colonised, portrayal of elders, respect for 37
48–9 elite
community betrayal 135
restoration of 70, 130, 134–5 ill-prepared 151
and socialism 15–16 Kenyan 128–9
comprador bourgeoisie 52, 57, 58, nation building 129
62–3 in nationalist narratives 25
betrayal 64 role of 126, 129, 130, 136
and borrowed power 65 and struggles of people 130,
exploiter type 76, 81 131
Cooper, Brenda 93, 101 and Western capitalism 27, 29
Cooper, Frederick 5, 8, 9, 11, 156 Empire, allegorised 49
cultural imperialism 27 ethnicity
culture, fusion of Western and backward-looking 16, 17, 110
African 91–2, 102, 110 construction of 39–40
instrument of power game
Davidson, Basil 1 40–1
de Man, Paul 50 invention of colonialism 39
decolonisation 26–7 mechanism of control 39–40
Decolonising the Mind 88 and nationalism 5, 7, 15, 20,
democracy 27, 32, 34, 43 110, 129
dependency theory 26, 27, 32–3, need for roots 70
34, 38–43, 157 exploitation 53–4, 121
Desai, G. 93 exploiter type 76, 80
Detained 56, 62
Devil on the Cross 28, 30 Fanon, F. 10, 12, 158
allegory 46, 48, 56–8, 83 African revolution 27, 28, 42,
artist type 82–6 137
Devil’s feast 57–8, 64 fragmentation in Africa 151
and the fantastic 30, 101–5 national bourgeoisie 30
and gender discrimination 116 workers 31
fantastic, and character social relations 157

development 101–5 women 112
Faust theme 88 grotesque images 55–67, 159
fiction, and history 4 Gurnah, A. 130–1
fire, and purification 122–3 Guthera (Matigari) 54, 99, 114
Foucault, Michel 56
fragmentation, social 151–2, 157 Hall, Stuart 126–7
Fraudsham, Mr (Petals of Blood) Harambee 135
139 Haugerud, Angelique 61
Furedi, F. 12 heroism 53, 130–1, 136–45
and colonial ideology 133, 134
Gallagher, 17 and resistance 138–9
Gatuiria (Devil on the Cross) 56 working-class 136–8
artist type 82–6 history
lack of commitment 84–5 invention 2–3, 4, 5, 33
music and patriotism 83–5 and literature 3–4
relationship with Wariinga 78, and neutrality 139–40
79–80, 113 reconstituted 151, 155
stories 63–4 Howlands, Mr (Weep Not, Child)
gender relations 115–16 47, 48, 49, 73–4
Gicaandi player 91, 95, 96
Gikandi, S. 1, 46–7, 81–2, 140, I Will Marry When I Want 113
142, 144 Idakho, human-shaped rocks 88
Gikonyo (A Grain of Wheat) identities, multiple 41, 51
betrayal 74 Ilmorog 28, 31, 54, 141–2, 144
capitalist accumulation 133–4 independence 132
founder of Agikuyu community see also Uhuru
135 individualism 5, 6–7, 51, 73, 133
and independence 48, 52, 132 institutions, and oppression 29
reconciliation 111–12 intellectuals see artist type
Gikuyu 18, 21, 70, 89 interpretation
Gitahi (Devil on the Cross) 32, historical 35–6, 44–5
80–1, 113 politics of 9–10, 27
Gitutu (Devil on the Cross) 29, invention, historical 2–3, 4, 5, 21,
58–9, 64, 81 33
Glenn, Ian 4, 86, 128, 130 investment, and loyalists 37
good and evil 102–5, 147, 158–9
Grain of Wheat, A Jacobo (Weep Not, Child) 24, 51,
allegory 48–9, 51, 111 111
betrayal 74–5, 133 Jameson, F. 52, 93, 136, 137, 151
character portrayal 68, 72–4, JanMohamed, A.R. 48
76 John Boy (Matigari) 32, 35
and educated elite 126 journey, narrative technique
heroism 131, 136 98–101
and independence 11, 132 Julien, Eileen 60, 92–3, 95, 96–7,
land loss 48 97, 99
Mau Mau 37
myth of origin 89 Kabonyi (The River Between)
nationalism 7, 20, 22–4, 25–6 16–17, 50, 70, 71
romance 111 Kaggia, Bildad 34, 61
sacrifice 91, 91–2 Kamiri (The River Between) 17–18
Index 179
Kamiti Maximum Security Prison Kunene, D 101, 104

46
Karanja (A Grain of Wheat) 51, 74 labour, forced 19, 71
Karega (Petals of Blood) 30–2, 54, land
118, 119 alienation from 45, 47, 71, 89
as hero 138–43, 144–5 common ownership 27, 28
and Ilmorog 142 and insanity 49
journey 98, 100, 139 as metaphor 47–8, 74
quest for truth 139–40 mutilation of 29
transformation 140, 141 and myth of origin 89, 90
Kariuki, J.M. 61 and national identity 46, 47, 48
Kenya and nature 46
anticolonial struggle 13 repossession 21, 25, 130
bourgeois attitudes 29 Lazarus, N. 131–2, 137
dependency theory 33 Leys, Colin 11, 12
history 2, 4, 8–14 liberation
independence 10–11, 12, 22, and education 22
132 from colonialism 64
political economy 11–12 and nationalist politics 21, 23
precolonial history 27 and reclaiming of history 48
underdevelopment 11–12, 42 and repossession of land 21,
working-class 150 25, 130
Kenya African National Union
war 24–6
(KANU) 128, 130
Lo Liyong, Taban 6
Kenya People’s Union 12, 34
Lonsdale, J. 36, 38, 40, 41
Kenyatta, Jomo 16, 23, 34, 36, 61,
Luos 88
128, 129
Kgositsile, Keorapetse 65
management, portrayal of 146
Kiama (The River Between)
ethnicity/nationalism 16–17, Mare, Gerhard 40
20, 21, 50 Marimu characters 88
and land 47, 128 Marxism 10, 13, 48
power of 71 Matigari
Kiambu 36 allegorical figures 50–1, 99
Kihaahu (Devil on the Cross) 29, character portrayal 68
59, 64 entering oral tradition 107–8
Kihara (Devil on the Cross) 32, 78, and fantasy 106–7
80, 99, 102, 113 narrator 95–6, 97
Kihika (A Grain of Wheat) 75, 91, national rebirth 100
131 trade union resistance 32
Kikuyu Independent Schools use of rumour 105–7
Association 19 workers 137
Kikuyu Karing’a (Pure) Matigari
Educational Association 19 comparison with Christ 106,
Kimathi, Dedan 53, 155 107
Kimeria (Petals of Blood) 29, 53–4, hero 138
113 marriage to Guthera 100, 114
Kimwana, John (Devil on the mythical redeemer 88, 105–6,
Cross) 102 108, 155
Kinuthia (The River Between) 18, patriarch 54, 114
69, 70 quest/journey 99, 100
symbol of postcolonial Kenyan Muturi (Devil on the Cross) 78, 79,

state 51 103
Matunda ya Uhuru (Fruits of as hero 138
Freedom) 26–7 trade union resistance 31–2
Mau Mau as worker 81, 146–7
discredited 128–9, 130 Mwihaki (Weep Not, Child) 22, 24,
loyalists 36–7 111
oathing rituals 29 Mwireri (Devil on the Cross) 37, 78,
role of veterans 34–5 101
songs 33–4, 41 myth of origin 7, 17, 18, 21, 47,
symbol of national liberation 88–90, 110
mythology, Christian 91
17, 32, 33–4, 52, 156
Mau Mau war 20
Nairobi 48
as inspiration 9, 12–13
names, meaning of 59, 66, 127,
and moral dilemma 111 139
and national identity 22–3, 156 narrative
and peasants 25 overdetermined narrative
Maughan-Brown, D. 129 structure 76–81
Mazrui, Ali 6 shaping history 153
Mbembe, Achille 55, 57, 60, 65–6 third person 95, 98
Mbiyu, Koinange wa 36 tool for social transformation
‘Mercedes family’ 38–9 160
Minister of Truth and Justice 99 narrator, role of 95–7, 141, 144,
Mink, L.O. 4 145
Miriamu (The River Between) 110 nation formation 1–2, 5–6, 17,
modernisation 130
resistance to 16–17 and modernisation 18, 21
through education 18, 22, national bourgeoisie 10–11,
69–71 29–30, 32, 42
Moi, Daniel Arap 34, 39 see also petit-bourgoisie
Mount Kenya 89, 90 National Christian Church of
Mugo (A Grain of Wheat) 17–18, Kenya (NCCK) 41–2
52, 74–6 national identity
betrayal 74, 75 Agikuyu mythology 46–7
and Chege 68 and land 47, 48
and Mau Mau war 22–3, 156
as national character 76
reconstruction 50, 154
political unconscious 51
national rebirth 100, 112, 115,
prophecy 23, 89–90
120, 131, 135
self-interest 133 nationalism 5–8, 17–19, 156
Mumbi 18, 21, 70, 89, 135 anti-imperialist 50, 51–2
house of 34, 41 embodied in Waiyaki 69–70, 91
Mumbi (A Grain of Wheat) 74, and ethnicity 5, 7, 15, 20, 110,
111–12, 135 129
Munira (Petals of Blood) 82, inward-looking 17, 21, 155
119–20, 122, 140–1 and land 48
Muriuki, G. 9 and literature 5–6, 10
Muriuki (Matigari) 54, 99, 107 and middle class 12
Murungu 17, 21, 89 peasants and workers struggle
Muthoni (The River Between) 110 155
Index 181
proto-nationalists 17–18 and written form 92, 94–101

and sacrifice 23–4, 91 see also fantastic
‘native poet’ 10 organs, spare 59–60
Ndebele, Njabulo 147 Ousmane, Sembene 136, 138,
Ndigirigi, Gichingiri 85 143–4, 150
Ndikita (Petals of Blood) 35, 59–60
Nding’uri (Devil on the Cross) 63, passion, and patriotism 114–15
64 past, parallel with present 53–5
Ndinguri (Petals of Blood) 29 patriarchy 116, 124
neocolonialism 10, 12, 35 patriotism 112, 114–15
dependency 64, 101–2 patriots, and traitors 25–6, 36,
disillusionment 52, 131–2 51
exploitation 53–4 peasants and workers
struggle against 26, 56 as audience 87, 108
‘new earth’ 135 collective consciousness 33
Ngaruro (Matigari) 32, 99 dispossessed 28–30, 37, 45
Ngotho (Weep Not, Child) 24–5, in history 8, 9
47, 49, 73–4 Ngugi’s representation of 137,
Ngugi wa Thiong’o 142–3, 144–7, 148, 149–51
concept of history 2–3, 4, 9, Ousmane’s representation of
15–43, 153–4, 159 143–4, 147–9
and ethnicity 7, 15, 20, 39 patriotism 112
historical omissions 19–20,
and postcolonialism 32
33–4, 41
power of 38
ideological shift 10–14
and revolution 28, 137–8,
mother tongue 87–8, 107–8,
145–6
159
strikes 147–8
past and present 46, 52–4
and urban working class
political activist 150, 160
textual counter-discourse 66–7 31
writing suppressed 46 victim type 76–81
Njoroge (Weep Not, Child) 21–2, and war 25
24, 26, 111, 130 Penpoint 6
Nkosi, L. 72 Petals of Blood 35, 118
Nkrumah, K. 156 and African history 8–9
Nyambura (The River Between) and allegory 53
110–11 artist type 82
collective narrator 97
Ochien’g, W.R. 9, 36–7 fire 122–3
Odinga, Oginga 34 and journey motif 98
Ogot, B.A. 9 march to Nairobi 149
ogres 64, 86 multiple points of view 95
Oloitiptip, Mr 61, 62 past and present 54–5
oppression 29, 30, 81, 157 women as victims 115–24
and romantic relationships workers 28–9, 30–2, 137, 144,
112–13, 115 146
oppressor, and oppressed 38, petit-bourgeoisie 36, 37, 39, 134,
65–6, 67, 112, 157–9 135
oral tradition 87–101 Piven, Frances, F. 148
redefined 92–5 political unconscious 51
rumour 92, 105–8 popular forms 87–108
postcolonial state 8–10 satire, allegorical 55–67

colonial context 28, 35–6, 53, saviour, myth of 68–72, 91
132 Scheiber, Daniel 77
corruption 11 schools
exploitation 54, 57 independent church 19
poverty and capital 29–30 see also education
power 55, 56, 57 self-interest 51, 133, 135
violence 56 Settler Williams (Matigari) 32
power Slemon, S. 44–5, 65, 67
banality of 55, 57 Smith, C.V. 143, 149
and economic success 61 social change/transformation 27,
of the Kiama 71 42–3, 145–6, 151–2
peasants and workers 38 social classes, immutable 159
prophecy 23, 68–9, 89–90 socialism 15–16, 32
Prophet of Justice (narrator) 95, 96 Stratton, F. 115, 116, 118
prostitution 117–18, 119, 123–4 symbolism 48, 52, 76, 77
Public Security Order 56 syncretic culture 13
purification, and fire 122–3
Tarmakin, M. 37
quest, and rebellion 139–40 tax, colonial 19, 71
Thabai (A Grain of Wheat) 131,
resistance 9, 30, 32, 81, 154, 157 133, 134–5
portrayed by Ngugi 35–6, 155–6 Theng’eta Breweries (Petals of
retrospection and introspection Blood) 54, 118, 122, 140
26 Thompsons (A Grain of Wheat)
revolution 31–2 49, 50
heroes 136–7 Thuku, Harry 23, 36
peasants and workers 28, Toussaint, 156
137–8, 145–6 trade unions 31–2, 140, 143–4
postcolonial 27 Trauerspiel 45
and transformation 150, 151 tribalism 16, 18, 39
Rich Old Man (Devil on the Cross) tribe
77–8, 79, 99, 104, 113 and nation 17, 110
River Between, The secretiveness of 16
and allegory 47, 50–1 truth, historical 3, 26
and educated elite 126–7 Turner, Nat 156
ethnicity 16–19, 21 Turugat, Laibon 156
individualism 73
and myth of origin 89 Uhuru
and nationalism 22, 130, 132 celebrations 132, 134
originally The Black Messiah 91 disillusionment 11, 52
women 110 ideals betrayed 75
Robinson, 17 land restoration 48
Rodney, W. 12 see also independence;
romantic relationships 111–15 liberation
rumour 92, 105–8 underdevelopment 11–12, 26
unity, for political freedom 72, 111
Said, Edward
restoration of community 1, 2, Vail, L. 39
5, 70, 154 Van Dyke, Dr Henry (A Grain of
on The River Between 72, 127 Wheat) 48–9
Index 183
victim type 76–81 as victim 54, 60, 77–81, 113

violence, and land repossession violence 32
130 voices 102, 104
Waweru (Petals of Blood) 29, 35
Wachiori (The River Between) wealth, importance of 61
17–18 Weep Not, Child
Waiyaki (The River Between) 22, allegory 47, 48–9, 111
23, 50–1 character portrayal 68, 72–3, 76
and the Kiama 16, 47, 129–30 and educated elite 126
as mediator 126–7, 128 land loss 47–8
as nation builder 18, 21, 127–8 Mau Mau War 26, 37, 130
romance and nationhood myth of origin 89
110–11 nationalism 20, 21, 22, 23–4
as saviour 68–72, 91 romance 111
Wangari (Devil on the Cross) 78 Were, 9
Wanja (Petals of Blood) Western values, imitation of
complexity 120–1 29–30, 37, 70
displacement 30, 31 White, Hayden 4, 10
ethnicity 38 White, Luise 117–18
and fire 122–3 women
and Kimera 113, 117 and ethnicity 110
liberation 120, 121–2 liberation 116–17, 120
and prostitution 117–18, metaphor for the nation 109
119–21 in nationalist literature 109
and state of the nation 118–19, in Ngugi’s earlier novels
120 109–12
as victim 53, 54, 115–24 in Ngugi’s later novels 112–15
Wariinga (Devil on the Cross) 56, subordination of 60, 78, 110,
60 116–17, 124–5
and the Devil 102–4 as victims 113, 115–24
dreams and visions 35, 64,
101–2, 104 Young Kikuyu Association 23
journey 98–9, 100
transformation 56, 60, 116 Index by Sue Carlton

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Ngugi’s Novels and

Copyright © James Ogude 1999

The right of James Ogude to be identified as the author of this work

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 0 7453 1436 8 hbk

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

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Introduction: Writing Back and the Restoration of a

Ngugi’s stature in African literature and his interventions in

and parts of Chapter 6 were drawn from my article appearing

Early African narratives have always been seen as writing

ideological lexicon of nation formation, involved the African

to understand the nuances underpinning the alternative

them in relation to the independently known history’ (p. 42)

to have a nuanced understanding of Ngugi’s texts one has to

Nationalism, Ethnicity and Individualism

Manufacturing Nationalism and the East African

Anderson, for example, has focused on the development of

notions of progress shaped by capitalism and European social

To look from the tribe to a wider concept of human

Ngugi, then, like many others in the early 1960s, was

a distinction that Ngugi appears to be making in his latter

The Postcolonial Phase

For there are many questions in our history which remain

showing that Kenyan people had always been ready to

Clearly, Ngugi rejects those historical archives akin to the

Hayden White’s thesis that the significance of any historical

Tracing Ngugi’s Ideological Shift and Politics of

dence. The political scenario after independence was fraught

African novelists were the first intellectuals to bring before

Besides, the 1970s were marked by major debates on the

(1974, pp. 302–9) noted how colonialism catalysed Kenya’s

it became the central link in the tradition of struggle among

texts. The third chapter attempts to examine the narrative

The Contradictions of Imagining the Nation in Earlier

The traditional concept of the African community should

what some have meant when they talk of African socialism.

Ngugi’s early novels, particularly The River Between, carry the

motive and favour a type of ‘backward-looking primary

look beyond their present content to a life and land beyond,

and ambiguous. It was a text born in the throes of the

following and have remained an important feature of Kenya’s

The texts still revolve around the Agikuyu myth of origin as

Mwihaki are its most striking icons. Both in their language

becomes the major icon around which national identity has

a nationalist text par excellence, unity and sacrifice to freedom,

Deviation from the Standard Nationalist Portrayal of

erational conflict, thereby shifting the traditional power base

cynicism towards heroism and hero worship. Retrospection

The Later Novels

independence, national liberation and people’s revolution. It

history of colonialism and how it affected the African

usher in any comfort or economic gains for peasants and

the writer is providing a salient critique of the postcolonial

The true lesson of history was this: that the so-called

Ngugi reinforces the possibilities of revolt in his creation of

higher pay in Boss Kihara’s company. Apparently, the role of

Suppression and Silences

colonial experience in Kenya. Ngugi’s articulation of Kenyan