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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has established himself as one of the leading second-generation African writers. His first two novels, Weep Not, Child (London, Heinemann, 1964) and The River Between (London, Heinemann, 1965), written while an undergraduate at Makerere University College, Kampala, brought him recognition as the foremost East African writer. His third novel, A Grain of Wheat (London, Heinemann, 1967), established James Ngugi, as he then called himself, as one of the most distinguished literary voices from Africa. There was a long pause before Ngũgĩ published his next novel, Petals of Blood (London, Heinemann, 1977). The change in name signalled that during the intervening years he had developed a radical new perspective on Kenya, the explicit locale of all his writing.
1 During the Mau Mau rebellion Ngũgĩ was being educated in the rather secure setting of Alliance High School, an élite boarding institution. His brother joined the uprising between 1954 and 1956, and his parents and other relatives were detained by the British. A stepbrother of Ngũgĩ, of the same name and condition as the deaf and dumb Gitogo who is shot dead by government forces in A Grain of Wheat, died in almost identical circumstances. The village of Kamiriithu was forcibly moved to a new site. Cook, David and Okenimkpe, Michael, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: an exploration of his writings (London, 1983), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar
2 For the other great epic rewriting African history, see Beti, Mongo, Remember Ruben (Paris, 1974), translated by Gerald Moore and published in English (London, 1980).Google Scholar
3 Petals of Blood alludes to actual events during the early post-colonial period, such as the assassination of Pio Gama Pinto in 1965 and of Tom Mboya in 1969s. The Gikuyu élite drew on the traditions of Mau Mau to organise oath-taking ceremonies so as to mobilise ethnic support during 1969–70. And the lawyer had his real life counterpart in Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, who was assassinated in 1975.Google Scholar
4 Ngũgĩ uses the very words that constitute the title of Achebe's, Chinua famous novel A Man of the People (London, 1966), denouncing the betrayal of Nigeria's independence by corrupt politicians.Google Scholar
5 For the reactions of the Kenyan Government that culminated in 1982 in the destruction of the Kamiriithu theatre, see Thiong'o, Ngũgĩ wa, Decolonising the Mind: the politics of language in African literature (London, 1986)Google Scholar and Moving the Centre: the struggle for cultural freedoms (London, 1993),Google Scholar and Björkman, Ingrid, ‘Mother, Sing for Me’: people's theatre in Kenya (London and New Jersey, 1989).Google Scholar
6 Sander, Reinhard, ‘Kim Chi Ha and Ngũgĩ was Thiong'o: decolonizing the neo-colony’, African Literature Association Conference, Pittsburgh, 1988,Google Scholar traces the form of Devil on the Cross to Ha, Kim Chi, an oppositional writer in South Korea, and in particular his Cry of the People and Other Poems (Hayama, 1974).Google Scholar
7 For a discussion of Devil on the Cross as a fable, see Julien, Eileen, African Novels and the Question of Orality (Bloomington, 1992).Google Scholar
8 Julien, op.cit. p. 150, characterises Devil on the Cross, and especially the competition, as hyperrealistic.
9 Neither novel addresses the major rôle played by Kenyans of Asian descent in the Kenyan economy. They are the dominant domestic element in accumulation according to Himbara, David, Kenyan Capitalists, the State, and Development (Boulder, CO, 1994).Google Scholar See also ‘Myths and Realities of Kenyan Capitalism’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), 31, 1, 03 1993, pp. 93–107, by the same author.Google Scholar
10 ‘Petals of blood’ appear in the passage in Derek Walcott's poem The Swamp, first published in his Selected Poems (New York, 1964), pp. 60–1, that provides the novel's epigraph. Ngũgĩ explained in an interview that the West Indian author sees a huge tree preventing a little flower from reaching out into the light, that he took this as a symbol of the contemporary African situation, where imperialism and foreign interests prevent little flowers, the workers and peasants, from reaching out into the light (quoted by Cook and Okenimkpe, op. cit. p. 219). This interpretation reflects Ngũgĩ's later stance rather than the analysis in Petals of Blood which depicts the emerging bourgeoisie collaborating with foreign interests but never suggests that it is subject to neo-colonial control.Google Scholar
11 In Petals of Blood, the changing demands of students at Siriana present the evolution in postcolonial Kenya rather well. Around the time of independence, Karega was expelled after a strike over the refusal of Chui, the new principal, to accede to student demands for the Africanisation of faculty and curriculum. A decade later, a strike is being planned over Chui's neglect of school affairs as he pursues his manifold business interests. On the novel's time-frame,Google Scholar see Richard, René, ‘History and Literature: narration and time in Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’, in Echos du Commonwealth (Paris and Montpellier), 6, 1980–1981, pp. 1–36.Google Scholar
12 Ngũgĩ reports in Decolonizing the Mind, p. 83, that Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ was read aloud in families, among workers, on buses, in taxis, and in public bars.Google Scholar
13 Ngũgĩ has been living in exile since 1982.
14 For an account of the arguments and a trenchant critique of the dependency perspective, see Kitching, Gavin, ‘Politics, Method, and Evidence in the “Kenya Debate”’, in Bernstein, Henry and Campbell, Bonnie K. (eds.), Contradictions of Accumulation in Africa: studies in economy and state (Beverley Hills, London, New Delhi, 1985).Google Scholar
15 The novel was translated into English by Goro, Wangũi wa: Matigari (London, Heinemann, 1989).Google Scholar