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‘The master's dance to the master's voice’: revolutionary nationalism and women's representation in Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Elleke Boehmer

in Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation

In Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981), the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o points to the strong position that women characters have held in his work over the years. Beginning with the writing ... More

In Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981), the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o points to the strong position that women characters have held in his work over the years. Beginning with the writing of the epic-length Petals of Blood (1977), Ngugi came unequivocally to identify with the plight of the neo-colonially betrayed Kenyan peasantry. His nationalism of the 1960s thus turned increasingly revolutionary and openly Marxist. With respect to his determination in the later novels to develop powerful women characters as counterparts to the strong hero figures he favours, in Ngugi's early work similar tendencies emerge in embryonic form. In particular, as the focus in the early novels is more on the remote past and the pristine origins of Gikuyu people, mother figures signify prominently. As if to make amends, Ngugi, in his more recent work, introduces heroines who have made a decisive break with a former life of mothering and/or whoring in their commitment to a revolutionary cause. To him, other interests give way before the ‘higher social system of democracy and socialism’ in a free Kenya.Less

European and African Literary Traditions in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow

Peter Mack

in Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions

This chapter examines Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's (1938–) Wizard of the Crow. Combining African and Western traditions to make something new, Ngũgĩ's incorporates Kenyan political history and Gikuyu ... More

This chapter examines Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's (1938–) Wizard of the Crow. Combining African and Western traditions to make something new, Ngũgĩ's incorporates Kenyan political history and Gikuyu folktales into the European and international form of the postmodern novel. By writing from a sort of exile to his own people, he also addresses a worldwide audience. The chapter discusses Ngũgĩ's incorporation of African history and traditional stories and storytelling methods into the form of the Western novel. Then it considers the political plot, focusing on the figure of the Ruler. Finally, the chapter turns to the plot of love and resistance, discussing Nyawĩra and Kamĩtĩ in turn.Less

Torture, Indefinite Detention and the Colonial State of Emergency in Kenya

Stephen Morton

in States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law

Chapter four considers how the state of emergency in Kenya from 1952 to 1959 has been codified in the literary and legal rhetoric of British colonialism, and criticised by postcolonial African ... More

Chapter four considers how the state of emergency in Kenya from 1952 to 1959 has been codified in the literary and legal rhetoric of British colonialism, and criticised by postcolonial African writers and intellectuals as a sign of the inherent violence of European colonial rule. The chapter begins by tracing how the colonial government used the deaths of white settlers and Kenyan Loyalists to justify its recourse to emergency legislation and the detention of an estimated 1.5 million Kikuyu people, who were suspected by the colonial authorities of being involved with the Land and Freedom army, more commonly known as the Mau Mau. After an analysis of the representation of the Land and Freedom army in Robert Ruark’s Something of Value (1955), the chapter proceeds to examine how the colonial state of emergency is framed and contested in the fiction of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.Less

Reading Ngũgĩ Reading Conrad: Modernism, Postcolonialism, and the Language Question

Mark Wollaeger

in Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present

This chapter considers points of intersection between Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Joseph Conrad. By Ngũgĩ’s own account, his rewriting of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) as A Grain of Wheat (1967) ... More

This chapter considers points of intersection between Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Joseph Conrad. By Ngũgĩ’s own account, his rewriting of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) as A Grain of Wheat (1967) triggered a crisis of audience that ultimately led him to abandon English for his native Gikuyu. To further complicate the question of influence, Wollaeger also examines the relationship between two works of nonfiction: Conrad’s A Personal Record (1912) and Ngũgĩ’s Decolonizing the Mind (1986). At the heart of Ngũgĩ’s attempt to fashion premodern tribalism into a utopian space are two problems that still animate critical discussion. What is the status of the local and the indigenous? Does attention to influence reinstate a center-periphery model in postcolonial criticism? This chapter shows the extent to which Conrad and Ngũgĩ both anticipate and generate theoretical models later used to articulate modernism and postcolonialism as fields of inquiry.Less

For Continuity: FR Leavis, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Peter J. Kalliney

in Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics

Chapter Three examines the influence of FR Leavis, architect of the Great Tradition, on the thinking of Kamau Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, two of the leading theorists of postcolonial ... More

Chapter Three examines the influence of FR Leavis, architect of the Great Tradition, on the thinking of Kamau Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, two of the leading theorists of postcolonial literature. The chapter argues that Leavis's emphasis on a "living language," as he called it - that is, his belief that a robust spoken dialect is the basis of any great literary tradition - would be rearticulated by Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ in their calls for vernacular literature. The chapter goes on to discuss the close but fractious connections between the English department and postcolonial literature, arguing that Leavis's complex professional relationship with the discipline was one of his major bequests to postcolonial studies.Less

Kenyan Reactance: Kenyatta, Huxley, wa Thiong'o

in Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women's Experiential Texts and Human Contexts

Culture is not an inborn destiny but a human artifact that can be reshaped. When culture is threatened to the core by outside forces, a phenomenon called “reactance” may arise. The cult of culture ... More

Culture is not an inborn destiny but a human artifact that can be reshaped. When culture is threatened to the core by outside forces, a phenomenon called “reactance” may arise. The cult of culture and the demarcation of a gender role in the flesh through excision can be interpreted as an African reactance against the forces of colonialism. This explains why the origins of writing on excision can be traced to colonial cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology is the first context in which female autobiography emerged in Kenya. This chapter examines these anthropological preludes to female self-writing by focusing on Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya ([1938] 1961), Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between (1965), and Elspeth Huxley's Red Strangers ([1939] 1999). It also considers the questioning of excision as a rite and a factor of social cohesiveness by analyzing Rebeka Njau's one-act play The Scar (1965), Charity Waciuma's Daughter of Mumbi (1969), Muthoni Likimani's They Shall Be Chastised (1974), and Miriam Were's Your Heart Is My Altar (1980).Less

“No Innocents and No Onlookers”:: The Uses of the Past in the Novels of Mau Mau

Eleni Coundouriotis

in The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony

This chapter offers a reading of the novels of Mau Mau, focusing extensively on the early fiction of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Godwin Wachira’s seminal Ordeal in the Forest, among others. The novels are ... More

This chapter offers a reading of the novels of Mau Mau, focusing extensively on the early fiction of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Godwin Wachira’s seminal Ordeal in the Forest, among others. The novels are looked at in the context of recent human rights histories of the conflict. Written against the backdrop of Jomo Kenyatta’s appeal to the Kenyan people to forget the painful history of the Mau Mau conflict, the novels take on varied approaches to the project of reconciliation that can be mapped on shifting aesthetic registers of modernist irony, sentimentalism and naturalism. Neil Lazarus’s assertion that the negativity of the naturalist aesthetic is a form of resistance is key to understanding the depiction of torture and detention camps. The idea of political responsibility is theorized through Frantz Fanon’s claim that in anticolonial struggle there are no neutral parties, or bystanders.Less

Between Formal and Infinite Time: Labor Law and Revolutionary Futures in Kenyan Popular Performance

Peter Leman

in Singing the Law: Oral Jurisprudence and the Crisis of Colonial Modernity in East African Literature

Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the history of colonial labour law, which became increasingly oppressive through emergency regulations. Among the ... More

Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the history of colonial labour law, which became increasingly oppressive through emergency regulations. Among the most important responses to this history is that offered by novelist, activist, and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Recognizing that the state and the oral artist are “rivals” in articulating and disseminating the law and, further, that orature played “the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, Ngũgĩ draws heavily on Kikuyu and other Kenyan oral traditions in addressing the history of exceptionalized labour law and its lasting effects in the postcolonial period. Through workers’ songs, revolutionary hymns, proverbs, and myths, Ngũgĩ’s theatre draws on the performative force of oral jurisprudence to challenge the temporal foundations of colonial labour law and also explore alternative models of democratic work that embody a vision of Kenya’s future. Specifically, I argue that through oratorical strategies (including formal open-endedness) in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and “Mother, Sing for Me” (1983), Ngũgĩ and his co-authors “[break] the barrier between formal and infinite time,” constellating (in the Benjaminian sense) past moments of revolution with both the present and possible revolutionary futures.Less

Metropolitan Publisher as Postcolonial Clearinghouse: The African Writers Series

Peter J. Kalliney

in Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics

Chapter Six examines Heinemann Educational Book's African Writers Series, the preeminent literary institution of anglophone Africa. Critics have repeatedly asked whether the series is fundamentally ... More

Chapter Six examines Heinemann Educational Book's African Writers Series, the preeminent literary institution of anglophone Africa. Critics have repeatedly asked whether the series is fundamentally imperialist - because of its links to the metropolitan publishing industry - or anti-imperialist - because it gave voice to so many politically engaged writers. This chapter, by contrast, places the series in the context of global changes in English studies. In the US and in metropolitan Britain, the series seemed to be participating in the fragmentation of the discipline: the breakup of Leavis's Great Tradition and the incorporation of minority writers into the canon. In Africa, however, it is possible to read the series as a part of an expansion and consolidation of English language and literary studies. How the series managed this apparent contradiction is the main topic of the chapter.Less

What Chronology Demands of Us

Michaela Bronstein

in Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction

Why tell a story out of order? Conrad’s narrative experiments are usually read as reflecting a skeptical attitude toward human achievement and knowledge: he tells events out of order, critics ... More

Why tell a story out of order? Conrad’s narrative experiments are usually read as reflecting a skeptical attitude toward human achievement and knowledge: he tells events out of order, critics suggest, in order to question whether any version of events is more valid than any other; experience dissolves into fragmentary chaos. This chapter shows that by upending chronology, Conrad instead provokes the reader to see the connections between different moments, and to become invested in the process of using disparate perspectives as material for the reader’s own single understanding. In Conrad’s chronological and perspectival experiments, Ngũgĩ sees tools for acknowledging the complexity of events—like British actions during the state of emergency in Kenya—while at the same time compelling his readers to take a political and moral stand on them. He uses achronology and multiple voices to demand an international audience’s engagement with the crises and dilemmas of decolonization.Less

History: Rapping Postcoloniality: Akala’s “The Thieves Banquet” and Neocolonial Critique

Justin A. Williams

in Brithop: The Politics of UK Rap in the New Century

This chapter focuses on a particular track, “The Thieves Banquet,” from Akala’s eponymous 2013 album and its critique of neocolonialism. His theatrical performance on these tracks, with their use of ... More

This chapter focuses on a particular track, “The Thieves Banquet,” from Akala’s eponymous 2013 album and its critique of neocolonialism. His theatrical performance on these tracks, with their use of multi-accentuality and code combining with elements of Western classical music, creates a multi-layered and intermedial hybrid text. As Black vernacular forms such as hip-hop have become a powerful site of (capitalist) critique, Akala’s performative skills as a rapper allow him to present a complex and didactic allegory informed by imperial history, the literature of the global south, and the global financial crisis. It also points a way forward for the study of accent in hip-hop as well as looking more closely at a performative approach to rap music that acknowledges its inherent theatricality.Less