Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

Brendon Nicholls

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

To Karen, Lauren, and my family, with love

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

Brendon Nicholls University of Leeds, UK

© Brendon Nicholls 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Brendon Nicholls has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401–4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Nicholls, Brendon. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, gender, and the ethics of postcolonial reading. 1. Ngugi wa Thiongo, 1938 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women in literature. 3. Gender identity in literature. 4. Kenya – In literature. I. Title 823.9’14–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nicholls, Brendon. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, gender, and the ethics of postcolonial reading / by Brendon Nicholls. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–7546–5825–2 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978–0–7546–9918–7 (ebook) 1. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1938 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Gender identity in literature. 3. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Title. PR9381.9.N45Z778 2010 823’.914–dc22 2009027381 Jacket illustration: ‘The Kiss’ by Fazenda. Mixed media on canvas, 2006. Author’s private collection. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holder for their permission to reproduce this image. ISBN 9780754658252 (hbk) ISBN 9780754699187 (ebk.I)

Contents Acknowledgements   Introduction  

vii 1

1

A Topography of ‘Woman’  

11

2

Clitoridectomy and Gikuyu Nationalism  

33

3

The Landscape of Insurgency  

61

4

Reading against the Grain (of Wheat)  

85

5

Paternity, Illegitimacy and Intertextuality  

117

6

The Neocolony as a Prostituted Economy  

151

Conclusion – Prostituting Translation: An Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

191

Bibliography  

203

Index  

211

This page has been left blank intentionally

Acknowledgements No book is ever written alone. In writing this one, I have benefited immeasurably from the help, support, wisdom and kindness of many people. To these loved ones, friends and colleagues, I record my thanks. In Gail Fincham I had a superb research supervisor who made the early stages of this work possible. I thank her for her exemplary rigour, enthusiasm and meticulous critique. Richard Gray, Peter Hulme, Leslie Marx, Jonathan White, Jeremy Krikler, Carli Coetzee, J. M. Coetzee, Andre Brink, Stephen Watson, Stewart Crehan, Itamar Avin, Ashok Bery, Pamela Ryan and Mikki Flockemann have each played a part in improving my ideas and in supporting my development as a young academic. I appreciate their collegiality and numerous kindnesses. My original research on Ngugi was undertaken with the generous financial assistance of the Centre for Science Development and the University of Cape Town. All opinions expressed in this book are my own and are not necessarily endorsed by these organizations. I thank Rowan and Herbert Nicholls for helping to resource my doctoral studies. At Ashgate, Ann Donahue, Whitney Feininger, Celia Barlow and Katherine Laidler have proven to be generous, patient and meticulously professional editors. I thank them immensely for their guidance and support, and hope that this book will repay their efforts in some part. Portions of Chapter 1 were originally published in article form, entitled ‘The Topography of “Woman” in Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40:3 (September 2005), pp. 81–101. I am grateful to Huw Alexander and SAGE for their kind permission to use the article here. An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published in article form, entitled ‘Clitoridectomy and Gikuyu Nationalism in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between’, Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing, XXV:2 (2003), pp. 40–55. I am grateful to Anne Collett and Kunapipi for their kind permission to use this material here. In the School of English and the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Leeds, I have been fortunate enough to work alongside some supremely gifted postcolonial colleagues. I have learned much from the intellectual excellence of Shirley Chew, Stuart Murray, John McLeod, Sam Durrant, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Georgina Sinclair, Manuel Barcia Paz and Graham Huggan. I thank them for their fine example, their friendship and professional advice. Jane Plastow and Ray Bush have proven to be wonderfully astute and progressive colleagues in the Leeds University Centre for African Studies, and I am grateful to a number of other colleagues for their assistance and support: Mark and Juliette TaylorBatty, Bridget Bennett, Denis Flannery, Matt Rubery, Nick Ray, Jay Prosser, Tracy Hargreaves, Mick Gidley, Andrew Warnes, Simon Swift, Jane Rickard, Ed Larrissy, Viv Jones, John Whale, Catherine Bates and David Higgins.

viii

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

In common with other scholars, I am privileged to be part of a thriving community of African and postcolonial scholarship. In particular, I am grateful to John Thieme, Andrew van der Vlies, Patrick Flannery, Derek Attridge, David Attwell, Ian Phimister, Neil Lazarus, Elleke Boehmer, Molara Ogundipe, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Caroline Rooney, Rashmi Varma, Keyan Tomaselli, Julie Mullaney, Eileen Julien, Glenn Hooper, Oliver Lovesey, Geoffrey Davis, Gerald Gaylard, Stephen Turner, David Farrier, Dave Gunning, Dennis Walder, Krishna Sen and Ganesh Devy for their brilliance, guidance and friendship. I thank my parents, Gordon and Estelle Nicholls, for their love, encouragement and support. They have constantly instilled in me a love of books and the value of progressive education. Kelwin, Susan, Oliver and Amy Nicholls have been unwavering in their encouragement. For this, and for much else, I am grateful. I thank Jeff and Pauline Gearing for their generosity of spirit and for the interest that they have taken in my research. Their assistance with the cover photograph is also much appreciated. Finally, I offer my heartfelt thanks to my wife, Karen Nicholls, for proofreading the manuscript with a sharp eye and an equally sharp wit. Any errors, of course, remain my own. My daughter, Lauren Grace Nicholls, has provided many welcome distractions from high-minded intellectual considerations since her recent arrival and has rightfully insisted upon a position at the centre of my thoughts. I thank Karen and Lauren for enduring my ‘upside-down days’ with patience and good humour and for their ongoing love and companionship

Introduction While first working on Ngugi during the heady days of South Africa’s new-found democracy, I witnessed a television programme about clitoridectomy among the Maasai in Kenya aired by the South African Broadcasting Corporation. In that documentary, an unnamed pubescent girl awaits her entry into womanhood, which will commence after she has been clitoridectomized. She is a camera-shy child and she laughs off the narrator/interviewer’s questions regarding the imminent event, or answers in monosyllables. The preparations, the festivities and the responses of her immediate family to the occasion are all captured by the camera. On the day of the operation, the viewer is shown the celebratory dances, the slaughter of a goat and the operator’s ‘surgical’ razorblade. At the moment of the incision, the camera is positioned some distance from the surgeon’s hut. The girl screams twice. In the next scene, the surgeon explains (via the interviewer/translator) that a second excision became necessary because the first had not removed all of the clitoral tissue. The documentary then records the girl’s activities a month later, immediately prior to her marriage. She no longer responds to the interviewer’s questions. She is silent. Her father explains that he is now a contented man, because his daughter’s beauty will fetch a reasonable bride-price in livestock from the family of the future husband. In World Press Photo 1996, six photographs record the circumcision of a 16year-old adolescent, Seita Lengila. Held down by her female relatives, her scream is reported visually, if at all. It is silent. Another photo depicts Seita examining her (now-public) parts in the bush some way from her homestead. According to the captions, she is ascertaining what exactly has been done to her. I introduce a book on Ngugi wa Thiong’o, gender, and the ethics of postcolonial reading in this way for a number of reasons. Such documents of clitoridectomy are from our recent past and do not, of course, emerge from a Gikuyu cultural milieu. But these visual records of the lived moment of excision speak powerfully against the cosy cultural nationalist claims made in defence of the practice of clitoridectomy in 1930s Kenya. Jomo Kenyatta himself writes in Facing Mount Kenya that: [cold] water is thrown on the girl’s sexual organ to make it numb and to arrest profuse bleeding as well as to shock the girl’s nerves at the time, for she is not supposed to show any fear or make any audible sign of emotion or even to blink …. The [female elder] takes from her pocket (mondo) the operating Gikuyu    Stephanie Welsh, ‘Second Prize story on female circumcision’, World Press Photo 1996 (London: Thames, 1996), pp. 29–31.



Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading razor (rwenji), and in quick movements, and with the dexterity of a Harley Street surgeon, proceeds to operate upon the girls. With a stroke she cuts off the tip of the clitoris (rong’otho) … At this juncture the silence is broken and the crowd begins to sing joyously in these words … ‘Our children are brave … Did anyone cry? No one cried – hurrah!’

There are a number of interesting observations one might make here. Firstly, Kenyatta’s account insists upon the clinical modernity of the excision, comparing it to surgery carried out in Harley Street. Secondly, he insists, somewhat tellingly, upon the silence of the clitoridectomized girl. Much more is silenced here than a voice. In fact, a primary site of female sexual pleasure – one that exceeds the functions of reproduction – is effaced at a single stroke (or two?). Additionally, there is a revealing discrepancy between contemporary media representations and Kenyatta’s influential historical account of clitoridectomy in Kenya. Kenyatta’s insistence upon the clitoridectomized woman’s silence is framed by a nationalist political interest that is also invested in upholding Gikuyu patriarchy. The much more recent media representations also omit the voice of the clitoridectomized female subject. However, they do so in order to assign clitoridectomized women as victims who consolidate a Western media mythology that claims to ‘save’ Africa from its own worst excesses. Kenyatta omits the possibility of the scream in the name of the Gikuyu subject’s bravery and resolve during a rite of passage. By contrast, the media coverage omits to report the languages according to which the operation is framed and rendered culturally intelligible by its key participants. Furthermore, although the media accounts promise us the immediacy of the visual, they can never gain access to the language with which these women invest the scream. Does the scream signify pain, terror, fear, outrage, rebellion? If the scream is extra-linguistic, is it a site of articulation that can ever really signify anything at all? The postcolonial gender critic occupies an uneasy, and indeed compromised, position in relation to these archives. The academic defences of clitoridectomy in the Kenyan context have traditionally been written by men (most notably by Jomo Kenyatta) and have invariably upheld a series of patriarchal prerogatives that are inseparable from nationalist resistance. There is no immediate or automatic recourse to a dialogue with clitoridectomized Gikuyu women of the 1930s or indeed with clitoridectomized women presented in the contemporary global media. Although Kenyatta’s account implies that peasant women are simply content with the custom of clitoral excision, contemporary media accounts purport to make such operations visible, but in fact ‘mediate’ any dialogue by filtering representations of clitoridectomy through opaque textual and filmic devices such as narration, translation, the interview, captions and camera angles, among others. Speaking from a position that is highly mediated by history and the opaque framing devices that underpin ‘visibility’ within the visual media and the written    Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968 [1938]), p. 146.

Introduction



archive, the postcolonial critic is placed within a limited and asymmetrical relation to the subjects who comprise something like the female constituency envisaged in Ngugi’s fiction. I would argue that gender oppression is deeply implicated in the formation of and construction of Kenyan postcolonial nationhood, with the result that some Kenyan women have been placed in a fraught relationship to national subjectivity. Ngugi’s fiction is informed by this fraught relationship and re-emphasizes it when the novels rely upon the female characters as vehicles for Ngugi’s political vision. How, then, might a postcolonial gender critic begin to address the representation of these female characters in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s fiction, given that much of Ngugi’s early work is informed by the very patriarchal discourses that are disseminated by Kenyatta’s anthropological treatise on the Gikuyu, and are disseminated even more subtly and perniciously by the contemporary global media? How might this critic interrogate clitoridectomy and its historical significance to Gikuyu nationalism, as well as its narrative import in Ngugi’s historiographic fiction? As we know from postcolonial theory, and particularly the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the critic may not speak for those African women whose voices are not recorded in the archive, because the critic’s own highly mediated position as narrating subject would risk simply compounding these women’s historical silence. Equally, the critic may not automatically assume that he or she can speak with African women whose voices are not recorded in the archive, because to do so would collapse the class hierarchies, the economic structures, the colonial history and the complex processes of subject formation that differentiate the subject positions of critic and indigene. My reading of Ngugi’s novels seeks to interrogate his representations of women by questioning the fiction’s patriarchal assumptions and by inhabiting the historical narratives enabled by his female representations. In producing this study, I am aware that I also work problematically within the crisis of representativeness that confronts the postcolonial gender critic who addresses the historical circumstances of some Kenyan women from a comparatively privileged location within a metropolitan academic institution. As such, I read Ngugi’s novels in a qualified and highly provisional sense, in order to explore how his narratives develop patriarchal and nationalist ideologies. I attempt to discover the itinerary of gender silencing that frames Ngugi’s historiography of struggle. In the later chapters of this book, I attempt to locate moments of disruption in Ngugi’s texts that may offer a place from which the female peasant or worker (as a sexual agent in insurgency) might begin to enter the field of fictional representation and its rhetorics of struggle as a woman. In my view, there is a compelling rationale for writing a book about Ngugi’s representations of women in general, and his representations of clitoridectomy in particular. When we plot the phases of Ngugi’s ideological development, it becomes possible to relate these phases to his changing representations of women. This study demonstrates that mechanisms of gender subordination are strategically crucial to Ngugi’s political project from his first novel to his penultimate novel. In other words, the female characters of Ngugi’s fiction prop up almost every



Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

ideological transformation through which Ngugi’s authorial trajectory moves. For instance, the representations of women in Ngugi’s early fiction arise out of its failed attempts to resolve ideological contradiction. This ideological contradiction issues from the competition between Christian and Gikuyu traditionalist discourses, between an elitist colonial education and militant nationalism, between individualism and social responsibility. In the first two novels, the male protagonist’s failure to resolve these contradictory forces leads to his attempt to commit a messianic act of self-sacrifice. In keeping with this Christian motif, the characteristic or valorized women of the early novels are virgins. Furthermore, the love relationships between the heroes and virginal women remain either unconsummated or emotionally unfulfilled, since that allows Ngugi to equate the hero’s political failure with sexual failure. In the middle novels, which equate acts of political resistance with virility, the privileged woman is the mother and her reproductive functions are harnessed into a narrative of future utopian nationhood. In the later novels, the characteristic woman is the fallen woman or prostitute who translates the debased state of neocolonial Kenya, ravaged by the business interests of the African capitalist élite and multinational corporations. In fact, the kind of politics that we find in the fiction has a direct bearing on the kinds of women we find there. And yet Ngugi has done more than any other male African writer to revise and reconsider his female representations, perhaps because his politics is so deeply invested in them. Even where his fiction appears to subordinate women, it works hard to emphasize the resilience, courage, strength, sagacity, loyalty, ability and integrity of the female characters. For this reason, I concur with Giovanna La Magna’s claim that the ‘women in Ngugi’s novels bear the sorrows of life without being crushed by them’ and with Chimalum Nwankwo’s assessment that although Ngugi’s ‘women suffer secondary roles in certain respects, in others they are somewhat compensated’. Nwankwo is also right to suggest that ‘questions about the general ability of women [are] answered with varying degrees of satisfaction … particularly in the novels’. As a result of this self-critical approach, Ngugi’s most recent novel, Wizard of the Crow, is a very accomplished feminist novel that may have an impact not only in reshaping the representation of female characters in African fiction, but also in improving the quality of life enjoyed by African women, depending upon how the novel’s readers receive it. It is this trajectory towards a truly feminist consciousness that my book charts. My study of Ngugi will focus primarily on the fiction, but it will also offer an extended commentary on his plays, his essays, his prison diary and his children’s stories in order to arrive at a comprehensive account of his work’s gender politics.    Giovanna La Magna, ‘Women in Ngugi’s Novels’, Quaderni di Lingue e Letteratur, 11 (1986), p. 93.    Chimalum Nwankwo, The Works of Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Towards the Kingdom of Woman and Man (Ikeja: Longman, 1992), p. 16.    Chimalum Nwankwo, The Works of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 26.

Introduction



Where texts have proven impossible to locate in an English version, such as Maitu Njugira (Mother, Sing for Me) and Njamba Nene and the Cruel Colonial Chief, I have been obliged to omit them from my commentary. Although each chapter takes one of Ngugi’s novels as its central focus, the study is arranged thematically, rather than in a strictly chronological order. Chapter 1 analyzes Ngugi’s first published novel, Weep Not, Child, in terms of the competing discourses that construct it (Christianity, nationalism, traditionalism) and in terms of the hierarchies of gender that those discourses collectively produce. The chapter develops one of this study’s pivotal themes – the gendering of the landscape, which ultimately develops into the gendering of the nation in Ngugi’s later novels. I argue that the female characters, like the land, are a consensual trope between the colonizer and colonized. These consensual tropes provide the male characters with a common terrain upon which politics and culture may be contested. In this sense, the female characters become the ground of struggle in Weep Not, Child and enable a contestatory discourse between male protagonists. Chapter 2, on clitoridectomy and Gikuyu nationalism in The River Between, provides an historical background to the Kenyan clitoridectomy debate (1928– 31). The chapter demonstrates how this debate was the point at which Gikuyu women’s bodies became ideologically linked with Gikuyu nationalism and their reproductive functions became a metaphor for the emergent postcolonial state. In Chapter 2, I show that clitoridectomy during the debate was not simply a physical amputation, but had a far greater social, political and ideological importance in producing the sign ‘woman’. The cultural production of the sign ‘woman’ during the clitoridectomy debate helped to consolidate male socio-economic and psychosexual prerogatives from which actual Gikuyu women were excluded. I show how Jomo Kenyatta’s anthropological defence of clitoridectomy in Facing Mount Kenya (1938) – a text of crucial significance to the rise of Gikuyu cultural nationalism – attempts to naturalize these masculine prerogatives. Given that Kenyatta later became the first president of an independent Kenya, and given that The River Between draws upon the argument he developed in Facing Mount Kenya, I argue that Ngugi’s representation of women is indebted to the founding gender narratives of national struggle. In particular, the novels reproduce the forms of uterine social organization that the clitoridectomy debate first instituted. Following the work of Ian Glenn, Chapter 2 analyzes The River Between’s representation of the clitoridectomy debate in terms of Ngugi’s own subject formation as a member of the indigenous, educated élite. I argue that, at this point in his development, Ngugi’s status as a member of this privileged class means that he is torn between the exemplary individualism he embodies and the burden of communal responsibility that the newly independent nation places upon his shoulders. Further, I argue that the novel resolves this ambivalence by privileging the hybrid characters who unite both sides of the clitoridectomy debate. The hybrid characters’ individualism and heroic self-sacrifice is consistent with Ngugi’s English liberal political sympathies at this point in his critical consciousness. In this sense,



Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

The River Between shapes its depiction of history according to the cultural pressures affecting the moment of writing. Chapter 3 continues the historical emphasis by providing an analysis of the Mau Mau period in Kenyan history. Influenced by the groundbreaking critical work of David Maughan-Brown, the chapter draws on historical scholars and Mau Mau memoirs to show that although a rebellion undoubtedly did happen in Kenya in the 1950s, the discourse of ‘Mau Mau’ was a figment of the colonial imagination later appropriated by Gikuyu nationalist historians for their own revisionist narratives. I demonstrate that ‘Mau Mau’ is best understood in terms of the psychological threat it posed, and that the Kenyan settlers’ brutal and disproportionate counterinsurgency tactics may be read symptomatically as a direct result of this threat. I argue that colonial discourses constructed Mau Mau according to a rhetoric of hostile proximity that imbued previously trusted servants and employees with sinister occult motives, rather than rational political or economic aspirations. I also show how colonial military strategy responded to ‘Mau Mau’s’ logic of contamination. Despite nationalist historians’ (and Ngugi’s) representations to the contrary, I furnish the evidence for Gikuyu women’s indispensable roles within the insurgent movement. One of these roles – the Mau Mau prostitute and courier – becomes extremely important to my critical methodology in the later chapters of the book. These women, footnoted by history, slept with British soldiers and Kenyan loyalists, often for a single bullet, then carried the ammunition to Mau Mau in the forests. Acting under threat of execution by both warring parties, the Mau Mau prostitute offers an historical precedent for an unpoliced female sexuality and a form of insurgent female agency that shuttles between two patriarchies without acceding to either one. The figure of the Mau Mau prostitute provides a viable model of female political and sexual agency that Ngugi’s later fiction (with its tropes of the neocolony as a ‘fallen woman’ or prostitute) half discloses. The second half of Chapter 3 traces how colonial mythologies of Mau Mau influence the representation of insurgency in the short stories collected in Secret Lives. Although Ngugi draws on colonial rhetorics of Mau Mau’s hostile proximity, he does so subversively in order to refuse colonialism’s need for stable and predictable political antagonisms. However, this subversive representation of the Mau Mau insurgency is accompanied by a conventional and problematic discourse of sexual conquest that contains exclusionary outcomes for the female characters. This gender framing of the political is in place consistently throughout the short stories in Secret Lives, even those stories whose historical setting is prior to Mau Mau or is post-Independence. Taken collectively, Chapters 4, 5 and 6 amount to a deconstruction of gender hierarchies in Ngugi’s later fiction. These three chapters relate Ngugi’s increasing emphasis on Gikuyu traditional cultural codes, folk mythology and folksong to his construction of a masculine historical narrative. Chapter 4 argues that A Grain of Wheat is a novel concerned with forging a national consciousness out of a shared historical experience. In imagining the nation, the novel has recourse to a number of desires, resistances and fantasies which, upon close scrutiny, turn

Introduction



out to produce some spectacularly ahistorical narrative moments. In keeping with previous scholarship on the novel, I view A Grain of Wheat as a ‘crisis novel’ that fails to translate adequately Ngugi’s conversion to Marxism. Hence, the novel contains vestiges of Ngugi’s residual Christian and liberal sympathies. The originality of this study’s contribution resides in the fact that it views the novel’s ideological crisis as containing a gendered dimension. In A Grain of Wheat, as in the two subsequent novels, nationalism as a ‘theory of political legitimacy’ is collapsed quite simplistically into a theory of legitimate paternity, or at other times a theory of legitimate patrilinear descent. Equally, political resistance is cast in terms of a problematic myth of male potency or virility. I demonstrate that A Grain of Wheat harnesses motherhood to nationalism via the legitimizing mechanism of Gikuyu myth. I also show that Ngugi uses myth to construct the Gikuyu nation retroactively as an entity spanning from prehistoric times (that is, since before the invention of the nation as a political form) to a future beyond the chronological frame of the novel. The effect of this construction of the nation is to situate women in a prelapsarian past and a utopian future, thus excluding them from political agency in the narrative present. In a reading ‘against the grain’ of the novel, Chapter 4 reads the female protagonist’s (Mumbi’s) act of infidelity with a homeguard (Karanja) in terms of the Mau Mau prostitute’s revolutionary sexuality. Since Mumbi’s act of infidelity is never given a concrete motivation, even when she confesses to it, the silences that surround her extramarital sex with a political untouchable are equivalent to the historical silences within which the Mau Mau prostitute conducts her covert revolutionary activities. To read Mumbi in this way is to find in the novel a more enabling model of female sexual and political agency than the narrative ostensibly allows. Chapter 5 begins by looking at the intertextual influences on Petals of Blood (including Yeats, Walcott, Blake, Whitman, Naipaul, Cabral and the Bible). It argues that these multiple influences upon Ngugi’s novel ensure that it contains textual strands that Ngugi himself has not authored, or ‘fathered’. As such, we encounter a crisis of naming or nomination in Petals of Blood, since what is named is inevitably multiple and mobile. I then relate this crisis of naming to the novel’s references to the Gikuyu language, to historical events or to the heroes of Kenyan history. The crisis of naming is also at work in these linguistic, historical and heroic references, which tend to condense multiple allusions in a single reference (for instance, the character Abdulla has multiple possible historical and literary counterparts). Following on from the previous chapter’s analysis of Ngugi’s construction of nationalism as a theory of legitimate paternity, Chapter 5 investigates the ways in which that theory is adapted to post-Independence nationhood in Petals of Blood. Specifically, the political leadership of neocolonial Kenya is represented via the metaphor of illegitimate paternity. The female archetype who corresponds with this version of the nation is the prostitute. In other words, the debasement of Wanja (a prostitute) in Petals of Blood corresponds with the novel’s sense that the forces   Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002 [1983]), p. 1.





Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

of neocolonial capital and the indigenous comprador élite are defiling the Kenyan national economy. In a straightforward, simplistic reading, Wanja is morally ‘redeemed’ by her impending motherhood at the conclusion of the novel. Part of her redemption (and, implicitly, the redemption of the nation) consists in the fact that she nominates three former Mau Mau fighters as the respective actual and symbolic fathers of her child. Using a deconstructive and psychoanalytical methodology, Chapter 5 argues the paternity of Wanja’s child is not a logically necessary fiction, given that she nominates more than one father for her child and given that her vocation as a prostitute means that other contenders for the paternity of the child abound. In fact, when it is opened up to scrutiny, the paternity of Wanja’s child inhabits the very same structure of illegitimacy and the very same crisis of naming that is central to the organization of Petals of Blood. In a reading against the grain of Ngugi’s novel that exploits paternity’s legal ‘fictiveness’, Chapter 5 suggests an alternative possible father for the child, so as to unharness Wanja’s motherhood from a masculine nationalist narrative and to restore to her the sorts of insurgent female political and sexual agency that Kenyan prostitutes historically performed during the Mau Mau rebellion. The alternative possible father I suggest is a plausible choice within the narrative logic of Petals of Blood. I interleave this potential father with a Gikuyu folksong performed by brides-to-be, in which they refuse the husband who has been arranged for them. In short, Chapter 5 tries to open up in Petals of Blood the traditional Gikuyu social institutions that accommodate female dissent, without imposing a critical violence upon the narrative structure of the novel or upon the Gikuyu cultural milieu that informs the novel. Chapter 6 continues to investigate the use of the fallen woman or prostitute in Ngugi’s later fiction. It argues that Ngugi uses these figures to construct the Kenyan neocolony as an economy prostituted to the interests of foreign capital. This construction of the neocolony offers decidedly unfavourable outcomes to Ngugi’s female characters, and, by implication, to his Kenyan female constituency. The female characters’ redemption no longer resides in motherhood but − in a curious new development − in adopting masculine characteristics, as critics such as Elleke Boehmer and Florence Stratton have argued. Chapter 6 contends that what we see in Devil on the Cross and Matigari is a shift from ‘woman’ as a signifier of lack redeemed by motherhood (as in the preceding novels) to ‘woman’ imbued with the masculine attribute of the phallus: the fetishized woman. In other words, we see a shift from the female character whose desire and political agency are repressed by clitoridectomy and motherhood to the female character whose political agency represses her femininity. Turning to Wizard of the Crow, Chapter 6 argues that we see a familiar Oedipalization of the key characters (Kamiti and Nyawira) and a familiar depiction of fallen women in the neocolony. However, Ngugi’s latest novel contains genuine feminist advances in its depiction of Nyawira’s performative and composite femininity – the narrative is in many ways the chronicle of an unfulfilled search for her that ends up discovering a national

Introduction



community of dissent. The novel also constructs the eponymous Wizard of the Crow as a distributed subject made up of a genuine male and female partnership between the two protagonists that contains a reflexive apparatus within itself. Nyawira’s feminine subjectivity is relayed between Kamiti and herself when she turns to wizardry. This ontological instability is an enabling capacity in Nyawira, because it is consistent with her transformative revolutionary impulses, her insurrectionary disguises and her vocation as an actress. My conclusion returns to the figure of the Mau Mau prostitute in order to model a wider ethics of postcolonial reading. In this sense, my study moves from history, through literature, in order to arrive at a theoretical model for reading the postcolonial text in translation. Since Ngugi’s most recent novels have been written in his Gikuyu home tongue and translated into English, my study concludes by arguing that the critic who relies solely upon the English translation must allow for the possibility that the original Gikuyu narrative may contain positive possibilities for Kenyan women that are lost in translation and that the anglophone postcolonial gender critic lacks the competence to decipher. Equally, since the first Gikuyu orthographies were produced by rival missionaries in Kenya, Ngugi’s return to writing in his mother tongue is not in any sense a return to a plentiful origin uncontaminated by colonial influences. Rather, it is already shaped by the very political lineage that it seeks to oppose. The conclusion constructs an extended critical metaphor – a conceit – and argues that translation is one viable space that Ngugi’s final texts may offer to female political and sexual agency. This conceit views the Mau Mau prostitute’s role in trafficking between colonizer and insurgent – shuttling between two patriarchies without necessarily subscribing to the legitimizing myths of either – as a cipher for the work of translation. I argue that translation is one textual space that remains irreducible to the agendas of either the Gikuyu author or the English-speaking critic. Understood in this sense, translation – the shuttling between two languages while productively exceeding the subject positions made available by both − might be designated an ethical space for Kenyan female desire and political agency to inhabit in Ngugi’s Gikuyu– English texts. In sum, this study is principally a cultural history. It is alert to the changing historical formations of ‘femininity’ in conditions of anti-imperial struggle and in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s literary oeuvre. Ngugi’s novels themselves need to be understood in terms of the array of cultural values that they seek to defend and the histories of struggle that they seek to dignify. For this reason, I have elected to relate my literary analyses to key texts on Kenyan history, Gikuyu anthropology and feminist theory and activism, among others. The methodology of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading is of necessity interdisciplinary, resulting in an informed, multidimensional account of the literary text and of the cultural milieu from which it emerges. This study of Ngugi’s fiction differs significantly from existing studies in that it investigates how narrative constructions of gender inequality and Ngugi’s anti-imperial gesture of writing in the Gikuyu language should influence the reading practices we adopt. Given

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that many of the women in Ngugi’s novels or Kenyan history might repudiate the position from which this research addresses them, the importance of my work is that it acknowledges the constituencies it addresses. It develops a reading method that is forceful in terms of the positions it critiques, yet is also receptive to contestation in the positions it adopts. In this way, my methodology aims to be both culturally literate and responsive to the political claims of the Gikuyu community within Kenya. The performative reading methodology developed in the later chapters makes the conditions of one text (such as prostitution in Mau Mau histories) active within another (Ngugi’s novels), in order to relate the disparities at work in Ngugi’s literary representations of gender to their historical antecedents. These correspondences between the literary text and historical context often function to model disruptive and progressive forms of female historical agency. Such clandestine forms of agency must at some level refuse the act of reading if they are to work at all, so my reading methodology is ultimately compelled to accommodate its own explanatory limitations. In this sense, it aims to acknowledge the limits of reading without lapsing into a debilitating mood of cultural relativism that is finally able to posit nothing. My introduction began with a relativizing moment, in which Kenyatta’s apologia for clitoridectomy was measured against contemporary media representations of this cultural practice. In turn, the politicized legacy of clitoridectomy plays a very direct role in Ngugi’s construction of his female characters from Weep Not, Child to Devil on the Cross and Matigari. It is only when Ngugi arrives at a performative and distributed model of femininity in Wizard of the Crow that he finds his way out of the desire to turn his female characters into desexualized mothers, hypersexualized prostitutes or – finally – into men. Fictions aside, two million women are ‘circumcised’ worldwide on an annual basis. As many as one hundred million women worldwide may bear the mark of lack that genital excision inscribes. There has been a substantial amount of criticism directed at deconstruction as a relativist theory that levels all it engages and posits nothing in place of its work. In contrast to the opponents of deconstruction, I view a deconstructive postcolonial gender critique as offering the very means by which cultural relativism invoked as an excuse for patriarchal praxes (such as clitoridectomy) may be interdicted. If patriarchy is the law of the dead father, a deconstructive postcolonial gender critique brings the law to account before itself, disinterring the mark of patriarchal repression from culture’s obfuscated origins. Ngugi himself would not disagree with this method, since he himself has argued that ‘One of the positive sides of deconstruction aesthetics is the way it makes one look at omissions, evasions, and echoes in literary images’. Following a deconstructive reading praxis, I write within, and occasionally against, Ngugi’s pioneering literary narratives: weep not, child, but scream.    Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 31.

Chapter 1

A Topography of ‘Woman’ Weep Not, Child, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s first published novel, takes its title from a line in Walt Whitman’s poem, ‘On the Beach at Night’. There are a number of ways in which ‘On the Beach at Night’ contributes to the framing of Ngugi’s novel. Written in the autumn of 1870, during a period of spiritual convalescence after the emotionally devastating American Civil War (1861–65), Whitman’s poem gestures towards the consolations provided by an emerging American national unity. Ngugi’s novel – a loosely autobiographical account of childhood during the Mau Mau period (1952–57) and written on the cusp of Kenyan national independence (1963) – is similarly positioned in its meditations upon national conflict and national reconciliation. Ngugi’s very title, Weep Not, Child, is a consolatory statement. But whatever its implicit consolations, the novel’s title is fraught with underlying anxieties that it is scarcely able to contain. Firstly, ‘Weep Not, Child’ is a gendered mode of address. In this, it emulates its source material in Whitman’s poem, where a child holds the hand of ‘her’ father and is comforted by him with these words. In Weep Not, Child, this gendered mode of address works conveniently alongside the ubiquitous infantilization of women. For example, we are told that ‘Njoroge always longed for the day when he would be a man, for then he would have the freedom to sit with big circumcised girls and touch them as he saw the young men do’. Here, circumcised women are ‘big girls’   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child (London: Heinemann, 1987 [1964]).   See Walt Whitman, ‘On the Beach at Night’ in Emory Holloway (ed.), Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose and Letters (London: Nonesuch Press, 1938), pp. 239–40.    For an extended commentary on Whitman’s influence upon Ngugi wa Thiong’o, see Sigurbjorg Sigurjonsdottir, ‘Voices of Many Together in Two: Whitman’s America and Ngugi’s Kenya’ in Peter Nazareth, (ed.), Critical Essays on Ngugi wa Thiong’o (New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000), pp. 93–122.   See Gay Wilson Allen, The New Walt Whitman Handbook (New York: New York University Press, 1975), pp. 182–3.    Allen suggests that ‘On the Beach at Night’ in the 1871 edition answers the despairing question of ‘As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life’ in the 1860 edition. By this time, Whitman’s spiritual crisis was completely over. ‘What saved him, above all else, was the unifying effect of the Civil War – not only through his own patriotic and devoted services in the army hospitals, but also because the war gave Whitman and the nation Abraham Lincoln.’ Allen, New Walt Whitman Handbook, p. 43.    Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 22.  

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12

– and therefore remain children – despite the fact that it is exactly clitoridectomy that traditionally confers adult status upon Gikuyu women. Hence, the distinction between ‘big circumcised girls’ (not ‘women’) and ‘young men’ reveals a mechanism of gender diminution that is arguably also at work in the novel’s title. Unsurprisingly, the character who cries most abundantly in the novel is Njoroge’s female childhood friend, Mwihaki, who is usually rendered in childlike imagery, even as an adolescent. Njoroge’s inadequate political vision – which at one point aspires to the ‘task of comforting people’ – translates as his inability to console Mwihaki. This inability contributes to the larger crisis in Njoroge’s masculinity that culminates in his attempt to commit suicide. Secondly, ‘Weep Not, Child’ is an injunction to silence. It is a consolation, but it forbids the expression of grief or pain.10 The expression of pain in this novel is designated by a specific, and significant, utterance. We see this when Njoroge is first familiarized with the vowels of the English alphabet at school: Teacher (making another mark on the board) Say Eee. Class Eeeeeeee. That sounded nice and familiar. When a child cried he said, Eeeee, Eeeee.11

It is, of course, singularly ironic that ‘Weep Not, Child’ would itself be unutterable were it not to contain exactly those repetitious utterances of pain (the ‘Eeeee, Eeeee’ in ‘Weep Not, Child’) that it expressly attempts to silence. The novel’s consolatory title ultimately pronounces itself imprisoned within the alienating and violent English linguistic structures that have produced it. Equally, the narrative of Weep Not, Child – Njoroge’s story – would be impossible to tell without the failures of consolation. One of the failures of consolation in the novel’s title is that it is indebted to a literary forbear, Walt Whitman, who is the subject of a gentle critique elsewhere in Ngugi’s oeuvre.12 The title, ostensibly a text’s declaration of singularity and identity, is in this instance internally conflicted. Additionally, given that ‘Weep Not, Child’ is an injunction to silence, and given that this   The interested reader should consult Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya.  For example, see Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 13, 56, 94–5, 107, 132–4.    Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 95. 10   A similar cultural injunction forbidding the expression of grief or pain is operative as Gikuyu girls undergo clitoridectomy. 11   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 33. 12   ‘Of course, there are writers who show great sensitivity to the social evils perpetrated against other peoples: William Blake, Walt Whitman, Brecht, Sartre for instance. But taken as a whole this literature could not avoid being affected by the Eurocentric basis of its world view or global vision, and most of it, even when sympathetic, could not altogether escape from the racism inherent in Western enterprise in the rest of the world.’ Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (London: James Currey, 1993), p. 14.  

A Topography of ‘Woman’

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silence is designated by a specific utterance (‘e’) which evokes the alienating English linguistic structures that support an ethnocentric system of value, the anxiety of cultural influence associated with the ‘father-poet’ suggests a latent racial inscription: ‘Whit[e]man’.13 This is perhaps an unavoidable consequence of critiquing a Western cultural legacy while working within its traditions. As a citation, as a gendered utterance, as an injunction to silence and as a consolation freighted with anxieties of influence, ‘Weep Not, Child’ is reconciled in the ideological device ‘woman’.14 The female characters in this novel inhabit fictions of substantiality: they carry the burden of exemplification. Expressed otherwise, they are figures that embody or incarnate an imported mythos. They demonstrate historical effects and enable masculine anti-colonial critique. Accordingly, their spaces of articulation are frequently also sites of censure or repudiation. This is consistent with the forms of gendered silencing that Ngugi’s title conducts. At its most general level, my argument will take its cue from a statement made by Cixous in ‘Exchange’ (with Catherine Clément): ‘Everything on the order of culture and cultural objects has a prohibition placed on it, which causes class positions in relation to culture. Likewise, woman is uneasy in relation to a certain sort of production – the production of signs …’15 Although Cixous and Clément’s statement clearly does not have colonial and post-Independence Kenya in mind, I would like to examine the way in which something like this unease operates in the first novel that Ngugi published. Weep Not, Child was written in 1962 and published in 1964, and this corresponds with Kenya’s transition from colony to independent nation – beginning with Kenyatta’s release from incarceration (1961) and ending with the declaration of the Republic (1964). The ideologically conflicted Kenya-in-transition that forms the backdrop to the writing of Weep Not, Child may have helped to determine its generic organization – a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman that details an intellectual consciousness whose evolution and whose contradictory affinities (traditionalism, liberalprogressive colonial education, nationalism, Christianity) follow trajectories that are occasionally at odds with its political conscientization. This patterning in turn points to the fact that fictional texts may mirror, at some level, the social matrix in which they are produced, because they partake of the discourses which construct and contest that matrix. As is well known, Ngugi’s conversion to Marxism occurred 13   My terminology here, ‘the anxiety of cultural influence’, is indebted to Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). 14   Wherever I use the term ‘woman,’ I refer not to an ahistorical, universal model of femininity, but to an historically situated and culturally produced sign mobilized within the ideological formation of Kenyan nationalism and imaginatively revisited via the female characters in Ngugi’s fiction. 15  Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing and intro. Sandra M. Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 145.

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at the University of Leeds after his first two novels had been written.16 However, in a foreword to Homecoming, Ime Ikkideh mentions that Marxism ‘provided an ideological framework for opinions [Ngugi] already vaguely held’.17 As if to confirm Ikkideh’s assertion, Weep Not, Child shows that Njoroge’s scholarliness is occasioned by class anxieties: ‘As [Njoroge] could not find companionship with Jacobo’s children (except Mwihaki), for these belonged to the middle class that was rising and beginning to be conscious of itself as such, he turned to reading.’18 Of course, the solitary activity of reading is one form of middle-class insularity into which Njoroge himself is becoming assimilated. Unsurprisingly, then, there is already evidence of a nascent class analysis in Weep Not, Child (and in The River Between). This class analysis is especially noticeable in the different economic strata occupied by the tenant farmer Ngotho and the landowner Jacobo. In addition, the novel is sensitive to the ways in which educational achievements confer an upward social mobility upon Njoroge while simultaneously alienating his sensibility, so that Njoroge’s sense of responsibility to his community is compromised. I am not suggesting that the first two novels are examples of a fully-fledged ‘socialist realism’, but merely that they indicate Ngugi’s early predisposition towards the Marxist world view that he would later adopt. In this sense, the first two novels are revealing in their relation to the later fictions. Of course, ‘vaguely held’ proto-Marxist opinions do not translate into complex social representations at this point in Ngugi’s career. His early fiction isolates certain social types in Kenyan society and it involves these figures in interpersonal dramas played out on a political and economic stage. This isolation of social types has a quadruple import. Firstly, it enables a young intellectual consciousness to confront the complexities of a society in transition towards independence and to render these complexities in a reduced, and hence manageable, form.19 Secondly, the isolation of social types amounts to a privileging of individual consciousness over collective consciousness. The type aggregates and simplifies the social and its relations, personifying complexity in a single figure. Thirdly, the isolation of social types and the sorts of consciousness it privileges amounts to what we might term a ‘privatization of the sensibility’. In sociological terms, this privatization to some extent emerges out of the intellectual élite’s exaggerated sense of its own responsibility in shaping a society in transition to independence – creating obvious contradictions in its class solidarity with the peasant constituency it 16   Both Weep Not, Child (1964) and The River Between (1965) were published while Ngugi was studying at Leeds. 17  See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. xiii. 18   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 48–9. 19   Patrick Williams has commented that this reduction to type is fraught, since it turns ‘a systematic colonial policy [of repressive counter-insurgency] into a question of individual malice’. Patrick Williams, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 44.

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seeks to address.20 Fourthly, the privatization of the sensibility requires a vehicle to domesticate the larger national drama confronted by the native intellectual. In Weep Not, Child, this vehicle is ‘woman’, a device that staves off ideological contradiction. My reading will engage Weep Not, Child at the various points at which Ngugi constructs the female subject. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that the female characters are uneasily implicated in the social vision of the novel.21 Myths of Substantiality and the Landscape as a Consensual Trope In Weep Not, Child, mechanisms of gender subordination enable an interplay of the male-dominated discourses of Christianity, Gikuyu nationalism, anti-colonial resistance and liberal-progressive education. The most obvious gender disparity in the novel lies in the different values ascribed to the sexual conquests of the male and female characters. When the barber recounts his reminiscences of the Second World War to his incredulous customers, his self-construction as a military adventurer is buttressed by demeaning constructions of women: ‘[In this war] we carried guns and we shot white men.’ ‘White men?’ ‘Y-e-e-e-s. They are not the gods we had thought them to be. We even slept with their women.’ ‘Ha! How are they – ?’ ‘Not different. Not different. I like a good fleshy black body with sweat. But they are … you know … so thin … without flesh … nothing.’ ‘But it was wonderful to …’ ‘Well! Before you started … you thought … it was eh – eh – wonderful. But after … it was nothing. And you had to pay some money.’22

The white woman is, like the gun, an enabling signifier in the barber’s narrative. She permits the colonized to transcend or transgress23 the rigidly hierarchical society 20

  This argument is brilliantly developed in Ian Glenn, ‘Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Dilemmas of the Intellectual Elite in Africa: A Sociological Perspective’, English in Africa, 8:2 (1981), pp. 53–66. 21   For an excellent critique of Ngugi’s gender representations, see Elleke Boehmer, ‘The Master’s Dance to the Master’s Voice: Revolutionary Nationalism and the Representation of Women in the Writing of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 26:1 (1991), pp. 188–97. 22   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 9–10. 23   There is an echo of this transgression when Howland’s daughter, a missionary, comes to the school: ‘Njoroge had not seen many Europeans at very close quarters. He was now quite overawed by the whiteness and tenderness of this woman’s skin. He wondered, What would I feel if I touched her skin?’ See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child,

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in colonial Kenya. Significantly, this act takes place outside of colonized space in Jerusalem, an important geographical locus in the Christian religion. Of course, Jerusalem’s significance in Christian mythology is that the Messiah was crucified there. However, the barber’s story inscribes a site privileged in Christian tradition with an anti-colonial discourse: if white men are not ‘gods’, then ‘their women’ who accede to intercourse with black soldiers are not untouchable madonnas. The fantasy of sexual possession operating in a problematic displacement of colonial space24 gestures somewhat inadequately towards the redistributive impulses that the novel elsewhere avows in relation to the land. The barber’s narrative of sexual triumph instrumentalizes black and ‘white’ women in its establishment of a chauvinistic anti-colonial discourse. In other words, the anecdote produces ‘woman’ as a sign that enables the reciprocation of dialogue between male oppressed subjects and the colonial Christian and racist discourses that have previously inscribed their subjectivities. As Patrick Williams has noted, there is a contradiction in the fact that the ‘white’ women in this passage are at first ‘not different’ to black women, only to become ‘so thin … without flesh … nothing’ when measured against ‘a good fleshy black body with sweat’.25 In effect, then, the substantiality of black women is a disempowering myth designed to consolidate the displacements and dispersals of colonial space within which the text’s narratives of resistance operate. By contrast with the masculine sexual conquests in the barber’s narrative, Ngugi depicts the sexual relations between Italian prisoners of war and Kenyan women in less flattering terms. While the barber entertains his clientele with a transgressive fantasy of the sexual possession of ‘white’ women – including the disappointing reality that ‘white’ women are no different to black women in bed (except perhaps that they are thinner and less sweaty!) – a vastly different hierarchy of value is attached to the interracial sexual relations conducted by Kenyan women: The Italian prisoners who built the long tarmac road had left a name for themselves because some went about with black women and black women had white children. Only, the children by black mothers and Italian prisoners who were also white men were not ‘white’ in the usual way. They were ugly and some grew up to have small wounds all over the body and especially around the mouth so that flies followed them at all times and at all places. Some people said that p. 46. Njoroge’s speculation here gestures towards the discourse of conquest that organizes the barber’s narrative. Frantz Fanon discusses the male colonized’s cross-racial desire as a form of political conquest in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 30, and in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 63. 24   The description of Jerusalem’s inhabitants as ‘white’ assumes a series of flawed ethnic, racial, geographical and historical definitions. The overarching category of whiteness in the barber’s tale does more to mystify the historical conditions of Kenyan oppression than it does to overturn them. 25   Patrick Williams, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 52.

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this was a punishment. Black people should not sleep with white men who ruled them and treated them badly.26

The passage is explicit in its analysis of these sexual relations. The act offends against the ‘natural’ divide between oppressor and oppressed,27 resulting in a diseased progeny – the product of a meeting between representatives of conflicting political groupings. However, it is difficult to conceive of the Italian prisoners of war as oppressors. They are, like the black women, governed by a common British political master. The same anti-colonial discourse that operates in the barber’s anecdote is at work in this passage. The wounds and flies associated with the mixed-race children allude in one possible reading to the plagues of boils and flies that beset the Egyptian oppressors of the Israelites.28 Hence, these children prefigure later references to the myth of Kenyatta as the ‘Black Moses’. Once again, women embody an imported mythos and establish a site of racialized critique in a displaced or dispersed translation of colonial space. As in the barber’s narrative, the anti-colonial discourse established here takes women’s bodies as its referent. Female bodies become vectors that transmit (and translate) the racial ‘impurity’ of the Italian prisoners to their children. The situation of the wounds ‘especially around the mouth’ is suggestive. On one level, the children may have become contaminated at the site of nurture (the breast) during suckling. Alternatively, they may have inherited venereal disease. The barber’s tale is ‘a traveller’s tale of daring and exotic knowledge’29 indicative of the (active) speaker’s empowerment via carnal knowledge: whether that knowledge originates in physiological intercourse with white prostitutes or in its symbolic substitute, the penetration of white flesh by bullets. By contrast, the description of the black women is rendered historically factual by an omniscient narrator who has a panchronic perspective. This narrative strategy functions to disempower the passive or ‘spoken’ woman. Her offspring ineradicably signify the carnal guilt that arises out of her sexual relations with a racially defined, but historically anomalous, ‘oppressor’. To the extent that the female body (or its product) signifies, it opens up a space of articulation that is ultimately a site of censure. In other words, the diseased progeny are an enduring symbol of the

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 5–6.  Interestingly, the members of the indigenous landowning class (Jacobo, Juliana and Lucia) all have Latinate names. This would align them structurally with the Italian prisoners, inasmuch as both groupings are situated between the English colonizer and the African peasantry. 28   See Exodus 8:20–31 and 9:8–12. 29   Abdulrazak Gurnah, ‘Transformative Strategies in the Fiction of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’ in Abdulrazak Gurnah (ed.), Essays on African Writing (Oxford: Heinemann, 1993), p. 144. 26 27

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‘unnatural’ intercourse between foreigner and black woman.30 Cumulatively, the two passages construct a hierarchy of value that works to negate female sexual agency. Gurnah points out the discrepancies between male and female sexuality in Weep Not, Child: What the barber and his listeners comment on is that white women for all their grandness will still sleep with black men, a response which implies both selfcontempt and deference, the triumph of a discourse of conquest. The black women having babies which are not ‘“white” in the usual way’, on the other hand, offends a deeper sense of what is moral and clean. Underlying it is the assumption that for women sex is equivalent to submission, which is itself the bedrock of patriarchal authority. The ‘white’ oppressor is indistinct and undifferentiated in this case, different and same: Italian or English, prisoner or settler. And since it was ‘the whites’ who brought calamity on the people, for African women to submit to them is abject.31

Gurnah’s analysis of the logical inconsistencies in the political vision of the novel is astute, but I would like to add two further observations. Firstly, the children are posited as symptoms of colonization. Secondly, colonization is ubiquitously depicted as an infectious phenomenon in Weep Not, Child, whether it is at the level of physiology (as it is here) or at the level of economics. In keeping with the myth of substantiality (and its attendant figuring of the colony as an afflicted body), the black female characters share an affinity with another contested domain: that of the land. No doubt, this affinity is informed by the cultural, spiritual and ideological values that Jomo Kenyatta’s cultural nationalist tract, Facing Mount Kenya, attaches to the land: Communion with the ancestral spirits is perpetuated through contact with the soil in which the ancestors of the tribe lie buried. The Gikuyu consider the earth as the ‘mother’ of the tribe, for the reason that the mother bears her burden for about eight or nine moons while the child is in her womb, and then for a short period of suckling. But it is the soil that feeds the child for a lifetime; and again after death it is the soil that nurses the spirit of the dead for eternity.32

Kenyatta’s passage may explain the reasons for equating the subaltern woman with the land in Weep Not, Child. Indeed, we are told that Ngotho practises custodianship over the shamba, because he owes it to ‘the dead, the living and

30   This episode arguably replays the original psychosexual crisis that the exploitative and invasive colonial relation imposes upon the colonized. Self-evidently, however, the novel revisits this crisis via an anachronous temporality. 31   Abdulrazak Gurnah, ‘Transformative Strategies’, p. 144. 32   Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 21.

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the unborn of his line’.33 However, the novel does not simply rehearse Kenyatta’s narrative of the earth’s generative power, nor the myth of Gikuyu autochthony that this narrative supports. The gendering of the landscape was also one of the master-tropes of colonial fiction.34 Therefore, the equation of women with the land has further antecedents in Ngugi’s subject formation within a Kenyan colonial education. In my view, Weep Not, Child contains residues of both colonial fiction and Gikuyu nationalist myths. As a result, the gendered landscape is something like a ‘consensual trope’ that allows colonial and anti-colonial discourses to contest one another. In Weep Not, Child, the land is a commodity around which the economic and social lives of the male characters centre. It is the measure of a man’s wealth (and, therefore, of his social status) and it is the means whereby he may afford his wives: Any man who had land was considered rich. If a man had plenty of money, many motor cars, but no land, he could never be counted as rich. A man who went with tattered clothes but had at least an acre of red earth was better off than the man with money. Nganga could afford three wives, although he was younger than Ngotho.35

Ngotho, himself a tenant farmer, describes how the aspirations of the Kenyan soldiers who fought in the First World War were thwarted by the colonizing power, which did not reward their military service with access to, or ownership of, the land. Significantly, Ngotho locates the land within the discourse of love when he says, ‘We came home worn out but very ready for whatever the British might give us as a reward. But, more than this, we wanted to go back to the soil and court it to yield, to create, not to destroy. But Ng’o! The land was gone.’36 Howlands, who operates in many respects as a double for Ngotho, also equates possession of the land with sexual conquest.37 We are told that ‘the farm was a woman whom [Howlands] had wooed and conquered. He had to keep an eye on her lest she should be possessed by someone else.’38 Boro’s accusation against Howlands again reveals Ngugi’s   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 31.  For instance, David Bunn has demonstrated that there is an enabling relationship between colonial discourse and the gendering of the landscape in two novels by Henry Rider Haggard. See David Bunn, ‘Embodying Africa: Women and Romance in Colonial Fiction’, English in Africa, 15 (1988), pp. 1–28. Ngugi acknowledges that Rider Haggard was one of his literary precursors in Carol Sicherman, Ngugi wa Thiong’o: The Making of a Rebel (London: Hans Zell, 1990), p. 21. 35   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 20. 36   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 25. 37   I agree with Killam’s assessment that ‘Howlands expounds the morality of paternal colonialism in conjunction with a belief in his right to land’. Douglas G. Killam, An Introduction to the Writings of Ngugi (London: Heinemann, 1980), p. 49. 38   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 127. 33

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gendering of the land: ‘Together, you killed many sons of the land. You raped our women.’39 The narratorial voice also contributes to the gendered constructions of the land: ‘“This is my land.” Mr Howlands said this as a man would say, This is my woman.’40 Despite their very different ideological moorings, Ngotho, Howlands, Boro and the narrator all reciprocate a patriarchal discourse, for which ‘women’ and ‘the land’ are enabling signifiers. The trope of the ‘raped’ land is developed early in the novel, when the landscape is located in a discourse linking colonial history with pathology: ‘You could tell the land of Black People because it was red, rough and sickly, while the land of the white settlers was green and was not lacerated into small strips.’41 Significantly, the surface of the black people’s land is infected or diseased in much the same manner as the children of the Italian prisoners of war, and this infection is attributed to the penetrative intrusion of the colonizer. The association of the female subject with the land points to the idealization of the land as a woman and the reification of ‘woman’ as a palpable entity within culture. It also indicates that the primary injury or wounding effected by colonization is not political (a denial of rights and freedoms) nor material (a denial of commodities or of control over the means of production) but psychosexual (a denial of potency).42 The emphasis placed on male potency is ultimately consistent with a patriarchal construction of subjectivity. Thus, once resistance is underway and the established colonial hierarchies are on the brink of inversion, it is significant that Howlands has ‘discovered that black women could be a good relief’43 from the political and sexual pressures of his situation – his wife has left for England during the emergency and, as District Officer, he is responsible for the eradication of Mau Mau. Since his position on the land is more precarious after the advent of Mau Mau, the most obvious respite available to him is with that entity which Ngugi allies most closely with the land – the subaltern woman. Like the sign ‘woman’, the land serves simultaneously to unite and divide colonial self and colonized other: it encloses male subjects in a contestatory dialectic. By working for Howlands, Ngotho acts as the vicarious custodian of his family’s ancestral lands. Likewise, Howlands’ spiritual bond to the land is established by proxy when he studies Ngotho’s affection for the farm.44 In this way, the land, like ‘woman’, enables the relationship between colonizer   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 128, my emphasis.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 129. 41   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 7, my emphasis. 42   This claim is ultimately consistent with one critic’s assessment that Ngugi ‘does not merely look at the problems affecting the individual lives of his characters; he goes further to expose the psychological struggles and changes these problems produce in them’. Jane C. Chesaina, ‘East Africa Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between and the African Oral Tradition’ in Eddah Gacukia and Kichamu Akivaga (eds), Teaching of African Literature in Schools (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1978), p. 62. 43   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 128. 44   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 29–30. 39

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and colonized to become a mutually defining one. Ngugi’s association of the land and the sign ‘woman’ enables the reciprocity of political discourses (nationalist, martial or colonial) between the male characters. This association covertly institutes a disempowering gender mechanism: the female character is allied with nature while her male counterparts dominate culture. Thus, the subaltern woman is silenced in Ngugi’s text because she lacks political representation in it. If there is a figure of the patriarch in Weep Not, Child, it would appear to find its embodiment in Ngotho. Njoroge secretly adores and fears his father,45 and his filial situation within the family is similar to that which Howlands has experienced as a child: ‘The joys, fears, and hopes of childhood were grand in their own way. The little quarrels he had had; the father whom he had feared and revered; the gentle mother in whose arms he could always find solace and comfort.’46 As befits a patriarch, Ngotho is a figure of supreme authority in the family. He governs it with a degree of equanimity, but this equanimity merely functions to validate his authority and to contain the threat of rebellion from his wives: Ngotho bought four pounds of meat. But they were bound into two bundles each of two pounds. One bundle was for his first wife, Njeri, and the other for Nyokabi, his second wife. A husband had to be wise in these affairs otherwise a small flaw or apparent bias could easily generate a civil war in the family. Not that Ngotho feared this very much. He knew that his two wives liked each other and were good companions and friends. But you could not quite trust women. They were fickle and very jealous. When a woman was angry no amount of beating would pacify her. Ngotho did not beat his wives much. On the contrary, his home was well known for being a place of peace. All the same, one had to be careful.47

Ngotho’s control over the affairs of his family deteriorates as conditions in Kenya deteriorate. The suggestive metaphor of civil war is eventually realized in ways that make familial discord a transparent allegory for national political upheaval. This is one mode via which politics is patterned into patriarchy. Ngotho’s inability to exert authority is most clearly evidenced in Boro’s disdain for his father’s moderate politics, and most especially in Ngotho’s inability to command Boro’s respect.48 The family’s disintegration corresponds with the disintegration of its patriarchal centre. Ngotho gradually faces a crisis of potency in respect of the emasculating political and economic tyranny of the Kenyan colonial administration

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 123.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 76. 47   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 11. 48  For a similar reading, see Clifford Robson, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (New York: St. Martins, 1979), p. 28. 45

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and the loyalist classes.49 Since political and economic protest is predicated upon male potency in this novel, the possibility of political failure must also include the possibility of sexual impotence. Tellingly, when Ngotho does confront the colonial powers by confessing to the murder of Jacobo (which Boro has committed), the response of the administration is to castrate him. Njoroge’s position in the family equates with his political position in the text. He fears his father and finds solace in his mother. Similarly, he does not actively challenge or resist the colonial government (as Boro and Kamau do) but finds solace in his education. Njoroge is impotent in a double sense. Firstly, he does not exercise his male sexual privilege in relation to women’s bodies (although he is circumcised), nor does he recognize his attraction to Mwihaki until it is too late. Secondly, he continually defers active involvement in political change by envisioning it as a withheld, future possibility. Ideological Sympathies Cook and Okenimpke claim that the novel’s ideological sympathies do not rest with Njoroge, but ‘lie inevitably with the freedom fighters’.50 This view of Weep Not, Child is misguided. Certainly, Njoroge’s perspective is not unequivocally endorsed, but neither is that of the Mau Mau insurgents for that matter. If anything, Weep Not, Child displays Ngugi’s attempts to redeem education (and, by implication, his own position within Kenya’s literate élite) by instrumentalizing the voices of Mau Mau insurgents. We are told, somewhat improbably, that Boro ‘had always shown a marked interest in Njoroge’s progress at school’.51 The more honest transcription is arguably that Ngugi’s interest in collapsing the class differences between an intellectual élite and a largely illiterate peasant constituency is indexed by Boro’s interest in Njoroge’s progress. In fact, Ngugi’s self-inscription in relation to Mau Mau is revealing. His brother, Wallace Mwangi – a carpenter, like Kamau in Weep Not, Child or Gikonyo in A Grain of Wheat – was one of the forest fighters,52 but the Mwangi of Weep Not, Child has died fighting for the British in the Second World War. This is an important silence in the novel, and it may indicate Ngugi’s early ideological ambivalence towards Mau Mau and a subconscious attempt to distance his historical entanglements with it.53 49

  In this sense, Gikandi is correct to assert that ‘colonialism has emasculated the father’. Simon Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 86. 50   David Cook and Michael Okenimpke, Ngugi wa Thiong’o: An Exploration of His Writings (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 56. 51   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 69. 52  See Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 4. 53   For an excellent discussion of this ambivalence, see David Maughan-Brown, Land Freedom and Fiction: History and Ideology in Kenya (London: Zed Books, 1985).

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Another revealing moment occurs when a letter is left on the church wall at Njoroge’s school: ‘The letter said that the head of the headmaster plus the heads of forty children would be cut off if the school did not instantly close down. It was signed with Kimathi’s name.’54 Following this incident, Nyokabi forbids Njoroge to attend the school, but Kamau persuades him to continue going. It is interesting that Kamau (an illiterate craftsman with Mau Mau sympathies) should be so unqualified in his support for Njoroge’s education. The narrative logic for such unqualified support is unclear. Given that the letter is discovered by a character called ‘Kamau’,55 Njoroge’s brother may be the one responsible for planting the letter and may therefore be in a position to allay Njoroge’s fears of Mau Mau reprisals if he continues to attend school. Alternatively, since Kamau does not attend school and has no reason to be there, the ‘Kamau’ mentioned in the passage may simply share a name with Njoroge’s brother. Regardless of what (flawed) statement the novel is making about Mau Mau’s ideological support for education, the incident may amount to another moment of interested self-inscription on Ngugi’s part. E. Carey Francis, Ngugi’s headmaster at Alliance High School, recalls a similar incident to the one in Weep Not, Child: Soon after the Lari massacre, 16 miles away, I went to a primary school [where] Mau-Mau had been … the night before, and damaged the school, tearing down the doors and leaving broken windows and broken hinges. In the doorway there was a blackboard with a message written on it in Gikuyu: ‘If anyone teaches here after March 29 he will be killed, by order of Dedan Kimathi’ … At another school something similar happened. There the message was a letter for the teacher saying ‘If the teacher comes here again he had better bring a basket for his head.’56

The syntax of the Carey Francis account does not make it clear whether the school he visited was 16 miles away from the massacre or whether the massacre was 16 miles from his own school. Nevertheless, there is a distinct possibility that one of the schools affected was Maanguu Karing’a school, which Ngugi was attending at the time (between 26 and 29 March 1953) and which is within 16 miles of Lari.57 If there is an ideology which is privileged in the text, it is to be found in the most dominant (and most covert) voice in the novel – that of the narrator. This narratorial voice is partisan in relation to certain of the discourses and characters in the novel. I have already examined the narrator’s counter-discourse which incorporates the biblical myth of the Ten Plagues. This myth is a continuous motif in the narrative. Jomo Kenyatta, the Black Moses, insists that the colonial   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 83.  See the answers to the headmaster’s questions. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 82. 56  See Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 395. 57  See the scale map in Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, unpaginated. 54

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authorities let his people go. Boro has told Kamau about Jomo, and Kamau relays this information to Njoroge.58 The narrator alludes to the myth when Jomo is tried by the colonial authorities: ‘Everyone knew that Jomo would win. God would not let his people alone. The children of Israel must win. Many people put all their hopes on this eventual victory.’59 The myth of the Black Moses is what unites the fictional community of Weep Not, Child. This is not to say that all of the characters subscribe to this myth, but that they assume their discursive positions in relation to the discourse this myth represents. Moses’ rebellion against the Egyptians is a principled, righteous rebellion (it is sanctioned by God). None of the characters finally lives up to this ideal. Njoroge has high ideals regarding the liberation of the Kenyan people, but he does not act upon those ideals. By contrast, Boro actively resists the colonial authorities, but he does not do so to uphold a higher principle. Asked by a Mau Mau lieutenant whether he believes in anything, Boro replies, ‘No. Nothing. Except revenge.’60 Ngotho’s traditionalism, which holds that the white man’s demise has been predicted by the prophecies, is a complacent world view. It has a spiritual basis, but lacks a coherent political praxis. These characters are animated by conflicting discourses and the narratorial voice is the centripetal device around which their diffuse positions are constellated. The Female Characters Mwihaki is the most ambivalent of the female figures in the novel. Her father is a member of the landed class that is complicit with colonial capitalist domination. Her mother, Juliana, has imported sensibilities that are alien to the Gikuyu peasantry. At a Christmas meal at her house, she admonishes Njoroge for laughing during grace, saying that she has raised her children ‘to value Ustaarabu’, unlike children from ‘primitive homes’.61 ‘Ustaarabu’ carries pejorative connotations. It is of Kiswahili, rather than Gikuyu, origin.62 Its etymology derives from the word ‘arab’, which implicates its adherents in behavioural codes established by the first (known) colonizers of Africa. It translates roughly as ‘civilization’ or ‘culture’ and is ‘considered the embodiment of civilization at [the Kenyan] coast’.63 Juliana translates these foreign sensibilities into normative structures that consolidate her class privilege. Mwihaki’s ambivalence consists in the fact that she neither strictly adheres to nor vehemently opposes her parents and the class consciousness which they represent. Whereas Juliana admonishes Njoroge for his lack of ‘manners’, Mwihaki   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 43.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 72. 60   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 102. 61   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 18–19. 62  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 233. 63  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 233. 58

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begins to take ‘a greater interest in him’.64 Similarly, Mwihaki defends Njoroge when he first arrives at the school. As an Njuka (newcomer), he is expected to be subservient to the older children, but she defiantly claims him as her Njuka.65 Nevertheless, despite Mwihaki’s qualities of generosity and strength of character, these qualities are subordinated to her ideological functions. For example, the dissimilarity in Njoroge’s and Mwihaki’s attitudes may be viewed as a difference in class consciousness: Sometimes they played. Njoroge was more reserved. But Mwihaki was more playful. She picked flowers and threw them at him. He liked this and wanted to retaliate but he did not like plucking a flower in bloom because it lost colour. He said, ‘Let’s not play with flowers.’ ‘Oh, but I love flowers.’66

Njoroge is a member of the dispossessed peasantry (the ahoi) which is represented as loving the land that was once its own. His reverence for the flowers indicates a political subtext of conserving of the land and that which issues from it. This reading would be supported by reference to the myth of inheritance and proprietorship recounted by Ngotho.67 By contrast, Mwihaki is a member of the landed class, which is shown to be possessed of bourgeois acquisitiveness. Njoroge’s relationship with Mwihaki operates on a denial of sexual attraction consistent with his subscription to Christian theology. Njoroge wishes Mwihaki were his sister and he comes to view their relation as a filial one.68 This filial relationship thwarts the possibility of an amorous affiliation. Further, the ‘fraternal– sororal’ relationship carries an implied third term: that of the parental figures who regulate the filial relationship by imposing the incest taboo upon it. Like Mwihaki, Njoroge is unable to escape an anxiety of (perceived) obligations to his parents (and, more particularly, obligations to his mother). In order to circumvent this anxiety, he accommodates his desire for Mwihaki by placing her within the familial structure from which that anxiety emanates. This dynamic is expressed somatically in the text:   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 19.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 13–14. As Simon Gikandi reminds us, njuka is a ‘word that literally means a new arrival, but has the connotations of a novice in initiation rite. The association between school and Gikuyu rites of initiation cannot be missed; in fact, when the narrator reminds us that the school has become the most important form of social institution, we cannot but read it as a supplement for traditional rites of passage such as circumcision.’ See Simon Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 89. Of course, Njoroge’s education-as-rite-of-masculinity – with the inadequate political vision and incapacited efficacy it entails – is never completely accomplished. 66   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 36. 67   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 23–4. 68   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 55, 107. 64

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‘When I come back, you will not let me alone?’ she appealed, again her eyes dilating. She was sitting close to him. She touched the collar of his shirt and then rubbed off an insect that was walking along it. He looked at her in a brotherly fashion. He had now quickly forgotten their differences. To him she was a girl who might easily have been his sister.69

Njoroge and Mwihaki are constructed with a vast erotic potential, but the increasing physical proximity of the two characters does not translate into an admission of their mutual attraction. Mwihaki and Njoroge are placed in a filial relation in order to substitute for a thwarted amorous relation. The root of this substitution is ideological: a love affair would collapse the class delineations that Ngugi has so carefully constructed. Indeed, one of the reasons that Njoroge derives pleasure from Mwihaki’s companionship as a playmate is that she is from a more affluent class than his own.70 When Mwihaki brushes off the insect, the action invokes her class situation: her father derives his income from the cultivation of pyrethrum, which is used in insecticides. The inclusion of the insect demystifies the genderpolitical premises that shape Njoroge and Mwihaki. In this moment, the text illuminates what the narrative represses – the possibility of mutual attraction between the children. This attraction threatens to disrupt the circulation of desire upon which the narrative is predicated, because it would severely undermine the text’s phallocentric premise: that Njoroge’s subscription to Christian discourse and to Western-style education places him in a position of emasculated complicity with the colonizing powers. Unsurprisingly, the female characters also practise avoidance – or, at best, nonconfrontation – in relation to political matters. When a strike is mooted, Nyokabi objects to Ngotho’s participation.71 Nyokabi’s objection is based upon her interest in preserving the stability and prosperity of her family: which is why she has so much invested in Njoroge receiving an education. However, Nyokabi’s private, domestic interest runs contrary to the collective national interests of the oppressed peasantry, for whom political uprising is a pressing necessity. The confrontation between Nyokabi and Ngotho signals a conflict between two institutions: politics (a masculine domain) and the family (a domain of masculine control and, to a lesser extent, female responsibility). This confrontation is not specific to Nyokabi’s family; similar disagreements have taken place between Juliana and Jacobo,72 and between Howlands and his wife.73 Although there are interesting structural similarities between the three wives’ objections, it is evident that to heed their warnings would be to permit the economic status quo to persist. When Ngotho, Jacobo and Howlands ignore these objections, the class struggle becomes explicitly 69

    71   72   73   70

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 96. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 15. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 52–3. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 56. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 77.

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confrontational and precipitates the events that follow. The upshot of Ngugi’s placement of women in a reactionary discourse is that women are excluded from political dialogue. It is interesting that the three men – Howlands, Jacobo and Ngotho – hold dialogue with one another at various narrative junctures, whereas their wives never once hold dialogue among themselves, nor with each other’s husbands. This gender-political strategy situates women outside of history, denying them sites of articulation and occasions for political community. Having said this, the larger mechanisms of silencing at work in Ngugi’s novel are mitigated by local instances in which female political agency is broached. We see this, for example, when Njeri comments subtly and astutely on the unfairness of Jomo Kenyatta’s trial: Nyokabi said, ‘I knew he would lose. I always said that white men are the same. His lawyers must have been bribed.’ ‘It is more than that,’ said Njeri. ‘And although I am only a woman and cannot explain it, it seems all as clear as daylight. The white man makes a law or a rule. Through that rule or law or what you may call it, he takes away the land and then imposes many laws on the people concerning that land and many other things, all without people agreeing first as in the old days of the tribe. Now a man rises and opposes that law which made right the taking away of the land. Now that man is taken by the same people who made the laws which that man was fighting. He is tried under those alien rules. Now tell me who is that man who can win even if the angels of God were his lawyers … I mean.’ Njeri was panting. Njoroge had never heard her speak for such a long time. Yet there seemed to be something in what she had said.74

It would not be difficult to discern a paternalistic construction of Njeri at this point. Her purported (but contradicted) inability to ‘explain’ events would be consistent with my claims about women’s exclusion from political discourse. However, despite Njeri’s disclaimer, her halting sentences, the non-specificity of her allusions and her trailing conclusion, her speech contains a forceful rhetoric that crystallizes the structures of dominance upon which the colonial administration is predicated. Further, her speech exposes the inefficacy of Christianity as a liberatory discourse. Njeri’s construction here is a tightly controlled deviation from patriarchal and Christian ideologies. Ngugi grants her the power of acute observation regarding the injustice of Kenyatta’s trial – a sense of injustice that he undoubtedly shares. Nevertheless, he limits her ability to express herself in a language equal to the perspicuity of her observations. In a more forthright manner, Mwihaki interrogates Njoroge’s idealistic vision of a new Kenya. She exposes the inconsistency of a utopian politics that is not rooted in social realities, telling Njoroge, ‘You are always talking about tomorrow, tomorrow. You are always talking about the country and the people.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 75.

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What is tomorrow? And what is the People and the Country to you?’75 Later, she and Njoroge have reversed their ideological positions: he wills flight from Kenya, while she realizes the obligations that she has at home. Ironically, she has adopted the vision which he has abandoned, although it would appear that she is also aware of the necessity for a commitment to family and community: ‘We had better wait. You told me that the sun will rise tomorrow. I think you were right.’ He looked at her tears and wanted to wipe them. She sat there, a lone tree defying the darkness, trying to instil new life into him. But he did not want to live. Not this kind of life. He felt betrayed. ‘All that was a dream. We can only live today.’ ‘Yes. But we have a duty. Our duty to other people is our biggest responsibility as grown men and women.’ ‘Duty! Duty!’ he cried bitterly. ‘Yes, I have a duty, for instance to my mother …’76

However, despite Mwihaki’s determination to reconstruct Kenya (which locates her within the realm of political and social activity), Ngugi’s construction of her contains a patriarchal subtext. She is described as ‘a lone tree defying the darkness’, which imbricates her in the traditionalist myth of origin that Ngotho recounts: ‘But in this, at the foot of Kerinyaga, a tree rose. At first it was a small tree and grew up, finding a way even through the darkness. It wanted to reach the light, and the sun. This tree had Life.’77 This is perhaps an instance of Ngugi situating women on either side of the present. The tree represents both an idyllic past and a utopian future beyond the darkness of the Emergency period. It embodies or possesses ‘Life’, and might thus be equated with the reproductive functions of ‘woman’. However, there are other cultural values at work here. The tree figures anti-colonial insurgency, since Mau Mau insurgents hid in forests during the Emergency. The fact that Njoroge chooses ‘the tree’78 upon which to hang himself suggests that he is a failure in both political/military and sexual conquest. In Christian discourse, the tree evokes an association between Njoroge – who has profited from his education, at the expense of his family, which is destroyed – and Judas, the disciple who betrayed Christ in the garden of Gethsemane and who hanged himself. Alternatively, the tree may refer to the crucifix, which is sometimes depicted as the ‘Tree of Life’.79 Within both the Christian and liberatory novelistic discourses, the tree connotes   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 106.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 133–4. 77   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, pp. 23–4. 78   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 135, my emphasis. 79   In terms of Ian Glenn’s argument, the crucifix would index the intellectual élite’s resolution of its class-privilege in acts of symbolic self-sacrifice that aim to redeem the community. 75 76

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an individual interest that runs contrary to the interests of the societal or familial collective. However, it is clear that Ngugi is not sympathetic towards the aims and strategies of Mau Mau at this point in his development. Rather, his early heroes and their potentials for redemptive self-sacrifice are homologous with his position as a Christian and a member of the intellectual (literate) élite.80 The conclusion of the novel is ambivalent. Njoroge’s final abandonment of the tree constitutes a return to the communal responsibility which his mothers (and, later, Mwihaki) have come to represent. However, he is allocated a place among women because of his ‘political cowardice’. Although Njoroge would seem to occupy a position of relative inferiority when compared with those male characters whose resistance to colonial authority has been more courageous (Boro, Kamau and, in the final instance, Ngotho), the gains made by these characters have been insubstantial. Their family has disintegrated and it has even less property than that with which it began. It is therefore left to women to lead those who remain into the future. Despite the conclusion of Weep Not, Child, which seems to suggest that the figure of woman (embodied in Nyokabi) is likely to play a part in the transition to Kenyan independence, Nyokabi’s temporal situation ultimately remains problematic. She is equated with a past which has been superseded by colonization81 and a future that has not yet been realized. Her agency falls on either side of the present, even while she is reified as the terrain over which the struggle of the present is fought. In short, Ngugi sometimes risks locating Gikuyu women outside of history: a condition consistent with Hélène Cixous’ claims in another context that women have been viewed as ‘the principle of consistency, always somehow the same, everyday and eternal’.82 Some critics have not found the positioning of characters such as Nyokabi and Njeri problematic. Rather, they have emphasized that it is precisely the consistency 80  In Weep Not, Child, Christianity and education lack potency as discourses of resistance. The execution of Isaka, the revivalist, is pathetic because he does not resist the soldiers at all. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, p. 101. Christianity is a form of subjection, since its emphasis on ascetic quietism is antithetical to the redistributive impulses of collective political resistance. Religious notions of an afterlife and Njoroge’s private investments in gaining the qualifications for political leadership both involve a deferral of rewards that equates with political apathy. Ngugi’s own ideological position at the time of writing provides an interesting comparison. Not only was he highly educated by Kenyan standards, but he had been a devout Christian for at least three years. See Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, pp. 4–6, and David Maughan Brown, ‘Matigari and the Rehabilitation of Religion’, Research in African Literatures, 22:4 (Winter 1990), p. 173. The discursive ambivalences in Weep Not, Child suggest that Ngugi was already beginning to question the political and social efficacy of Christianity and education. By 1970, Ngugi felt able to claim: ‘I am not a man of the Church. I am not even a Christian.’ See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 31. 81   See, for example, the first paragraph of the novel. 82  Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, p. 66.

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of the female characters in the novel which gives its representations credibility. In Jennifer Evans’ view, ‘Njoroge’s two mothers [and Ngugi’s female characters more generally] are all in their own ways “resistance heroines” and the strongest symbols of cultural identity, community and continuity that these novels have to offer.’83 Cook and Okenimpke add: Those who point the way are, as so often in Ngugi, the mother figures, Nyokabi and Njeri. They, throughout, have been positive characters, the centre of harmonious collaboration in Ngotho’s family, involved with other people, concerned and informed about their environment. The rescue and possible rehabilitation of Njoroge is their triumph, and this, with all its overtones and undertones, is the concluding event of the book, reversing the negative trends, and thrusting us out hopefully, actively into an unknown future.84

I would argue that Ngugi’s construction of Nyokabi and Njeri (whose name means ‘the devoted’)85 is informed by religious/mythic productions of woman as nurturer and homemaker. This construction entrenches traditional female roles and reinforces patriarchal privilege. Nevertheless, these critics point to a certain quietism and continuity, an enduring dutifulness in relation to the maintenance of the social order on the part of the female characters, which demands respect despite the fact that their acts of self-fulfilment are often framed by patriarchal perspectives. Read in terms of their negotiations of constraint and their transgressions of ideological framing, these women produce a politics of the everyday within which a version of agency resides. Of course, it must be said that at this formative stage in Ngugi’s authorial development, a contemporary feminist awareness was only beginning to achieve popular recognition in Europe and America. As such, a feminist reading of Weep Not, Child may be an exercise in futility. However, Elleke Boehmer defends the worth of such an exercise: [The early female characters] are consistently viewed only in their relation to men. Mwihaki … gives Njoroge strength when he is wavering, yet the ideals which she upholds are based upon what he has taught her … Yet [such] stereotypes are predictable: at this stage Ngugi had not yet come out in support of sexual equality, let alone of class conflict. But it is for this very reason that the characterization of women in the early novels provides a useful point of reference. Here Ngugi upholds the patriarchal order by establishing archetypal

83   Jennifer Evans, ‘Women and Resistance in Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross’, (Women in) African Literature Today, 15 (1987), p. 131. 84   David Cook and Michael Okenimpke, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 67 85   Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed: The Political Dimension in the Languageuse of Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1991), p. 30.

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roles and patterns of relationships that will continue, albeit in transmuted form, into the later novels.86

Boehmer’s argument is a subtle one. She suggests that Ngugi’s earliest published novel should not be critiqued retroactively according to feminist arguments that the fiction could not have anticipated, but rather that the novel should be critiqued on the basis of the fictional patterns that its narrative precedents do anticipate. Conclusion In this chapter, I have examined the gender disparities that inform Ngugi’s writing and that contribute to the marginalization of women in Weep Not, Child. These disparities originate in the novel’s contradictory ideological formations and they cumulatively prioritize Gikuyu male prerogatives. In order to explain the reasons for these ideological formations, it becomes necessary to investigate Kenyan history (and Gikuyu traditionalism’s reinscription by Gikuyu nationalism in particular). In this way, we can establish those culturally specific material conditions that construct the sign ‘woman’ in Gikuyu patriarchy, as well as the reasons for which it became necessary to deny Gikuyu women a political voice issuing from a politicized body. The larger idealized or metaphysical binaries that accompany the acquisition of a culturally and linguistically coded female subjectivity emerge when the female body is appropriated, and its desire silenced, by a male-dominated Symbolic Order – an order that includes language, the law and kinship structures. If the sign ‘woman’ is produced in and by an exchange that solidifies the relations between men, then the point at which the Gikuyu indigene acquires her cultural significance is the point at which her body acquires value for exogamy – during the rite of clitoridectomy. As we shall see in the following chapter, the Kenyan circumcision debate was an historical juncture that contained tacit collusion between the colonial and anti-colonial patriarchies, leading to the adoption of Gikuyu women’s bodies as a terrain of struggle.

86

  Elleke Boehmer, ‘The Master’s Dance to the Master’s Voice’, p. 193.

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Chapter 2

Clitoridectomy and Gikuyu Nationalism In this chapter, I shall examine the production of the sign ‘woman’ in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s early novel The River Between. The analysis of signs and of signifying systems in the novel is only viable if one examines the movements of history that have facilitated and necessitated the production of signs. Equally, it is important to examine the subject formation of the historical person, (James) Ngugi, who acts as an agent of particular discursive practices, motivated by specific ideological interests. The River Between provides insight into a pivotal moment in Kenyan history − that of the Kenyan circumcision debate. This historical moment is interesting for three reasons. Firstly, it highlights the contest between conflicting power bases (traditionalism, education, Christian revivalism and Gikuyu nationalism) in colonial Kenya. Secondly, the debate is particularly revealing of the Gikuyu community’s production of female subjects within conflicting discourses and it is revealing of these subjects’ marginalization from political debate (since they become the site of contest in the debate). Thirdly, Ngugi’s re-presentation of the debate in The River Between points to his own ideological unease in relation to the discourses that inform his novel. The originality of my contribution in this chapter will be threefold. Firstly, I offer a way of theorizing the Gikuyu nationalism via the effacement of the clitoris. Using Gayatri Spivak’s concept of a ‘uterine social organization’, I frame a larger anti-colonial political formation in terms of its gender dispositions. Secondly, I wish to read symptomatically those points at which Ngugi’s fictional representations of the circumcision ritual differ from Kenyatta’s orthodox – though still politically invested – account. Such discrepancies offer readers a way of measuring the contradictions and pressures that Ngugi was negotiating as a young, politically conscious writer in a partially decolonized society. Thirdly, this chapter will offer an original account of the hybrid characters in the novel (Waiyaki, Nyambura, Muthoni) and will suggest that they are narrative vehicles designed to contain ideological contradiction.

   Although I am aware that ‘circumcision’ is a dangerous term to employ in the description of an amputation that differs substantially from the operation performed on men, I have retained the term in places. In my opinion, ‘clitoridectomy’ might be a far more disabling term in an analysis of this kind, since it might confine a feminist discourse to the specifically corporal (or ‘bodily’) effects of the operation. I therefore use ‘clitoridectomy’ to denote the physical operation, and I reserve ‘circumcision’ to imply the cultural effects attendant upon the rite.

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The Circumcision Debate The circumcision debate erupted in Kikuyuland in 1928 when several of the missions located there (most notably the Church of Scotland Mission) initiated a campaign against clitoridectomy and required their followers to renounce both the custom and their membership of the Kenya Central Association, a nationalist party of which Jomo Kenyatta was the general secretary. The Gikuyu community, under the leadership of the Kenya Central Association, initiated a countercampaign of protests, letters to the press and pro-circumcision politicking. The mission schools instructed pupils that circumcised students would not be admitted. In the short term, the debate cost the missions most of their followers, although many later returned. More importantly, it provided the Kenya Central Association with an issue around which Gikuyu solidarity could be fostered. The Kenya Central Association also began to see the need for an independent school system and an African-controlled church, which would sanction both polygamy and clitoridectomy. Rosberg and Nottingham inform us that ‘the missions were increasingly regarded as the spiritual edge of the colonial sword. In particular, the dominant mission role in education was no longer regarded as sacrosanct. Out of the controversy there developed a drive to establish a comprehensive educational system independent of missionary control.’ The Kenya Central Association set about establishing the Gikuyu Karing’a Education Association (karing’a denotes ‘nationalist’ or ‘full blooded’ – that is, non-hybrid) and the African Independent Pentecostal Church. The feeling regarding the issue of clitoridectomy ran so high that, on 2 January 1930, one of the missionaries, Miss Hulda Stumpf, was reportedly attacked in her home and forcibly clitoridectomized, according to unsubstantiated settler rumour. By 1931, more moderate voices within the church had prevailed and the air cleared. Despite the Gikuyu community’s and the missionaries’ representations to the contrary, the circumcision debate did not centre on clitoridectomy as a moral issue. The heat that the debate generated was largely due to the moral indeterminacy which inhered between the conflicting ideologies of the Gikuyu 

  Self-evidently, this had the effect of politicizing clitoridectomy, since the requirement to renounce membership of the Kenya Central Association brazenly targeted the organization that was at the forefront of Gikuyu anti-colonial protest. The resulting polarization was very damaging to the social fabric of the community, because the ‘traditionalists called the converts “ahonoki” (the saved ones) … while the latter referred to the former as “acenji” (the uncultured). The conflict between the two groups was so intense that it seemed like a feud between two different ethnic groups rather than between members of the same society.’ Jane C. Chesaina, ‘East Africa Ngugi wa Thiong’o’, p. 70.   Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of Mau Mau: Nationalism in Kenya (London: Pall Mall, 1966), p. 125.    Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed, p. 39.   Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of Mau Mau, p. 124.

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and the missionaries. The church’s opposition to the ritual was relatively straightforward: its intent was to eliminate an operation that is painful, sometimes fatal and always irreversible. The clitoridectomy procedure was not carried out in the sanitary conditions of a Western hospital and its function in terms of Gikuyu spirituality was anathema to the West’s received notions of religious worship. As such, clitoridectomy was deemed a barbaric and heathen practice. The missionaries’ representation of clitoridectomy was an interested one − their civilizing mission consisted in the redemption of African subjects from the clutches of darkness, but this mission was co-extensive with colonialism, because both involved the eradication of the Gikuyu’s history, social organization and sense of identity. Clitoridectomy produced a crisis for the missionaries because the liberal-humanist discourse that informed their activity meant that they could only recognize the Gikuyu subject’s common humanity as long as that humanity was constituted in the image of the West. The Gikuyu community’s argument was more complex − at least, from an outsider’s point of view. In its original cultural context, the operations were the very fabric of community. Firstly, circumcision and clitoridectomy were deciding factors in one’s manhood or womanhood. Secondly, the operations allowed one to marry. Thirdly, those circumcised together formed an ‘age-group’ that would eventually govern the community. Fourthly, the names given to each ‘age-group’ were the means by which the Gikuyu remembered their history. Fifthly, circumcision gave men the right to own property. In these respects, clitoridectomy and circumcision were absolutely crucial to the traditional social, economic, sexual and political organization of the community. Jomo Kenyatta’s account of clitoridectomy, which Ngugi follows in The River Between, is the clearest exposition of the ritual and its importance in Gikuyu culture. In Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta describes circumcision as ‘a deciding factor in giving a boy or a girl the status of manhood or womanhood in the Gikuyu community’. He continues, ‘No proper Gikuyu would dream of marrying a girl who has not been circumcised, and vice versa. It is taboo for a Gikuyu man or woman to have sexual relations with someone who has not undergone this operation.’ Furthermore, those ‘detribalized’ Gikuyu who did wish to settle down with an uncircumcised partner would not have enjoyed the blessing of their family and would have faced exclusion from the homestead, disinheritance and, therefore, landlessness. Kenyatta continues: It is important to note that the moral code of the tribe is bound up with this custom and that it symbolizes the unification of the whole tribal organization … The irua (ceremony) marks the commencement of participation in various   See Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, pp. 63–4, and Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of Mau Mau, pp. 111–19.    Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 133.    Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 132.

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governing groups in the tribal administration, because the real age-groups begin from the day of the physical operation. The history and legends of the people are explained and remembered according to the names given to various age-groups at the time of the initiation ceremony.

More importantly, the parents of the initiates became members of the governing council of elders (kiama) subsequent to the initiation of their first child. Hence, clitoridectomy was far more than a quasi-medical operation or amputation. It was also crucial to social organization and to the organization of power within the Gikuyu community. However, circumcision was also of crucial importance to the organization of sexual difference and male privilege in the community: Before initiation it is considered right and proper for boys to practise masturbation as a preparation for their future sexual activities. Sometimes two or more boys compete in this, to see which can show himself more active than the rest … Masturbation among girls is considered wrong, and if a girl is seen touching that part of her body she is at once told that she is doing wrong. It may be said that this, among other reasons, is probably the motive of trimming the clitoris, to prevent girls from developing sexual feelings around that point.10

Clitoridectomy was thus tantamount to an erasure of one aspect of female sexuality by a male-dominated culture. Allied with this negation was a series of cultural relations that the operation enacted and instituted. It not only dispossessed Gikuyu women of one site of bodily pleasure, but also dispossessed them of material possessions. Becoming a woman among the Gikuyu meant submitting to exclusion from the ownership and inheritance of land and from access to political decision-making. In short, clitoridectomy enacted something akin to the relations of male dominance and female submission that constitute a patriarchal social order.11

  Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 134.   Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 162. 11   I am aware that this ‘structural reading’ of the clitoridectomy debate might oversimplify Gikuyu women’s terms of engagement with the struggle for independence. For instance, more than a quarter of a century later, the Ngaitana movement comprised women who clitoridectomized themselves in the midst of the Mau Mau insurgency. In the context of the Kenyan emergency, the clitoris as a site of struggle appears misplaced. Yet it is exactly this seizure of asymmetrical agency that resists co-option into masculine narratives of Mau Mau. The definitive source on Ngaitana is Lynn M. Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 79–102. 

10

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Clitoridectomy and Nationalist Ideology We have so far dwelt upon the traditional significance of clitoridectomy, but during the clitoridectomy debate, the operation assumes a secondary nationalist resonance. During clitoridectomy, the Gikuyu female body is intrumentalized in the establishment of male prerogatives. Likewise, the Gikuyu female subject is allocated an important ‘place’ within culture, in spite of the fact that she will never own that place. Her body founds the male right to property, the male prerogative in the homestead, male accession to power, the male-defined dialectic of desire. Her desire (which exceeds her reproductive functions) is partially effaced in order to naturalize her subjection in culture. Spivak’s explanation of asymmetrical gendering is apposite here: Male and female sexuality are asymmetrical. Male orgasmic pleasure ‘normally’ entails the male reproductive act − semination. Female orgasmic pleasure (it is not of course the ‘same’ pleasure, only called by the same name) does not entail any one element of the heterogeneous female reproductive scenario: ovulation, fertilization, conception, gestation, birthing. The clitoris escapes reproductive framing. In legally defining woman as an object of exchange, passage or possession in terms of reproduction, it is not only the womb that is literally ‘appropriated’; it is the clitoris as signifier of the sexed subject that is effaced. All historical and theoretical investigation into the definition of woman as legal object − in or out of marriage; or as politico-economic passageway for property and legitimacy would fall within the investigation of the varieties of the effacement of the clitoris.12

Hence, there was far more at stake in the circumcision debate than a Gikuyu woman’s right to determine whether or not to submit her body to clitoridectomy. In fact, her assenting or dissenting voice was never an issue. Rather, the central (but unspoken) issue in the debate was the material composition of the Kenyan state. In order to clarify this point, I shall make use of Louis Althusser’s essay, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. Althusser argues that the capitalist state reproduces itself in two ways. Firstly, it must reproduce the skills and materials required for production. Secondly, it must reproduce the labour force’s submissive relationship to the organizational hierarchy of the state: To put this more scientifically, I shall say that the reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for 12   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 151, italics in the original.

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Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’. In other words, the school (but also other State institutions like the church …) teaches ‘know-how’, but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its ‘practice’.13

Althusser claims that the ruling ideology of the state is promulgated by Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which include the religious Ideological State Apparatus (the system of different churches) and the educational Ideological State Apparatus (the school system). Ideological State Apparatuses such as these become ‘not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle’14 in the proletariat’s attempts to ward off the ruling class’s exploitation and to seize control of the state. In pre-Independence Kenya, the Christian Church’s contribution to colonialism was to ensure a docile populace, who could look forward to the Kingdom of Heaven in the afterlife while enduring servitude on Earth. Equally, the school system functioned to produce an African élite, who would emerge as a buffer class between the settler’s neo-aristocracy and the Kenyan peasantry. In other words, the Ideological State Apparatuses constituted by the school system and the missions enabled and perpetuated exploitative social formations in colonial Kenya. In political terms, the circumcision debate marks a decisive juncture in the history of Gikuyu resistance to colonial rule.15 The emergence of the independent schools and the African churches was tantamount to the emergence of powerful new Ideological State Apparatuses in the Kenyan state, instituting a counter-colonial discourse. These Ideological State Apparatuses, like the Gikuyu nationalism they fostered, had their ideological roots in Gikuyu traditionalism. The advent of the Mau Mau insurgency,16 20 years later, may be 13   Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’ in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 6–7, italics in the original. 14   Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, p. 21, italics in the original. 15   In this context, Hickey’s argument that the missionaries at least raised objections to a gender-oppressive cultural practice is slightly myopic. The missionaries’ intervention at a politically sensitive time had the upshot of hardening ideological positions and harnessing clitoridectomy to Kenyan nationalism for many years beyond the initial circumcision debate. Hence, this intervention probably set back the anti-clitoridectomy cause by about 50 years. See Dennis Hickey, ‘One People’s Freedom, One Woman’s Pain: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Alice Walker, and the Problem of Female Circumcision’ in Charles Cantalupo (ed.), Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: Texts and Contexts (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1995), pp. 231–46. 16   The predominantly Gikuyu Mau Mau uprising took place between 1952 and 1957. Its association in the European mind with brutality and barbarism led to a disproportionate backlash against the Gikuyu and to extreme civilian hardship. Despite its military failures, Mau Mau precipitated Kenyan Independence in 1960.

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viewed as an attempt by the Gikuyu people (and others) to violently usurp the Repressive State Apparatuses (the army, the police, the homeguard, the courts) that enforced the last vestiges of colonial domination in Kenya. Although the debate may have had far-reaching consequences for the Gikuyu populace, the central figure in the debate − the Gikuyu woman − is conspicuously silent. This silence may be understood in terms of Althusser’s remark that ‘[ideology] represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’.17 In terms of this formulation, a Gikuyu woman’s identity as ‘a woman’ was produced by the ritual of circumcision and its attendant cultural implications − it was only by submitting to clitoridectomy that a Gikuyu woman could call herself ‘a Gikuyu woman’ (or, for that matter, ‘a patriot’). Equally, it was only by refusing to be circumcised that a Kenyan Christian woman could call herself ‘a Christian woman’ (or, for that matter, ‘a good colonial subject’).18 In Althusser’s terms, ‘all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects’.19 Despite the hostility that developed on both sides, the result of the circumcision debate was the production of a regime of signs in which the Gikuyu patriarchy and the colonial patriarchy colluded to silence Gikuyu women.20 Evidence of this collusion may be found in the strikingly similar conclusions that Kenyatta and the missionaries drew from the events in 1931: that circumcision was a custom ingrained in Gikuyu culture, and that it was best left to die out by itself.21 Although the Gikuyu community was the only party to advocate clitoridectomy in the debate, the missionaries’ Christian belief system entailed the suppression of the clitoris by a more subtle mechanism. As an example, one might cite the myth of the Immaculate Conception (as Tobe Levin’s article on The River Between does), in which Mary’s motherhood entails a lack of sexual participation, which in turn constitutes an effacement of female desire. Mary is an icon of femininity defined exclusively in terms of her reproductive capacities. In a related vein,

17

  Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, p. 36.  Chris Dunton’s article unhelpfully reproduces this binaristic logic in stating that The River Between is a novel ‘that foregrounds a stated defence of this practice [clitoridectomy] in the interests of the preservation of an indigenous social order (as against the process of social transformation instigated under colonial rule)’. The neutrality with which colonial violence is represented here limits the power of Dunton’s critique of clitoridectomy. See Chris Dunton, ‘This Rape is Political: The Siting of Women’s Experience in Novels by Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Farah and El Saadawi’, English in Africa, 27:1 (May 2000), p. 9. 19   Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, p. 47. 20   Patrick Williams’ description of the Gikuyu ‘female agency as ideologically trapped’ is pertinent here. See Patrick Williams, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 34. 21   Not astonishingly, Waiyaki – the protagonist of The River Between – reaches a similar conclusion. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between (London: Heinemann, 1965), pp. 141–2. 18

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Gayatri Spivak has provided an incisive critique of the ubiquitous symbolic clitoridectomy of women: Psychological investigation in this area cannot only confine itself to the effect of clitoridectomy on women. It would also ask why and show how, since an at least symbolic clitoridectomy has always been the ‘normal’ accession to womanhood and the unacknowledged name of motherhood [Spivak refers here to Freud’s assertion that women’s psychosexual maturity rests upon a change from clitoral to vaginal orgasm], it might be necessary to plot out the entire geography of female sexuality in terms of the imagined possibility of the dismemberment of the phallus. The arena of research here is not merely remote and primitive societies … The pre-comprehended suppression or effacement of the clitoris relates to every move to define woman as sex-object, or as means or agent of reproduction − with no recourse to a subject-function except in terms of those definitions or as ‘imitators’ of men.22

If we read the Gikuyu rite of circumcision and the gendering of Christian myth in this way, we can begin to see how there was a tacit form of collusion between two seemingly intransigent political adversaries. The upshot of the collusion between colonial-Christian and traditionalist-nationalist ideologues in the circumcision debate was that both camps decided upon a shared referent (‘the Gikuyu peasant woman’) and differed only as to whether she should be symbolically or physically clitoridectomized. Hence, the debate relies upon a consensual trope of femininity in order to found political disagreement, with obviously exclusionary outcomes for the women involved in the debate. There is a fossilizing of the possibilities open to Gikuyu women at this point in Kenyan history. The female body becomes politicized or ideologically inscribed in the clitoridectomy debate – women’s bodies become a metaphor for the emergent Gikuyu nation. At an institutional level, the creation of independent schools and churches represents Gikuyu nationalism’s seizure of two of the most powerful colonial institutions (the Church and education) 30 years before the arrival of Kenyan independence. This seizure is a crucial moment in the formation of the post-Independence state. Thus, clitoridectomy was deeply enmeshed within the trajectory of Gikuyu nationalism. And, more significantly perhaps, clitoridectomy instituted within Gikuyu nationalism what Gayatri Spivak would call ‘a uterine social organization (the arrangement of the world in terms of the reproduction of future generations, where the uterus is the chief agent and means of production)’.23 In other words, women’s anatomies and identities became symbolically bound to motherhood and in turn to the emerging nation – at the expense of female sexual and political agency. The cultural suppression of the clitoris enabled women’s reproductive functions to eclipse other kinds of female agency.   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 151.   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 152.

22 23

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Ngugi’s own subject formation is an uneasy synthesis of the colonial and counter-colonial ideologies that competed for primacy in the circumcision debate. He was born into a family of ahoi (tenant farmers), and although his parents were located within the Gikuyu peasantry, they distrusted Gikuyu traditionalism. Their landlords were devout members of the Church of Scotland Mission. The first three years of education Ngugi received were at a mission school (Kamaandura). He then transferred to the Maanguua Karing’a school, which was one of the independent schools, and underwent circumcision at the age of 15. He then attended Alliance High School, where he became ‘rather too serious a Christian’.24 Shortly after writing The River Between in 1961 (originally and revealingly titled The Black Messiah), Ngugi wrote an article for the Kenyan newspaper Sunday Nation with the propitiatory title of ‘Let Us Be Careful About What We Take From The Past’. The article argues ‘for selective retention of things from the past in keeping with “our progress to a higher and fuller humanity” [and] finds the Gikuyu “the worst offenders”, citing “brutal” female circumcision and bride price as customs that have “completely outlived” their purposes’.25 The River Between It is perhaps not surprising that representations of women in The River Between reflect the tensions within Ngugi’s ideological formation. On one level, the text reinforces the production of women in terms of traditionalist ideology. For example, the free indirect discourse attributed to Chege reveals the social importance with which clitoridectomy is invested: ‘[circumcision] was a central rite in the Gikuyu way of life. Who had ever heard of a girl that was not circumcised? Who would ever pay cows and goats for such a girl?’26 These words are ambiguous. Firstly, it is ironic that it is precisely Chege’s son (Waiyaki) who falls in love with an uncircumcised ‘girl’ (Nyambura). Yet Chege’s thoughts prove to be prophetic: events intrude upon the young lovers’ plans and prevent them from marrying according to either Christian or African custom. As prophecy, Chege’s assertions are validated. As irony, they are deflated. This should point us to Ngugi’s ambivalence in regard to both Gikuyu and Western belief systems, which play out their confrontation in terms of the sign ‘woman’ (or ‘girl’) that can only be produced in exogamy. The exchange of women in Gikuyu culture (and implicitly in the novel) is an exchange that cements social and political

 See Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 4.  Carol Sicherman, Ngugi wa Thiong’o: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (London: Hans Zell, 1989), p. 11. 26   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, pp. 37–8. 24

25

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relationships between men.27 Circumcision therefore provides a seal on the act of exogamy − it invests ‘the goods’ with value.28 In one of its less equivocal moments, The River Between resorts to a free indirect discourse that inadvertently exposes circumcision as a cornerstone upon which the Gikuyu patriarchy is founded: Circumcision was an important ritual to the tribe. It kept people together, bound the tribe. It was at the core of the social structure, and a something that gave meaning to a man’s life. End the custom and the spiritual basis of the tribe’s cohesion and integration would be no more. The cry was up. Gikuyu Karinga. Keep the tribe pure. Tutikwenda Irigu [we do not want uncircumcized girls]. It was a soul’s cry, a soul’s wish.29

Beyond the sexist language in this passage and its construction of a masculine performative (‘we’) that articulates the destiny of women’s bodies in an unimpeachably spiritual register, The River Between is a little simplistic in its reduction of an entire tradition to one custom.30 However, the text’s emphasis on the ‘spiritual’ importance of circumcision also obscures its material importance in disciplining Gikuyu subjects: The knife produced a thin sharp pain as it cut through the flesh. The surgeon had done his work. Blood trickled freely onto the ground, sinking into the soil. Henceforth a religious bond linked Waiyaki to the earth, as if his blood was an 27  Hence, there is a very subtle texturing to the novel’s understanding of love as a metaphor for social unity. As one critic has argued, ‘At the social level, Ngugi emphasizes the value of unity and co-operation in the absence of which society disintegrates. Love is presented as an essential element for human happiness and survival.’ Eddah Gachukia, ‘The Novels of James Ngugi’ in Eddah Gacukia and Kichamu Akivaga (eds), Teaching of African Literature in Schools (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1978), p. 106. The failure of love in The River Between is a metonym for Waiyaki’s failure to achieve political unity. 28   My argument here is indebted to Elizabeth Cowie, ‘Woman as Sign,’ m/f, no. 1 (1978), pp. 49–63. Cowie contends that the sign ‘woman’ is socially constructed in terms of the relationships in which women are positioned by exogamy. On one level, the Gikuyu patriarchy’s intervention in the circumcision debate had the upshot of regulating the exchange of women. The Kenya Central Association claimed, in a letter to the press, that the missionaries’ attempts to outlaw clitoridectomy were motivated by a desire to secure uncircumcised ‘girls’ as wives. See Guy Arnold, Kenyatta and the Politics of Kenya (London: Dent and Sons, 1974), p. 121. 29   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 68, my emphasis. 30   James Ogude has written of the novel, ‘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.’ James Ogude, Ngugi’s Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation (London: Pluto, 1999), p. 16.

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offering. Around him women were shouting and praising him. The son of Chege had proved himself. Such praises were only lavished on the brave.31

The blood that drops on to the earth during circumcision is supposed by the Gikuyu subject to naturalize their bond with the land. This representation obfuscates the fact that, unlike the empowering outcomes of the operation upon men, clitoridectomy functions to acculturate Gikuyu subaltern women32 and to appropriate their bodies in the service of oppressive social relations. The ritual re-enacts this silence because the subject (whether male or female) is expected not to cry out, nor to register pain.33 The material basis of circumcision becomes manifest if one examines these silences in the text. If the ritual serves to naturalize the relationship between the subject and the land, it may be viewed as a legitimizing enactment of Gikuyu proprietorship of the land. In a number of places, the text refers to a secret language of the Kenyan highlands; a language that the colonizer does not understand. The content of this secret language is not explicitly revealed to the reader, but it forms part of a coded reference to Gikuyu proprietorship of the land at one point in the narrative: ‘On sunny days the green leaves and the virgin gaiety of the flowers made your heart swell with expectation. At such times the women could be seen cultivating; no, not cultivating, but talking in a secret language with the crops and the soil. Women sang gay songs.’34 The secret language of this passage is one which links the subaltern woman with the land and that which issues from it − the flowers have a ‘virgin gaiety’ (which might, in turn, imply the pristine agrarian society prior to the advent of colonialism) and likewise the women sing ‘gay’ songs. In short, the privileged realm of women’s dialogue is also a realm of suppression, in which female speech is subsumed in landscape. Equally, in the Kenya of the early 1930s, the secret language of the Kenya Central Association’s involvement in the circumcision debate was that the cultural preservation of the ritual formed part of its political programme for the reclamation of land alienated from the Gikuyu and the reinstitution of a social order which was beginning to lapse under the weight of the colonial incursion. The alignment of ‘women’ (or ‘mothers’, or ‘virgins’) with nature legitimizes a broader narrative that divests women of a controlling hand in the realms of culture and politics. This narrative is expressed in one of the Gikuyu myths that appears more than once in Ngugi’s work. The myth describes the overthrow of a prehistorical matriarchy in Gikuyuland. In Ngugi’s novel, Waiyaki asks why antelope do not flee from women. Chege replies:   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 45.   For the classical definition of the term ‘subaltern’, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), pp. 271–313. 33   Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 146. 34   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 79. 31

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‘You do not know this! Long ago women used to rule this land and its men. They were harsh and men began to resent their hard hand. So when all the women were pregnant, men came together and overthrew them. Before this, women owned everything. The animal you saw was their goat. But because the women could not manage them, the goats ran away. They knew women to be weak. So why should they fear them?’ It was then Waiyaki understood why his mother owned nothing.35

This passage naturalizes Gikuyu male privileges and prerogatives, both in Ngugi’s novel and in the Gikuyu society from which the myth is drawn. The implication in the myth is that women are suited to neither the ownership of property nor to the offices of traditional governance. More importantly, the myth depicts the rise of the Gikuyu patriarchy through an appropriation of women’s reproductive capacities. In this way, the myth is linked with the mobilization of circumcision within the narrative of Kenyan nationalist resistance. Like clitoridectomy (symbolic or real), the founding myth of Gikuyu patriarchy places ‘women’ within a uterine social organization in which women’s bodies and identities are symbolically bound to motherhood. As Spivak would argue, by symbolically binding women to motherhood, excess female desire is effaced and the womb is appropriated for its reproductive potential. Since the womb is a site of production, the appropriation of the womb also, of course, exploits female labour in one of its forms. Thus, the Gikuyu myth above undergirds a patriarchal system that is predicated on the effacement of female sexuality and it comprises a symbolic effacement of the clitoris (a metonym for female desire). The myth thus serves to legitimize the practice of clitoridectomy and its subsequent cultural effects, including the prohibition on female ownership of property. Further, the myth serves to forestall Gikuyu women’s claims to political self-representation. In a sense, the circumcision debate and the myth that legitimizes male power conspire to place subaltern women in a double bind from which even Ngugi’s hybrid female characters can not escape. Effectively, the circumcision debate meant that a woman’s political choice was exercised through her physiological status (clitoridectomized or not). Contrarily, the myth legitimizing male power implies that it is precisely women’s physiology which prevents them from exercising political power. However, my reading of The River Between has not taken into account the contradictory status of the characters that are a synthesis or middle ground in the ideological divide between Western Christianity and Gikuyu traditionalism. These characters are hybrid and are therefore offered a revolutionary potential in the text. It is clear that the text privileges these characters. Even the title, The River Between, refers to the Honia river which serves as an ‘ideological between’ – a negotiated position in the conflict between the Makuyu and Kameno ridges. Perhaps the most important of these hybrid figures is Muthoni. Her decision to be both Christian and circumcised is revolutionary in the context of the circumcision debate, and   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 15.

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her justification of this decision provides Waiyaki with the first inklings of how he may assist in the liberation of the Gikuyu from colonial rule. Muthoni says, ‘I want to be a woman. Father and Mother are circumcised. But why are they stopping me, why do they deny me this? How could I be outside the tribe when all the girls born with me at the same time have left me?’36 Her position exposes the inconsistency of her father, Joshua’s, prohibition of circumcision. However, although her position offers her a revolutionary potential in the text, it does not offer her liberation from the strictures of the patriarchal order: ‘I want to be a woman made beautiful in the tribe; a husband for my bed; children to play around the hearth.’37 Clearly, to be ‘made beautiful in the tribe’ is to acquire an ideologically determined beauty that supports the patriarchal organization of the Gikuyu community. If clitoridectomy effaces female desire in order to produce wives and mothers, then Muthoni’s words indicate that she will find her own fulfilment in the role that has been allocated to her. Muthoni’s hybrid status is further confirmed by her final words to Waiyaki: ‘I am still a Christian, see, a Christian in the tribe. Look. I am a woman and will grow big and healthy in the tribe. [Tell] Nyambura I see Jesus. And I am a woman, beautiful in the tribe …’38 These affirmations are ironically deflated by Muthoni’s death. In fact, the only authority her words may carry is that they confirm Waiyaki’s Messianic pretensions – Muthoni sees Jesus while Waiyaki is the only person in her presence. Muthoni’s death functions to negate the positive possibilities that the text affords her − although she is admirably outspoken and rebellious, she constitutes a failed attempt at an ideological synthesis of the Gikuyu nationalist and Christian stances in relation to clitoridectomy. Significantly, the injuries that she sustains during the operation can be cured neither by Gikuyu remedies nor by Western medicine.39 Incidentally, Muthoni’s death signals another negated possibility in the text. In Gikuyu, Muthoni means ‘a relative by marriage’, and the reader later discovers that a marriage between Waiyaki and Nyambura is fated not to take place. The second hybrid character is Waiyaki. He is referred to as the ‘Black Messiah’, and, as we have seen, there is some suggestion that Waiyaki is the Jesus that Muthoni has seen on her deathbed.40 He is described in terms that evoke both Gikuyu traditionalist and Christian discourses: [His] voice was like the voice of his father − no − it was like the voice of the great Gikuyus of old. Here again was a saviour, the one whose words touched the souls of the people. People listened and their hearts moved with the vibration

36

    38   39   40   37

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 44. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 44. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 53. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 50. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 103.

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of his voice. And he, like a shepherd speaking to his flock, avoided any words that might be insulting.41

Likewise, Nyambura − Muthoni’s sister and Waiyaki’s lover − is offered a revolutionary position. She is Christian and uncircumcised, and is therefore outcast unclean according to the Kiama. She defies Joshua’s order not to love Waiyaki,42 and when Waiyaki comes to warn Joshua and his followers of the Kiama’s plans to harm them, Nyambura does the unthinkable by declaring her love for him: Joshua was fierce. He hated the young man with a hatred which a man of God has towards Satan. There was another murmur in the room. Then silence reigned as Nyambura walked across towards Waiyaki while all the eyes watched her. Waiyaki and Joshua must have been struck by her grace and mature youthfulness. She held Waiyaki’s hand and said what no other girl at that time would have dared to say, what she herself could not have done a few days before. ‘You are brave and I love you.’43

Nyambura’s voice at this point becomes a powerful instrument for dissembling the hardened ideological positions which contribute to the crisis in the text. However, her voice is never permitted to exert any influence upon the action. Like Waiyaki, Nyambura becomes a sacrificial victim of the Kiama; the scapegoat on to whom all of the Gikuyu community’s guilt and hatred are transferred. Class, Contradiction and the Post-Independence Intellectual If hybrid characters such as Waiyaki, Nyambura and Muthoni are privileged in the text, one might wonder why their ostensibly revolutionary potential is negated: why do they fall foul of circumstance or of self-interested powermongers such as Kabonyi? Significantly, Kabonyi is the archetypal villain, and, rather than attempting to achieve a synthesis of the two ideological poles posited in the novel, he fluctuates between them, first as a Christian convert and later as the leader of the Kiama. The answer to my question has less to do with Ngugi’s contradictory formation under Christian and Gikuyu discourses than it has to do with his contradictory position within the educated élite in post-Independence Kenya. These latter contradictions are outlined in Ian Glenn’s reading of Ngugi’s fiction. Glenn emphasizes Ngugi’s class position within post-Independence Kenya and he lists four features that characterize the intellectual élites in newly independent states. Firstly, the intellectual élite plays a mediating role between the colonized’s culture and Western culture. Secondly, it has an exaggerated sense of   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 96.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 134. 43   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 136. 41

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its own importance and representativeness in the shaping of the nation state and its ideology. The third notable feature of intellectual élites is that they are especially likely, by virtue of their training, outlook and position, to stress intellectual and abstract solutions to social and political problems … The fourth feature of the intellectual élite is that a member is a member, paradoxically, by having his [sic] own views, opinions, conscience, judgement. He is likely to clash with traditional religious belief, marriage practices and value systems. This stress on individualism offers the temptation of a life of private consciousness, but in view of the élite’s sense of idealism and of its own importance, this temptation will be resisted or take particular forms. The two most important exceptions are the pursuit of a separate religious goal or destiny for the transcendent self, or the exaltation of the self in the most individualistic of relationships, that of romantic love, with its insistence on the signs of a unique and individual attraction.44

Waiyaki exhibits all of these features. He is initiated into Gikuyu customs by his father and by undergoing circumcision. He also receives an education at the Siriana mission school. He sees himself as a visionary who has been chosen to redeem the Gikuyu community from the conditions of its oppression, and the wistful solution Waiyaki offers to these conditions is that of education. Further, it is precisely Waiyaki’s ambition to enter into a companionate marriage with Nyambura that marks his position as a half-outsider in relation to the Makuyu and Kameno communities. If Waiyaki does share with Ngugi the features that characterize an intellectual élite, one might expect the narrative to represent him in a considerably sympathetic light. Why, then, is Waiyaki abandoned to the discipline of the Kiama by the conclusion of the novel? Why is there a strong suggestion that his lover, Nyambura, will be clitoridectomized or immolated? The unexpected turn of events at the conclusion of the novel may be explained by Ian Glenn’s remark: Clearly the situation and dilemma of the heroes [of Ngugi’s novels] is structurally related to that of the élite whose alienation is, paradoxically, their source of power. How are we to understand the persistent failure and sacrifice of the hero? Is it a resurgence in African writing of the colonial novelist’s theme of the tragedy of the educated African, the man of two worlds? In some sense, yes, it seems to me that the novels reflect the strain of this mediating position, this double alienation, and exonerate the hero by suggesting that the task of modernising his primordial attachments or satisfying the various allegiances is impossible, that the contradictions cannot be lived out. At the same time, in death as sacrifice, the

44   Ian Glenn, ‘Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Dilemmas of the Intellectual Elite in Africa’, p. 62. Glenn notes a fifth feature which does not inform my analysis.

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élite finds an ideal individualist gesture and intellectual act through which the opposites may be reconciled.45

Although the two central female characters in The River Between are not explicitly demarcated as intellectual figures, their mission school education and missionary father demarcate their class affinity with a wealthy, literate minority. It is clear that, like Waiyaki, these female characters respectively represent two poles of hybridity in the narrative: Muthoni is clitoridectomized and Christian, whereas Nyambura is uncircumcised and in love with a circumcised Gikuyu man. This construction offers each of the sisters a reconciliatory potential in the narrative, and yet this potential is negated by Muthoni’s death and Nyambura’s uncertain fate. The fates of both women are yoked into the heroic failure of their masculine counterpart, Waiyaki. I would suggest, in agreement with Glenn’s critical position, that The River Between plays out the possibilities and failures of a male intellectual consciousness attempting to be representative of an emergent nationhood. Ngugi’s reinscription of the myth of Waiyaki supports this latter contention. The ‘real’ or ‘historical’ Waiyaki entered into a treaty with Lord Lugard,46 then later initiated resistance against the British. He was captured and killed (allegedly by being buried upside down while still alive). Nationalist historians depict Waiyaki as an early Gikuyu martyr and a forerunner of nationalist resistance to colonial domination. Mbugua Njama’s pamphlet,47 which Ngugi translated into English, is a representative example of this trend. However, Cora Ann Presley labels Waiyaki ‘an early collaborator’.48 More importantly, she notes, ‘Kikuyu oral tradition maintains that Waiyaki was an ambitious young man from a poor lineage who believed he could become a man of status, wealth and authority by working with the Europeans.’49 I would not like to argue for either the educated nationalist élite’s or the illiterate peasantry’s representations of Waiyaki. Rather, 45

  Ian Glenn, ‘Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Dilemmas of the Intellectual Elite in Africa’, p. 63. 46   Lord Frederick John Dealtry Lugard was a former military man who ‘spent four decisive years in East Africa (1888–92)’ (see Carol Sicherman, Making of A Rebel, pp. 147–8) during which he established the first British East Africa Company station in Kikuyuland (with Waiyaki’s agreement) and urged the inclusion of Uganda into the British Empire. Lugard’s other achievements include bringing Nigeria under British Administration (1895–1902) and acting as the Nigerian Governor General (1912–19). Lugard was the architect of the British policy of Indirect Rule in Nigeria. In a beautiful irony, Kenyatta’s anthropological studies under Malinowski in London (1936), which led to the publication of Facing Mount Kenya, were completed with the assistance of a scholarship from the International African Institute, chaired by Lugard (see Guy Arnold, Kenyatta and the Politics of Kenya, p. 28). 47  See Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, pp. 350–55. 48  Cora Ann Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1992), p. 9. 49  Cora Ann Presley, Kikuyu Women, p. 63.

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I would read the differences between the two versions as an allegory of the crisis of representativeness that confronts Ngugi as an African intellectual, removed from his constituent class by an education which is as disabling in political terms as it is enabling in socio-economic terms. Of course, the Waiyaki of The River Between is not the unqualified hero and martyr of nationalist accounts, but he is always partially inscribed by the Waiyaki of myth. This may be seen in the passage that relates to the Second Birth: ‘The women went on shouting but Waiyaki did not see them now. Their voices were a distant buzz like another he had heard in a dream when a swarm of bees came to attack him.’50 Two points are important here. Firstly, the dream of the bees is a proleptic moment in the narrative; it prefigures the immolation of Waiyaki and Nyambura and thus enhances the suggestion that Waiyaki is a prophet chosen by the Gikuyu gods to lead his people. Secondly, it resonates with a moment of divine intervention in the myth of Waiyaki. Waiyaki has been captured and is being taken to the coast by British soldiers. A group of warriors is following them in order to free Waiyaki by force: It is very significant that there were many guards with him, and when they were travelling … near Kabete a beehive, which no one had touched, fell from a tree, and the bees burst out and attacked the people who were guarding Waiyaki. The warriors wanted to fight; now they were being helped by the bees.51

There is an obvious difference in the function of the bees in the two stories. In the myth, they protect Waiyaki. In the novel, they attack him. Ngugi’s novel reinscribes the myth in order to act out the idealistic scenario of the individual sacrifice/martyrdom of the hero. It is a gesture that reconciles Ngugi’s position with that of the illiterate peasantry (as Glenn suggests) and it accords with Ngugi’s Christian world view at the time of writing − the sacrificial victim or messiah reunites the collective. Given that Ngugi’s novel broadly follows Kenyatta’s anthropological defence of circumcision in Facing Mount Kenya, there is a very revealing disparity between the two accounts of the Second Birth: His mother sat near the fireplace in her hut as if in labour. Waiyaki sat between her thighs. A thin cord taken from a slaughtered goat and tied to his mother represented the umbilical cord. A woman, old enough to be a midwife, came and cut the cord.52

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 12.   Mbugua Njama, quoted in Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 352. 52   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between, p. 12. 50

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[The] gut is cut in a long ribbon, and while the initiates stand in one group close together the ribbon encircles them, being tied so as to cover the navel of those on the outside of the circle. They stand in position for a few minutes; then the midwife comes along with a razor dipped in sheep’s blood and cuts the ribbon in two. This symbolizes the cutting of the umbilical cord at birth. This is done to express the rebirth of the initiate.53

Ngugi reinscribes the Second Birth in two ways here. Firstly, it takes place before Waiyaki’s circumcision, rather than afterwards (as in Kenyatta’s account). Secondly, Ngugi’s account deals − revealingly − with an individual, rather than with a collective. Ngugi’s text is marked by individualism (which, in turn, evidences a self-interested account of Gikuyu culture and resistance). Further, this account of the Second Birth defines Ngugi’s version of Kenyan history as a history of individuals, heroes and martyrs. The Early Plays and Essays Ngugi’s earliest plays and essays repeat this patterning of the political leader as an exemplary individual riven by social contradiction. One might take as an example The Black Hermit, whose title is akin to the original title Ngugi had in mind for The River Between, The Black Messiah. The play’s eponymous black hermit, Remi, is living in the city in exile from his rural community. He has taken a white girlfriend (Jane) and has thus abandoned his wife (Thoni) whose marriage to him was arranged after the death of her first husband, Remi’s brother. In the village, separate delegations are sent by the community elders and the Christian pastor to persuade Remi to return home to his mother and his community, and to put his education to use by taking up the mantle of political and religious leadership. As an educated figure representing the vicarious ambitions of his entire community, Remi has been elected to destiny. The double imperative that confronts him is that he is expected both to serve and to save, but this imperative emerges from different constituencies within the community – the elders and the pastor. It is fairly clear that the community here is divided along ethnic-traditionalist and Christian lines, much as the community is in The River Between. This sense of division is structurally repeated in Remi’s split loyalties to two different women, the modern and urban Jane of his present, and the long-suffering and rural Thoni of his past. These two women are located respectively in the loaded geographies of ‘country’ and ‘city’ that give the first two acts their titles. As such, Thoni and Jane symbolically contribute to a uterine social organization in the play – their femininity assists in organizing the community’s political stakes. Of course, like Waiyaki in The River Between, Remi is destined to lose both of his prospective lovers as a result of the contradictions in his position. Jane leaves him when she   Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 150.

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discovers that he is already married, and Thoni commits suicide after she overhears him claiming that he was wrong to marry a woman who he believes never loved him. Remi is unable to reconcile the responsibilities to his community with a future with Jane, and he is unable to reconcile the communal customs – via which Thoni has become his wife – with his modernizing vision. Political leadership, as it expresses itself in the educated and idealistic Remi, is a cult of youth and its failures are marked by sexual crisis. Although Jane and Thoni are given articulate dialogue and both criticize the way in which Remi’s sense of his mission removes him from the very constituencies he would claim, both are placed in a subsidiary relation to him. Thoni, in particular, claims that she ‘can’t do without a husband’54 or a child of her own to make her ‘feel a new self’55 and that she would rather die than have to find a replacement for Remi. Likewise, Nyobi, Remi’s mother, locates social renewal in their marriage and in Thoni’s childbearing capacities, which are figured in terms of a seedling bearing fruit.56 Remi himself claims that ‘a man’s public life is given meaning only by the stability of his private life’.57 In short, all of the major characters in The Black Hermit equate the domestic and the political in ways that are consistent with Ngugi’s early fictional works. Indeed, one elder goes as far as to call Remi a ‘husband to all the land’,58 repeating familiar tropes from the early novels that collapse femininity into the landscape. The Black Hermit and The River Between are consistent with Ngugi’s analysis of post-Independence society at this point in his development. For Ngugi, the political independence of Kenya carries with it the requirement of a unifying national ideal that will circumvent tribal-ethnic, class and religious divisions and form the basis for a broader community. In 1962, he argues in an essay titled ‘Kenya: The Two Rifts’ that Kenya exhibits two rifts. Firstly, there is a vertical rift in Kenya’s entrenched racial divisions, with the Asian struggling for political equality with the European, and the African struggling for a better political and economic dispensation.59 This rift is compounded by tribal conflicts and suspicions among Africans. Secondly, Kenya exhibits a horizontal rift in the division of the élite from the ‘common mass of the people’.60 Ngugi’s argument is that these two rifts need to be overcome by a ‘wider concept of human association … not of different tribal entities, but of individuals, free to journey to those heights of which they are capable’.61 Additionally, he advises that the ‘traditional African concept of the community should not be forgotten in our rush for western culture and political 54

    56   57   58   59   60   61   55

James Ngugi, The Black Hermit (London: Heinemann, 1972 [1968]), p. 3. James Ngugi, The Black Hermit, p. 3. James Ngugi, The Black Hermit, p. 19. James Ngugi, The Black Hermit, p. 41. James Ngugi, The Black Hermit, p. 39. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 23. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 24. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 24.

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institutions’ because the individual ‘finds the fullest development of his personality when he is working in and for the community’.62 However, as the conclusion of The Black Hermit indicates, the difficult double bind in such worthy ideals is how to confront ‘Tribe and Custom’ without destroying the personal relationships that constitute community.63 A few points should be made here. Firstly, it is clear that Ngugi does not quite manage to resolve the tension between individual self-actualization and communal responsibility in his early essays, or in his early fictional and theatrical output. Rather, the conflicting claims of the personal and the political are dramatized in figures such as Waiyaki or Remi. Secondly, the two ridges in The River Between approximate the two rifts that Ngugi sees at work in Kenya. In this sense, the novel spatializes politics, just as The Black Hermit does in the titles of its first two acts: ‘The Country’ and ‘The City’. The novel and the play both submit the unifying ideals of Remi’s African nationalism or Omange’s worker solidarity to the differentiations of national space. These differentiations of national space are feminized, so that Thoni represents ethnically derived ‘tradition’ in Kenyan rural communities, while Jane represents urban modernity. What allows such social contradictions to be placed in encounter is the mobility that the female subject gains through the medium of exogamous exchange. In other words, by weighing up his marital destiny between Thoni and Jane, Remi places a larger set of symbolic affiliations into a meaningful social relation. The irreconcilable differences at work within ‘a wider concept of human association’ also form a key concern of Ngugi’s second collection of plays, This Time Tomorrow (1970). The collection comprises the plays The Rebels, The Wound in the Heart and the eponymous This Time Tomorrow. The first play, The Rebels, was performed in 1961 at a Makerere University Interhall Competition and was broadcast a year later on the Ugandan Broadcasting Service.64 Unsurprisingly, given its origins in Uganda, it tells the story of Charles, an intellectual returning to his community with a Ugandan fiancée, Mary. Unbeknownst to Charles, his father has arranged for the Chief’s daughter, Mumbi, to marry Charles upon his return from university. Nguru, Charles’ father, rejects Mary because she is Ugandan and, crucially, because she is not clitoridectomized.65 Charles is unable to stand up to his father and he assents to Nguru’s wish that he should marry Mumbi – partly out of a sense of duty and obligation to his community for having received an education. As a result, Mary leaves him. Meanwhile, Mumbi, who has heard of Mary, runs away and is drowned while trying to cross a river. This action is framed by the narrative of a stranger who has known Nguru as a younger man in his home community of Murang’a. Nguru carries a curse for marrying a woman who is   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 25.   James Ngugi, The Black Hermit, p. 76. 64  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 5. 65   James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1970), pp. 8–10. 62 63

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unclean (‘with thahu’) and for not attending his father on his deathbed, and, as a result, Nguru’s own children are destined to defy him. What is interesting in the play is the tussle between Christian and Gikuyu traditional modes of belief, but this is also a tussle between the two different economies at stake in arranged and companionate marriages. This tussle is symbolically played out in the names of Charles’s fiancées, Mary (whose father is a clergyman) and Mumbi (whose father is the Chief). These two women are ideological daughters, and both ultimately reject Charles. In this sense, Charles’s class alienation from his community by virtue of his education is filtered through constructions of femininity. By the end of the play, Mary has left and Mumbi is dead. This distribution of fate might at first seem to privilege Mary’s education and Christianity over Mumbi’s significance to custom and community, and yet the ending is more equivocal than this. Charles recognizes the failures in his community’s ‘blind adherence to custom’,66 but he also recognizes that he has not been strong enough to adhere to his convictions. After Charles leaves, Nguru is made to see the failure of his authority. And yet the fulfilment of the curse from Nguru’s past in Murang’a – for marrying a woman with thahu (uncleanliness) and for disobeying and dishonouring his father – reinstates an older form of traditional, Oedipal authority that is laden with gender determinants. The stranger may proclaim of Nguru, ‘[t]he last of the tribe falls and with him, a generation’,67 but the prophetic force of the past and its traditions is still left in place. What Ngugi is modelling in this play (as with the figures of Chege and the historical Waiyaki in The River Between) is a social model in which the political inefficacy of Gikuyu tradition is compensated for by its predictive power. In this ambivalent twist, the past is never quite dispensed with. Its authority lingers on in the unforeseen consequences of prophecy. The returning Mau Mau detainee of The Wound in the Heart, Ruhiu, repeats the gender patterning we have noticed at work in The Rebels. Once home, Ruhiu greets his mother as ‘mother of our Africa and of the black race’ and he greets the elders as ‘my fathers’.68 There is a repetition here of the burden of exemplification that we have seen at work in Weep Not, Child – Ruhiu’s mother, Wangari, is imagined here to exemplify all of Africa and its diasporas. Similar forms of objectification appear elsewhere in the play. Ruhiu describes his unnamed wife, who is given no dialogue in the play, as ‘a great possession’.69 When he discovers that she has been raped in his absence and has borne a child, Ruhiu goes on to claim: I had beaten the white man? He has stabbed me in the heart. And yet – oh – couldn’t someone prevent the white man, the cursed District Officer, from carrying her? I would have borne all. But this! this! oh, a child by a white man,

66

    68   69   67

James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 15. James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 16. James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 23. James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 25.

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my enemy? God, you have in the past let him seize our property and now he takes away our women.70

We see in this dialogue a familiar comparison between women and property, and it seems clear that Ruhiu sees the child of interracial rape as the real injury, not the rape itself. The theme of wounding is associated with mixed-race children, as in Weep Not, Child, and it is likewise extended to the land. We are told that the ‘whole dark Emergency has left [an] incurable wound in the country, which might go on bleeding for a long time’.71 The Wound in the Heart is thus a meditation on the capacity for national trauma to play itself out in multiple ways in the lives of ordinary people; a point underscored by the deaths of both Ruhiu and his wife at the end of the play. Interestingly, we see a development of Ngugi’s concern with the lingering past, especially in Ruhiu’s initial debate with the elders. Although the elders encourage Ruhiu to ‘forget the past and look only for a new day tomorrow’, he argues that there ‘is no tomorrow without yesterday’.72 In this sense, The Wound in the Heart broaches wider debates in Kenyan public life in the aftermath of the Mau Mau war. Jomo Kenyatta famously advocated forgetting the divisive past in order to advance the project of national unity and reconciliation.73 Ngugi’s fictional works, especially A Grain of Wheat and Matigari, advocate a different approach – remembering the traumas and betrayals of the past in order to move on and to ensure that the heroic participants in Kenyan anti-colonial resistance might realize the economic and political gains for which they fought. The Wound in the Heart perhaps fails to resolve its own impulses to remember the past, since the personal and political injuries towards which it gestures become compounded when they are placed in dialogue with one another. In Wangari’s decision to care for the child after losing her son and her daughter-in-law, the play ends on a note of resignation that precludes the possibility of justice. This Time Tomorrow tells the story of a mother and daughter, Njango and Wanjiro, which unfolds while the shanty town in which they live is scheduled for demolition. In an ironic twist, both women have been evicted from their homes during the Mau Mau war and are about to have the same fate visited upon them by the post-Independence authorities. Njango refuses to permit Wanjiro to see her boyfriend, Asinjo, because he is ‘not of [her] tribe’.74 This refusal replays the ethnic divisions at work in The Rebels and it poses a limit to the ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’75 that a national consciousness requires. Wanjiro’s aspiration to be   James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 26.   James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 21. 72   James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 24. 73   See Patrick Williams, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, pp. 70, 72–3. 74   James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 45. 75   Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2002 [1983]), p. 7. 70

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‘like a European lady’76 motivates her decision to leave the settlement in order to be with Asinjo, whose job as a taxi driver she hopes will provide her with the luxuries she desires. This aspiration, of course, replaces national consciousness with cross-racial identification, and the legacy of colonial racism will ensure that Asinjo’s aspiration to be like a European lady cannot truly be realized in good faith.77 Interestingly, the ‘stranger’, an unnamed political activist who mobilizes the community against their forced removal, is a figure who provides at least the possibility of this horizontal comradeship in place of the informal settlement’s faceto-face relations. As in The Rebels, the inclusion of ‘the stranger’ as a character in This Time Tomorrow might be viewed as a device that opens localized communal relations to the broader possibilities of national consciousness, even if his vision fails to inspire communal solidarity in the face of violent police repression. Of course, the broader notion of a national consciousness is forestalled by the journalist’s sensationalist framing of the tinsmith’s and the shoemaker’s individual stories78 and the assimilation of these complex personal histories into the national print media’s stock of saleable clichés. However, the female characters occupy an asymmetrical position in relation to the stranger and to the broader possibilities he represents. Njango notices that the stranger’s eyes remind her of her man,79 and there are strong suggestions that the two men have parallel histories in joining Mau Mau and enduring detention, although Njango’s husband has been reported killed. Likewise, Wanjiro notices that ‘Asinjo has eyes like the stranger’.80 In effect, then, the political visionary is constructed like a sexual consort to the female heroines of this play. These women identify with politics and national consciousness primarily in their sexual and domestic capacities, rather than via more direct modes of belief and commitment. The net effect of this identification is that these women are placed at a remove from the collective identity that a national consciousness inspires. They experience this collective national identity via the mediatory agency of their male partners. As the bulldozers move in, Njango’s final words – ‘If only we could stand together’81 – therefore suggest the failure of communal solidarity, but simultaneously invoke the more immediate dissolution of her family now that Wanjiro has left her to live with Asinjo. Chronologically and thematically, the three plays collected in This Time Tomorrow are fascinating. Chronologically, they span the period 1961–70, which means that their journey from performance to publication brackets the period   James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 46.   Simon Gikandi has identified the potential for horizontal comradeship at work in the inter-ethnic relationship in The Rebels: ‘by his willingness to marry a girl from another ethnic group, Charles is performing the drama of nationhood and questioning old axioms of social organization.’ Simon Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 172. 78   James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, pp. 41–4. 79   James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 48. 80   James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 34. 81   James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 50. 76

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in which Ngugi wrote his first three novels. Thematically, the first play (The Rebels, 1961) maps on to the concern with an educated hero defying his father in Weep Not, Child and the concern with circumcision in The River Between. The second play (The Wound in the Heart, 1962) contains the heroic Ruhiu, who has ‘preached’ victory in the Mau Mau struggle82 after leaving school and who is detained. He returns to find that his wife has been raped and has borne a child. This storyline maps on to the Gikonyo–Mumbi, the Kihika and the Dr Lynd– Koinandu subplots of A Grain of Wheat. The third play (This Time Tomorrow, 1967) focuses on the forced removal of a community living in an urban shanty town. Their delegation to the City Council and the eventual bulldozing of the settlement anticipates the delegation to the MP and the razing of old Ilmorog in Petals of Blood. These three plays exhibit in some limited respects a similarity of focus to Ngugi’s first four novels, and as such they are a very good indication of how his disillusionment with post-Independence Kenya (already in evidence in A Grain of Wheat) gathers pace in the late 1960s. However, although the plays may be said to measure Ngugi’s increasing disillusionment with the project of Kenyan nationalism, their representations of gender do not develop significantly beyond Kenyan nationalism’s emphasis upon a uterine social organization. In other words, there is a residual nostalgia for nationalism’s mobilization of gender at work in the plays. Most tellingly, the collection’s title, This Time Tomorrow, is not only inspired by Njango’s question as the bulldozers move in to raze her informal settlement: ‘Where shall I be, this time tomorrow?’83 It is not widely known that ‘This time tomorrow’ is also a phrase from a circumcision song, which contains the words ‘Ruciu ta riu ruiru hui / Ndi kamwana gatemete ndaka ruiru hui (This time tomorrow / I will be a man)’.84 In my view, there are unconscious echoes of the Kenyan circumcision debate running through this collection of plays, which should signal to us the importance of the issues contained in The River Between for the later development of Ngugi’s fiction. Clitoridectomy and Contemporary Kenya We have seen in The River Between that Ngugi rewrites aspects of circumcision and Gikuyu myth in accordance with his position within the intellectual élite. Despite the discrepancies that the novel’s interested accounts of circumcision involve, there is also a sense in which The River Between leaves intact the gender disparities produced by circumcision and the nationalist ideologies that the Kenyan circumcision debate first enabled. The effacement of clitoral desire is crucial to such nationalist ideologies, since their representations of women   James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 19.   James Ngugi, This Time Tomorrow, p. 50. 84   Mary W. Wanyoike, Wangu wa Makeri (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2002), p. 6. 82

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rely fundamentally upon the iconography of motherhood. In her analysis of The River Between, Tobe Levin locates the sociocultural basis for clitoridectomy in a masculine fear of clitoral power. In an even-handed way, Levin highlights Ngugi’s ironic juxtaposition of Gikuyu and Christian religious belief: Christianity’s failure is perhaps of far greater concern to the author than the obviously reactionary stance of the Kiama. … One needs little maturity to doubt the credibility of an organization condemning clitoridectomy but espousing belief in a virgin birth. In fact, concerning sexual matters, the tribe appears to be infinitely more sophisticated than the Christians. For example, the clitoris is at least acknowledged by the former (being too powerful, it is removed), while the organ has been treated by western ideology as though it didn’t exist.85

Levin also argues that clitoridectomy serves to produce docile wives. The ritual enables Gikuyu culture to appropriate the female desire that threatens to introduce social disorder. Equally, in the Kenya of 1929, the female body is appropriated for the production of manpower, which the ‘postcolonial’ state in embryo requires in order to be born. In terms of this dynamic, Gikuyu women’s bodies become the baby factories that service culture. There are resonances of this appropriation in Ngugi’s subsequent novel, A Grain of Wheat. At the conclusion of this novel, Gikonyo envisages a pregnant Mumbi. In Gikuyu mythology, Mumbi is the mother of the Gikuyu community, and Mumbi’s (the character’s) pregnancy presages the birth of a new Kenya. Thus, Mumbi is situated on either side of the present − as part of a mythical past and an uncertain future − and is therefore excluded from history. She only achieves historical presence once she has been inseminated by her male counterpart.86 If we wish to interrogate Ngugi’s production of ‘woman’ as a sign, we may trace many of his later heroines back to the production of women in the circumcision debate. Gikuyu nationalism took shape around the issue of clitoridectomy. At this juncture in Kenyan history, the Gikuyu female body became a metaphor for the social composition of the state. To be uncircumcised was to uphold the Christiancolonialist establishment and to be clitoridectomized was to support the institution of an independent Kenya, purified of colonial influences and controlled and peopled by Africans. The role of Gikuyu women in the debate was productive inasmuch as they helped to initiate the resistance that would later topple the colonial order, but it was a role that has proven to be expensive in retrospect. Immediately after 85   Tobe Levin, ‘Women as Scapegoats of Culture and Cult: An Activist’s View of Female Circumcision in Ngugi’s The River Between’ in Carol Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves (eds), Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1986), p. 214. 86   Referring to Ngugi’s earliest short story ‘Mugumo’, Simon Gikandi states that reproduction ‘is justified by its capacity to give life to the new nation’. Simon Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 44.

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Independence, Kenyatta’s first legislative act was to abolish the prohibition on clitoridectomy. Levin comments on the increasing prevalence of the operation in latter-day Kenya. She remarks that there has been: … an accelerating neglect of the rite accompanied by the spread of excision performed in hospitals on girls at increasingly younger ages, for whom the amputation is totally divorced from any kind of moral, ethical or even sexeducational dimension. The death of 14 young girls in 1983 led to the passage of an edict against the operations in Kenya. At the same time, law without the force of custom remains impotent …87

Levin’s claims are supported by the statistics in one available study of clitoridectomy in Kenya, which claims that 4.74 million of the 7.9 million women in Kenya in 1985 had undergone clitoridectomy − a figure of roughly 60 per cent.88 Conclusion If this trend has continued unchecked, then it would appear that the Gikuyu patriarchy is producing disciplined bodies as effectively as it ever has. Furthermore, the only difference between the Kenya of today and the Kenya of the 1930s would be that the patriarch now has Western medical technology at his disposal. I am not claiming that Ngugi shares complicity in these atrocities, but rather that his consistent and idealistic equation of the female character’s body with the body of the state contains problematic implications for Kenyan women, and does not afford them the emancipation or the agency that it initially appears to promise.89 In fairness, the recent publication of a Kenyan school textbook edition of The River Between reportedly expunges the clitoridectomy debate entirely from its plot. This revision – presumably authorized by Ngugi – might be construed as consistent with the muting of sexual issues for a young readership, and it is also consistent with the journey towards feminist consciousness that we shall see that Ngugi has undertaken and completed in his most recent novel, Wizard of the Crow. Such revisions of the basis of anti-colonial struggle cannot, however, be consistent with Kenyan history. Recent changes notwithstanding, Ngugi’s third novel, A Grain of Wheat, most certainly entertains the forms of symbolic discipline and material dispossession that clitoridectomy instituted. As we shall see in the Chapter 4, A Grain of Wheat emphasizes an iconographic motherhood and a reproductive, 87

  Tobe Levin, ‘Women as Scapegoats of Culture and Cult’, p. 216.   Leonard Kouba and Judith Muasher, ‘Female Circumcision in Africa: An Overview’, African Studies Review, 28:1 (March 1985), p. 99. 89   Regarding solutions for Gikuyu women, Levin notes that one activist (Awa Thiam) has gone as far as to suggest radical lesbianism for gender-oppressed African women. Tobe Levin, ‘Women as Scapegoats of Culture and Cult’, p. 220. 88

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rather than a desiring, female subject. By symbolically yoking women’s bodies and identities to motherhood, A Grain of Wheat partially attempts to erase the possibility of female forms of revolutionary agency and, with it, the possibility of a female national subject. In order to find those forms of female revolutionary agency, we need to turn to the history of Mau Mau. As the reader will see presently in the chapter that follows, Ngugi is alert to Mau Mau’s subversive political impact and he measures this impact in his collection of short stories, Secret Lives. However, he frames the insurgency in masculine terms in order to stage a contestatory discourse between colonizer and colonized.

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Chapter 3

The Landscape of Insurgency There is a tendency to think of colonial discourse and its language of stereotype as instilling a monolithic system of power and perception that buttresses the imperialist project. But in the Kenyan Mau Mau Emergency (1952–60), we witness the full onslaught of colonial stereotype and racist iconography being brought to bear on a thing that did not exist, in order to conceptualize it in terms that did not apply, and to meet it with a brutality as overwhelmingly disproportionate as it was misdirected. In an expanded definition, ‘Mau Mau’ – as settler fantasy, as colonial discourse or imperial military strategy – is only readable in terms of exaggeration or distortion, excess or oversight. The severity of the settlers’ response to a threat that they themselves had largely manufactured ultimately rendered not only their counter-insurgency tactics but also the entire apparatus of Kenyan colonial rule utterly indefensible. Hence, far from shoring up white control of Kenya, or disciplining its unruly antagonists, the colonial discourses that produced ‘Mau Mau’ as an object of knowledge became hindrances in the war on the insurgents, and ultimately proved fatal to the imperialist project in its Kenyan manifestation. In the Mau Mau period, British colonialism in Kenya was finally subdued by its own neurotic excesses. Militarily, Mau Mau failed. Psychologically, Mau Mau was an incontestable force that continues to occupy an unsettling or disturbing place in the European and white African imagination. Significantly, the term ‘Mau Mau’ was a chimera, a pure figment of the settler imagination. Constituted by and existing only within colonial discourse, ‘Mau Mau’ cannot credibly be made to fit into the Gikuyu linguistic code. Indeed, the insurgents never called themselves ‘Mau Mau’. Hence, all attempts to translate or define ‘Mau Mau’ – and there have been many – are destined to fail. ‘Mau Mau’ refers to an intransigent absence since the term is symbolically indeterminate. It is remarkable that so many of the received etymologies of the term rely upon notions of linguistic slippage, in which ‘Mau Mau’ was a product of letter transposition, a settler misprision of Gikuyu onomatopoeia, an Anglicization of the Gikuyu for oath (‘muma’), a 

  Despite popular myth and colonial propaganda to the contrary, Mau Mau killed a mere 32 European civilians. The Emergency death toll for Gikuyu civilians may well be in excess of 1,000 times that figure.    David Maughan-Brown, Land, Freedom and Fiction, p. 260.   For a list of some of the names used by the insurgents themselves, see Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within: An Analysis of Kenya’s Peasant Revolt (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), pp. 54–5.

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Maasai’s mispronunciation of ‘muma’, a Gikuyu term for non-specific objects (a ‘thingamajig’), a Swahili acronym, an English acronym reversed, an allusion to Chairman Mao, a name derived from the Mau Forest in the Maasai region, or a transcription of the last cries of a sacred wild cat killed by an unthinking white farmer. This linguistic slippage, this referential vertigo, meant that it was impossible for the Kenyan settler to speak of ‘Mau Mau’ from a position of any authority. Every attempt to master Mau Mau in discourse gave way to, or even instilled, the authority and mastery of the Other. In ‘Mau Mau’, the settlers became ‘unsettled,’ and their relationship to place, space and landscape entered a phase of crisis. Losing Ground In response to Mau Mau’s destabilization of the colonizer’s relationship to colonial space, the British military introduced a programme which aimed at the complete reordering of African space. The colonizer’s production of the Kenyan landscape during the Emergency period evidences an attempt to isolate Mau Mau in the landscape, to contain it within certain boundaries or beyond impermeable barriers – to define its dimensions in discourse, to locate it within spatial parameters, and thereby to eliminate it. If the colonizer conceived of Mau Mau as an atavistic and unpredictable insurgency, then the military strategies (of detection, containment, infiltration, detention, torture and the forced removals of vast swathes of the population from their homes) index an attempt by the colonial government to    The etymologies of ‘Mau Mau’ are listed by Carol Sicherman, The Making of a Rebel, pp. 214–15; Robert Edgerton, Mau Mau: An African Crucible (New York: Ballantine, 1989), pp. 56–7; Credo Mutwa, My People: The Writings of a Zulu Witchdoctor (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 175; and Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, pp. 53–4.    Leading on from this point, the etymologies ascribed uncritically to ‘Mau Mau’ in historical accounts point towards the efforts of both colonial and African historians to appropriate the term for either the colonial or Gikuyu nationalist constructions of the insurgency. These historians attempt to produce the Mau Mau insurgent as an homogeneous historical subject. As such, the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army, with its heterogeneous – and, at times, divided or discontinuous – membership, aims and strategies, is almost invariably recuperated in terms of a colonial or nationalist narrative. The proper name ‘Mau Mau’ is a site of contested desires and interests in the colonial social matrix. In addition, it is a term whose paleonomy – which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak glosses as ‘the charge which words carry on their shoulders’ in Sarah Harasym (ed.), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 25 – overwhelmingly locates and narrates the historian who uses it. I have opted to retain the term ‘Mau Mau’ because I am overtly engaged with its discursive dimensions, but also because I believe that the insurgents themselves are better represented via a conscious misnomer (‘Mau Mau’) than an appropriated silence (‘the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army’).   See C. T. Stoneham, Mau Mau (London: Museum Press, 1953), pp. 61–2.

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produce a spatial knowledge of Mau Mau, and thereby to restore to itself sovereign control of the landscape. In all of its aspects, this spatial knowledge relied fundamentally upon technologies of the visible to accomplish its aims. Unfortunately, colonial military strategy was premised upon stereotypical assumptions of ‘the African’, so that Mau Mau was typically associated in the settler mind with the bestial, the occult and the primordial. As a result, what the colonial forces set out to find impeded what they were actually able to see. Accordingly, the Kenyan administration sought to render Mau Mau visible by containing it within the ‘wild spaces’ of the forests, so that the civilian areas occupied by supposedly docile and loyal Gikuyu subjects could remain ‘sanitized domestic spaces’ uncontaminated by Mau Mau’s pernicious influence. The colonial caricatures of the insurgency could only be emplotted on the landscape by imposing the most horrific brutality upon the Kenyan population. If the colonial government sought to produce a spatial taxonomy of Mau Mau, then the borders between the artificial categories it imposed had to be policed with brute force, with civilians bearing the brunt of military whim. In other words, the landscape had to be inscribed with the violence of the coloniser’s narrative of self-legitimation. Colonial military strategy was articulated throughout the 1952–60 period in five distinct phases. Firstly, there was Operation Jock Scott (1952), in which the leaders of the Kenya African Union were arrested and detained. Secondly, the Rehabilitation programme was introduced (1953–59), in which Mau Mau suspects were detained in concentration camps until confessing the oath, after which they graduated through successive camps (the ‘pipe-line’) until they were considered to be innocuous enough for release. Confessions were believed to ‘cure’ the prisoner’s    There were severe restrictions on the movement and employment of Gikuyu, Embu and Meru people. See Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 86–7, 90–91.    Incidentally, during the Emergency, the settlers’ pet name for the Gikuyu was ‘Nugu’, or ‘baboon’. See Robert Edgerton, Mau Mau, p. 162. Edgerton also records that the term ‘Mickeys’ (from ‘Mickey Mouse’) was used by British and Loyalist forces to describe Mau Mau. See Mau Mau, pp. 151–6. Edgerton comments on the British Army in Kenya, ‘Most of these officers and men had left Britain with firm convictions about the racial superiority of whites … and their service overseas in places like Egypt, Cyprus, Palestine, and Malaya had only confirmed for them that “wogs” and “niggers” were a lower form of life.’ See Mau Mau, p. 165. The ferocity of the British Army’s attacks on and reprisals against Mau Mau (including civilians) suggests that these experienced soldiers were in no mood to humour uncooperative natives. Despite its overt resonances in Disney lore, the use of the term ‘Mickeys’ may also have displaced an unconscious animosity towards ‘Micks’ (the Irish) on to Mau Mau and the Gikuyu. Expanding on this theme, the Kenyan conflict may have concentrated a number of post-imperial resentments, and its brutal moments may have provided psychological compensation for earlier imperial losses – such as Egyptian (1922), Irish (1922) and Indian independence (1947), and the establishment of the Irish Republic (1949).   For one example among many, see C. T. Stoneham, Mau Mau, p. 27.

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pathological political sympathies and were extracted using inducements (such as prostitutes), brainwashing, propaganda, hard labour and, if all else failed, beatings and torture. Significantly, the treatment of prisoners in the camps by their guards and superintendents was as depraved as anything the settlers had claimed in regard to Mau Mau atrocities: Electric shock was widely used, and so was fire. Women were choked and held under water; gun barrels, beer bottles, and even knives were thrust into their vaginas. Men had beer bottles thrust into their rectums, were dragged behind Land Rovers, whipped, burned and bayoneted. Their fingers were chopped off, and sometimes their testicles were crushed with pliers.10

The severity of the prisoners’ punishment regimes in the camps depended on whether they were classified ‘black’ (hardcore), ‘grey’ (Mau Mau supporters) or ‘white’ (clear or rehabilitated). Some 80,000 Gikuyu were detained in concentration camps, many without trial. Ultimately, the brutality of the Rehabilitation programme proved to be self-defeating. In Hola detention camp, 11 recalcitrant prisoners designated as ‘hardcore’ Mau Mau were beaten to death for refusing to work. After a settler cover-up was exposed and their political position in Kenya was revealed to be untenable, the British Parliament resolved to embark upon the path towards Kenyan independence. The third phase of colonial military strategy was Operation Anvil (1954), in which 25,000 men of the government’s forces surrounded Nairobi and searched it, sector by sector, for Mau Mau operatives. After being ‘screened’ by hooded informants and interrogated by the authorities, approximately 30,000 Nairobi Gikuyu were sent to detention camps.11 Fourthly, the Villagization programme of forced removals (1954–57) was implemented, which entailed the relocation of Gikuyu civilians to ‘safe’ villages (that is, surrounded by barbed wire and cut off from the forest by a trench 50 miles long, 10 feet deep and 16 feet wide, filled with barbed wire, sharpened stakes and booby traps), in order to minimize the contact between Mau Mau and its civilian wing. Almost all of the women in the villages were coerced into digging the trench that would limit Mau Mau’s access to supplies, food and ammunition. The settler administration espoused the preposterous hope that the Villagization and Land Consolidation programmes would ‘produce a harmonious society of prosperous villages and sturdy yeoman farmers immune to the appeals of political radicalism. In the end, the Emergency became an attempt to re-create the administration’s idealised image of the organic community of traditional England.’12 In other words, the colonial administration sought to produce in the landscape a civilian population that was domesticated, easily subjected to surveillance and utterly visible, because  Robert Edgerton, Mau Mau, p. 160.   Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, p. 86. 12   Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa – Violence and Ethnicity (Book Two) (London: James Currey, 1992), p. 254. 10

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community and landscape were essentially transcriptions of an English rural idyll. But ‘Old England’ was simulated at a terrible human cost, and over 250,000 people were removed from their homes in the forests or on the perimeters of the mountain ranges to villagized settlements.13 By early 1955, ‘over a million Gikuyu had been settled in these villages’,14 and Mau Mau operations in a given area led to communal punishments.15 Since Mau Mau was alleged to be hiding in Gikuyu gardens, crops were destroyed. In conjunction with forced labour and curfews, the colonial administration effectively instituted widespread famine among the civilian population by keeping communities from their fields where they might assist Mau Mau fighters,16 leading to an as yet unquantified civilian death toll.17 The fifth and final phase of colonial military strategy entailed Operations Hammer, Schlemozzle, Bullrush, Dante, Hannibal and First Flute (1955–56), in which the Aberdare forest was swept for insurgents. Some of the tactics employed against the forest fighters included using infrared technology to scan the forests and then bombing heat sources,18 or, in the colonizer’s more telling Conradian moments, shelling the edge of the forest randomly with light artillery at hourly intervals.19 The Villagization programme and the Rehabilitation programme fashioned the Emergency landscape in ways that reflected colonial constructions of Mau Mau. If Mau Mau issued from the adverse influence of the primordial and inscrutable African landscape, then the organization could be made visible by completely redefining space in the rural Kenyan countryside. If Mau Mau was a contaminant or a disease, then the body politic could be cured by quarantining the afflicted in concentration camps and removing the infection by tried and tested methods (torture, brutality). And if the good African was docile and domesticated, then this good African could be produced in the orderly space of the villagized settlements – and disciplined with industrious time-management and work regimes (curfews and forced labour). Of course, the boundaries that policed Kenyan subjectivities in the Emergency period could only be established by imposing overwhelming violence on a recalcitrant population. Much of this violence issued from legal and paralegal redefinitions of colonial space. For instance, a corridor 100 miles long and between one and three miles wide was established between the forests and the Gikuyu population. Huts, food stores and crops were burned and the inhabitants were evicted. The corridor and parts of the forest were made ‘Prohibited Areas’, where unauthorized Africans   Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 209.   Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, p. 90. 15   Marshall Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs: History, Memory, Politics (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1998), p. 156. 16  Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs, p. 159. 17   The food that was distributed was given in small quantities, to eliminate the sharing of rations with Mau Mau. See Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau (London: James Currey, 1987), p. 143. 18  Animal fatalities are not recorded. 19   Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 223. 13 14

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could be shot on sight.20 The majority of administrative districts in the Central and Rift Valley Provinces (the Gikuyu reserve) were made ‘Special Areas’, in which ‘a person failing to halt when challenged could be shot’.21 Under Emergency powers, this sanction also applied to ‘military installations, prisons and power stations in danger areas’ and thousands of African deaths resulted from this loophole in the law, along with the claims that the victims had been ‘trying to escape’.22 The topography of the Emergency period – with its restrictions on human movement, villagized settlements, fortifications, booby-trapped trenches, infrared scanning, concentration camps, torture chambers, no-go areas – dramatized an afflicted colonial psyche in the theatre of war. In other words, the Emergency landscape evidenced the way in which the political imagination of the settler asserted itself upon space. The Emergency period was marked by a colonial mythology of the domestic and familiar giving way to the demonic and treacherous, the hospitable and habitable giving way to the unhomely, the trusted houseservant metamorphosing inexplicably into the treacherous or crazed fanatic23 – as if the cultivated and civilized landscape of settler farms had been breached by the primordial landscape of the forests in which the insurgents sheltered,24 as if anti-colonial resistance could only be explained by pathologizing the ‘primitive or superstitious psychology’ of the African.25 For the settler, a primeval environment accounted for the African’s unpromising political and socio-economic destiny. Unsurprisingly, given the instability of colonial space and the pathologizing of Mau Mau’s political grievances, the colonial representation of Mau Mau relied heavily upon a rhetoric of contamination.26 To some extent, Mau Mau memoirs written by the insurgents   Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 211.   Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, p. 92; Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 211. 22   Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, pp. 92–3. 23   This mythology fuelled settler hysteria: ‘Farmers and their wives, even little children, were hacked to death by devils who up to the moment of their black treachery had been treated as loyal and trusted friends.’ See Christopher Wilson, Kenya’s Warning: The Challenge to White Supremacy in our British Colony (Nairobi: The English Press, 1954), p. 56. 24   ‘[Eric Bowyer’s farm] was no more than a mile from the forest, in whose depths wild beasts, and wilder men, might lurk …’ C. T. Stoneham, Mau Mau, p. 70. 25   ‘The Nairobi houseboy or Government clerk … may even be a devout Christian, but still the superstitious terrors imbibed with his mother’s milk will be lurking at the back of his consciousness, ready to creep forth for his undoing.’ Stoneham, Mau Mau, p. 141. 26   ‘At an election meeting at Londiani, Hubert Buxton, a retired District Commissioner, warned that virtually the whole Kikuyu tribe had been “contaminated” with Mau Mau.’ See David W. Throup, Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau (London: James Currey, 1987), p. 226. Early on, Michael Blundell, the leader of the white elected members of Kenya’s Legislative Council also warned of a ‘subversive organization which is like a disease, spreading through the Colony …’ See Legislative Council Debates, second series, 20 21

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themselves attest to the fact that the movement was able to infiltrate prohibited or sacrosanct spaces as part of its psychological weaponry and tactical capacity. For instance, when three of his men were captured, Brigadier Nyama Nduru (the nom de guerre of Paul Mahehu) ‘arranged to sweep the remand toilets of the High Court on the trial day, working as a uniformed City Council employee’.27 Nyama Nduru retained his broom and gave one of his three comrades – the principal defendant in the case – an overall and a bucket, and the two men walked out of the court undetected, with the result that the trial collapsed. On other occasions, disguised as a policeman and with an accomplice disguised as a servant, Nyama Nduru stole weapons from the private armoury of Governor Evelyn Baring and organised the theft of 39 rounds of ammunition from the home of Mr Edward Windley, the Chief Native Commissioner.28 Mau Mau’s relatively unhindered passage across the landscape, and the ease with which it trespassed in the citadels of colonial power, is a direct result of the discourse that yoked the insurgency to narratives of the crazed fanatic or the Gikuyu possessed by demonic tribal oaths.29 In fact, Mau Mau’s mobility – and in some cases, its continuing organizational survival – relied heavily upon covert support from a large, dormant civilian wing, and extensive collaboration by black colonial officials, ‘loyal’ houseservants, the King’s African Rifles,30 and the loyalist, paramilitary homeguards. Only the settler truly respected the battle lines that had been drawn. As the example of Nyama Nduru demonstrates, Mau Mau evaded detection by performing identities and subjectivities that went unchecked in the colonial landscape: it was only because the settler was on the lookout for a dangerous intruder that a Mau Mau raider was able to disguise himself as a compliant houseservant or a protective policeman. It was only because the settler sought an unruly antagonist that the Mau Mau prisoner could walk unnoticed to his freedom, dressed as a prison warder.31 Moreover, it was only because the Mau Mau operative was officially an ethnic Gikuyu that the Mau Mau escapee could perform Somali ethnicity (by donning a turban, robe and false beard) with impunity vol. xlviii, 1952, first session, second sitting, 10 July 1952, cols. 172–8; and 11 July 1952, cols. 281–349, quoted in David W. Throup, Economic and Social Origins, p. 225. 27   Waruhiu Itote (General China), ‘Mau Mau’ General (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967), p. 114. 28  Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, pp. 112–13. I view this theft as an example of what I would call a ‘rhetoric of hostile proximity’ employed in Mau Mau’s psychological warfare. 29   Edgerton notes that, after the declaration of the Emergency, Michael Blundell gave Mau Mau fighters the derogatory label of ‘debased creatures of the forest’, but that as the war took its toll upon the remaining fighters in the latter stages of the conflict, the fighters truly became ‘creatures of the forest’ in their resourceful survival of hardship. See Robert Edgerton, Mau Mau, pp. 107, 138. 30  See Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, p. 106. 31   See Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, p. 116.

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while running from the law,32 or the warrior pass undetected by braiding his hair in the fashion favoured by the Maasai.33 In short, official colonial knowledges of what Mau Mau was – their reductive tableaux of the human figure in colonial space34 – enabled many of the mutinous successes that Mau Mau achieved. Gaining Ground By contrast, Mau Mau’s relationship to the landscape was strategically canny.35 Insurgents used the forests for camouflage and for shelter – it was ‘a home and a fortress as well as the provider of [their] most basic needs’.36 They raided crops and livestock from nearby farms, hunted wild animals or located hives laid by honey harvesters in the forests when they were hungry.37 They relied upon sympathetic civilian populations near the reserves to bury stores and supplies in prearranged caches. Some Mau Mau groups even adopted vegetarianism during the rainy season, when livestock raids would leave tracks betraying the way to their camps in the forest.38 In addition, their childhood experiences as cattle herders equipped them to find water in inhospitable terrain.39 The landscape was also a repository of significance for Mau Mau fighters, since it occasionally articulated their situation in times of difficulty. For recent Mau Mau escapees from the Manyani concentration camp, a nearby rhinoceros herd became a security cordon keeping watch over their sleep.40 And for the injured fugitive left by his fellow escapees to fend for himself in an inhospitable landscape, a nearby anthill became a moral lesson in social cooperation and solidarity, so sadly lacking in the moment of his abandonment.41 Among the fighters, animals were a tactical resource. Elephant tracks guided them across rough terrain and showed the most direct route to water.42 By listening attentively to forest sounds, such as bird calls or the erratic movements of frightened animals,43 the insurgents produced a sympathetic sensory landscape in  See Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, p. 115.   See Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 174. 34   C. T. Stoneham’s account is saturated with ethnic stereotypes of Mau Mau. 35   Since Mau Mau strategies and objectives varied between its component units, my version of Mau Mau is located less in the uniformity of its action than in the proliferation of its practices. 36   Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 146. 37  See Joram Wamweya, Freedom Fighter (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967), p. 151. 38  See Joram Wamweya, Freedom Fighter, p. 163. 39  See Joram Wamweya, Freedom Fighter, p. 93. 40  See Joram Wamweya, Freedom Fighter, pp. 91–2. 41  See Joram Wamweya, Freedom Fighter, p. 107. 42  See Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, p. 76. 43   See Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, pp. 70–71. 32

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which the dangers of attack or discovery were signalled long before they became imminent and in which surveillance was delegated to omnipresent, non-human military ‘allies,’ some of whom had become used to the insurgents’ presence in the forests.44 The cooperation and acceptance of animals and birds was taken to be a sign that Ngai (God) had given them power to assist the insurgents in thwarting the enemy.45 Indeed, enemy soldiers were occasionally ambushed and chased deeper into the forest, where they could be picked off at will in hostile terrain or left to contend with marauding wildlife.46 In religious terms, many insurgents viewed their relationship to the landscape as a sacred one. Before embarking for the forests, they received instruction in forest lore from Gikuyu elders.47 These elders invested the landscape with spiritual significance, in which the slightest human action (such as cutting down trees, killing animals needlessly or shooting towards mountains in which spirits dwelled) interacted with a network of taboos and portents and could invoke adverse meteorological, military or even cosmological consequences. Portent and prophecy occasionally informed Mau Mau’s battle strategy, as when the appearance of a particularly bright star in the sky prompted the insurgents to conduct the raid on Naivasha Police Station (26 March 1953) without fear of capture or death.48 Before and after important military operations, the fighters prayed facing the sacred landmark, Mount Kenya, frequently with a ball of earth held aloft.49 The spiritual dimensions of Mau Mau led to the adoption of some unpredictable military tactics – as when the mundu mugo (religious practitioner) halted raids because a gazelle had crossed the fighters’ path.50 In political terms, ownership of the land was one of the crucial aims of the movement that named itself, among other things, the ‘Kenyan Land and Freedom Army’. One of the political grievances that facilitated Mau Mau’s emergence was the colonial administration’s policy of preventing soil erosion. The ‘agricultural campaign, with its compulsory communal terracing two mornings per week, had provided the Nairobi militants with a ready-made constituency with which to challenge the African moderates’ rural power base’.51 In some instances, insurgents had an intimate relationship with the land on which, and for which, they fought. For example, Karari Njama became politicized when he realized (at a rally held by 44

  Among themselves, the fighters passed a law prohibiting the killing of ‘friendly’ wildlife. See Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 146. 45   Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 167. 46   Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 207. 47  See Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, pp. 61–2. Although Itote dismisses the elders’ admonitions on empirical grounds, he states that ‘most of the men’ believed these admonitions. 48  Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, pp. 82–3. 49   See Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 162. 50   Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 205. 51  David, W. Throup, Economic and Social Origins, p. 240.

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Jomo Kenyatta) that his family had been dispossessed of the land that bore his and his grandfather’s name – Karari’s Hill, alienated by the colonial government in 1910. Significantly, Njama’s Mau Mau unit was initially stationed in the Aberdare forest reserve on the land formerly owned by his grandfather.52 The landscape was invested with other forms of cultural memory. For instance, Mau Mau raiders killed Gray Arundel Leakey (Dr Louis Leakey’s uncle) by burying him ‘alive upside down, his feet left protruding from the earth’.53 As appalling as this murder appeared, and as much as it seemed to confirm settler claims about Mau Mau’s depravity, the method of execution had a straightforward rationale: the act was ordered by a Gikuyu seer who claimed that the colonizer would only be chased out of Kenya when a settler ‘elder’ had been killed in the same way as the British had killed Waiyaki (an early Gikuyu prophet) in one widely believed version of Gikuyu folk history.54 When Mau Mau groups moved, they were mindful of leaving the landscape and the forest foliage undisturbed,55 of walking backwards to confuse trackers, and of splitting up into groups and walking in different directions to throw the enemies’ bloodhounds off the scent before meeting up again at an agreed rendezvous point.56 Hence, Mau Mau’s choreography of revolution became a highly reflexive act of writing on the landscape that largely flouted the colonizer’s strategies of detection and containment in the early years of the insurgency. But beyond evading the colonizer’s technologies of visibility, one of Mau Mau’s most ingenious strategies was to stage its own absence in the landscape – for example, by setting up mock camps for the enemy to bomb, or by sending a small detail to attack a homeguard post in the Gikuyu reserve in order to prompt the immediate withdrawal from the forest of nearby government forces searching for Mau Mau.57 Similar tactics of deflection were used to alleviate the sufferings of the civilian wing under security force control. In Nairobi, Mau Mau’s urban wing was highly mobile, with its operatives executing informants in the back seats of moving taxis. Separating the Women from the Boys Women were Mau Mau’s most transgressive principle. In the reserves and in the cities, they provided a largely invisible backbone to the movement and their contributions were made at the cost of enormous adversity and suffering. It was

  See Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, pp. 74, 85–6.  Robert Edgerton, Mau Mau, p. 97. 54  Robert Edgerton, Mau Mau, p. 97. 55  See Joram Wamweya, Freedom Fighter, p. 143. 56  Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, p. 73. 57  Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, pp. 71–2. 52 53

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precisely the colonial assumption that Gikuyu women were backward58 that contributed to the Kenyan government’s underestimation of Mau Mau’s passive or civilian wing. As a result, women were able to pass through the landscape largely undetected by colonial surveillance. Colonial discourses on women in Mau Mau built failure into the colonizer’s look: When women’s activism is described in pro-colonial historiography, two portrayals of women emerge. They project women as either victims of Mau Mau or prostitutes who, through personal [read sexual] contact with male nationalists, were drawn to Mau Mau while resident in Nairobi. The view of women as victims of Mau Mau originates from the colonial record. Women are presented by colonial officials as physical and psychological victims of atavism … Women nationalists were relegated to the role of ‘adoring female hangers-on.’59

These misguided notions of women as victims meant that they were able to conduct Mau Mau’s business uninterrupted and unnoticed. Speaking of Mau Mau scouts, Itote says, ‘Girls found it simpler to disguise themselves, or at least to be inconspicuous’,60 and that all a woman had to do to escape attention when cornered was to pretend to garden. Mau Mau constructions of women were uneven. Karari Njama’s memoir is perhaps the most revealing example of the ways in which ‘femininity’ was instrumentalized in Mau Mau narratives of the insurgency. He describes the administration of the Batuni Oath (a corruption of the English military usage ‘platoon’), during which the Mau Mau initiate’s penis was inserted into a hole in a goat’s throat. The fighters in the Aberdare Mountains referred to their lovers or sexual consorts as kabatuni, or ‘small platoons’,61 establishing an obvious link between male virility, resistance and the diminution of women. The sexual imagery in the more advanced oathing procedures, such as the Batuni oath, was pervasive.62 In addition, the leadership of Mau Mau referred to its enemies (loyalists, traitors and homeguards) as thata cia bururi – ‘the barren ones of the country’63 – thus constructing Mau Mau according to a narrative of male potency. Some (contested) accounts of oathing ceremonies point towards the use of women’s private parts in the initiation of new fighters.64 Njama’s memoir marks a sexually ambivalent relation to women within the movement: 58  See Christopher Wilson, Kenya’s Warning, pp. 78–9. Wilson seems to suggest that one result of the women’s backwardness is their unsophisticated agricultural methods. His implicit argument is that the settler is a better custodian of the land. 59  Cora Ann Presley, Kikuyu Women, p. 158. 60  Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, p. 78. 61   Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 242. 62   See Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, pp. 104–6. 63   Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 349. 64   See Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, pp. 106, 195 n. 57.

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To feed and defend women [I thought] is an unnecessary burden to our warriors. Sleeping with them would bring calamity to our camps, weaken our itungati [warriors] and, probably, they would become pregnant and would be unable to run away from the enemies, and they would be killed … For generations, women had been a source of conflicts between men …65

In other Mau Mau narratives – most notably in Kariuki’s66 – the struggles of female insurgents are either strategically omitted or received as textual asides. Despite the lack of archival material dealing with the struggles and aims of women within Mau Mau, their role within the movement was crucial to its successes, and possibly to its survival. Women’s roles: … included ‘organization and maintenance of the supply lines which directed food, supplies, medicine, guns and information to the forest forces.’ Those women who went to the forest were ‘responsible for cooking, water-hauling, knitting sweaters etc.’ … Women formed the valuable link between the forest fighters and the passive wing in the reserves. Those women who went to the forests tended on the whole to be engaged in noncombat roles, acting as ‘transport, signals, medical corps and ordnance to their male counterparts.’67

Further, Mau Mau women in the reserves and in the city procured ammunition for the forest fighters by submitting to intercourse with government forces. Karari Njama tells us that ‘Bullets had become token payment [from security force personnel] to prostitutes who later sent them to our warriors’,68 and Edgerton confirms that some ‘Mau Mau women did seduce British soldiers in the hope of receiving a bullet or two in return’.69 The Mau Mau prostitute and courier is an important figure. The male fighters forbade women to sleep with the enemy and yet it was precisely the prostitute who sustained the supply of guns and ammunition to the forests. Waruhiu Itote, who provides two anecdotes of women using their sexuality to obtain arms and ammunition, omits any mention of intercourse.70 The prostitute subverts Mau Mau narratives of phallic heroism and Mau Mau’s policing of female sexuality. She provides us with a model of sexwork-in-insurgency, a specifically female form of militancy in which sex is not capitulation, but revolution. Her perilous journeys between the security forces and the rebels, from settlement to countryside and back again, meant that she shuttled between the extremities of the   Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 242.   J. M. Kariuki, Mau Mau Detainee (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1963). 67   Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, p. 177, quoting Presley and Gachihi. 68   Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 208. 69  Robert Edgerton, Mau Mau, p. 168. 70  Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, pp. 100–101. 65 66

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Emergency landscape in full view of the colonial surveillance apparatus and made an invaluable contribution to Mau Mau’s military survival. The Secret Lives of Mau Mau In Secret Lives, Ngugi embellishes upon historical representations of Mau Mau as a radical entity that will not settle down into a stable contestatory position. However, while such fictional embellishments transgress against the colonial framing of the insurgency, they also rely upon ‘women’ or metaphors of the feminine as referents. The most obvious example is to be found in ‘Goodbye Africa’, where the shamba ‘boy’ progressively flouts the authority of the white male protagonist in his social capacities as employer, screening officer, district officer and, finally, husband. The servant refuses to accept the hand-me-downs that consolidate the master’s status as the wishfully benevolent European settler, whose mission to uplift the moral and material conditions of the African obscures his complicity with imperial capitalism’s expropriation of land and resources from the Kenyan peasantry. The employer’s memories of his former employee coexist with memories of his wife: Then one Christmas, the boy suddenly threw back at him the gift of a long coat and ten shillings. The boy had laughed and walked out of his service. For a long time, he could never forget the laughter. This he could have forgiven. But the grief and the misery in his wife’s face at the news of the boy’s disappearance was something else.71

The ‘boy’s’ refusal of servility amounts to a refusal of imperialism’s imposition of race and class determinations. His laughter is an unanticipated antagonistic response that remains with the master as a form of disjunctive affect. This last laugh continues and haunts, separated from its original object. Such a refusal of stable and predictable political antagonisms enables the possibility of a return of the repressed to the white male protagonist’s colonial selfhood. We see this return especially in the way that the dreams of the settler progressively transform themselves into a delusional reality: He had forgotten the incident until these, his last months in Africa. Then he had started re-enacting the scene in his dreams, the vision becoming more and more vivid as days and months whistled by. At first the face had only appeared to him by night. His bed held terror for him. Then suddenly, these last few days, the face started appearing before him in broad daylight.72

71   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives and Other Stories (Oxford: Heinemann, 1975), p. 73. 72   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 72.

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This passage bears out my assertion that the settler rhetoric of Mau Mau’s hostile proximity produces the insurgency as an indeterminate semi-presence on the borders of settler consciousness. This rhetoric of hostile proximity is the inevitable consequence of the colonizer’s entry into a dialogue of misprision and political misrecognition. It is this dialogue of misprision and misrecognition that Ngugi’s fiction outlines so clearly. What is interesting in ‘Goodbye Africa’ is that the ‘shamba boy’s’ sexuality becomes crucial in the representation of Mau Mau’s destabilizing effects upon the colonialist. In ‘Goodbye Africa’, this dialogue is rendered in the settler protagonist’s letter to his wife in his notebook. The letter asks, ‘Was it wrong for us, with our capital, with our knowledge, with our years of Christian civilization to open and lift a dark country onto the stage of history? I played my part.’73 The misprision of Africa in the letter arises from the settler’s belief in the superiority of European culture, knowledge and belief systems over those of Africa. The possibility that this belief might not be shared by the colonized subject unsettles the colonizer’s own subjectivity in a profound manner. Since the ‘other’ remains unassimilable to the protagonist’s consciousness (his sense of self and his perceived place within the larger narrative of imperialism), the other is demonized: Do you remember him? The one who spurned my gift and disappeared, maybe to the forest? He stood in the office with that sneer in his face – like – like the devil. The servile submissive face when he worked for you had gone … I felt a violent rage within such as I had never felt before – I could not bear that grin. I stood and spat into his face.74

This passage shares a remarkable affinity with passages in colonial mythologies of Mau Mau as a mocking demonic presence, as we will see. In ‘Goodbye Africa’, the settler orders the execution of the ‘shamba boy’. Nonetheless, with the approach of Independence, the young man’s face returns to ‘haunt’ the settler. Additionally, the settler is replaced in his job by a black district officer and, most tellingly, the settler discovers that the disappointment that his wife registered when the ‘shamba boy’ walked out of their employ derived from her emotional and sexual attachment to the young man. We might conclude, therefore, that the young man’s agency is an agency associated with the revisions of the past that of necessity accompany moments of political transformation. I regard the young man’s politicized sexuality as symptomatic of the crisis of potency that colonization imposes upon the colonized in Ngugi’s fiction. The transition in attitude that takes place in the settler’s wife is equally revealing of Ngugi’s gender-political standpoint. It demonstrates that his female characters are positioned at a limit between male antagonists in order to enable a liberatory discourse. We are told that:   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 75.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 75.

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[She] wanted to understand Africa, to touch the centre, and feel a huge continent throb on her fingers … It was during one of her walks that the boy had first made love to her among the banana plantations. Freedom. And afterward their fevered love-making had finally severed her from the world of her husband and other District Officers.75

The unnamed woman’s desire for her former employee (as a man rather than as the fantasized embodiment of ‘Africa’) is never elaborated, and it is clear that Ngugi’s representation of her offers the possibility of a sexual realm that is discrete from a realm of politics. And yet, although this possibility works to free her from the oppressive colonial establishment, it also inevitably severs her from the political landscape in which she finds herself. The semi-obscure rationale for her adultery consequently translates her sexual agency into a sociosexual defeat for her husband and a political conquest for the young man. Her own political interest is never disclosed. In short, she becomes something like a sign that is exchanged in order to validate a liberatory discourse, and her sexual desire is located outside of the available masculine historical narratives. The female settler is also in this sense instrumentalized by her husband’s confession, which is a predictable apologia for his imperialist sympathies. She is the silent addressee of the letter and, when her husband burns his notebook after hearing of her affair, her silence is compounded. The subject who does speak through the flames is the young man. His history (sexual, political and economic) is what unwrites the husband’s imperialist history. The husband locates his unconsciously dysfunctional relationship with his wife within a broader narrative of imperial values. For instance, his entry in the notebook indicates that ‘The white man in Africa must accept a more stringent moral code in the family and in the society at large. For we must set the ideals to which our African subjects must aspire.’76 On the other hand, the young man’s colonized history returns as something unthought within imperial narratives. We are told of the settler that the young man’s ‘ghost would forever pursue him. Africa.’77 This return of the unthought is positioned within a discourse of sexual conquest. In contrast to the representations of the colonizer’s sexuality-in-crisis in ‘Goodbye Africa’, ‘The Return’ plays out a crisis of potency that confronts a male insurgent, Kamau. The return to which the story’s title refers is both a double return and a non-return. Kamau returns from a past of resistance and incarceration to his village, family and friends, only to find that both the landscape and his former acquaintances have changed under the Emergency conditions. The villagized settlement and the people in it now carry the traces of imperialist ‘counterinsurgency’ strategies. These traces imply a return of Kamau’s history under colonial forms of domination which runs counter to his recent liberation from   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, pp. 76–7.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 79. 77   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 79. 75

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the concentration camps. If Kamau returns home free, an unfree home returns to him. In this sense, his return is a double return. Furthermore, Kamau’s return is a non-return because he returns to nothing: the familiar ways of life and established human relations have been fragmented under the Emergency in one of liberation’s cruellest twists. Kamau’s crisis may be adduced to a mutual lack of recognition. His home environment has altered and his reappearance in it goes unacknowledged, especially by the women who remain in the villagized settlement. This lack of recognition leads Kamau to realize that the ‘old village had not even waited for him. And suddenly he felt a strong nostalgia for his old home, friends and surroundings. … But for all that, Muthoni, just as she had been in the old days, came back to his mind.’78 Kamau’s nostalgia is a desire for an originary plenitude, and Muthoni, his wife, is the most important sign of that plenitude. Of course, a proleptic reading of this moment points to the possibility that Muthoni (like the old village) has not waited for Kamau and that she has therefore been subsumed into the rural landscape. We soon find out that she has left the village with a love rival, Karanja, who lied to the villagers that Kamau was dead. The idea of a woman as a lost plenitude is, of course, a familiar one. It points to an Oedipalized form of masculinity that appears throughout Ngugi’s work at this point. Women in Ngugi’s representations of the Emergency period are, perhaps unavoidably, ‘lost objects’. For instance, when Kamau’s fellow detainees discuss their various lost loved ones, it is evident that the prisoners’ identities as resisters or as victims of colonialism – their constructions of self – are predicated on constructions of women, birth and home. The resumption of life after incarceration is metaphorically equated with the resumption of procreation. One detainee says, ‘“For me, I left my woman with a baby. She had just been delivered. We were all happy. But on the same day, I was arrested …” And so they went on. All of them longed for one day – the day of their return home. Then life would begin anew.’79 Here, home is figured as new life and is implicitly associated with rebirth. For the detainees, women are the signs of a lost past and of an harmonious future to which men will return after colonialism has ceased. ‘The Return’ shares a number of thematic and ideological affinities with A Grain of Wheat; the most important of which is Ngugi’s location of the feminine as an idealized category outside of history. At the most straightforward level, Kamau’s inability to identify with the changes brought about by the Mau Mau insurgency and the Security Force’s counter-insurgency efforts reflects his inability to reidentify with the woman who might reconsolidate his identity: Muthoni. The only other transcendent sign in the narrative is that of the river (‘Honia river still flowed’80), and Muthoni is aligned with the river when Kamau drops his bundle into Honia. The loss of his spouse becomes ‘water under the bridge’ and paradoxically realigns femininity   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, pp. 50–51.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 51. 80   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 50. 78

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with nature, reinforcing the patterning of womanhood as a transcendent category outside of history. Kamau’s crisis is resolved in the narrative when a linear history under colonization (his arrest, Muthoni’s loss, his ‘return’) is replaced by a cyclical history (Honia’s English translation as ‘bring-back-to-life’ implies the seasonal and the perennial). In turn, this cyclical history accords with the destiny of Oedipalized male heterosexuality, in which the male subject’s desire for the original lost object (the mother) must repeatedly be invested elsewhere. The encounter between Kamau and his captors depicts his crisis of potency in the face of the emasculating machinery of imperial dominance. After suffering many ‘humiliations’ without resisting, he assures himself ‘that no one would ever flout his manhood again’.81 We might say that Ngugi’s protagonist conforms with a fairly conventional phallic heroism that is, of course, deflated by Karanja’s betrayal. Significantly, this heroism emerges from a subjugated protagonist and relies upon a discourse of conquest in order to establish itself. In Ngugi’s symbolic universe, conquest takes the form of the eradication of the white settler’s presence in Kenya, the retrieval (winning back) of alienated land, and the sexual command of women. ‘The Martyr’ is perhaps the most ambivalent representation of Mau Mau in Ngugi’s short fiction. The story exposes the inconsistencies and disparities in the settlers’ constructions of self and other. Mrs Hardy and Mrs Smiles are clearly exponents of the imperialist narrative, even when this narrative is becoming redundant in practice. When they visit Mrs Hill’s house to discuss the murder of Mr and Mrs Garstone, ‘they wore a look of sad triumph – sad because Europeans (not just Mr and Mrs Garstone) had been killed, and of triumph, because the essential depravity and ingratitude of the natives had been demonstrated beyond all doubt’.82 Their responses emphasize the racism that informs Mrs Hardy’s and Mrs Smiles’s appraisal of the murder, and they also point to the failure of Mrs Hill’s widely reputed liberal-humanist perspective. We are told explicitly that Mrs Hill could no longer ‘maintain that natives could be civilized if only they were handled in the right manner’.83 Of course, the failure of liberal-humanist ideology is structural within colonial contexts. The cornerstone of liberal humanism is that people may relate on equal terms because they share an underlying humanity, and in the process it ignores the material asymmetries which make some subjects ‘more human’ than others. Notwithstanding the critique of Mrs Hardy’s and Mrs Smiles’s racism, we might detect in the story a lingering and uncomfortable liberal-humanism within Ngugi himself. ‘The Martyr’ is implicitly a critique of Mrs Hill’s liberalism, but I would suggest that this critique is contaminated by the very ideology that Ngugi seeks to oppose. Mrs Hill is an apologist for the imperialist narrative of civilization. Her construction of colonized Kenyans is premised on flagstone liberal values such as tolerance and co-option. She is unconsciously complicit   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 52.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 39. 83   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 39. 81

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with imperialism because she represents its beneficent face, excusing the violent seizure of land by assuming that no one else ever lived on it before she arrived. As she remembers her ‘pioneering days’, she forgets colonial violence and expropriation: ‘She and her husband and others had tamed the wilderness of this country and had tamed the unoccupied land. People like Njoroge now lived contented without a single worry about tribal wars. They had a lot to thank the Europeans for.’84 Mrs Hill’s retrospective dialogue with colonial Kenya and the peasantry is founded on misprision. By contrast, Njoroge’s memories of his father and his family’s claim to the land she now occupies provide a counter-narrative to Mrs Hill’s interested self-authorization. Equally, it emerges that Njoroge is, quite rightly, far from contented. After learning that the Garstones have been murdered, we are told that nowhere ‘was the matter more thoroughly discussed than in a lonely, remote house built on a hill, which belonged, quite appropriately, to Mrs Hill’.85 Clearly, Mrs Hill’s naturalization of her privilege is represented as an accident of language. In its choice to exercise such ‘natural language’ in relation to colonization, Ngugi’s short story becomes uncomfortably complicit with Mrs Hill’s naturalization of her privilege. By contrast with Mrs Hill’s naturalization of her privilege, Njoroge’s counter-narrative subverts his employer’s seemingly natural ownership of the land. Significantly, his arrival in her employ is also the result of a strange coincidence because a ‘big portion of the land now occupied by Mrs Hill was the land his father had shown him as belonging to the family … He knew where every boundary went through.’86 Njoroge’s ‘counter-memory’ of his ancestral land illustrates that colonization is accompanied by an inscription of the landscape that fragments the peasantry’s relationship to its environment and to its past. Since Njoroge’s father tells him to remember and recognize the land by a fig tree (‘Mugumo’) planted on it, his relation to the land is naturalized by a myth of origin, legation and patrilinear succession. To this extent, it is implicated in a chauvinist cultural discourse. As such, Njoroge’s claim to proprietorship of the farm is a tellingly gendered claim. ‘The Martyr’ contains another double inscription, which may be found in the dual significances attached to the sign ‘boy’. The sign forms part of Mrs Hill’s linguistic arsenal as a term that both domesticates and diminishes her male African employees.87 Further, this usage is subjected to authorial irony when Njoroge is described as Mrs Hill’s ‘houseboy’, and we are then told that he ‘was a tall, broad-shouldered man nearing middle age’.88 Njoroge, on the other hand, uses the word ‘Boys’ to denote the ‘Freedom Boys’ (Ihii), who are 84

    86   87   88   85

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 46. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 39. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 43. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, pp. 41–2. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 41.

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Mau Mau insurgents.89 The capital letter used here points towards the authorial valorization of this usage. The activities of Mau Mau in this story imply a form of political and socio-economic empowerment for male colonized subjects such as Njoroge. However, as we might already expect, this empowerment is framed in sociosexual terms. The term ihii signifies ‘uncircumcised boys’. Its occurrence in the story recuperates a Mau Mau symbolism of revolution as a male rite of passage. Given that revolution in this story would mean the murder of Mrs Hill, Mau Mau symbolism is ultimately consolidated by the intention to silence a woman, even if Njoroge’s intervention thwarts the insurgents’ plans. The resolution of Njoroge’s ‘plot’ to murder Mrs Hill is interesting because the conclusion of ‘The Martyr’ finally denies Njoroge the possibility of masculine mastery. Rather, Njoroge’s death enacts a symbolic castration. Yet, prior to the (accidental) shooting, Njoroge and Mrs Hill have separately reached a private rapprochement with each other, despite the marked differences in their ideological positions. The negated possibility of a negotiated middle ground is what fuels the narrative’s ‘tragic’ trajectory. This middle ground warrants much closer attention: [Mrs Hill] thought of Njoroge. A queer boy. Had he many wives? Had he a large family? It was surprising even to her to find that she had lived with him for so long, yet had never thought of these things. This reflection shocked her a little. It was the first time she had ever thought of him as a man with a family. She had always seen him as her servant. Even now it seemed ridiculous to think of her houseboy as a father with a family … This was something to be righted in future.90 [Njoroge] knew that [Mrs Hill] had loved her husband. Of that he was sure. She almost died of grief when she had learnt of his death. In that moment her settlerism had been shorn off. In that naked moment, Njoroge had been able to pity her. Then the children! He had known them. He had seen them grow up like any other children. Almost like his own … And then he realized, all too suddenly, that he could not do it. He could not tell how, but Mrs Hill had suddenly crystallized into a woman, a wife, somebody like Njeri or Wambui, and above all, a mother. He could not kill a woman. He could not kill a mother.91

The terminology of the latter passage is suggestive: the ‘naked’ moment and the children who are almost like Njoroge’s own perhaps hint at Njoroge’s latent desire for Mrs Hill. In fact, Njoroge and Mrs Hill reach a middle ground in a private, psychosexual realm. This ideational realm is unrealizable in the material circumstances of revolution. In short, we see a familiar binary here between the domestic and the political that is characteristic of Ngugi’s early and middle fiction. Importantly, Mrs Hill progressively becomes ‘a woman, a wife … and above   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, pp. 44–6.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 47. 91   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 45. 89

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all, a mother’ in a sequence that might be read as an allegory of the formation of female subjectivity within a uterine social organization. Quite clearly, despite Mrs Hill’s position of ideological complicity with the dominant culture, her gendered physiology redeems her. Njoroge and Mrs Hill both succumb to a seductive mythology of the family as a realm somehow outside of politics. Whatever their individual generosity towards each other’s circumstances, both obscure the family’s importance as a political institution that produces, and is in turn produced by, ideologies of gender. In short, Ngugi’s patriarchal interest is made explicit here. The possibility of a negotiated intersubjectivity in this story relies upon employer and employee, oppressor and oppressed, relating as gendered subjects instead of as political or economic subjects. Njoroge is sacrificed to an ideal that colonial subjects may ignore their interpellation into asymmetrical subject positions – dominant and dominated, paternalizing and inimical, privileged and abject – and find their equality in their respective memberships of the human family. Here, Ngugi resurrects the liberal-humanist discourse that his fiction has so carefully exposed. Mrs Hill misprises Njoroge’s impulse to save her, and her misprision originates in the colonial rhetoric of Mau Mau’s hostile proximity (‘So Njoroge had led them here!’92). Even after Njoroge has died, Mrs Hill’s ideological position is far from consolidated. She finds the circumstances of his death ‘a puzzle’ and refuses to confirm Mrs Hardy’s and Mrs Smiles’s assumptions that black Kenyans are ‘all bad’.93 Mrs Hill’s inability to make sense of the incident translates as an inability to perpetuate a narrative of settler identity that contributes to the broader narrative of imperialism. Her final subject position in the story is unstable because it admits to an outside – an ‘unknown’ elsewhere. We might acknowledge that Ngugi’s representations of Mau Mau in Secret Lives are ultimately transgressive, insofar as they frame Mau Mau as an unhomely presence in the colonizer’s consciousness. Nevertheless, the short stories in Secret Lives often construct the insurgents according to a chauvinistic historical narrative, neglecting in the process the Kenyan women who formed the backbone of the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army. In fact, the stories that treat women at length tend to bracket them within a domestic and purely reproductive social narrative that takes place prior to or after Mau Mau insurgency. We see this, for example, in the first section of Secret Lives, which is explicitly titled ‘Of Mothers and Children’. To be fair, many of the stories in this section were published or written very early on in Ngugi’s career. As such, stories such as ‘Mugumo’ and ‘And the Rain Came Down!’ belong with the fiction written before Ngugi had given gender concerns his full consideration. In the former story, Mukami goes to the mugumo (‘fig’) tree because she fears that she is barren and is therefore not desirable to her husband, Muthoga. Under the mugumo, she falls asleep and wakes up after having dreamt that Gikuyu has touched her. She recalls Mumbi’s   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 47.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, pp. 47–8.

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assertion that she is ‘the mother of a nation’.94 Mukami then realizes that she has been pregnant for some time. In short, Mukami re-enacts the foundation myth of the Gikuyu people under the sacred mugumo tree, and becomes a version of Mumbi, the female archetype. By contrast, ‘And the Rain Came Down!’ features a character called Nyokabi who is childless. She has ‘the one desire, to marry and have children’.95 Nyokabi discovers the lost child of another woman, Njeri, in the middle of a forest during a rainstorm and undertakes an act of motherly rescue. She vows that she is willing to sacrifice her life if the child can only be allowed to live. Upon her return home, Nyokabi’s husband recognizes the child as Njeri’s son and returns him to his biological mother. Although we never learn whether or not Nyokabi survives her ordeal, the story ends with a kind of compensation for her barren status. Her husband is proud that his wife has overcome her jealousy of Njeri and has accomplished this selfless feat of endurance. These two stories are stories of feminine rivalry and of unfulfilled motherhood that serve to separate women’s issues from the political. These two stories are miniatures that are more extensively treated in Weep Not, Child and The River Between. Nyokabi and Njeri, of course, share their names with Njoroge’s mothers in Weep Not, Child. Moreover, the mugumo myth features prominently in both of Ngugi’s first two novels. By contrast, ‘Gone with the Drought’ is an early version of one of the subplots in A Grain of Wheat, in which an old woman goes mad due to the loss of her son, Githogo. In ‘Gone with the Drought’, the death of the son is due to colonial maladministration in the period immediately after Mau Mau and prior to Independence. In this story, the narrator serves as the old woman’s surrogate son, whom she temporarily misrecognizes as her own when he takes her some food. Upon her death from starvation, the narrator comes to the same conclusion as his father – that the old woman’s madness is a misdiagnosis. She has been labelled mad by a community who might have intervened to help her feed her starving son and who continue to misrecognize the ways in which inefficient colonial famine relief has contributed to the old woman’s tragedy. There are other forms of unfulfilment to which the female characters are subjected. In this sense, many of the short stories pattern femininity through modes of lack. We might think, for instance, of Wamaitha, the lover of the handsome loner, Mangara, in ‘The Black Bird’. Wamaitha loses him to a curse placed upon his family by a traditional spiritualist whose property is destroyed by Mangara’s grandfather, who has become an over-zealous convert to Christianity during the colonial period. In a sense, Wamaitha loses her loved one to an undisclosed patrilinear inheritance. The story of the black bird is related to the narrator of the story, but Mangara proclaims that Wamaitha ‘won’t understand’.96 Just as Mangara and Wamaitha are at their happiest moment in love, this is described as   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 7.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 10. 96   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 33. 94

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a ‘new world’97 into which the black bird steals, noticed only by him. In effect, Wamaitha is a woman excluded not only from knowledge of the historical legacy of colonial injustice, but also from access to the story of ‘The Black Bird’ in which she is such a prominent presence. Wamaitha’s femininity debars her from both history and its contemporary reworking as narrative. Although Mangara wrestles with the return of historical repression in the dream-like figure of the black bird, and although it is strongly suggested that he is able to bring closure to both history and narrative by undergoing a purifying ritual under the mugumo tree before his untimely death, Wamaitha inhabits repression tout court and is none the wiser in relation to her tragic situation. If Mangara is haunted by intergenerational unease, then a similar form of Oedipal crisis affects the hero of ‘A Meeting in the Dark’. John is the uncircumcised son of a puritanical clergyman and he is destined to go to Makerere University on a scholarship. His bright, upwardly mobile prospects and his obedience to his father’s religious authority are thrown into disarray when his circumcised girlfriend, Wamuhu, falls pregnant. John has a dream of being circumcised before meeting her, but then imagines himself being destroyed by ghosts. Rather than owning up to the truth and challenging his father’s authority, John tries to silence Wamuhu by bribing her and then throttles her in a frenzy when she refuses to be bought off. Again, a female character succumbs to a male character’s conflicted political and Oedipal crises. Although John’s flawed attempts to preserve his own interests are subjected to sincere and stinging critique by Ngugi’s deft authorial framing, the murder of Wamuhu is consistent with the patterns of earlier stories. The difficulty here is that in seeking to vilify John’s sexism and to dignify Wamuhu’s integrity and fortitude, Ngugi does not succeed in examining the gendering at work in his own narrative mechanisms. There is altogether too neat a symmetry within the clergyman’s status as a familial, religious and cultural authority, and too neat a distinction between Wamuhu’s feminized tradition and John’s masculine modernity. The stories in the final section of Secret Lives deal with the aftermaths of Mau Mau and the disappointments of the post-Independence era. In this sense, they are very much akin to the later novels. Indeed, we might even say that the character of Beatrice in ‘Minutes of Glory’ is an early precursor of Wanja in Petals of Blood, or that ‘Wedding at the Cross’ is an earlier version of the inverted theology of Devil on the Cross. These stories detail neocolonial depredation and its effects upon family and sexual relationships. In ‘Minutes of Glory’, Beatrice is seduced by a man who lures her away from home with promises of work in Nairobi. Without support of any kind in the city, she drifts into prostitution. She struggles for custom and is jealous of Nyaguthii, a fellow prostitute for whose attention and services the male clientele often compete. When a regular lorry-driving client falls asleep during Beatrice’s story of her unhappy entry into the life of prostitution, she steals his money. Beatrice spends his money on clothes and accessories and returns to work to enjoy a night of unprecedented attention from the punters. Her ‘minutes   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 37.

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of glory’ come to an end when the lorry driver returns with the police to arrest her. In this story, neocolonial femininity is reduced to a sexual commodity that is only marketable when it carries the costly outer trappings of ‘beauty’: wigs, clothes, skin-lightening creams, accessories. Beatrice is trapped in a cycle of poverty by a lack of available options. At home, she is unable to find work. In the city, she is unable to find custom and loses her job as a barmaid for refusing the advances of her boss. Even the lorry-driving customer places a higher value on his own property than upon Beatrice’s tragic life history. Only Nyaguthii is able to relate to Beatrice’s plight, and it is, of course, a plight that Nyaguthii herself shares. If ‘Minutes of Glory’ details the life of the single prostitute, then the circumstances of the married woman are no less advantageous. In ‘Wedding at the Cross’, Miriamu is the daughter of a God-fearing Christian called Douglas Jones, who belittles Wariuki, Miriamu’s suitor, due to his lack of money. In response to this slight, Wariuki sets about striving for upward mobility. He fights for the British colonial power in the Second World War, becomes a collaborator during the Mau Mau period, joins the church, renames himself Dodge W. Livingstone, Jr. and then profits from the Asian exodus from East Africa to become a prosperous timber merchant. When Dodge insists upon marrying Miriamu in church, she finally realizes at the altar that the man she is about to marry is no longer Wariuki. In striving to avenge himself upon Douglas Jones for the slight, Wariuki has finally become another version of Jones himself, and in the process his own former self has died. For this reason, Miriamu refuses to take the wedding vows. The man she once fell in love with has not survived his own immersion in the neocolonial socio-economic order. Driven by the originary wound of inequality, Wariuki has become corrupted by aspiration. Miriamu’s love for him becomes a measure of misrecognition indicating how sizeable his transition has been. A similar story of decline is evident in ‘A Mercedes Funeral’. The narrator and Wahinya have both attended school during the Mau Mau era, but Wahinya’s school is burned down by the colonial forces who suspect it to be in league with the insurgents. While the narrator prospers and progresses to the missionaryadministered Siriana high school and then to university, Wahinya undertakes a succession of low-paid jobs as a porter, a matatu turn-boy and a watchman, all the time dreaming of completing his education. These dreams are continually frustrated and he succumbs to alcoholism. In a cruel irony, Wahinya’s desire to die in a Mercedes Benz is fulfilled when a corrupt MP seeking re-election loans the vehicle out to Wahinya’s family as a hearse, thinking that this move will secure popular support among the electorate. The story highlights the formative consequences of accidents of fate and suggests that a colonial education has conferred a series of arbitrary privileges upon the narrator.98 98

  Ngugi has a strong and ethical investment in this storyline. In his critical writing, he remembers his own fortune in this way: ‘I remember one boy in my class of 1954 who had distinctions in all subjects except English, which he had failed. He was made to fail the entire exam. He went on to become the turn boy in a bus company. I who had

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The concluding story, ‘The Mubenzi Tribesman’, analyzes the ways in which neocolonialism corrupts. This corruption is registered dramatically in terms of the decline of the family life of the protagonist, Waruhiu. As a villager with a university education, Waruhiu marries an urbanite named Ruth. He takes up a post as a teacher, ploughing his learning back into his community. She works in the city. Accordingly, the economic activity within their marriage is distributed across rural and metropolitan space. The constant approaches of Waruhiu’s relations for help with financial problems irks Ruth and she persuades him to move to the city. Once there, he takes up a position in an oil company, but soon finds that he needs to embezzle money in order to keep pace with the affluent lifestyle and conspicuous consumption expected of him by his new Wabenzi ‘tribesmen’ and by his wife. Once caught, Waruhiu is imprisoned. Upon his release, he discovers that his wife will have nothing to do with him. Perhaps the most interesting dimension of the story is that exogamy becomes a metaphor for detribalization. Marrying Ruth and marrying into the values of social mobility and class aspiration that she embodies is equivalent to becoming part of a new tribe – the privileged stratum of neocolonial fatcats dubbed the ‘Wabenzi’ due to their love of the Mercedes Benz and other luxury foreign products. Waruhiu’s final recognition is of a coruscating self-loathing within himself. Having cut ties with his community, having been subjected to the very public disgrace of a guilty verdict and having finally lost his wife, he ultimately dissociates even from himself and finds that he is involuntarily emitting a ‘hoarse ugly laughter’.99 In short, neocolonial values and material aspirations run so deeply against the grain of Waruhiu’s community that he takes on an entirely new ethnicity and is finally unable to recognize himself upon his release from prison. Taken collectively, the stories in Secret Lives and Other Stories offer Ngugi’s readers a fictional cross-section of Kenyan historical experience. They follow a movement from the initially depoliticized stories of mothers and children, through to the stories of Mau Mau-inspired neuroses in both the settler and the colonized subject, through to the alienations of African subjectivity that accompany neocolonialism. In this sense, these stories encompass a transitional phase of disquiet that is more broadly at work in the shift from the early novels to the late novels. This transitional phase of disquiet finds its fullest expression in Ngugi’s two middle novels, A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood. It is to these to novels and their gender complexities that we must now turn.

only passes but a credit in English got a place in Alliance High School, one of the most elitist institutions for Africans in colonial Kenya.’ The accidental nature of privilege in this example is in direct proportion to the violence of colonial cultural imposition. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1989 [1986]), p. 12. 99   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, p. 144.

Chapter 4

Reading against the Grain (of Wheat) In this chapter, I shall discuss the ways in which Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat narrates the Kenyan nation in the moment of reckoning immediately prior to Independence. Obviously, a figure like Benedict Anderson looms large in this theoretical context, with his definition of the nation as ‘an imagined community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’. I propose to work within the idiom of Anderson’s definition, by focusing on how A Grain of Wheat invents and delimits colonial and ‘decolonized’ Kenyan national identities. An endeavour of this kind requires one to explore the sorts of fantasies or narratives involved in imagining a community. A Grain of Wheat is ideally suited to this purpose. It is a novel concerned with forging a national consciousness out of a shared historical experience. The main characters desperately need to reconcile themselves to their unavowable histories of mutual betrayal before embracing a collective future. These unresolved individual pasts and their subtle interconnections are revealed via a series of recollections, flashbacks and confessions. Hence, each character’s life story is carefully woven into the broader narrative of Kenyan history. The result is a complex, layered and multidimensional narrative. However, whatever its formal complexities and nuances, A Grain of Wheat is itself a symptom of the historical processes and the ideological formations it describes. Moreover, the novel’s narration of the national moment of reckoning at Kenyan Independence is textured by post-Independence disappointments that coincide with the moment of writing. As such, A Grain of Wheat is an historical novel that of necessity buys into a series of spectacularly ahistorical fantasies. Chief among these fantasies are the colonial representations of Mau Mau that inform Ngugi’s depiction of Kenyan history. Since the publication of David MaughanBrown’s Land, Freedom and Fiction, it has almost become a critical orthodoxy to say that A Grain of Wheat is a crisis novel, whose residual sympathies with English liberalism lead it to exaggerate Mau Mau violence in the name of a flawed ideology of aesthetic balance. In other words, by trying to tell both sides of the story, A Grain of Wheat equivocates in its account of Kenyan history. In seeking to make A Grain of Wheat a balanced historical novel, Ngugi unbalances the novel’s historiographic integrity. What has less often been remarked upon is that the novel’s gendering of politics also ensures the impossibility of its historical representations. Admittedly, the novel’s gendering of history is in some senses a response to one of the psychosexual injuries that colonialism inflicts upon its subjects − a denial of the   Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6.



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colonized’s potency. Ngugi adopts a number of strategies in order to recuperate Gikuyu male potency and these strategies consist in silencing the female characters in A Grain of Wheat. As such, Ngugi’s novel erroneously constructs Mau Mau as a male nationalist movement and frequently excludes women’s contributions to the struggle or filters these contributions through domestic sexual or reproductive roles. This means that A Grain of Wheat ultimately articulates Mau Mau at the expense of female articulation and gender-political agency. Although the novel offers a number of positive representations of Gikuyu women, in which their capacity for political and sexual articulation is privileged, these representations are almost invariably susceptible to reappropriation by a patriarchal discourse. I would like to suggest three things in this chapter. Firstly, I shall argue that A Grain of Wheat brings a gender framing to bear on its imagining of community. The nation in this novel is metaphorically female. Secondly, the metaphorically female nation is also a site of psychosexual desire. As a result, the novel’s ideologies of gender instigate unconscious processes of displacement and distortion that skew its representations of history. The result is that the novel’s retrospective impulses and their attempts to recuperate a kind of phallic heroism readily give way to moments of anachronistic wish-fulfilment. As we shall see, such moments of anachronistic wish-fulfilment are especially evident in the differences between the original 1967 version and the revised 1986 edition of A Grain of Wheat. Thirdly, I would like to propose that if one reads A Grain of Wheat against the grain, it is possible to locate a site of female sexual and political agency that is also historically apt. Simply put, if the novel addresses colonialism and its legacy in terms of a masculine psychosexual crisis, it follows that its constructions of patriarchal authority are inevitably compromised. Therefore, the novel covertly sets in place the conditions for alternative possible narratives of female sexual and historical agency. Ngugi’s Ambivalence towards Mau Mau Despite his espousal of Marxism while at Leeds University, Ngugi’s fictional representation of Mau Mau reveals an extraordinary ambivalence towards Mau Mau violence. David Maughan-Brown argues that this contradiction can be attributed to two factors: Firstly, the fiction is clearly rendering visible residual ideological formations, most traces of which have been consciously expunged from [Ngugi’s] essays. … Secondly, Ngugi’s notion of ‘good’ fiction, based on an aesthetic ideology derived from his literary ‘education’ in English departments oriented towards traditional critical orthodoxies, demanded a ‘balance’ which prevented the fictional expression of certain positions (particularly those tending towards the deconstruction of concepts like ‘violence’) articulated outside the fiction.

  David Maughan-Brown, Land, Freedom and Fiction, p. 252.



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Here Maughan-Brown identifies a faultline between the aesthetic demands of Ngugi’s received notions of literary form and the political demands of his recent conscientization at the University of Leeds. Maughan-Brown goes on to suggest that Ngugi’s representations of Mau Mau are tainted by an emphasis on individualism, rather than on the collective (but by no means homogeneous) resistance of the community. This stress on individualism problematizes Ngugi’s Marxian sympathies, because the fictional representatives of collective resistance emerge only as savage killers (General R., who has assassinated a clergyman) or rapists (Koinandu) or self-styled Messianic heroes (Kihika). More dangerously, perhaps, the privatized sensibility for which the novel appears to argue is ideologically suspect, since it excuses the characters’ various political betrayals on the grounds of human frailty. Maughan-Brown makes this point quite forcefully: Ngugi’s general implication seems to be that once concepts like ‘the masses’ and ‘collective consciousness’ are subjected to the test of close-up scrutiny what emerges is a network of private, self-delusory, messianic identifications which testify to an underlying principle of competition as the mainspring of human conduct. Thus endemic guilt and bad faith underlie even the ‘best deeds’ – another formula for original sin.

As Maughan-Brown suggests, a residual Christianity underpins Ngugi’s representations of the Mau Mau insurgency. One of the implications of this patterning is that Ngugi’s representations of Mau Mau do not privilege the rank and file members (such as Koinandu) or even the peasant leadership (General R.’s real name, Muhoya, also denotes ‘a tenant farmer’ or Muhoi). Rather, Ngugi privileges a literate, Christian Mau Mau, which synthesizes the liberal ideal of principled rebellion and which inevitably gestures towards an élitist reconstruction of the insurgency’s guiding values and orientations. In my view, such moments reflect ideological compromises between Ngugi’s political vision and his subject formation. For instance, the exemplary figure of Kihika carries a double ‘historical’ inscription. Firstly, the details of his life parallel those of Dedan Kimathi, a prominent general in the Land and Freedom Army. Secondly, his name evokes one of the arathi (prophets), Reuben Kihiko, who was the leader of a breakaway    Readers should note that – unless otherwise indicated – I refer to the first, unrevised edition of Ngugi’s novel (1967). It is also worth noting here that the revision of a novel purporting to be historical begs all sorts of questions about the constructedness of Ngugi’s historical accounts.    ‘Ngugi’s tendency towards a Messianic mode of characterization expresses a type of individualism that is, I think, typically petty-bourgeois. Its role is not so much historically illuminating as ideological.’ Michael Vaughan, ‘African Fiction and Popular Struggle: The Case of A Grain of Wheat’, English in Africa 8:2 (1981), p. 27.    David Maughan-Brown, Land, Freedom and Fiction, pp. 249–50.    See Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, pp. 133–5.

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Christian sect called the Dini ya Jesu Kristo. Kihiko’s followers espoused a Gikuyu traditionalist version of the Christian myth, and they were considered by the colonial authorities to be subversive. In December 1947, they clashed with the Kenyan police and killed three policemen, resulting in Kihiko’s arrest and execution. Certain colonial accounts of Mau Mau claim that the insurgency had its origins in sects such as the Dini ya Jesu Kristo. Ngugi himself has argued in an essay that the ‘conflict between the Kenyan people and the missionary churches, the subsequent setting up of African independent churches, and the religious aspects of the Mau Mau liberation movement, were direct results of the culture conflict initiated by the missionary holy zeal’. In fact, Kihika’s ‘crucifixion’ by hanging is suggestive of a Christ-like dimension and accords with Ngugi’s later thinking about the role for the Church in post-Independence Kenya: ‘One could say that if Christ had lived in Kenya in 1952, or in South Africa or Rhodesia today, he would have been crucified as a Mau Mau terrorist or Communist.’10 Certainly, Kihika’s first revolutionary inclinations are demonstrated in a theological dispute with Teacher Muniu on the grounds that ‘[the] Bible does not talk about circumcising women’ and that it therefore does not specifically condemn Gikuyu initiation ceremonies.11 However, Ngugi’s representation of Mau Mau in A Grain of Wheat is not necessarily ideologically aligned with colonial narratives of the Mau Mau insurgency’s origins in the breakaway African churches and Christian sects. Rather, Kihika, as both Kimathi and Kihiko, indexes Ngugi’s attempt to bridge the disparate ideological subtexts of Christian nationalism and Gikuyu traditionalism. Kimathi was a christian rebel and Kihiko was a rebellious christian (the lower case denotes a para-institutional theology). These two models fit comfortably together as prototypes of principled resistance in Kenya, which was clearly the sort of resistance Ngugi privileged before writing A Grain of Wheat. In ‘Mau Mau, Violence and Culture’ (1963), he writes, ‘Violence in order to change an intolerable unjust social order is not savagery: it purifies man. Violence to protect and preserve an unjust, oppressive social order is criminal, and diminishes man.’12 And in a much later essay, ‘Church, Culture and Politics’ (1970), Ngugi describes the Church’s complicity with imperialism, but qualifies his arguments in this way: ‘I want to stress that I am talking of the Church as a corporate body, an institution, and not of the individual holders of the faith.’13 This qualification points to a residual sympathy towards Christianity and individualism in Ngugi, and perhaps accounts for the crisis between Christian nationalism, Gikuyu traditionalism and   Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of Mau Mau, pp. 327–8.   See, for example, D. H. Rawcliffe, The Struggle For Kenya (London: Victor

 

Gollancz, 1954), p. 34.    Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 32. 10   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 34. 11   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (Oxford: Heinemann, 1978 [1967]), p. 75. 12   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 28. 13   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 34

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socialism in A Grain of Wheat. If Ngugi was still expressing latent support for Christianity at this point in his development, it was evidently the Christian aversion to violence that he risked importing into his novel. Significantly, this latent support for Christianity also contains gender implications. The para-institutional theology that Ngugi’s novel upholds is much the same as that developed by the African independent churches in post-1920s Kenya. As we saw in Chapter 2, the African independent churches were enmeshed with Gikuyu nationalism’s discursive formations. Their para-institutional theology legitimized polygamy as a form of domestic organization and clitoridectomy as a determinant in the sociopolitical (and discursive) construction of female sexuality. Hence, the kind of Mau Mau we receive in A Grain of Wheat also at some level determines the kind of woman that we encounter there. If Ngugi’s account of Mau Mau is ideologically conflicted, there may be additional reasons for his residual distrust of the resistance movement, some of which speak to Oedipal or gender-political antecedents. Firstly, his half-brother (Mwangi) was an ‘active’ member of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. Secondly, and as a result, his mother underwent ‘three months of torture at Kamiriithu homeguard post’.14 Additionally, on a first reading of A Grain of Wheat, I was struck by the pathos of Gitogo’s murder at the hands of the Security Forces. It seemed a gratuitous and sentimental representation of settler atrocities under the Emergency: a deaf and mute Gikuyu man is shot in the back because he does not register the Security Forces’ command to ‘Halt!’15 However, this is in fact an important moment of self-inscription in the novel, because Ngugi’s ‘deaf-and-dumb step-brother [was] shot dead in circumstances identical to those of Gitogo’, whose name he shared.16 In the passage dealing with the murder, there is a poignant significance in Gitogo’s motives: he flees home in order to save his mother from the approaching government forces. I shall suggest in this chapter that the sign ‘woman’ in A Grain of Wheat is produced as a discursive intersection between Mau Mau and the Security Forces, much as Ngugi’s mother was produced as that intersection during her detention at one point during his formative years. Although I concur with Maughan-Brown’s sense that the novel privileges heroic individualism, I would argue that the principle of communal unity which ostensibly underlies the novel is the category of ‘the feminine’. History in this novel is a public, masculine affair, and community is a private, feminine affair. My argument here coincides with Michael Vaughan’s claim that Ngugi’s ‘treatment of the significance of the experience of women tends to work symbolically and metaphorically rather than by means of a plain and open realism. … Nevertheless, it is clear that for Ngugi

14   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (Oxford: Heinemann, 1981), p. 109. 15   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 6. 16   Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 3. See also David Cook and Michael Okenimpke, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 4.

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… women have a very specific relation to community and communal values.’17 The sign ‘woman’ enables notions of community – and, therefore, the economy of relations – in A Grain of Wheat. The sign ‘woman’, as it is exchanged between characters in the text (via desire or narrative construction) and between author and readership (via significance or meaning constitution), is crucial to Ngugi’s representation of Kenya during the Emergency. The characters may be politically indexed according to their male–female relations. As we shall see much later in this chapter, the pivotal female character is Mumbi, who is absolutely crucial to this political indexing. Representing Resistance, Betrayal and Liberation Even if we were not to take Mumbi’s pivotal role into consideration, the male characters are all constellated in terms of the various subsidiary women who surround them. For example, Kihika’s entry into the public – though clandestine – domain of insurrection entails leaving behind a private or domestic domain as Wambuku’s lover. These two domains are established by a crucial misunderstanding between the pair: ‘You’ll not go away from me. You’ll not leave me alone,’ she said in desperation. ‘Never!’ Kihika cried in ecstasy, seeing Wambuku at his side always. When the call for action came, he alone among the other men would have a woman he loved fighting at his side. His one word like a knife stabbed Wambuku, thrilling her into a momentary vision of happiness now and ever; would Kihika now leave the demon [of political resistance] alone, content with life in the village like the other men? They walked back to the dancers in the wood, hands linked, their faces lit, both happy, for the moment, in their separate delusions.18

This passage is a synecdoche of the narrative as a whole, in that it severs the female private or domestic domain from the male domain of public culture or politics. These gender binates permeate Ngugi’s narrative and are crucial in the establishment of ‘the feminine’ as a consensual trope that defines the terrain of struggle between the government forces and the insurgents. Of course, Wambuku and Kihika cannot reconcile their differences in aspiration. They inhabit ‘their separate delusions’ (a form of false consciousness) because they respectively inhabit two irreconcilably gendered spheres. Hence, this passage insidiously establishes gender binarism only to withhold its resolution, which in turn enables the novel to suggest that gender dialogue is always-already a discussion at cross  Michael Vaughan, ‘African Fiction and Popular Struggle’, p. 48.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 86.

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purposes. Kihika soon leaves Wambuku, in order to engage in active resistance, but he is joined by her rival, Njeri, in the forest. Njeri joins the forest fighters because she loves Kihika, in the absence of her own political ambitions or motivations. Njeri’s ‘passionate devotion’ to her ‘handsome warrior’19 implies that Kihika is as much an icon of potency as he is a figure of resistance. Of course, this iconic status means that it is exclusively Kihika’s phallic heroism that can enjoin the domestic with the political, which equates masculine sexual and cultural prerogatives in an extremely subtle move. Kihika is not the only Mau Mau representative whose martial activity is formed in relation to ‘the feminine’. Muhoya (General R.) begins his military training with the British in World War I after he has attempted, unsuccessfully, to rescue his mother from being beaten by his father, and has been expelled from his home village as a result.20 General R. confesses to Koinandu that Reverend Jackson Kigondu (the loyalist clergyman that General R. has executed) ‘looked like [his] father’.21 These Oedipal underpinnings to General R.’s killing of a Kenyan loyalist retroactively divest the act of any political motive. On completely the opposite side of the political spectrum, the homeguard Karanja’s relations with his mother are also significant. His idleness is a source of contention between them and, in an agricultural society such as that of the Gikuyu peasantry among whom the novel places itself, this idleness compounds Wairimu’s economic hardship. She disapproves of Karanja’s loyalist activities. However, as a long-suffering mother, she consoles herself with the traditional saying (itself complicit with the subjection of subaltern women who inhabit a society geared towards uterine production) ‘a child from your own womb is never thrown away’.22 Again, in Wairimu we see the cleaving of the domestic and the political along gender lines. Her motherly responsibilities and loyalties to Karanja place her at a remove from her community’s political interests. A further example can be seen in Mugo. Mugo’s stature as a half-outsider in the community is not only a result of his apolitical inclinations. It is also, I think, integrally linked with his lack of a mother. He has two mother substitutes: his aunt and the old woman who is Gitogo’s mother. His aunt is a drunkard and an imperious harridan, and her characterization corresponds with the other matriarchs in the novel – Queen Elizabeth and Wangu Makeri. These matriarchs share an affinity in that they all compromise male potency and potentially threaten the phallocentric momentum of Ngugi’s historical narrative. Mugo’s aunt, Waitherero, asks him confrontationally, ‘[W]hat’s your penis worth?’23 and Mugo’s ‘one desire’ is to kill her by strangulation.24 This desire is to castrate rather than to be castrated     21   22   23   24   19 20

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 89. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, pp. 184–5. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 191. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 196. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 8. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, pp. 8–9.

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and it reappears in the narrative when Mugo attempts to throttle Mumbi after he has confessed to betraying Kihika (the betrayal results in Kihika’s execution by hanging). Other than confessing to Kihika’s betrayal,25 Mugo’s one significant act of heroism occurs when he intervenes to save Wambuku, pregnant with child, from a beating by the homeguards. His stature within the community, and the Messianic desire he inspires, is indicated in the song that relates his heroism: And he jumped into the trench, The words he told the soldier pierced my heart like a spear; You will not beat a pregnant woman, he said, You will not beat a pregnant woman, he told the soldier26

If I am correct that there is a uterine social organization in the novel’s iconography of nationhood, then Wambuku’s pregnancy is manifestly significant. It figures not only personal but also national suffering during the Emergency and arguably accords with the phallocentric narratives of resistance that we encounter elsewhere in the novel. As in nationalist and imperialist accounts of Mau Mau, Ngugi’s text positions the women as the limit between Mau Mau and the government forces. In this episode, home guard violence occurs in an historically plausible site of colonial anti-insurgent strategy. During the Emergency, the trench was designed to be a defensive military barrier against Mau Mau attacks. It was completed by coercing civilian, and largely female, labour into its excavation. But beyond the trench’s topological position as a limit or boundary, the woman involved (Wambuku) invokes a significant set of homosocial relations in Ngugi’s novel. Wambuku, whom Mugo tries to save from the beating by a homeguard, has been Kihika’s lover prior to his involvement in active combat, and she later dies during pregnancy as a result of her injuries. In larger symbolic terms, just as we have noticed in Weep Not, Child, the sign ‘woman’ is a consensual trope that encloses masculine subjects within a contestatory dialectic. If female characters in the novel are positioned as consensual tropes, then it is understandable that a figure like Mumbi occupies a crucial place in the moral economy of confession and reconciliation – those sites from which a post-Uhuru consensus will emerge. Mumbi is Mugo’s confiteor and ‘inspires [his] social redemption’,27 and her role is deeply enmeshed with her sexuality. Before Mugo confesses to Mumbi, she speculates about his desire for her and half-admits to her own desire for him. As Mumbi goes to meet Mugo, her thoughts are offered to us through the following sexualized language: ‘The thrill sharpened as later in that evening she set out for Mugo’s hut. … Mumbi felt like a girl again, braving the 25   As many critics have noticed, Mugo’s private and public confessions are similar to those made by Razumov to Natalia and to the revolutionaries in Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (London: Methuen, 1923 [1911]), pp. 297, 307. 26   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 156. 27   Michael Vaughan, ‘African Fiction and Popular Struggle’, p. 48.

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dark and the wind and the storm, to meet her lover. What if Mugo should – she left the question and answer in abeyance.’28 Of course, Mumbi’s desire is tightly controlled by the use of simile and of free indirect discourse in the passage, and by the fact that she does not quite manage to express the possibility of mutual attraction. Once Mumbi is in Mugo’s hut, we are told that ‘He was handsome and lonely, she bit her lower lip to steady herself. … Yet she allowed irrelevant thoughts to capture her fancy; if he should want me – If he should –’29 It is, of course, to Ngugi’s considerable credit that he is almost able to write Mumbi’s sexual desires. But the device that makes these desires possible is Mumbi’s mistaken belief in Mugo’s heroism, and the myth of warrior masculinity that this mistaken belief allows her to attach to him. Since we soon discover that the largely apolitical Mugo has betrayed Kihika, Mumbi’s desire for him – constrained as it is – is ultimately debunked as another form of false consciousness that she was never quite able to admit to in the first place. Unlike Kihika’s visions of revolutionary self-sacrifice, Mumbi’s version of Messianic heroism is that of Christ betrayed – we are told that her ‘idea of glory was something nearer the agony of Christ at the Garden of Gethsemane’.30 As Kihika’s Judas, Mugo’s confession to Mumbi in private presages his eventual confession in public.31 Mugo’s interior monologue, in which he recalls his confession to Mumbi, confirms that she is placed similarly to other female characters in relation to masculine narratives of the insurgency: [Mumbi] had sat there, and talked to him and given him a glimpse of a new earth. … That night, he hardly closed his eyes. The picture of Mumbi merged with that of the village and the detention camps. He would look at Mumbi and she would immediately change into his aunt or the old woman.32

We should notice three patterns of association here. Firstly, we should notice the association between Mumbi and a utopian ‘new earth’. Secondly, Mumbi’s transition into Mugo’s ‘two mothers-by-proxy’ is, I think, symptomatic of the uterine textual organization of the novel. In other words, once feminine subjectivity is delimited to female mothering capacities, it risks becoming reduced to the monadic womb (at the expense of desire that exceeds reproductive framing and that Spivak or Cixous might term ‘clitoral’). Tellingly, after Mugo has confessed to Mumbi, he is ‘reunited’ with the old woman; a mother-by-proxy, who in turn mistakes him for her

    30   31  

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 158. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 159. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 77. See David Maughan-Brown, ‘“Mau Mau” and Violence in Ngugi’s Novels’, English in Africa, 8:2 (1981), p. 13. 32   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 203. 28 29

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own lost son, Gitogo.33 To Mugo, Mumbi now seems ‘a thing of the past’.34 Bearing in mind that Gitogo’s construction reveals a ‘private’ investment on Ngugi’s part, I would argue that this symbolic resolution of two disquieting narrative moments (Mugo’s betrayal and Gitogo’s murder) reconciles the discrete spheres of ‘private’ and ‘public’. It anticipates a more general reconciliation between the characters’ traumatic personal histories and the collective Kenyan national identity that Ngugi would like to see formed in common. It is this reconciliation that Mugo’s ultimate affiliation with a mother-by-proxy symbolically enacts, and it is his confession to Mumbi that enables it. Finally, the third pattern we should notice in the quotation above is that it places Mumbi recognizably at the intersection between colonial and nationalist discursive sites in the Emergency landscape (the detention camps and the village). As such, she becomes something like the site and the stake of a struggle played out between the conflicting sexual and political masculinities that Gikonyo and Karanja represent. Mumbi’s merging with the village and the detention camps contaminates the discrete spaces of private confession (of the oath in the torture chamber) and public confession (of Kihika’s betrayal in the cathartic scene that begets the solidarity of the post-Independence community). It is one of the unconscious ironies of A Grain of Wheat that its vision of Kenyan national identity relies upon the same confessional logic as that of the colonial torture chamber in the detention camps. Again, it needs to be remarked that both the private and public spaces of confession are gendered. We do not only see this in Mugo’s hallucination of Mumbi blurring into the village and the detention camps; the name of the village in which the novel is predominantly set, Thabai (Kenya in microcosm), effects a similar blurring of these spaces. ‘Thabai’ denotes the stinging nettles that the starving villagized populations were forced to rely upon for food and which were inserted into women’s vaginas as a form of torture in settings such as the detention camps.35 If Mumbi’s womb is the site and stake of struggle between Karanja and Gikonyo and the larger colonial and anti-colonial forces that they represent, then the symbolic allusiveness of blurring Mumbi on to Thabai and the detention camps is consistent with such a uterine organization of female subjectivity. There are other ways in which the novel instrumentalizes femininity in its depiction of conflicting discursive formations during the crisis of insurgency. The effects of Villagization upon Thabai are described as follows: Men, finding women like Mumbi on the roof hammering in the nails, stopped to tease them: it was all because a woman – a new Wangu – in England – had been crowned: what good ever came of a woman’s rule?

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 205.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 205. 35   See Donald Barnett and Karari wa Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 209. For 33

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more information about Thabai (Urtica Massaica), see F. N. Gachathi, Kikuyu Botanical Dictionary of Plant Names and Uses (Nairobi, 1989), pp. 143–4.

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‘Aah, but that is not true,’ the women would reply at times, glad for the interruption. ‘Doesn’t Governor Baring, who rules Kenya, have a penis?’ ‘Aah, it’s still the woman’s shauri [affair]. See how you women have sent all the men to detention for their penis to rot there, unwilling husbands to Queen Elizabeth?’ ‘And to the forests, too,’ the women would burst out, the raillery turning into bitterness. And without another word the men would hurry back to their own sites to continue the metallic cries of the hammer and nail.36

The passage likens the Emergency to female rulership under Wangu Makeri in order to rationalize Gikuyu male dominance in public affairs. The rejoinder that refers to Mau Mau fighters in the forest presumably offers resistance as a recuperation of Gikuyu male potency. Incidentally, the roofs of the huts in New Thabai are made of metal, indicating that the traditional thatching (performed by women) has been replaced with metal and that the roofing of huts is now increasingly performed by ‘feminized’ men. As such, the Emergency and its Villagization programme have, in Ngugi’s analysis, severed the Gikuyu from the time-honoured traditions and the gendered division of labour that constitute their social relations. Of course, with the novel’s emphasis on having a penis as a precondition of power (like Baring), Gikuyu history is depicted in androcentric terms. As we have seen, female misrule is linked explicitly with the history of colonization under the British, ruled by a female monarch. Gatu’s story in the concentration camp undermines the authority of the British monarch by representing her as a prostitute, willing to sell her body in exchange for the valley in which he was born: She said (mimics her): ‘If you sell me your valley, I’ll let you … once.’ Women are women you know. ‘In my country,’ I told her, ‘we do not buy that thing from our women. We get it free.’ But man, my own thing troubled me. I had not seen a woman for many years. However, before I could even say anything more, she had called in her soldiers, who bound my hands and feet and drew me out of the valley.’ … ‘Man,’ he said after the laughter. ‘I wish I had agreed at once to satisfy my thing which troubles me to this day.’37

Sex translates as a form of political conquest in this passage, and female desire is fantasized – however humorously – as a form of political misrule. If colonization is cast in terms of sexual disempowerment, then it is telling that resistance is cast in terms of potency. This framing of anti-colonial resistance is extended to other characters in the novel. When we are introduced to Wambui (whose construction is partially based upon Mary Nyanjiru, the first Kenyan woman to die in resistance   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 124.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 94, first ellipsis in the original.

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to colonial rule), we are told that as a younger women she criticized the reticence of male workers to go on strike at a shoe factory: She believed in the power of women to influence events, especially where men had failed to act, or seemed indecisive. Many people in old Thabai remembered her now-famous drama at the workers’ strike in 1950. The strike was meant to paralyse the country and make it more difficult for the whiteman to govern. A few men who worked at a big shoe factory near Thabai and in the settled area, grumbled and even said, so the rumours went, that they would not come out on strike. The Party convened a general meeting at Rung’ei. At the height of the proceedings, Wambui suddenly broke through the crowd and led a group of women to the platform. She grabbed the microphone from the speakers. People were interested. Was there any circumcised man who felt water in his stomach at the sight of the whiteman? Women, she said, had brought their Mithuru and Miengu [long skirts and aprons] to the platform. Let therefore such men, she jeered, come forward, wear women’s skirts and aprons and give up their trousers to the women. … The next day all the men stayed away from work.38

This passage predicates male potency upon one’s circumcised status. At first reading, Wambui’s actions and words in this passage ostensibly offer her a position from which to transgress the cultural codes that silence Gikuyu women’s dissenting political voices. Paradoxically, however, her voice is recuperated for the Gikuyu patriarchy by the gender framing of her dissent. The men strike, not because they have been persuaded of the necessity of strike action, but because they do not wish to be ‘upstaged’ by a woman. Wambui holds them accountable as members of a dominant and privileged gender, but her appeals to the potency or bravery of men also serve to reinforce that dominance and privilege. If both colonization and resistance are couched in sexualized description, then it is unsurprising that the climactic description of Uhuru celebrations follows this pattern. The description of the community’s tense moments of anticipation in the moments leading up to Independence renders visible a patriarchal subtext: As usual, on such occasions, some young men walked in gangs, carrying torches, lurked and whispered in dark corners and the fringes, really looking for lovemates among the crowd. Mothers warned their daughters to take care not to be raped in the dark. The girls danced in the middle, thrusting out their buttocks provokingly, knowing that the men in corners watched them. Everybody waited for something to happen. This ‘waiting’ and the uncertainty that went with it – like a woman torn between fear and joy during birth motions – was a taut cord beneath the screams and shouts and the laughter.39

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 157.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 177.

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Immediately afterwards, the villagers wait outside Mugo’s hut and, at the hour of Independence, the women cry out ‘the five Ngemi to welcome a son at birth or at circumcision’.40 In passages like these, the novel’s narration of the history of resistance explicitly locates Independence within the ambit of circumcision, copulation and reproduction. In other words, national politics is collapsed conveniently on to sexuality and reproduction. To this extent, A Grain of Wheat instrumentalizes the sign ‘woman’ as a metaphor for the nation in the novel’s narration of history. The upshot of these associations is that the Kenya of A Grain of Wheat emerges as a theatre of desire and gender-political interest. Transgressive Female Representations It would be difficult to argue, as Kirsten Holst Peterson does in ‘Birth Pangs of a National Consciousness’, that A Grain of Wheat operates ‘with complete political consciousness, coupled with revolutionary action’.41 Quite obviously, the implicit tensions between a Christian discourse (however revised it may be) and cultural nationalist discourses (which elide the privileged class position of educated exponents of Kenyan nationalism) preclude an oversimplified reading of Ngugi’s political vision at this point in his development. Additionally, we surely have to acknowledge that political consciousness in Ngugi’s novel or in any other can never be complete when gender operates as a blind spot within it. Indeed, the metaphor implicit in the title of Peterson’s article (‘Birth Pangs of a National Consciousness’) suggests the infiltration into her perspective of exactly the patriarchal discourses that underpin Ngugi’s writing of history. Some critics have not perceived anything problematic with the ways in which ‘femininity’ is constructed in A Grain of Wheat. Charles A. Nama argues, in ‘Daughters of Moombi’, that Ngugi’s heroines occupy a special place in his fiction, with respect to their function as custodians and defenders of traditional Gikuyu aesthetics and culture. Nama does not interrogate the more manifest moments of sexism in the novel or the historical gendering of national resistance during the circumcision debate. This oversight manifests as a slight anomaly in Nama’s article. Nama’s misreading of one of the passages of A Grain of Wheat is perhaps attributable to the traditionalist interests implied in the title of his article: ‘When Karanja, Kihika and Gitongo [sic] encounter Mumbi at Gikonyo’s workshop she is addressed in glowing terms by Karanga [sic], “Mother of Men, we have come make us some tea” … These tributes to Mumbi also illustrate her role in the world of the novel.’42 In fact, Karanja addresses Wangari, and he addresses her in this   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 178.   Kirsten Holst Petersen, ‘Birth Pangs of a National Consciousness: Mau Mau and

40 41

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’, World Literature Written in English, 20:2 (Autumn 1981), p. 218. 42   Charles Nama, ‘Daughters of Moombi: Ngugi’s Heroines and Traditional Gikuyu Aesthetics’ in Carol Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves (eds), Ngambika: Studies of

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way: ‘Mother of men, we have come. Make us tea.’43 Nama’s misreading is perhaps not terribly important in the broader scheme of the novel. After all, Wangari is also a ‘traditional heroine’. However, this is exactly where I take issue with Nama’s reading of Ngugi’s fiction. The seemingly interchangeable ‘tribute’ to Wangari (or Mumbi, or ‘woman’) reinforces Gikuyu male privilege by revering Gikuyu women’s reproductive and child-rearing capacities. Karanja’s tribute endorses a cultural world view that emerges from the uterine social organization of traditional Gikuyu society, at least as it is represented in A Grain of Wheat. ‘Women’ are thus constituted as ‘heroines’ while they perform their duties as gender-oppressed entities. Indeed, the ‘tribute’ – ‘Mother of men’ – might be interrogated via Spivak’s critique of Freud: ‘Everywhere there is a non-confrontation with the idea of the womb as a workshop, except to produce a surrogate penis.’44 Not all of Ngugi’s female characters are figured in this way. One of the delights of his fiction is the way in which it strains against its ideological patterning. For example, Wambui’s construction as a figure of resistance is largely positive. For one thing, her activities during the Emergency are consistent with the resistance to colonial authority offered by the ‘passive wing’ of Mau Mau: Wambui was not very old, although she had lost most of her teeth. During the Emergency, she carried secrets from the villages to the forest and back to the villages and towns. She knew the underground movements in Nakuru, Njoro, Elburgon and other places in and outside the Rift Valley. The story is told how she once carried a pistol tied to her thighs near the groin. She was dressed in long, wide and heavy clothes, the picture of decrepitude and senile decay. She was taking the gun to Naivasha. As luck would have it, she was suddenly caught in one of those sporadic military and police operations which plagued the country. … Soon came her turn to be searched. Her tooth started aching; she twisted her lips, moaned; saliva tossed out of the corners of her mouth and flowed down her chin. The Gikuyu policeman searching her was saying in Swahili: Pole mama: made other sympathetic noises and went on searching. He started from her chest, rummaged under her armpits, gradually working his way down towards the vital spot. And suddenly Wambui screamed, the man stopped, astonished. ‘The children of these days,’ she began. ‘Have you lost all your shame? Just because the whiteman tells you so, you would actually touch your own mother’s … the woman who gave you birth? All right, I’ll lift the clothes and you can have a look at your mother, it is so aged, and see what gain it’ll bring you for the rest of your life.’

Women in African Literature (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1986), p. 142. 43   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 70. 44   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 81.

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She actually made as if to lift her clothes and expose her nakedness. The man involuntarily turned his eyes away.45

We should notice here that A Grain of Wheat highlights through Wambui women’s vital roles as Mau Mau arms couriers – roles which are bracketed in so many historical accounts of the insurgency. But more importantly, Wambui’s evasion of colonial strategies of detection is conducted via an ingenious appeal to her revered position as a mother within traditional society. Although her subterfuge is unavoidably predicated upon patriarchal ideologies and a uterine social organization, she recasts gender oppression by inhabiting it as a strategic performance, evacuating it of its authoritative claims upon her in the name of revolution. There are other ways in which A Grain of Wheat exposes the inconsistency of a uterine textual organization. Mumbi’s child unsettles Gikonyo’s masculinity in a profound manner. The child is the cause of Gikonyo’s neurotic reaction to Mumbi, a reaction which leads to Mumbi leaving the household: Previously, Gikonyo also treated the boy politely, showing neither resentment nor affection. For, as he argued in his heart, a child was a child and was not responsible for his birth. The boy had sensed a coldness and instinctively respected the distance. Today, however, he propped himself in between Gikonyo’s knees, and started chattering, desiring to be friendly. ‘Grandma has told me such a story – a good one – about – about – Do you know the one about the Irimu?’ Gikonyo roughly pushed the boy away from the knees, disgust on his face. The boy staggered and fell on his back and burst into tears.46

Of course, Gikonyo knows the story all too well. The story of the irimu (an ogre) is one in which a ‘girl’ takes the wrong path in a forest and fails to keep an appointment with her lover (a warrior). The irimu captures her and wishes to eat her. She delays his advances by singing to him that she knows of a nicer place to be eaten. Eventually, her lover arrives and kills the ogre.47 Okpewho states that this story may have been influenced by the Mau Mau war. Gikonyo is, on one level, the Mau Mau warrior who makes love with Mumbi in the forest and who leaves her in order to fight in the forest. Karanja is the ogre who begets a son by Mumbi in his absence. The child is ‘the son of an ogre’ and Karanja’s mother is named Wairimu (the son/daughter of an irimu). These metonymic associations conspire together in the child’s ‘innocent intercourse’, provoking Gikonyo to respond irrationally. This   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 19, second ellipsis in the original.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, pp. 145–6. 47   Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity 45

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(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 219–20.

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textual moment constitutes a return of the repressed, as is evident in the imagery of flooding and overflow in Mumbi’s speech: ‘What sort of a man do you call yourself? Have you no manly courage to touch me? Why do turn your anger on a child, a little child …’ She seethed like a river that has broken a dam. Words tossed out; they came in floods, filling her mouth so that she could hardly articulate them.48

At this point in the narrative, Mumbi’s voice is privileged as an excess; an excess which unsettles the fixity with which the novel elsewhere constructs female desire as political misrule. If the novel’s ordering of male and female subjectivities functions on the repression of one of the binates, then Mumbi’s speech encapsulates the return which disrupts that economy. Equally, Wangari becomes directly involved in the conflict on Mumbi’s behalf: ‘This does not concern you, Mother!’ [Gikonyo] said. ‘Does not concern me?’ She raised her voice, slapping her sides with both hands. ‘Come all the earth and see what a son, my son, answers me. Does not concern me who brought you forth from these thighs? That the day should come – hah! – Touch her again if you call yourself a man!’49

Wangari’s admonishment of Gikonyo causes him to leave the hut in defeat, and is thus a privileging of female speech within a largely male-dominated narrative. Her argument exposes the limits of a uterine social organization. If women are revered in Gikuyu society because of their ability to produce children – and to become ‘mothers of men’ at the expense of female desire (and, specifically, the clitoris) – then Wangari points out the inconsistencies in Gikonyo’s claim to proprietorship of Mumbi’s child-bearing capacities. She accomplishes this by allowing that it does not matter who has fathered the child. The name of the father is immaterial to a woman’s status as a ‘mother of men’. Wangari thus silences Gikonyo’s patriarchal violence by exposing the limits of a discourse that demarcates female subjectivity exclusively within women’s mothering functions. In short, Wangari and Mumbi forge a subaltern sisterhood that plays devil’s advocate to the patriarchal law. The Gender Framing of the Nation Not only are women intricately bound up with the symbolization of community. In a much larger sense, they are harnessed into the novel’s gender framing of the nation. Like the signifiers ‘community’ or ‘Kenya’, Mumbi forms the nexus for social relations between the male protagonists. She is Gikonyo’s wife, and   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 146, ellipsis in the original.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 146.

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since the category of the familial and domestic is a privileged realm in A Grain of Wheat, this relationship is the most important in terms of the novel’s politics. Mumbi is Kihika’s sister and has been ‘moved by her brother’s words into visions of a heroic past in other lands marked by acts of sacrificial martyrdom’.50 Since brother and sister are both possessed of strong spiritual convictions and notions of redemptive self-sacrifice, their relationship translates the messianism implicit in Ngugi’s subject formation within Christian discourses. As we have seen, Mumbi is Mugo’s confessor, a medium through which the violent truths of nation formation are revealed. Mumbi and the loyalist Karanja conceive a child in an illegitimate relationship that equates with Karanja’s illegitimate political relation to postIndependence Kenya. Of course, Karanja initially becomes a homeguard not for ideological, political or material reasons, but because he wishes to win Mumbi for himself. Therefore, even without her framing in Gikuyu myths of origin, Mumbi enables the most important homosocial and political constellations in the novel.51 More broadly, we might say that A Grain of Wheat associates the sign ‘woman’ with the Kenyan nation in a number of ways, especially via the construction of Mumbi. Ernest Gellner, a theorist of nationalism, has defined nationalism as a ‘theory of political legitimacy’.52 In A Grain of Wheat and in Ngugi’s subsequent novels, the ‘theory of political legitimacy’ is collapsed quite simplistically into a theory of legitimate paternity, or at other times a theory of legitimate patrilinear descent. It will already be clear to readers from my discussion of The River Between that this gendering of the nation occurs for historical reasons. Historically, Gikuyu nationalism consolidated itself during the Kenyan clitoridectomy debate. During this debate, the clitoridectomized woman came to symbolize Gikuyu resistance and this instituted a uterine social organization within Gikuyu nationalism. Hence, female identities and anatomies became symbolically bound to motherhood and to the nation – at the expense of female political agency and female sexual agency. This discursive formation was consistent with clitoridectomy’s privileging of Gikuyu women’s reproductive capacities over their sexual capacities. Given these historical and institutional foundations, it is unsurprising that we find a privileging of motherhood in Ngugi’s fiction. Kihika, the Mau Mau hero in A Grain of Wheat, says explicitly, ‘With us, Kenya is our mother.’53 More significantly perhaps, there is an obvious gender framing of the nation at work in the marital relationship between Gikonyo and Mumbi. Gikonyo and Mumbi are not only characters in a post-Independence Kenyan novel. As any reader of Ngugi’s fiction will know, Gikonyo and Mumbi’s names also evoke the two   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 77.   As Patrick Williams suggests, ‘the extent to which the central male characters

50 51

achieve or experience significant existence is precisely in relation to [Mumbi]’. Patrick Williams, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 64. 52   Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, p. 1. 53   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 78.

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legendary founders of the Gikuyu community; Gikuyu and Mumbi. Given their correspondences with the male and female archetypes in the Gikuyu foundation myth, Gikonyo and Mumbi each represent a gendered collective. Mumbi’s name has remained unchanged, but Gikonyo’s name is a derivative of ‘Gikuyu’. His name also denotes the Lincoln bombers which used infrared scanning to detect Mau Mau insurgents’ body heat in the forest. The bombers were dubbed ‘Gikonyo’ (meaning, literally, ‘navel’) because the doors of their bomb-bays were located beneath the planes.54 In terms of this association, Gikonyo represents the Gikuyu male peasant whose identity has been fragmented by colonial strategies of detection and detention during the Kenyan Emergency. His activity as a Mau Mau member is dispersed across three sites: as a member of the passive wing in Thabai, as a detainee in Rira and as a fighter in the forest. However, his name also invokes his separation from the mythical past in which ‘Gikuyu’ reigned supreme – it bears the inscription of modernity. Mumbi as a character or as an archetype of all Gikuyu women is situated conveniently on either side of the narrative present (in Gikuyu myths of historical origin and as a figure of deferred utopian nationhood). As a transhistorical constant, Mumbi is located at the furthermost reaches of the Gikuyu historical experience: as a source from which the gravid effects of history issue, or as an unrealized national destination. She is excluded from the present and, arguably, from the processes of history itself.55 Gikonyo, whose mythical name (Gikuyu) bears the inscription of modernity and is therefore part of the historical process, holds sway over the post-Independence present. Hence, Gikonyo and Mumbi’s framing in Gikuyu folklore yokes them into a nationalist lineage originating in a mythical prehistory that precedes the emergence of the nation as a modern political form. Therefore, Gikonyo and Mumbi index Gikuyu communal origins and all of Gikuyu history. But Gikonyo and Mumbi are freighted with a great deal more ideological baggage than that. When Mumbi first approaches Gikonyo with a panga for repair, the resistance song that he sings invokes further inscriptions of their relationship: Gikuyu na Mumbi Gikuyu na Mumbi Gikuyu na Mumbi Nikihiu ngwatiro.56

The first phrase in the song does not only denote the archetypal founders of the Gikuyu community (Gikuyu and Mumbi). ‘Gikuyu na Mumbi’ is also one of the   See Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 201.   Patrick Williams asserts, ‘Charm and beauty some of Ngugi’s female characters

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may have, but at this stage, real power is something they are not allowed to get their hands on.’ Patrick Williams, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 66. 56   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 69.

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names which the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army used for itself – it never called itself ‘Mau Mau’. The second phrase in the song is ‘a proverb suggesting the pressure of time. … Ngugi translates it “the firebrand is burned at the handle”.’57 In terms of this translation, the exchange between Gikonyo and Mumbi relates the urgent need for military successes in the Mau Mau insurgency. However, the song’s reference to the archetypal male and female figures (Gikuyu and Mumbi) suggests that it is using gender as a framing device for anti-colonial struggle. This reading is confirmed in a secondary resonance of the song, confirmed by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin: ‘Nikihiu’ literally means that something is ‘cooked’. Ngwatiro is literally a ‘handle’. But when used together the term means that someone is in trouble because the handle is too hot. The song as invented by Kihika means that the relationship between man and woman spells ‘trouble’. The relationship is ‘too hot to handle’ and as a chorus it has both sexual and political overtones. 58

Mumbi finds a poignant irony in the song’s applicability to the mundane situation in which the two characters find themselves: ‘Oh Carpenter, Carpenter. So you know why I came?’ ‘I don’t!’ he said, puzzled. ‘But you sing to me and Gikuyu telling us it is burnt at the handle.’ … She turned to a small basket she was carrying and took out a panga. ‘You see this panga needs a wooden handle. The old one was burned in the fire by mistake. My mother wants it quickly because it is the only one she has got for cultivating.’59

There is a very careful overlaying here of the secular world of men’s and women’s work on to the political world of revolution and the sacred world of Gikuyu belief systems. This episode in the novel introduces the relationship between Gikonyo and Mumbi, which – prior to Gikonyo’s detention – is depicted as a harmonious extension of Gikonyo’s organic relation to his work as a Gikuyu craftsman and artist. When he fixes the handle of the panga, his work is a labour of love: Gikonyo saw Mumbi’s gait, her very gestures, in the feel and movement in the plane. Her voice was in the air as he bent down and traced the shape of the panga on the wood. … Everything, Thabai, the whole world was under the control of

  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 201.   Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory

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and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 58. 59   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 70.

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his hand. Suddenly the wave of power broke into an ecstasy, an exultation. Peace settled in his heart. He felt a holy calm; he was in love with all the earth.60

Gikonyo’s work culminates in a moment of political and religious ‘peace’, which contains resonances of sexual afterglow. Moreover, the climactic language in this passage anticipates the later consummation of Gikonyo’s love for Mumbi, when we are told that ‘Gikonyo passed his hands through her hair and over her breasts, slowly coaxing and smoothing stiffness from her body, until she lay limp in his hands’.61 Gikonyo’s lovemaking is implicitly a form of craftsmanship; smoothing out the rough edges of the embattled man–woman relationship to which the resistance song refers. As if to underscore this seamless relationship between Gikonyo’s vocation and his sexuality, the setting in which Gikonyo and Mumbi first have sex is the forest, which is also the setting of the resistance staged by Mau Mau, as well as the source of raw material (wood) for Gikonyo’s labour as a carpenter. Michael Vaughan’s article on A Grain of Wheat, with which I am in general agreement, has the following insights to offer about the relation between Gikonyo’s work and his love for Mumbi: Because of the nature of Gikonyo’s work – that of an independent craftsman – Ngugi is able to seize the element of personal control over the labour process and treat it as a moment of purely individual self-realisation. Gikonyo fuses with the totality. But this is the totality of creation, of nature, not of society. In the second place, the prosaic actuality of the labour process counts for nothing here. Economic life has no meaning in itself. The cycle of labour becomes meaningful when it is meshed with the cycle of romantic love.62

In my view, the absence of ‘prosaic actuality’ in the depiction of Gikonyo and Mumbi arises out of the fact that they are characters encumbered with political, but also mythical, functions. As markers of transhistorical belief, Gikonyo and Mumbi are associated with the foundation of the Gikuyu people and an as-yetunrecognized utopian post-Independence future that is deferred beyond the chronological frame of the novel (we see this in Gikonyo and Mumbi’s imminent sexual reconciliation at the end of the novel). The cultural resources that Ngugi is drawing upon in his naming of Gikonyo and Mumbi mean that the novel equates the sexual and the political in other ways too. When Mumbi’s hut is burned down as part of the anti-Mau Mau Villagization programme, we need to remember that the wife’s hut in Gikuyu culture is called Nyumba ya Mumbi, the House of Mumbi. In its traditional context, the House of Mumbi is the name of the hut in which children are conceived and raised – it is a physical edifice. In addition, the House of Mumbi denotes the ‘elementary   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 71.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 80. 62   Michael Vaughan, ‘African Fiction and Popular Struggle’, p. 37. 60 61

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[or nuclear-polygamous] family’ in the Gikuyu community.63 In other words, the House of Mumbi is a gender-political institution. However, Nyumba ya Mumbi (the House of Mumbi) was also one of the Gikuyu nationalists’ names for the Kenyan nation – a political metaphor. Before Mumbi is relocated to New Thabai by the colonial authorities, her hut is set on fire. This event is charged with Gikuyu cultural significances. Firstly, the Gikuyu woman’s hut (Nyumba ya Mumbi – ‘House of Mumbi’) is the equivalent of a gynaeceum.64 All sexual relations between spouses take place in it (rather than in the dwelling of the husband – the thingira) and children inhabit this hut prior to their initiation into adulthood via circumcision.65 Secondly, women are responsible for the thatching of huts. Charles A. Nama explains: While building huts was the work of men, the women were charged with the responsibility of beautifying it with thatching. … This symbolic completion of a Gikuyu homestead underscores the artistic prowess of Gikuyu women in enhancing the ‘beauty’ of Gikuyu art forms.66

Following Nama, we might say that the burning of the hut by the homeguards constitutes an affront against both women’s work under the sexual division of labour and women’s mothering function (the two forms of work are interrelated and should perhaps not be distinguished so easily from one another). These two forms of work are partially subsumed under the cultural-nationalist construction of Kenya as the ‘House of Mumbi’.67 Since all of the major characters experience a disparity between the ‘discrete’ categories of the domestic and the political, the task of reconstructing Kenya is rendered by the metaphor of the reconstruction of the homestead. The tragic national parable of a Mau Mau prisoner, Gatu, makes this metaphor explicit: A certain man, the only son of his parents, once wanted a woman. And the woman also wanted to marry him and have children. But the man kept on putting off the marriage because he wanted to build a new hut so that the children would be

  Carol Sicherman, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 228.   For the term ‘gynaeceum’, I am indebted to an interview with Michel Tournier,

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in which he says: ‘Initiation cannot have the same meaning for [girls] as it does for boys. Brought up by women, like their brothers, they obviously do not have to break with that milieu and become integrated into another group, like boys. Normally, they are destined to remain within the gynaeceum.’ See Michel Tournier, The Fetishist (London: Minerva, 1992), p. 219. My reading of the term ‘House of Mumbi’ is that it retains women within one social position (that of childbearers or future mothers) whether the girl resides with her mother, or the wife with her husband. 65   Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, pp. 83–4. 66   Charles Nama, ‘Daughters of Moombi’, p. 140. 67   See Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau From Within, p. 182.

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born in a different hut. ‘We can build it together,’ she often told him. In the end, she was tired of waiting and letting life dry in her. She married another man. The first man went on trying to build the hut. It was never finished. Our people say that building a hut is a lifelong process. As a result the man never had a woman or children to continue his family fire.68

Gatu’s parable is, of course, prophetic, since Gikonyo returns to find that Mumbi has slept with Karanja. Arguably, the new hut to which Gatu refers (‘Nyumba ya Mumbi’) is a metaphor for a new Kenya. In terms of Gikuyu cultural codes, it is the gynaeceum. This passage, spoken by the most outspoken critic of British imperialism in the novel, reveals that political dissent in A Grain of Wheat is informed by a desire for mastery of the domestic; a mastery that entails Gikuyu male prerogatives in culture at large. So when Gikonyo imagines impregnating Mumbi at the end of A Grain of Wheat, this fantasy or prediction prefigures the rebuilding of the House of Mumbi as a physical edifice or a social institution, but also the reinstating of the Gikuyu nation at a metaphorical level. In brief, the construction of Gikonyo and Mumbi allows Ngugi to reduce a complex national confrontation to an estrangement between spouses and to resolve this confrontation in terms of Mumbi’s reproductive capacities. Of course, the Emergency did fragment the lives of families and communities, and it would seem obvious to use a love relationship as the model for social discord or social cohesion at the most microcosmic level. However, a gender analysis of the novel reveals that even the homestead is the site of an ideological struggle between male and female subjects who are socially constructed and hierarchically organized. By framing Gikonyo and Mumbi’s relationship in orature, Ngugi renders this ideological struggle transparent. A Grain of Wheat tries to resolve the legacy of colonialism by suggesting that the child resulting from Gikonyo and Mumbi’s sexual reconciliation will herald the long-delayed arrival of a truly egalitarian and democratic Kenya. Of course, a univocal reading of the novel’s conclusion would seem to suggest a cause for optimism. After all, Gikonyo determines to ‘reckon with [Mumbi’s] feelings, her thoughts, her desires’,69 promising a consensual relationship between the spouses. However, the sculpture on which Gikonyo is working invites a reappraisal of the conclusion. Gikonyo’s resolution to ‘change the woman’s figure’ and ‘carve a woman big – big with child’ may presage the resumption of Gikuyu male privilege in culture.70 On the novel’s own terms, a reading in which the nationhood that fulfils the destiny of Mau Mau resistance is aligned with the   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 96.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 213. 70   Stratton’s comment about Devil on the Cross – that while ‘women serve as an 68 69

index of the state of the nation, men make up the nation’s citizenry’ – is also apposite here. Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 161.

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parturition that fulfils male potency would not be unfounded.71 During Gikonyo’s incarceration, this association has been made explicit. The free indirect discourse framing Gikonyo’s thoughts tells us that ‘[his] reunion with Mumbi would see the birth of a new Kenya. … Jomo had lost the case at Kapenguria. The whiteman would silence the father and the orphans would be left without a helper.’72 It is a telling silence that the orphans’ ‘mother’ is neither named nor represented here. It is as if Ngugi’s economy of signs permits mothering few political functions other than the (re)production of manpower required by post-Independence Kenya. The ‘birth of a new Kenya’ heralded at the conclusion of A Grain of Wheat at one level works to silence femininity. In my view, it replays the myth depicting the emergence of the Gikuyu patriarchy – a narrative that engenders an ethnic political community at the expense of female political agency. In its closing pages, Ngugi’s novel reworks this myth to anticipate the post-Independence national political community. Fortuitously, this Kenya will comfortably coincide with the resumption of a legitimate Gikuyu patrilineage. For here, we cannot help but remember the legitimizing myth of Gikuyu patriarchy described early in the novel. The prehistorical matriarchy, we are told, was weak and tyrannical and so the men got together, impregnated all the women simultaneously and took over the running of culture while the erstwhile matriarchs were otherwise indisposed: It was many, many years ago. Then women ruled the land of the Agikuyu. Men had no property, they were only there to serve the whims and needs of the women. Those were hard years. So they waited for the women to go to war, they plotted a revolt, taking an oath of secrecy to keep them bound each to each in the common pursuit of freedom. They would sleep with all the women at once, for didn’t they know the heroines would return hungry for love and relaxation? Fate did the rest; women were pregnant; the takeover met with little resistance.73

We have seen that nationalism as a theory of legitimacy becomes a theory of legitimate paternity in A Grain of Wheat. We have seen that colonialism is repeatedly figured in terms of female misrule and that political revolution is figured in terms of male potency. The references to the mythical overthrow of the matriarchy sit uncomfortably within this broader logic. In effect, insurrection and   For the reason that A Grain of Wheat turns sentimentally towards a uterine national allegory at its conclusion, I am unconvinced by Gikandi’s claim that Ngugi expects readers to enter his novel through ‘two scenes of reading: an allegorical scene in which we are invited to identify with the grand narrative of nationalism and its desires, and an ironic scene in which we are asked to be alert to the discrepancies between the structure of the narrative and the experiences it represents’. Simon Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 113. Self-evidently, Mumbi’s imminent pregnancy at the conclusion of the novel ‘romantically’ reasserts an allegorical frame. 72   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 92. 73   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 11. 71

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impregnation become equivalent and interchangeable terms, with the result that Mumbi’s imminent pregnancy at the end of the novel begins to look a little less promising! Given Mumbi’s own implication in Gikuyu myths of origin, it begins to look as if her reproductive functions will be used to exclude her from political agency. As a mother, she will represent the nation, but her pregnancy will exclude her from power. She is positioned within the iconography of historical tradition and future aspiration, but she is divested of political agency in the present moment. In other words, Mumbi is both symbolically valorized and politically incapacitated at the novel’s conclusion. In short, A Grain of Wheat orchestrates home as a metaphor for nation, even though its valorization of the masculine requires a largely unbridgeable severance of the private–domestic from the public–political. If home is nation in this novel, then Kenya ends up as a nation divided. One of Ngugi’s most astute critics, Michael Vaughan, locates this severance of the domestic and the political in a nostalgia for individual or privatized consciousness: [Ngugi’s] subject-matter is imperfectly rendered in social and historical terms. An ahistorical, individualist core of values, produced by a human nature at once guilty and redeemed, abased and heroic, resists the penetration of social and historical determinants. Instead of dialectics, we encounter utopian idealism and political pessimism. The novel falls apart, torn between social commitment and individualism.74

Vaughan locates the failure of Ngugi’s political commitments in the author’s representation of ‘the home’ as an apolitical institution and space. ‘The home’ thus becomes the site of harmonious prelapsarian social (and gender) relations and, I would add, the model for a post-Emergency utopia.75 My one important reservation regarding Vaughan’s article is that it is something of an anomaly to speak of a communal consciousness (or, more precisely, class consciousness) in the context of the Mau Mau insurgency, in either a ‘fictive’ or an ‘historical’ or even a ‘critical’ text. The guerillas did not operate with a unified set of aims or strategies. Their activities were often based upon random contingencies. Militarily, they frequently confronted found situations in canny, opportunistic ways. Ngugi himself acknowledges this in his essay ‘Mau Mau, Violence and Culture’ when he writes that ‘after the capture of Dedan Kimathi the men became disorganized, became desperate and tended to rely more and more on the “advice of witchdoctors”

  Michael Vaughan, ‘African Fiction and Popular Struggle’, pp. 45–6.   Vaughan is perhaps too quick to overlook Ngugi’s stated intentions. In ‘Church,

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Culture and Politics’, Ngugi states: ‘I write about people: I am interested in their hidden lives; their fears and hopes, their loves and hates, and how the very tension in their hearts affects their daily contact with other men: how, in other words, the emotional stream of the man within interacts with the social reality.’ Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 31.

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instead of a clear analysis and understanding of the forces against them’.76 As a subaltern community, the Gikuyu peasantry, and the collective resistance to which it contributed, had not yet developed a class consciousness. Spivak is explicit on this point: ‘Subalternity is not, after all and strictly speaking, a class-position; it is the detritus of colonialism, a dislocated (“cultural”) idiom. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why the rational Marxian subject is not discursively in tune with subalternity.’77 By the same token, my slight reservation in regard to Vaughan’s article is not intended to provide justification for Ngugi’s ideological refuge from the realm of the political in a discrete realm of the domestic. In the context of my gender-political reading of A Grain of Wheat, Vaughan’s argument provides a useful articulation of how the novel departs from Ngugi’s stated political position. Further, it is Vaughan’s astute reading of the category of ‘the home’ in Ngugi’s text which I find particularly pertinent for a gender critique. If, at the most reductive level, Ngugi’s fiction espouses an utopian rhetoric, rooted in the home and based upon male–female relations which are, on the face of it, free of ideological determinants – and if it is this utopian rhetoric which derails Ngugi’s sociopolitical convictions – then this should alert the literary critic to the possibility that it is precisely Ngugi’s phallocentric representations of subaltern women which translate the impossibility of the novel’s social vision. Problems of History I would now like to move on to my second larger point about A Grain of Wheat, and to begin thinking about the problems of historical representation that the gendering of the nation institutes. The larger implication of the gendering of the nation is that the novel’s historical vision becomes unworkable. The most obvious example of this is the glaring anomaly in the 1967 version of the novel, in which Lieutenant Koinandu rapes Dr Lynd, despite the fact that not even in the most rabid colonial accounts of Mau Mau is it accused of raping white women. And although critics such as David Maughan-Brown have noticed this historical anomaly in A Grain of Wheat and have viewed it as a symptom of Ngugi’s residual ambivalence towards Mau Mau violence, no one has made the straightforward observation that the rape episode is not only an exaggerated or hyperbolic act of violence; it is also, quite obviously and quite crucially, an act of gendered violence. Koinandu’s act of political betrayal and his subsequent trauma takes place with the rape of Dr Lynd. His violation of her both affirms and denies his potency as a member of the resistance movement:

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 29.   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Academic Freedom’, Pretexts: Studies in Writing

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and Culture, 5:1–2 (1995), p. 122.

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[Not] one of the bloody scenes in which he had taken part had broken into his sleep. On the contrary the fight for freedom had given him a purpose. It had made him a man. Why then did her ghost shake him so? … He and the two men laid her on the ground. He vibrated with fear and intense hatred. He hated the whiteman – every one. He was being avenged on them now; he felt their frightened cry in the woman’s wild breathing. Whiteman nothing. Whiteman nothing. Doing to you what you did to us – to black people – he told himself as he thrust into her in fear and cruel desperation.78

Sex translates as a form of political conquest in this passage, in a manner that recapitulates motifs that we have noticed at work throughout A Grain of Wheat. Koinandu’s act is, as Maughan-Brown notes, the one account in all the literature on Mau Mau of the rape of a white woman by a Mau Mau combatant.79 MaughanBrown is also correct in pointing out that Koinandu does not enjoy the sympathy of the author. Nevertheless, this passage constructs ‘woman’ (as a biological, rather than class or racial entity) as a linkage between the discursive formations produced by freedom fighter and colonizer. In other words, by violating Lynd (or by the even more bizarre gesture of felling her dog with panga blows in the revised edition), Koinandu (or Koina) supposedly avenges himself and his people upon the colonial master. In my view, the rape episode is the flipside of the novel’s equation of political resistance with male sexual potency. The rape episode may be an historical anomaly, but in terms of the novel’s ideologies of gender it is simply at the extreme end of a largely coherent spectrum. Of course, Ngugi has corrected the historical anomaly by omitting the rape scene from the revised edition of A Grain of Wheat, published in 1986. In the revised edition, Koinandu is renamed Koina and, instead of raping Dr Lynd, he kills her pet dog. When asked ‘in 1990 about his reasons for the revisions described above, Ngugi cited his growing familiarity with the history of the period covered by A Grain of Wheat. (For example, there was an incident in which a white man shot an African for raising – not throwing – a stone against his dog.)’80 In this incident, a 29-year-old English electrician named Peter Richard Harold Poole killed Kamawe Musunge, his house-servant. His subsequent execution in 1960 made him the first European to receive capital punishment for the murder of an African and signalled British political willingness to give Kenya independence.81 Karanja’s raising of a stone in self-defence against Dr Lynd’s dog is an incident partially based upon Musunge’s tragic death.82 But   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, pp. 185–6.   Maughan-Brown, ‘“Mau Mau” and Violence in Ngugi’s Novels’, p. 18. 80   Kathleen Greenfield, ‘Murdering the Sleep of Dictators’ in Charles Cantalupo (ed.), 78

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The World of Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1993), p. 33. 81   Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 84. 82   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat revised edition (Oxford: Heinemann, 1986 [1967]), p. 42.

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despite Ngugi’s claims of greater verisimilitude in the revised edition, what we see is not a more accurate portrayal of history, but instead an attempt to compensate for an historical injustice. In other words, what we have in the revised scene between Koina and Dr Lynd is a kind of historical wish-fulfilment that is, in any case, utterly anachronistic. Quite self-evidently, the historical stone-throwing incident resulted in the death of a black Kenyan. Ngugi’s fictional episode results in the death of a house-pet. The stone-throwing incident took place in 1959, three years after Mau Mau hostilities ended in 1956. So Ngugi’s revision of the rape scene does not evidence a growing familiarity with the history of the period as he claims but, in fact, the exact opposite. Koina’s killing of Dr Lynd’s dog is a construction of Mau Mau violence that attempts to compensate for an historical injustice that, in terms of the novel’s own chronology, could not possibly have happened yet. Although Ngugi’s revised novel has substantially scaled back the extremity of Mau Mau violence in the original version of the novel, he has not revisited its gendered components. As a result, these components exercise a shaping function that displaces and distorts the availability of history in A Grain of Wheat. In short, when Ngugi genders the nation female, he also opens his novel up to unconscious psychosexual slippages. The fantasies of gender at work in A Grain of Wheat ensure the impossibility of its politics. Reading against the Grain Given the disempowering and distorting equation between feminity and the nation, I think it is necessary to read the novel against the grain in order to clear a space for female political and historical agency, and indeed to clear a space for a more accurate presentation of Kenyan history. Despite the fact that ‘woman’ in A Grain of Wheat is an ideologically overdetermined sign, there are ways in which a subaltern historiography may be brought to bear on the text’s narration of history. My methodology here is indebted to Spivak’s guidance on reading against the grain of subaltern historiography: ‘You can only read against the grain if misfits in the text signal the way. (These are sometimes called “moments of transgression.”)’83 Spivak’s strategy of reading in the margins is gleaned from deconstruction. She acknowledges this political debt by quoting Derrida’s Of Grammatology: Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work.84

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 211.   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 201. See also Jacques Derrida, Of

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Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 24.

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By falling prey to its own work, a deconstructive reading methodology places literary criticism within a necessarily provisional and self-qualifying structure. This provisional structure is necessary when we read Ngugi’s fiction in order to ensure that critical self-interest does not efface or seize the articulatory position of the female peasant constituency that criticism seeks to address. This constituency may be removed from the moment of reading by historical and geographical distance, race, class, gender, political interest, language, literacy, education and any number of possible differences of positioning. As such, the moment of reading is always destined to rely upon a constitutional ignorance of its failures of relation. Noting these failures of relation within one’s reading is the basis upon which a relation of reciprocity might begin to meet its minimal conditions of possibility. Spivak asserts, ‘This is the greatest gift of deconstruction: to question the authority of the investigating subject without paralysing him, persistently transforming situations of impossibility into possibility.’85 I find this reading strategy particularly useful to my own analysis of Ngugi’s novel, given that Mau Mau (but not the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army!) is a figment of colonial and bourgeois nationalist discourse and that the subaltern insurgent (male or female) only ever emerges as an obscured subject – already submitted to the mechanics of representation – in narratives of Mau Mau. The gender-political critic confronts a palimpsest when attempting to address subaltern women. ‘Reading against the grain’ enables one to submit the layers of interested representations of Mau Mau to a play of signification, even as the critic’s own interlocution is rendered unstable by writing. In my view, the novel’s privileged symbolism of the ‘grain of wheat’ casts an unexpected light on the ways in which readers might think about Mumbi. As we have seen, Kihika’s Messianic heroism enjoins the domestic and the political, and the imagery of the ‘grain of wheat’ is crucial to the novel’s imageries of rebirth. The novel accomplishes an ideological suturing of the domestic and the political by constructing a complex mythology, in which Kihika (as martyr) is the grain which must die in order that the fruits of his vision might be born. This is clearly also a copulative metaphor that recuperates the equation (established during the circumcision debate) between the body of ‘woman’ and the social composition of the state. However, the grain of wheat is also the bullet which is instrumental to Mau Mau resistance. General R. states that bullets were called ‘maize grains’ in the forest86 and we know from the novel’s epigraphs taken from St John and Corinthians that the ‘corn of wheat’ may ‘chance of wheat or of some other grain’.87 To sum up, then, the metaphor of ‘the grain of wheat’ conflates insemination, Kihika’s self-sacrifice, his utopian vision and the bullets used by the insurgents of which he is the most eminent example. If one were to read ‘against the grain’ in search of alternative possibilities for Mumbi, then a different story might emerge. Here, we might be guided by questions that the novel does not really broach.   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 201.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 132. 87   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, p. 175, unpaginated frontispiece. 85 86

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What might it mean to insert Mumbi into the mythology of ‘the grain of wheat’? As Kihika’s sister, in what capacities might Mumbi’s kinship with revolution be exercised? A viable space for female political and historical agency in A Grain of Wheat emerges when we re-examine Mumbi’s adulterous relationship with the colonial loyalist Karanja during the Mau Mau period. One of the signal misfits in A Grain of Wheat is that Mumbi’s desire for Karanja, or her submission to his sexual demands, remains largely unexplained. Even when Mumbi confesses her infidelity, the reasons for it are never quite made clear. She is the only character in A Grain of Wheat that does not really get to confess. Her ‘confessions’, such as they are, take the form of questions. Here is the passage: [Karanja] came to where I was standing and showed me a long sheet of paper with government stamps. There was a list of names of those on their way back to the villages. Gikonyo’s name was there. What else is there to tell you? That I remember being full of submissive gratitude? That I laughed – even welcomed Karanja’s cold lips on my face? I was in a strange world, and it was like if I was mad. And need I tell you more? I let Karanja make love to me.88

Mumbi’s confession is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, but most especially because she makes no positive statement as to her adulterous motivations.89 Her desire and her political motivation in this passage are a cipher. Indeed, the only statement she makes is that she ‘let’ Karanja have intercourse with her. This passive construction of Mumbi’s desire is consistent with the novel’s phallocentric construction of female sexuality according to a model of lack. However, the novel’s privileged symbolism of ‘the grain of wheat’ – which, in an expanded reading, references self-sacrifice, insemination and Mau Mau’s bullets – may offer the gender-political critic a means of speaking both to Mumbi’s desire and to her political investment in this ‘unthinkable’ act. If we make the secret history of women’s contributions to Mau Mau performative in this text, we can begin to see a space of female desire and political agency emerge in a way that is consistent with Mumbi’s confession. One of the contributions of women to Mau Mau was to conduct a revolutionary form of prostitution. Hence, given Mumbi’s own sexual indiscretions, we might read the role of the Mau Mau prostitute into the passage in which she ‘confesses’ to Mugo.

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, pp. 131–2.   Perera terms this moment ‘a very weak piece of writing’ and an ‘artistic lapse’. In

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particular, Mumbi’s actions are ‘inconceivable’. S. W. Perera, ‘From Mumbi to Wanja: The Emergence of the Woman in Ngugi’s Fiction’, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 14:2 (1992), p. 70.

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These women, footnoted by the historical record,90 slept with British soldiers and loyalists (like Karanja), often for a single bullet, then carried the ammunition to Mau Mau in the forests. The Mau Mau prostitute sleeps with the enemy for the bullet that he would shoot her with if he caught her carrying ammunition,91 and she delivers the bullet to the Mau Mau fighter who might execute her with it if he knew she was sleeping with the enemy.92 The Mau Mau prostitute shuttles between two oppressive structures, between two patriarchies, without acceding to either one. And she does so in a way that resists conceptualization or framing in colonialist or nationalist histories of Mau Mau. Such revolutionary sexualities therefore amount to an unassimilable and undisclosed form of female agency. This historical precedent for characters like Mumbi (an adulteress) and Wanja (a prostitute) permits us to read Ngugi’s fiction for a form of female political and sexual agency that escapes its framing in literary narrative and in critical discourse. The Mau Mau prostitute is not the good mother of Ngugi’s nationalist iconography, nor is she the model of female sexual lack constructed by the clitoridectomy debate. Mumbi’s confession, I think, needs to be reread in the light of what it is unable to disclose, in the light of what it must keep secret in the name of revolution. Mumbi’s confession needs to be reread in the context of women’s specifically gendered contributions to the Mau Mau revolution. It is obvious that what we are working with here is a kind of impossible agency that can be neither disclosed nor articulated. If this agency is to work, its dimensions or implications must forever remain open-ended or aporetic. An agency of this kind exposes the explanatory limits of our gender-political   Itote offers this very coy allusion: ‘The parties which our girl scouts arranged for police and Government soldiers often yielded valuable supplies of arms and ammunition.’ Elsewhere, he alludes to innocent flirtation between Mau Mau women and enemy soldiers, but omits any description of sexual intercourse. See Waruhiu Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, pp. 78, 100–101. 91   Extrajudicial killings were not uncommon: ‘In protected and special areas, members of the armed forces could shoot anyone who failed to stop when ordered to do so. And so naturally, this became the most common cause of shootings of Africans in Central Province by the security forces. Thousands were shot “while attempting to escape.” ... As the emergency progressed, the law provided for the death penalty through a variety of offenses which lended themselves to abuse through false accusations. The most notable of these offenses were “consorting with terrorists” and “supporting and aiding terrorists.”’ Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, pp. 92–3. 92   ‘Together with other members of the movement, the girls chosen to run Mau Mau errands, such as delivering food, were made to understand, through the strictest threats, that being a Mau Mau woman was a serious and dangerous business and entailed extreme selfrestraint in all sorts of ways. For example, it was impressed upon women who had taken the oath that they were not to get involved with non-Kikuyu men (nduriri), the obvious implication being that a non-Kikuyu man would not belong to Mau Mau and was therefore an enemy. … Mau Mau women were banned from prostitution … although the women were allowed to flirt with the “enemies” for the purposes of gathering vital information.’ Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, p. 145. 90

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readings of Ngugi’s novel, since part of the story must remain untold. Hence, we find in Mumbi a form of female agency that disturbs literary criticism’s own selfimaging tendencies. If Mumbi were imagined as one of the historical women who prostituted themselves to procure bullets for the Land and Freedom Army – martyring her desire to Karanja in favour of an anti-colonial political interest – then one would be able to see her as an asymmetrical agent who contributes to the economy of significance in the novel, rather than being constructed and instrumentalized by that economy. Her political interest in, and contribution to, the struggle for independence would subvert her positioning within patriarchal discourses because her child would be historically ‘legitimized’ even as it is not subject to the patronym. Equally, Mumbi’s desire would retain its integrity even as it feigns complicity with imperialism and bargains into phallocentrism. The broader implication of this reading against the grain is that it reverses and displaces Ngugi’s narrative by treating it as instrumental to Mumbi’s agency.93 This interested reading must work strategically within, and against, the dominant symbolisms of A Grain of Wheat and the marginalia of Mau Mau histories in order to discover the spaces that these texts make available to a female sexual and revolutionary subject. As the first ‘fallen woman’ in Ngugi’s novels, Mumbi anticipates the prostitute Wanja in Petals of Blood, the single mother Wariinga in Devil on the Cross, and the prostitute Guthera in Matigari. More importantly, the revolutionary sexuality of the Mau Mau prostitute allows us a critical model with which to reconceptualize the problems of textuality and translation that we find at work in the later novels.

93   For a collection of short stories which approaches a literary representation of Kenyan subaltern women, see Muthoni Likimani, Passbook Number F. 47927: Women and Mau Mau in Kenya (London: MacMillan, 1985). Likimani nowhere attempts an investigation of the activities of Mau Mau prostitutes during the Kenyan emergency, but her collection points to some of the complexities of subaltern women’s political and gender positions, and their multiple forms of resistance during the insurgency.

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Chapter 5

Paternity, Illegitimacy and Intertextuality In Petals of Blood, we see a crucial sea change taking place in Ngugi’s political vision. Concomitantly, there are new strategic affiliations into which his fiction must enter at this point. Up until A Grain of Wheat, Ngugi’s project might be broadly thought of as being oriented towards a decolonizing nationalism, in which socio-economic oppression – although propelled by foreign pressures – is comprehended in terms of its local effects within the geographical boundaries of Kenya. By contrast, Petals of Blood arrives at the recognition that neocolonial exploitation is global in scope and therefore demands postnational axes of identification in the formulation of a novelistic response. The emergence of these postnational axes of affiliation may be traced to Ngugi’s University of Leeds Master of Arts dissertation on George Lamming in particular, and to his wider investments in Caribbean literature more generally. We should recall that Ngugi names Petals of Blood after a line in Derek Walcott’s poem ‘The Swamp’ and that he alludes to at least two of V. S. Naipaul’s novels (The Mystic Masseur and The Mimic Men) as the narrative unfolds. But it is the influence of Lamming in particular that we might identify with the making of Petals of Blood. In fact, the introduction to Ngugi’s essay on In the Castle of My Skin might even be read as the genesis of a plot structure for Petals of Blood: It will be our argument that although it is set in a village in a period well before any of the West Indian islands had achieved independence, In the Castle of My Skin is a study of a colonial revolt; that it shows the motive forces behind it and its development through three main stages: a static phase, then a phase of rebellion, ending in a phase of achievement and disillusionment with society poised on the edge of a new struggle; that it sharply delineates the opposition between the aspirations of the peasantry and those of the emergent native élite, an opposition which, masked in the second phase, becomes clear during the stage of apparent achievement. The novel itself is built on a three-tier structure corresponding broadly to our three stages: the first three chapters describe stable life, a village community whose social consciousness is limited to a struggle with immediate nature; the next six chapters deal with a village whose consciousness is awakened into a wider vision; involving challenge of and struggle against the accepted order of things; while the last chapters show the ironic denouement; a new class of native lawyers, merchants, teachers has further displaced the peasantry from the land. But underlying the story’s progress in time is a general conception of human history as a movement from the state of nature to a ‘higher’

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consciousness; it is a movement from relative stability in a rural culture to a state of alienation, strife and uncertainty in the modern world.

We might detect similar stages at work in Ngugi’s Petals of Blood, beginning with the drought (mirroring Lamming’s flood), continuing with the journey to the city to protest to the MP (equating to the strike and the riots of In the Castle of My Skin), and concluding with the final phase in which the apparent marketability of Theng’eta results in the influx of corrupting economic forces and the establishment of New Ilmorog (just as Lamming’s landlord Creighton has sold up and the new owners have decided to sell the villagers’ homes out from under them). The death of Ngugi’s Nyakinyua before she loses her land mirrors closely the death of the old woman in Lamming’s village before the Friendly Society and the Penny Bank evict her husband to the Alms House. Both novels mix third person and first person narration. Both interweave a series of perspectivally bound narratives. These perspectivally bound narratives amplify each other’s dimensions and build to the profundity of a fully elaborated historical perspective. In Caribbean literature and in the black diaspora, Ngugi discovers a shared past of world historical proportions, and a community whose grievances and possibilities are global in scope. Within this radically amplified arena, Petals of Blood undertakes an aesthetic of reconnection with the aim of overthrowing global oppression by mobilizing global dissent. The importance of paternity to this project is that it models a lineage that, if it were sufficiently excavated and expressed, would reveal a common point of convergence within the African past. It is something like this point of convergence that Wanja, Abdulla, Nyakinyua, Karega and Munira arrive at in their discovery of a shared past. In his essay on Caribbean fiction, ‘A Kind of Homecoming’, Ngugi acknowledges that ‘the West Indies has been very formative in Africa’s political and literary consciousness’. Additionally, the essay quotes E. R. Braithwaite’s A Kind of Homecoming (which gives Ngugi’s essay and Homecoming their titles) in which the Guyanese writer claims he ‘gave up the struggle to find a particular point of origin [in Africa] and embraced the whole continent’. Africa and the West Indies, then, are becoming mutually constitutive origins in Ngugi’s political and literary vision at this point, leading potentially to an emptying out of national and ethnic categories and to a broader basis for political and cultural identification. Accordingly, the affiliations of Petals of Blood are diasporic, the scale of its ambition is epic, and I would argue that its profundity is ultimately of a biblical weight. This is no exaggeration: Ngugi claims that, in fact, ‘there is something about the Jewish experience – the biblical experience – which appeals to the West   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 111.  See George Lamming, In the Castle of my Skin (New York: Longman, 1979).    Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 81.    Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 82.  

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Indian novelist. Biblical man has been a slave and an exile from home.’ The biblical narrative appeals because it is at one level a story of homecoming from exile, and some constituencies in the Caribbean might be read metaphorically as being in exile from Africa. Lamming’s character, Trumper, who has been to America like Ngugi’s character, the lawyer, resolves this exile by identifying with African-Americans at the level of race. Although Ngugi cautions in ‘What is My Colour, What is My Race?’ that to ‘create a religion out of skin colour is to despair of a solution for social injustice’, he also adds that ‘to ignore it is dangerous’. In fact, ‘What is My Colour, What is My Race?’ argues that race and class discrimination are twin modes of oppression facing the communities of the black diaspora, and it is perhaps unsurprising that Petals of Blood construes both race and class liberation as having a millennial significance. We should not forget here that the Yeatsian section headings of the novel (‘Walking … Toward Bethlehem … To Be Born … Again … La Luta Continua!’) read like an extremely abbreviated account of Christian belief, encompassing the Jewish exodus from Egypt, the birth of Christ and, naturally enough, the Second Coming. Moreover, Ilmorog’s historical development from Ndemi na Mathathi’s edenic founding of the cultural clearing to the closing passages invoking apocalyptic ‘gnomic angels’ reads like the biblical development from Genesis to Revelation. What we have in Petals of Blood is a vision of socialist liberation as the realization of a faith in collective human potentials, and a vision of black history as culminating in apotheosis. In this understanding, freedom crafts a god who may be recognized only in the dignity of other men (and women!). Hence, Petals of Blood is, in one possible reading, nothing less than the bible of black worldhistorical experience. Although this novel is of epic theological dimensions, it is also very precisely engaged with global Cold War politics, since its black theology opposes itself quite consciously to anti-Communist Christian evangelism during the Cold War. Genre Among its more modest accomplishments, Petals of Blood is an African detective novel. By generic convention, the detective novel culminates in an act of nomination, when the processes of deduction combine to name the criminal. However, Petals of Blood is a rather anomalous or unusual species of detective   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 89.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 108.    Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood (London: Heinemann, 1986 [1977]), p. 344.    As Georg M. Gugelberger has observed, the villagers’ journey to the city also has biblical overtones: ‘They are led by Abdullah’s donkey, an ironic allusion to Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.’ Georg M. Gugelberger, ‘Blake Neruda, Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Issues in Third World Literature’, Comparative Literature Studies, 21:4 (1984), p. 473.  

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novel, because in it the victims of murder (Chui, Mzigo and Kimeria Hawkins) are ultimately revealed to have been perpetrators of the real crime: the capitalist exploitation of neocolonial Kenya. To complicate matters further, Petals of Blood gives the same name – ‘Godfrey’ – to its irreligious detective and to its devout murderer in a move that entangles the novel’s constructions of the law. In short, Petals of Blood does not merely invert our common understanding of the victim and the criminal. It also contaminates the positions of the criminal and the officer of the law in ways that ‘stump’ the novel’s own deductive processes.10 Petals of Blood works its way towards a vision of Kenyan social justice, but, by flouting the laws of the detective novel, its narrative scheme may also at some level be hatching a profoundly antisocial plot. Quite simply, Petals of Blood insists on pointing out the failures of the law, only to exploit comparable loopholes within its own expository mode. In this sense, the novel evacuates its own authenticating premises. If I have made much of these generic idiosyncrasies, it is because they are merely one instance of a much larger nominative crisis at work in Ngugi’s novel. Petals of Blood complicates the act of naming in any number of ways. This is a strategically disabling manoeuvre, because it places the novel’s construction of paternity (the nomination of the father) under perpetual erasure. Structurally speaking, the institution of paternity relies upon a surmise that suggests the detective’s method. Indeed, Freud’s account of the prehistorical advent of patriarchy invokes a process of ratiocination: This turning from the mother to the father, however, signifies in addition a victory of intellectuality over the sensuality – that is, an advance in civilization, since maternity is proved by the evidence of the senses whereas paternity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a premiss.11



  In translation, the name ‘Godfrey’ implies both irreligiousness (‘God-free’) and piety (it is derived from the German ‘Gottfried’, meaning ‘God is satisfied’). See Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume 23, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage and The Hogarth Press, 2001 [1939]), p. 23, n. 1. 10   This argument is indebted to Steven R. Carter’s very perceptive analysis of the novel: ‘There is not much of a distinction to be made between this criminal and this detective, unlike Ngugi’s usually sharp distinction between the oppressed and the oppressor. But in a criminal system, what is a crime? Individual criminals must be viewed differently when the structure of society is the primary source of evil and viciousness.’ Quite clearly, notions of the law become impossible in the context of injustice. Steven R. Carter, ‘Decolonization and Detective Fiction: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 8:1 (1987), p. 105. 11  Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 114.

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Betsy Wing’s translation of this passage in Hélène Cixous’ and Catherine Clément’s The Newly Born Woman reflects even more clearly the narrative of detection embedded within claims to paternity: This turning from the mother to the father, however, signifies above all a victory of spirituality over the senses – that is to say, a step forward in culture, since maternity is proved by the senses whereas paternity is a surmise based on a deduction and a premiss.12

In Freud’s view, the turn from a matriarchal order to a patriarchal order is a monumental development in the advancement of culture, and it is enabled by a triumph of masculine rationality over the female body of evidence. Ngugi’s novel contains a strikingly similar myth. On the Ilmorog villagers’ journey to the city, Njuguna (‘the common man’13) teases Nyakinyua that antelopes are supposed by Gikuyu custom to be ‘women’s goats which had run wild because the women could not look after them’.14 This allusion refers to the founding myth of the Gikuyu patriarchy, in which men, knowing women to be polyandrous, tyrannical rulers (and poor shepherds!) conspired to impregnate all of the women at once and took over the running of culture while the erstwhile matriarchs were otherwise indisposed.15 The mythical advent of the Gikuyu patriarchy, therefore, purports in its way to be a triumph of rational masculine rule over capricious female desire. Ngugi’s novel extrapolates this myth in its imaging of anti-colonial resistance, by equating revolutionary heroism with virility. In Petals of Blood, however, the surmise that institutes paternity is destined to fail. As I shall demonstrate, such premises are inherently untenable and such deductions finally impossible. At first glance, paternity would appear to function as a narrative metaphor for legitimate political succession (that is, a passage of authority, power and property) from an illegitimate colonial father.16 But the novel’s nominative crisis renders this analysis of history unworkable – the legitimate cultural father can never quite be named in an unimpeachable manner, due to his illegitimate colonial ancestry.17 Indeed, impediments to filial succession  Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, p. 100.   Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed, p. 34. 14   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 139. 15  See Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 8. 16   As one critic has observed, ‘the patrilineal system of inheritance of property’ forms part of women’s oppression. Kavetsa Adagala, Wanja of Petals of Blood: The Woman Question and Imperialism in Kenya (Nairobi: Derika Associates, 1985), p. 4. 17   The primal scene that founds the Gikuyu patriarchy, the illegitimate (neo)colonial scene in which sexual tourism and prostitution flourish, and the re-legitimizing scene of ‘post-colonial’ rebirth are at one level simply versions of one another. In each, sexual intercourse translates as the overthrow of a pre-existent political order. In Petals of Blood, all of the modulations of Gikuyu history are structured by relations to the phallus, the symbolic 12 13

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are an inescapable consequence when one inhabits a filial relation and receives a political inheritance that must both be disavowed. In short, the novel’s sense of social justice (embedded in its narratives of detection) and its vision of paternity (as a mode of political legitimacy) are structurally linked, but they share a common predicament. In both cases, games with names thwart the assignation of blame. The novel’s generic predicament and its ideological predicament both emerge out of its gendering of the nation. Its privileged model of Gikuyu femininity is ‘mother Kenya’, and its subordinate construction is of the Gikuyu woman as a ‘fallen woman’ who translates a prostituted economy. This subordinate construction betrays a psychosexual anxiety – the unrestrained female desire of the prostitute substitutes for the unregulated forces of monopoly capitalism that beset the neocolony. Elleke Boehmer has made this point quite forcefully: ‘In Petals of Blood, once again, a woman is used as victim. As a thriving madam, obviously equipped with an extremely durable vagina, Wanja becomes a ready symbol for the ravaged state of Kenya.’18 I would add that Wanja, who has had an illegitimate child by Kimeria Hawkins (a member of the comprador class), bodies forth a bastardized history that bears the inscription of an illegitimate (neo)colonial father. The name of the legitimate father, or the patronym towards which Ngugi’s history is oriented, is the name of Gikuyu resistance.19 In Wanja’s case, it is the name of Dedan Kimathi; one of the leaders of the Mau Mau insurgents. However, as I shall show, it is precisely the ‘durability of Wanja’s vagina’ that resists the novel’s authenticating paternalistic impulses. In short, Ngugi’s ideologically interested narration of Kenyan history is initiated – and ultimately scuttled – by the patriarchal construction of Wanja. I view Petals of Blood as Ngugi’s attempt to contest neocolonialism (coextensive with multinational capitalism, the English language and Eurocentric culture) with indigenous patriarchal discourses (which are not, at this point in Ngugi’s development, entirely coextensive with the Gikuyu language). Given Ngugi’s androcentric project, history in this novel is contested by claims to a legitimate law of resistance over against an illegitimate law of oppression. Thus, in an anti-colonial feminist reading, historical representations in Petals of Blood are tantamount to claims of paternity. Since acts of nomination (and hence, claims of paternity) are unstable in this novel, I shall argue that Ngugi’s chauvinistic narration of the nation can be submitted to the undecidability of the paternal fiction in ways that make political, historical and sexual agency available to Kenyan women.

arbiter of political power. Such phallic primacy self-evidently contains exclusionary outcomes for women. 18   Elleke Boehmer, ‘The Master’s Dance’, p. 193. 19   Against the broader historical backdrop of multi-ethnic Kenyan resistance, Ngugi’s narrative is Gikuyu-centric, even though he seems in places to be espousing more broadbased socialist ideals.

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The Gendering of the Landscape and Circumcision as History The gendering of the landscape is one of the most obvious ways in which female agency is silenced or contained in Petals of Blood. Despite the different ideological and class positions of Ngugi’s male protagonists (peasant, worker, bourgeois), they express a commonality in their constructions of women. In each case, women’s sexual and reproductive potentials are associated with the generative agricultural potential of the land, which at one point is described as wearing ‘a floral cloth’.20 The peasant focalizer, Njuguna, makes the colonial influence on a gendered landscape clear when he reflects that ‘The land seemed not to yield much and there was now no virgin soil to escape to as in those days before colonialism’.21 Likewise, Munira, the schoolteacher of bourgeois Christian origins, views women on various occasions as being inseparable from or at one with the land.22 Before he sleeps with Wanja, he refers to the act with anticipation as ‘my harvest’23 and dreams of ‘the perfumed garden that was her body’.24 For Munira, Ilmorog during Wanja’s absence becomes ‘a land of drought’,25 and he fantasizes about sleeping with Wanja again so that he may be ‘reborn into history’.26 Although sex with Wanja seems to promise a utopian future for Munira, it offers a return to an idyllic past for Karega, the teaching assistant who later becomes a small trader and union organizer. When Karega and Wanja have intercourse, we are told that they work ‘together in rhythmic search for a lost kingdom’.27 After they have slept together, Karega’s reminiscences explicitly align Wanja with the land: ‘So many experiences, so many discoveries in a night and a half. Harvest time for seeds planted in time past.’28 The communal narrator adds, ‘… we were soon intrigued, fascinated, moved by the entwinement and flowering of youthful love and life and we whispered: see the wonder-gift of God. Crops will sprout luxuriant and green. We shall eat our fill and drink Theng’eta at harvest time.’29 At this point in the novel, Munira jealously observes of Wanja, ‘I watched her undergo yet another change. It was a new, youthful, life-full, luscious growth after the rains …

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 32.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 9. 22   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, pp. 47, 24. 23   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 66. 24   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 34. 25   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 83. 26   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 217. 27   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 230. 28   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 234. 29   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 243. Curiously enough, one of the rare terms for the clitoris – ‘mugina’ – also denotes a young plant or sapling. See T. G. Benson (ed.), Kikuyu–English Dictionary (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 114. Read in this light, the imagery of ‘petals of blood’ may contain undertones of circumcision. 20

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Their love seemed to grow with the rains.’30 In response to Munira, Wanja herself argues, ‘I feel I am about to flower.’31 Femininity and sexuality are constructed through these consensual tropes of ‘harvesting’ and ‘flowering’ throughout Petals of Blood. The harvest imagery is not only related to agriculture and sexuality. It becomes a more general metaphor for the expropriation of wealth from the Kenyan peasantry, as seen in Karega the union organizer’s assertion that ‘[We] shall no longer let others reap where they never planted, harvest where they never cultivated’.32 To the extent that the agricultural imagery is invoked consensually by all the main characters, it becomes a marker of the commonality of oppression. The broader implication is that the economic exploitation of Kenyan labour contains overtones of sexual imposition. This gendering of oppression partly originates from the generative dimensions of the agricultural economy within which Ngugi’s peasant characters find themselves, but it is also derived from the more complex institutions of circumcision and governance in the Gikuyu cultural past. The floral and agricultural imagery is based upon assumptions of generative sexual and economic activity, seasonal time and cyclical governance, and an idea of generational history. These interlinked assumptions require careful explanation. To begin with, harvesting in Petals of Blood encodes male virility and paternity. This is demonstrated in the description of the antelope at harvest time in Ilmorog, because we are told that ‘the male would run after a young female, giving it no rest or time to eat, expecting another kind of harvest’.33 In terms of the seasonal calendar of this agricultural society, circumcision occurs after the harvest, and the dialogue of the male characters reiterates the association between Theng’eta, harvesting and birth: ‘[Theng’eta] must be ready on the day of circumcision. When the elders are having their Njohi [beer] we too can join them with our Theng’eta.’ ‘Why not? To celebrate! To say farewell to a season of drought,’ said Karega with boyish enthusiasm. ‘To celebrate a big harvest.’ ‘Farewell to the drought in our lives,’ added Abdulla. ‘And for more sperms of God [rain] to fertilize the earth,’ Munira said.34

The importance of Theng’eta, of its petals of blood, to Ngugi’s narrative is that it encodes the fertility of Gikuyu female subjects, marriage and circumcision – the very fabric of traditional Gikuyu communal cohesion regulated by patriarchal law. In other words, the rite of Theng’eta drinking, in its traditional context at least, is institutionally imbricated in female subjecthood and in the cultural constitution 30

    32   33   34   31

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 244. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 251. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 326. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, pp. 203–4. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 205.

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of the Gikuyu woman as ‘a woman’. We are told that Theng’eta is traditionally only ever drunk ‘after the ceremony of circumcision or marriage or itwika, and after a harvest’;35 a set of occasions that are deeply enmeshed with gender associations. Moreover, the overdetermined constitution of femininity, especially via clitoridectomy, is used to reinforce narratives of anti-colonial resistance. For instance, Nyakinyua’s performance of a song on the eve of the circumcision ceremony locates resistance to colonialism within the ambit of circumcision: She sang of other struggles, of other wars – the arrival of colonialism and the fierce struggles waged against it by newly circumcised youth. Yes, it was always the duty of the youth to drive out foreigners and enemies lodged amongst the people: it was always the duty of the youth to fight all the Marimus, all the twomouthed Ogres, and that was the meaning of the blood shed at circumcision.36

This passage anticipates Ngugi’s use of the ogre myth in Devil on the Cross and Matigari, and the ogre – like the ‘monster-god’ to which the lawyer in Petals of Blood refers37 – is a folkloric symbol that naturalizes a contest over femininity within Ngugi’s construction of the representatives of neocolonial corporate capital. There is a very complex set of folkloric allusions at work in Theng’eta’s association with itwika and Nyakinyua’s references to the banishing of ogres. According to Gikuyu myth, a harsh king called Gikuyu refused to permit his nomadic people to settle and cultivate the land. The iregi age-set (derived from rega, denoting ‘to refuse or revolt’38) overthrew Gikuyu, and the ndemi age-set which followed cleared the land of forests in order that the people might cultivate their crops. Ndemi is called ‘the founding patriarch’ of Ilmorog,39 and his name denotes the ‘cut’40 that produces the cultural clearing. Out of the iregi and ndemi revolutions, the custom of itwika developed, in which a peaceful transfer of power from one generation to the next, approximately every 30 years, ensured a ‘democratic’ (in Kenyatta’s term) system of government.41 The last itwika was held between 1890 and 1898. The successive itwika (scheduled for 1925–28) was banned by the colonial government, thus displacing Gikuyu history from a cyclical repetition into a linear progression. Sicherman notes:

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, pp. 204–5.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 210. 37   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, pp. 163–4. 38   Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 186. 39   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 120. 40   Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 187. 41   Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, pp. 187–97. See also Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, pp. 166–7. 35 36

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Dedan Kimathi … is ‘of Iregi generation’ … this is not to be taken as a literal reference to his age-set but to Kimathi’s role as ‘revolter’ – the actual meaning of the word.42

Karega’s name derives from the verb rega (Sicherman glosses ‘Karega’ as ‘rebel’43) and encodes the iregi age-set. Nyakinyua and her husband are of the ndemi ageset.44 When, Nyakinyua refers to the Member of Parliament for Ilmorog as ‘this Ndamathia which only takes but never gives back’,45 she refers to the banishing of a river-monster (Ndamathia) by the Ndemi generation after the itwika.46 We can see here something like the narrative’s blueprint for the revolutionary overthrow of the Kenyan government. Via its heroes of resistance – Ndemi, Kimathi and Karega – Petals of Blood argues for the revolutionary or innovative institution of a ‘democratic’ form of Gikuyu traditional government to replace colonial and neocolonial misrule. History here is generational and therefore democratic. But generational histories require a vehicle of production. In Petals of Blood, this vehicle is, quite simply, a transhistorical and static model of femininity, whose raison d’être resides in motherhood. If one pauses for a moment to reflect on the complex set of gender associations at work in Theng’eta, circumcision, seasonal harvesting and cyclical male governance, then it becomes possible to see that Ngugi is attempting, unsuccessfully, to naturalize a traditional mythical narrative of revolution into a dialectic that is not Marxist but familial, and whose sublimate is a new ‘generation’ of children – who comprise the revitalized social order. History in Petals of Blood is ostensibly both cyclical (in which ‘women’ repeatedly produce children) and linear (in which men become heroes of historical struggle). This distribution of gender imbalances produces an unbalanced and ultimately divisive model of history that is at once progressive and recursive. While Karega and Joseph succeed Abdulla in struggle at the end of the novel, Wanja’s trajectory is resolved via a more politically satisfactory repeat of her earlier pregnancy. Resistance in Petals of Blood offers self-transformative possibilities to the male subject, but one must surely question whether equivalent possibilities are offered to the female characters. We see a generational idea of history at work in Abdulla’s commitment to political struggle: He had indeed endured thirst and hunger, briars and thorns in scaly flesh in the service of that vision which first opened out to him the day he had taken both the oath of unity and the Batuni oath. … How he trembled as the vision opened out, embracing new thoughts, new desires, new possibilities! To redeem the land: to  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 238.  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 207. 44  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 166. 45   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 116. 46   Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, pp. 187–97. 42

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fight so that the industries like the shoe-factory which had swallowed his sweat could belong to the people: so that his children could one day have enough to eat and to wear under adequate shelter from rain: so that they would say in pride, my father died that I might live: this had transformed him from a slave before a boss into a man. That was the day of his true circumcision into a man.47

There is a crucially silent figure who accompanies such lofty reminiscences. The Kenyan Land and Freedom Army’s Batuni oath occasionally indentured Kenyan women to receive the penises of the initiates, and yet they are forgotten here. Instead, Abdulla frames resistance within a discourse of the family (a discourse in which Ngugi’s construction of women is overdetermined). In a certain sense, Wanja becomes the vehicle for Abdulla’s vision by carrying his child at the end of the novel. Abdulla’s generational model of history is derived from Gikuyu oral traditions. In other words, the patrilinear construction of Gikuyu history in Petals of Blood relies to some extent upon indigenous mechanisms of naming associated with circumcision. Traditionally, Gikuyu oral history is remembered via the significant names given annually to the circumcision age-sets, and these names link each generation to the significant historical events that accompany their rite of passage. These aptronymic processes provide the means by which Gikuyu history is traditionally remembered and retold. We see an example of this mnemonic history at work when Munira narrates his recollection of going to school at Siriana: Siriana, you should have been there in our time, before and during the period of the big, costly European dance of death and even after: you might say that our petty lives and their fears and crises took place against a background of tremendous changes and troubles, as can be seen by the names given to the agesets between Nyabani [‘Japan’] and Hitira [‘Hitler’]: Mwomboko [a dance] … Karanji [‘college’?], Boti [‘forty’], Ngunga [‘army worms’], Muthuu [a dance performed before circumcision], Ng’aragu Ya Mianga, Bamiti [‘permit’], Gicina Bangi, Cugini-Mburaki [‘black market’].48

The names of the age-sets were given annually, after the harvest, so that Gikuyu history was seasonal and cyclical. Many of these names are Anglicized corruptions and carry the inscription of a colonial father: for example, ‘Hitira’ (Hitler), ‘Boti’ ([Nineteen] Forty) and ‘Bamiti’ (Permit). In a sense then, the novel is relating a history in which the communal relation to its past has been bastardized by colonial intrusion. So, for example, the Boti (‘Forty’) age-set was circumcised in 1947, the Hitira age-set was named in solidarity with Hitler, a fellow enemy of the British   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 136.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 27. See Carol Sicherman, The Making of a Rebel, pp. 236–9, for a detailed explanation of the names of the age-sets. All translations are taken from this source. 47 48

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colonial power, and so on. In its filtering of communal history through the age-sets, it is quite clear that Petals of Blood is privileging a notion of generational struggle that, when viewed diachronically through its nominative mechanisms, produces a patrilineage. The circumcision age-sets and the uterine social organization that they institute thus become a way of theorizing political power. Implicit in this theory of political power is a rhetoric of reproduction, couched in a metaphor of efflorescence. Upon his release from incarceration, Abdulla makes this metaphor clear, wishing that Nding’uri and Ole Masai and others were there to witness the ‘flowering of faith’.49 Petals of Blood: What’s in a Name? The imagery of flowering is given a privileged place in Petals of Blood, since it all but names this novel. This imagery of flowering is also associated with Wanja, but in her case it figures private, rather than public, concerns. Her ‘redemption’ from life as a prostitute (a deflowered woman) is accomplished via the recuperation of her errant desire for a patriarchal construction of Gikuyu motherhood. This change is described as ‘a new flowering of self’.50 Wanja’s decision to abandon her career in prostitution is motivated by two ‘humiliating’ experiences: her failed relationship with a truck-driver client, and the incident in which a German national attempts to drug her in order to export her to Europe for resale as a prostitute. The personal sexual history with which Wanja wishes to break is symbolically conflated with a turning point in the national history of Kenya as a prostituted economy. We can see an equivalent gendering of the nation at work in the title of the novel. Petals of Blood is ostensibly derived from a passage in Derek Walcott’s poem ‘The Swamp’, which the novel adopts as an epigraph: Toadstools, the potent ginger-lily, Petals of blood, The speckled vulva of the tiger-orchid; Outlandish phalloi Haunting the travellers of its one road.51

It is clear that the floral genitalia in Walcott’s poem fit quite comfortably with the ubiquitous gendering of the landscape in Ngugi’s novel. For example, the petals of blood apply both to the Theng’eta plant and to the beanflower with ‘petals of   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 253.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 107. 51   Derek Walcott, ‘The Swamp’, Collected Poems, 1948–1984, by Derek Walcott (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), pp. 59–60. 49

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blood’52 in which Munira’s school pupils discover an outlandish phallus (a worm). Through the course of the narrative, the worm-eaten flower is established as a figure for political corruption, but it is also, of course, a figure for sexual crisis. What this gendering of the landscape allows is a reproductive framing of historical struggle. Since the land is a female and a generative space, political struggle for the land is ultimately reduced to a contest between two masculine proprietorial discourses: imperialist and anti-imperialist. That is why the petals of blood apply metaphorically to Wanja, a prostitute who accommodates outlandish phalloi with some regularity, thus representing the debased state of the Kenyan neocolony.53 As a fallen woman, Wanja is repeatedly rendered in terms of imagery of deflowering. Unsurprisingly, her moral redemption finally consists in motherhood. In fact, we are even told that Wanja’s sexual self-restraint is the precondition for ‘a new flowering of self’.54 Here, a questionable binarism equates (male) potency with an emergence into historical agency and equates (female) celibacy with a breaking from the past. Petals of Blood’s analysis of history is, therefore, cast in terms of a male psychosexual crisis, in which the claims of a legitimate law of antiimperialist resistance are measured against an illegitimate law of neocolonial oppression. This masculine psychosexual crisis is finally resolved through the act of sexual reproduction and a claim to paternity. The upshot of this reproductive framing of history is that Kenyan nationalism as a ‘theory of political legitimacy’55 is collapsed quite simplistically into a theory of legitimate paternity. If political representations in Petals of Blood are tantamount to claims of paternity, then I hope to show that these claims are mutually exclusive with the crisis of nomination at work in Petals of Blood. Intertextuality: A Rose by Any Other Name … This crisis of nomination works at two levels. Firstly, there are a number of illegitimate fathers and children in Petals of Blood. For instance, both Karega and Joseph are born out of wedlock, and Abdulla states that Joseph is ‘[not] my brother. He is more of a son to me.’56 Secondly, the novel’s own acts of naming are complicated by a proliferation of references. Central to my argument is the idea that the allusions which comprise the novel’s historical and intertextual weave may be read as citations or signatures of illegitimate fathers. In short, the multiple references in Petals of Blood contest the unity of its authority. I am influenced by   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, pp. 21–2.   Significantly, just before Munira and Mukami first sleep together at Manguo Lake, he plucks a leech from her chin, causing it to bleed. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, pp. 218–19. 54   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 107. 55  Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, p. 1. 56   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 285. 52 53

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Gayatri Spivak’s deconstructive reading of the patronym here. Spivak notes that ‘[quotation] in Derrida is a mark of non-self-identity: the defining predication of a woman, whose very name is changeable’.57 To read for female agency in Petals of Blood is to read for a changeability of references that renders the deduction of paternity impossible. In other words, the mechanism by which paternity is usually brought into being – a single, unequivocal act of nomination – is ultimately rendered impossible by the symbolic saturation we find at work in the novel. This symbolic saturation is at work even in the title of Petals of Blood. We have seen that the title is derived from Walcott’s poem ‘The Swamp’. But Ngugi’s title and the novel’s central motif are arguably also informed by an extract from Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Resurgemus’,58 which decries those who are ‘paid to defile the people … Worming from his simplicity the poor man’s wages’.59 ‘Resurgemus’ celebrates ‘the revolutionary movements of 1848 in Europe’60 and depicts political corruption as a shadowy figure clad in red: Yet, behind all, lo, a Shape Vague as the night, draped interminably, head front and form in scarlet folds, Whose face and eyes none may see, Out of its robes only this … the red robes, lifted by the arm, One finger pointed high over the top, like the head of a snake appears.61

The snake in scarlet folds is, of course, a version of the worm in the flower. In fact, Petals of Blood uses the passages immediately preceding and following this extract as epigraphs for Part One and Part Four of the novel. Hence, the extract from ‘Resurgemus’ that provides the novel with its ‘name’ and central motif functions as an excluded middle – an invaginated larval presence – enfolded within the leaves of Ngugi’s book. Whitman’s wish in ‘Resurgemus’ is ‘that the spirits of the men murdered by tyrants will live on to fight for Liberty’.62 Likewise, Petals of Blood aspires to an efflorescence of revolutionary sacrifice, but this wish is imaginatively 57

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Displacement and the Discourse of Woman’ in Mark Krupnick (ed.), Displacement: Derrida and After (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 171. 58   Published before Leaves of Grass, ‘Resurgemus’ was untitled when reprinted in the 1855 edition. In the 1856 edition, it acquired the name ‘Poem of The Dead Young Men of Europe, the 72d and 73d Years of These States’. Walt Whitman, ‘Resurgemus’/‘Poem of The Dead Young Men of Europe, the 72d and 73d Years of These States’, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, New York, 1856), pp. 252–4. 59   Walt Whitman, ‘Resurgemus’/‘Europe’, p. 252. 60  Roger Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 38. 61   Walt Whitman, ‘Resurgemus’/‘Europe’, p. 253. 62  See Gay Wilson Allen, New Walt Whitman Handbook, p. 80.

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fulfilled by reducing women to ‘Woman’, a monolithic transhistorical vehicle through which the revolutionary spirit may incubated and enlivened.63 Some critics have sought to describe Whitman’s ‘Resurgemus’ as ‘Gothicized protest’, located in an American lineage.64 Indeed, it exhibits obvious similarities with Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Conqueror Worm’, included in the short story ‘Ligeia’ (1845). In this poem, an airborne ‘Invisible Wo!’65 presides over a theatrical performance of human tragedy while the angels spectate, following which a monstrous interloper appears on stage: But see, amid the mimic rout, A crawling shape intrude ! A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude ! It writhes ! – it writhes ! – with mortal pangs The mimes become its food, And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued. Out – out are the lights – out all! And over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, And the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’ And its hero the Conqueror Worm.66

In formal and thematic terms, Poe’s story is highly evocative of the central motif in Petals of Blood. The fact that we encounter a poem’s intrusion within a short story as a vehicle for theatre means that Poe’s text itself contains generic aberrations

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  Significantly, Whitman argued in his journalism for the legalization of prostitution. In this, he was influenced by a women reformer – the poignantly named Ernestine L. Rose. Rose’s remarkable campaigns for the political and social enfranchisement of women and African-Americans is detailed in Sherry Ceniza, Walt Whitman and 19th-Century Women Reformers (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1998), pp. 140–80. 64  See David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), pp. 131–2. Reynolds, however, dismisses the notion of Poe’s influence in favour of a Lippardian influence. 65   Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ligeia’ in David Galloway (ed.), The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1986 [1845]), p. 116. 66   Poe, ‘Ligeia’, p. 117.

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comparable to those we have noticed in Petals of Blood.67 Quite simply, Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ is, like Ngugi’s Petals of Blood, a genre-bender. More importantly, if ‘The Conqueror Worm’ (a poem) resides inside a woman (the short story ‘Ligeia’) who then becomes the stage for a pageant of metaphysical proportions (‘the tragedy, “Man”’), this means that we have another plausible originary scene for Ngugi’s Petals of Blood – in which a worm/phallus and a flower/woman illustrate a clash of masculine world-historical forces (imperial capitalism and its organic communist antithesis in Ngugi’s novel). Although one might not expect an African writer like Ngugi to have been influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, there is at least one other striking similarity in ‘Ligeia’ and Petals of Blood. Foreshadowing her death and subsequent resurrection, Ligeia asks Poe’s narrator, ‘… Shall this Conqueror [Worm] be not once conquered?’68 This question is rephrased in Petals of Blood when the schoolchildren question Munira about the worm-eaten beanflower (‘Why can’t the eaten eat back?’69) – anticipating a revolutionary reawakening in Kenya. Whereas Munira declines to answer the children’s question, Wanja’s conclusions after realizing that Kimeria would benefit from the economic progress of Ilmorog provide an answer to the children’s question: Eat or be eaten. If you have a cunt – excuse my language but it seems the curse of Adam’s Eve on those who are born with it – 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.70

The biblical reference is apt here, because the worm in the flower is simply another version of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The first epigraph to Part One of the novel is a quotation from the Book of Revelation. By moving from edenic imagery to apocalyptic imagery via the metaphoric vehicles of the worm/snake and the fire that occur in both Genesis and Revelation, Petals of Blood builds to a theology of black oppression and liberation. However, although this repetitive imagery provides the novel with a narrative thread, the imagery’s repetitions at biblical origin and outcome also collapse the very history that the novel purports to explain. Given the number of William Blake’s poems used as epigraphs for the four parts into which the novel is divided, another plausible source for the floral imagery in Petals of Blood is his poem ‘The Sick Rose’. Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and Ngugi’s Petals of 67

  ‘The Conqueror Worm’, with three sentences before and two paragraphs after the poem, was inserted when Poe revised the story for the New York New World in early 1845. See J. Gerald Kennedy, ‘Poe, “Ligeia,” and the Problem of Dying Women’ in Kenneth Silverman (ed.), New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 120. 68   Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ligeia’, p. 117. 69   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 22. 70   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 293.

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Blood are almost certainly derived from this source,71 which repeats the scene of the flower afflicted by an outlandish phallus: ‘The Sick Rose’ O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.72

In this poem, as in ‘Ligeia’, something interesting is happening with gender. Michael Simpson has argued: … the rose may be sick because its life is being destroyed by the worm’s ‘dark secret love’ or because this ‘dark secret love’ is being destroyed by the rose’s ‘life.’ … The factor that specifically allows ‘his dark secret love’ to be read as the object of ‘destroy’ and ‘thy life’ as the subject, is the rhetorical figure of syntactic inversion called ‘anastrophe.’73

In other words, the final two lines of the poem are ambiguous as to whether the worm’s ‘dark secret love’ destroys the rose’s life, or whether the rose’s life ‘does … destroy’ the worm’s ‘dark secret love’. There is a question of agency here: of whether the rose is destroyed or destructive, castrated or castrating. The primal scene in Blake’s poem, then, introduces a fluctuating organization of sexual difference (just as the primal scene does in the example of Freud’s the Wolf-Man). Quite simply, Blake’s 71   The storm, the airborne ‘Invisible Wo!’ and the rubicund conqueror worm in Poe’s poem metonymically evoke Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’. But whereas Blake’s worm suggests the destructive power of sexual desire, Poe’s worm suggests the triumph of death over human mortality and humanity’s divine ambitions. 72   William Blake, ‘The Sick Rose’ in Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), Blake: Complete Writings with Variant Readings (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 175. 73   Simpson’s comment on the performative act of reading Blake’s poem might also be applied to the vexed relation between Petals of Blood’s title, its gendered motifs and its intertextual affinities: ‘What happens to the text determines what happens in the text (this continuity is incidentally signalled by the punning title of the [text], for it names an item within the text as well as the text itself).’ Michael Simpson, ‘Who Didn’t Kill Blake’s Fly: Moral Law and the Rule of Grammar in “Songs of Experience”’, Style, 30:2 (Summer, 1996), p. 223.

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rose, like Wanja Kahii (‘tomboy’) in Petals of Blood, is a gender-bender.74 Curiously, what Blake’s feminine rose ultimately discloses is a covert form of masculinity, as the etymology of ‘crimson’ suggests. Nathan Cervo explains that ‘the word crimson is essential to Blake’s meaning, for the word crimson can be traced to the Sanskrit krmi (worm) and jan (to generate)’.75 Etymologically speaking, the rose’s ‘crimson joy’ generates a worm (a phallus). Given the transports of etymology, we could make the obvious statement that the rose’s crimson colouring (or that of her fellows in the flowerbed) encodes her procreative or generative female capacities. But, in a more radical reading, the rose inherently expresses a cryptophallic disposition – she is secretly masculine. This masculine disposition leads to a paradoxical doublemovement. The rose’s ‘crimson joy’ (krmi jan) belatedly originates her own demise by generating the worm (krmi jan) who has arrived to destroy her life. Additionally, she ensures that her successor (the worm) is preoriginated in the ‘crimson joy’ to which he succeeds – the worm comes to destroy the rose’s life and what he finds in her ‘crimson joy’ is the thing that made him. We might say that the rose makes the worm who destroys her, and the worm discovers in her ‘crimson joy’ his own disputed origins – the cause, perhaps, of his invisibility. The rose thus proliferates the worm’s anterior moment and complicates his succession. (In Blake’s anastrophic reversals, of course, the worm’s succession does not ever completely occur.) Both rose and worm ultimately consume themselves through the mediatory agency of the other. To put this another way, the eaten eat back. The other prominent figurative pattern in Petals of Blood involves imagery of fire. Munira commits two purificatory acts of arson. The first is after his sexual experience with Amina (‘Amen / so be it’76), a prostitute to whom Munira has lost his virginity, and whom he attempts to forget by burning a matchbox effigy of her hut. This incident prefigures Munira’s torching of Wanja’s brothel in order to save Karega from Wanja, in the distorted logic of his Christian-influenced apocalyptic or redemptive vision. In a curious symmetry, Wanja’s aunt – a courier of arms and ammunition for Mau Mau – has perished when her hut is mistakenly torched by a cousin’s husband, who fears that his wife has been ‘going about with men’.77 Wanja, in turn, survives three fires. The first is the fire started when the pressurelamp tips over in her bedroom.78 The second is an act of arson designed to trap

74   In the notebook containing the first draft of ‘The Sick Rose’, the crucial line read ‘And [his del.] her dark secret love’. The pronoun underwent subsequent gender reassignment and reverted to its original masculine form. See Geoffrey Keynes, Blake, p. 175. 75   Nathan Cervo, ‘Blake’s THE SICK ROSE’, The Explicator, 48:4 (Summer, 1990), p. 253, italics in the original. 76   Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed, p. 61. 77   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 64. In my view, the cousin and aunt are characters designed to decouple the Mau Mau prostitute’s revolutionary and sexual agency. 78   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 62.

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Wanja in her room with her regular, the Somali truck driver.79 The third is Munira’s torching of her brothel; the moment when Wanja ‘eats back’ by killing Kimeria even as the flames rise to consume her. In a moment of prolepsis, Wanja tells her friends that she harbours suicidal thoughts of setting herself on fire, associating this with ‘the water and the fire of the beginning and the water and the fire of the second coming’.80 The fire imagery, especially when arson is conceived as an act of purification after sexually promiscuity, is inspired by Genesis and the Book of Revelation. Clearly, the whore of Babylon, ‘sitting upon a scarlet beast’81 and ‘arrayed in purple and scarlet colour’82 who ‘shall be utterly burned with fire’83 informs the characterization of Wanja, the scarlet woman who substitutes for the debased polis and who is injured by Munira’s climactic act of purificatory arson in Ngugi’s novel. However, the fire imagery is also derived from another of Blake’s poems, which Ngugi uses as the epigraph of Part Three of Petals of Blood: Morning blush’d fiery red: Mary was found in an Adulterous bed; Earth groan’d beneath, and Heaven above Trembled at the discovery of love.84

Although the flower and fire imageries may have been inspired by Blake’s poems, these imageries are also replayed in the Caribbean literatures exerting an influence upon Ngugi’s thinking at this point in his development. We know that the flower imagery of Petals of Blood is inspired by a line in Derek Walcott’s poem ‘The Swamp’. What is less obvious is that the fire imagery is inspired by V. S. Naipaul’s novel The Mimic Men. Specifically, Munira’s act of arson, which dispenses with the villains of Ilmorog’s neocolonial history, has its sources in Gurudeva’s burning of the Deschampneufs’ horse, Tamango, in Naipaul’s novel. In both novels, an act of arson laden with political implications is ironically motivated by religious delusion.85 It is quite possible that Karega’s vision of Nding’uri is also informed by The Mimic Men. During his brother’s visitation (as a ghost), Karega is surprised that Nding’uri knows him, given that he might not yet have been born while Nding’uri was alive. Nding’uri answers: ‘Seedlings from the same womb. Kinsmen. Mumbi’s children. Nyumba ya Mumbi [House of Mumbi]. It does matter, or is it not so?’

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    81   82   83   84   85   80

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 98. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 65. Revelation 17:3. Revelation 17:4. Revelation 18:8. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 189. V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (London: Picador, 2002 [1969]), pp. 169–70.

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‘Why are you adrift on a raft?’ … ‘… Tell me one black man who is not adrift even in the land of his birth. But you? For a second I thought I knew you. Listen, my brothers, the true house of Mumbi, Mumbi the mother creator, is all the black toiling masses carrying a jembe in one hand and three bullets in the other, struggling against centuries of drifting, sole witnesses of their own homecoming. That is why in 1952 we took the oath.’86

Nding’uri’s use of the word ‘brothers’ includes Karega in a familial framework of reference that extends to all of the African diaspora. Like Wanja, Mumbi is equipped with exceptionally durable sexual capacities, as were the Gikuyu women indentured to receive the penises of male insurgents who took the Batuni oath during the Mau Mau insurgency. Clearly, Nding’uri’s words privilege the maternal functions of Gikuyu women – encoded in the term Nyumba ya Mumbi (‘the House of Mumbi’, implying both Kenya, the family and the gynaeceum) – over the possibility that they might use their sexual organs for other forms of production, such as sex work. Nding’uri’s placement upon the raft and his assertions about being adrift suggests the influence of John Pepper Clark’s play The Raft, in which one of the characters says of his situation and his nation, ‘We are a castaway people.’87 However, Nding’uri is also arguably inspired by the presiding imagery of shipwreck in The Mimic Men. In Homecoming, Ngugi writes that ‘the image of the shipwreck – “this feeling of being adrift” – stands astride [Naipaul’s] novel, a colossus of loneliness amidst disorder’.88 The fire motif in Petals of Blood also owes something to the title of Billy Graham’s World Aflame89 and to Richard Wurmbrand’s name (‘worm brand’).90 Both of these Christian anti-communist authors are referenced specifically in relation to the evangelical movement that Lillith leads.91 By drawing on these two Christian evangelical sources in its patterning of Munira’s arson, the novel’s aesthetic entertains what is ideologically negated. In other words, Ngugi references   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 237.   J. P. Clark, Three Plays: Song of a Goat, The Masquerade, The Raft (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 101. 88   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming, p. 91. 89   Billy Graham, World Aflame (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1965). 90   Anyone who has read Wurmbrand’s work will know that his allusions to African societies are frequently patronizing. His account of the conversion of fellow Romanian political prisoners to Christianity is couched in imagery that Ngugi’s novel may also be consciously resisting: ‘For the first time, a few ugly worms, caterpillars which creep on leaves, understood that, after this miserable existence, there comes life as a beautiful butterfly, multicoloured butterfly, able to fly from flower to flower.’ Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ: Christians Suffering in Communist Prisons (New York: Spire Books, 1969), p. 54. 91   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 306. 86 87

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Graham and Wurmbrand because he wishes to oppose evangelical Christianity’s ideological functions during the Cold War with a form of theological belief rooted in worldly institutions. In Petals of Blood, the most important of these worldly institutions is the secular ‘red church’ of socialism. In this sense, Petals of Blood intervenes in Cold War politics by producing an anti-theology implicit in the section headings’ echoes of ‘The Second Coming’. Writ large, Ngugi’s Gikuyu modes of generational history and cyclical governance amount to nothing less than the epochal world-historical shifts of the Yeatsian gyre. The novel’s intervention into Cold War cultural politics is further evidenced by the lawyer’s allusion to Josh White’s version of ‘Strange Fruit’, whose lyrics again approximate the leitmotif of ‘petals of blood’: Southern trees Bear strange fruits Blood around the leaves And blood at the roots Black body swaying In a southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from poplar trees.92

The reason that the lawyer hums the Josh White version, rather than the Billie Holiday version, is that White was forced to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee as part of its investigation of communist influence upon the African-American community. During his testimony, White read out the lyrics of the song, ensuring that its scathing indictment of lynching registered subtly on the Congressional record.93 It is something like this inscription of black historical experience into the narratives of the Cold War that Ngugi’s novel attempts to accomplish. Hence, there are a number of literary ancestors (St John the Divine, William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Derek Walcott, Richard Wurmbrand, V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, John Pepper Clark, Josh White, Billie Holliday, William Butler Yeats, Okot p’Bitek) who contend for the status of ‘father-poet’ in this novel, so that the neither the title of Petals of Blood nor its narrative progression will settle down into a single, stable representational field. Although the novel’s floral imagery and its reproductive framing of history might at first appear to provide Petals of Blood with an organic mode of address in relation to the Kenyan landscape and post-Independence national politics, upon closer inspection the narrative’s symbolic authority relies upon a series of outlandish literary progenitors. Expressed succinctly, neither the identity nor the provenance nor the referential impetus of Petals of Blood is underwritten by cohesive   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 165.   Nat Hentoff, American Music Is, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2004), p. 5. 92

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ontological guarantees. In other words, by mooting several ‘father-poets’, Petals of Blood begins to undermine exactly the forms of deducible authority that a patrilinear narrative of history would seem to require. Embedded within Ngugi’s novel are the foundations of its own critique, and the crux of this critique resides in the impossibility of the novel’s asymmetrical constructions of gender. Opening Ngugi’s Petals of Blood to close scrutiny, one discovers not so much a parasite as a large-scale infestation; not so much a primal scene as an interminable orgy. Onomastic Corruptions The crisis of fatherhood in the novel expresses itself symptomatically through an anxiety about names. The novel’s own onomastic (naming) processes are fraught and rapidly become corrupted. One of the crucial moves in Petals of Blood is to adopt a critique by naming. So invested is the novel in this critique that it discloses its own ideological moorings in the process of naming its characters. Just as Kimathi was a teacher who became a revolutionary,94 we find that the teacher Munira’s name denotes the ‘stump’95 missing from the body of the amputee Abdulla, the Mau Mau insurgent. Additionally, the unrelated figures of Abdulla’s adopted ‘son’ Joseph (the exemplary revolutionary student) and Karega’s peasant mother, Old Mariamu (‘a Swahili translation of Mary’96), collectively comprise a Christian symbolism. When we consider this choice of names, we are not far from locating Ngugi’s self-interested representation of an intellectual élite that grafts itself on to the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army and re-members Mau Mau – and infuses the peasantry with the divine word they lack. Furthermore, we are close to detecting in Petals of Blood the collapsing of class distinctions which should be so central to Ngugi’s Marxist thesis, despite Karega’s concluding polemic about the impending revolution of workers and peasants.97 But more broadly than this, the novel maps out its national political constellations in terms of the names of its characters. What we encounter in the characters is a series of aptronymic condensations. This means that the characters’ names map conveniently on to their political characteristics. However, these aptronymic condensations rapidly become mobile and proliferate – they will not stay still. As a result, there are very few characters in Petals of Blood who have only one name. Hence, the view of Kenyan history as a generational struggle and its resulting myth of patrilinear succession finally succumb to the larger nominative crises at work in the novel. It is perfectly clear that Petals of Blood interrogates the unexamined adoption of Western standards and ideals into an African context.  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 133.   Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed, p. 33. 96   Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed, p. 35. 97   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, pp. 344–5. 94

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Karega, for example, rejects the adoption of Anglicized values that accompanies Africans assuming the names of an illegitimate colonial father: It is not that I don’t believe in names. For what could be a more ridiculous caricature of self than those of our African brothers and sisters proudly calling themselves James Phillipson, Rispa, Hotensiah, Ron Rodgerson, Richard Glucose, Charity, Honey Moonsnow, Ezekiel, Shiprah, Winterbottomson – all the collection of names and non-names from the Western world? … It is rather that I believe in the reality of what’s being named than the name itself.98

However, there is a significant blindness in the novel’s own acts of naming. Petals of Blood begins to bargain into the very problematic of naming that it wishes to resolve. The novel’s blindness consists in the fact that its critique by naming is itself susceptible to a critique of naming. In short, the very processes by which the novel contests the name are the same as those processes via which its own acts of naming might be critiqued. Although the novel undertakes an aptronymic project, almost every character in it has more than one name, ensuring the contestability of its references. The reality of what is being named begins to slide. For instance, Kimeria wa Kamia Nja has renamed himself Kimeria Hawkins (‘hawk that swallows’99), Raymond Chui has become Chui Rimui (‘chui’ denotes ‘leopard’100), then is nicknamed ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Joe Louis’ by his fellow pupils.101 David Samuel becomes Nderi wa Riera (‘vulture of the air’102). Reverend Kamau has assumed the name Reverend Jerrod Brown, and Munira’s father Waweru assumes the name Ezekieli in line with his Christian faith. Munira’s wife Wanjiru (‘the black one’103) alters her name to Julia. Built into the names of Cambridge Fraudsham and the Reverend Hallowes Ironmonger are subversive translations of their fraudulent and inflexible dispositions, and Mzigo’s name translates as ‘a burden’.104 Additionally, there is a counterbalancing of Hallowes Ironmonger’s religious authority in the mysterious figure of Mwathi wa Mugo, a traditional healer who manufactures iron implements and who requires secrecy in order to be protected from ‘the power of evil and envious eyes’.105 Mwathi’s ‘real’ identity is that of Muturi, a peasant elder, whose name denotes ‘smith’.106 It is obvious enough that many of the names in the novel work to parody or critique the name(s) of the colonial father. What   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 125.  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 209. 100  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 198. 101   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, pp. 28, 167. 102  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 224. 103   Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed, p. 94. 104   Lisa Curtis, ‘The Divergence of Art and Ideology in the Later Novels of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’, Ufahamu: Journal of the African Activist Association, 13:2 (1984), p. 205. 105   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 17. 106  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 222. 98

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is perhaps less obvious, but more important for a gender-political reading, is that this critique by naming tries and fails to foreclose the very possibility of hybridity which the form of an intertextual ‘Petals of Blood’ admits. There are many examples of how this proliferation of signs works. The first example I would offer is Abdulla, the former Mau Mau fighter. In a discussion with Wanja and Karega about names, Abdulla reveals that his own name has its origins in a category mistake. Wanja speaks first: ‘Karega …’ [Wanja] said aloud. ‘What a funny name!’ ‘Ritwa ni mbukio [Ritwa resembles the person he’s named after],’ Karega quoted the proverb. ‘Somebody a long time ago asked the question: What’s in a name? And he answered that a rose would still be a rose even by another name.’ … ‘Names are actually funny. My real name is not Abdulla. It is Murira [one who asks]. But I baptized myself Abdulla. Now everybody calls me Abdulla.’ ‘You mean, you thought Abdulla was a Christian name?’ Wanja asked. ‘Yes. Yes.’107

Although Abdulla’s name passes as a mistake, it arguably also alludes to the name of the dissident Kenyan Swahili poet Abdilatif Abdalla, who was sentenced to three years imprisonment in 1969 for publishing a pamphlet entitled ‘Kenya, Where Are We Heading?’108 The passage I have quoted might even be read as an interested silencing of the struggles of Indian or Muslim Kenyans against common structures of neocolonial subjection afflicting their African compatriots. Ole Masai, Abdulla’s comrade in Mau Mau, has similarly plural origins. Popularly known by the Gikuyu nickname ‘Muhindi’,109 he is the son of Njogu’s daughter and Ramjeeh Ramlagoon Dharamshah, who occupied the shop prior to Abdulla’s arrival. ‘Ramlagoon’ is, of course, an allusion to ‘Ramlogan’, the troublesome shop owner in V. S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur. We are told in Petals of Blood that Ole Masai hates ‘himself, his mother, his father, his divided self’.110 His name denotes ‘the son of a Masai’,111 and his character is ‘possibly based in part on Joseph Murumbi (who is half-Maasai, half-Goan), a KAU activist educated in India [and the] first vice-president of Kenya’.112 Where, then, should we locate Ole Masai’s patronym? Is it Dharamshah, Murumbi, Ramlogan or given by a Maasai man, a Goan man, or his comrades among the Mau Mau insurgents? Equally, why should Ole Masai hate his ‘divided self’ when Abdulla’s name invokes the patronym of Abdilatif Abdalla and when Ole Masai himself descends partly from a novel by V. S. Naipaul? The answer, I think, is ideological. It is to be found in   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 61.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, p. 94. 109   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 137. 110   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 137. 111  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 228. 112  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 152. 107 108

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Ngugi’s interested representation of a Gikuyu-centric, masculine historiographic narrative that attempts to foreclose the possibilities of marketable intercourse outside of exogamic strictures (prostitution) and the hybrid subjects who might issue from ‘illegitimate’ liaisons. Ole Masai’s anger is based, in part, on the fact that Dharamshah has not financially supported his former mistress, Ole’s mother. Beyond the allusive reference to Abdilatif Abdalla, Abdulla’s characterization in Petals of Blood is partly inspired by the shop owners, Behari and Ramlogan, in Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur.113 As we have seen, Ramjeeh Ramlagoon Dharamshah’s name is also derived from this source, indicating a common literary parentage for a hero and a villain of Ilmorog’s history. Like Petals of Blood, The Mystic Masseur also contains a female shop assistant with a penchant for placing notices in the shop window (Leela, who corresponds to Wanja). Both novels contain a spiritually minded teacher (Ganesh, who corresponds to Munira). Ganesh’s visceral aunt in The Mystic Masseur, ‘the Great Belcher’, corresponds to Wanja’s grandmother Nyakinyua (who shits outside the school when Munira first arrives in Ilmorog). So Abdulla’s origins are already arguably in four places: his real name is Murira, his adopted name mistakenly alludes to Christianity and acknowledges a dissident Kenyan poet, and his characterization is indebted to a Caribbean novel by an Indo-Trinidadian writer. By any measure, the Abdulla’s origins are multiple and mobile. Given the fact that Abdulla has lost a leg, we might mischievously add that his real name – ‘Murira’ – is simply a truncated version of ‘Munira’, whose name, in turn, translates as ‘stump’114 – an allusion to the epithet attached to the educated character, Ocol, in Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino.115 In Munira we see the ironic figure of ‘justice’ who sets fire to the neocolonial villains for misplaced reasons and who restores to Abdulla his missing limb, so that what has been ideologically removed is also symbolically present. A similar instability is at work within Wanja, the prostitute. Petals of Blood reflects an anxiety about sexually licentious women – namely, that they reverse or destabilize gender roles. There is a curious moment in the novel, in which Wanja and Karega leave the rest of the encamped Ilmorog villagers and encounter a hill. Wanja speaks: ‘That! It is called the hill of uncircumcised boys. It is said that if a boy runs right round it, he will turn into a girl and a girl will turn into a boy. Do you believe that too?’ ‘No, I don’t. We should have heard of cases of some who had tried and were changed into their opposites.’

  V. S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977).   Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed, p. 159. 115   See Steven R. Carter, ‘Decolonization and Detective Fiction’, p. 109. See also Okot p’Bitek Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol, intro. G. A. Heron and illus. Frank Horley (Heinemann: Oxford, 1990 [1969]). 113 114

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‘I wish it were true!’ she said rather fiercely, almost bitterly.116

In a certain sense, Wanja’s wish, or Ngugi’s wish for her, has already been accomplished. Wanja’s name, given to her by her playmates at school and by the Ilmorog townsfolk,117 is Wanja Kahii (‘kahii’ denotes an uncircumcised boy118), because she was considered a tomboy in her youth. The anxiety in the naming here, like Wanja’s wish to change her gender in front of a feature in the landscape whose name she shares, forms part of a broader anxiety in Ngugi’s later fiction. As Florence Stratton puts it, from Ngugi’s perspective, ‘“a strong determined woman” is to all intents and purposes a man. The identification of his heroine with masculine values is Ngugi’s response to the question of how to create a female national subject ... [Rather] than rewriting nationalism, he rewrites woman.’119 In fact, we see a comparable hermaphroditic fantasy in the sculpture of a freedom fighter that the Ilmorog villagers discuss at the lawyer’s house: Abdulla stood a few seconds in front of Kimathi’s picture and then he abruptly hobbled across the room and out into the garden. The others surrounded the sculpture and commented on the fighter’s hair, the heavy lips and tongue in open laughter, and the sword around the waist. But why did he possess breasts, somebody asked: it was as if it was a man and a woman in one: how could that be? They started arguing about it until Nyakinyua almost silenced them with her simple logic. ‘A man cannot have a child without a woman. A woman cannot have a child without a man. And was it not a man and a woman who fought to redeem this country?’120

A few observations are pertinent here. Firstly, as we shall see presently, the sculpture and the picture of Kimathi are both included in Wanja’s gesture towards the father of her child. At some level, Wanja’s final nomination of a father for her child invokes the sexual union of a hermaphrodite and a transsexual: a resolution in which all gender binaries begin to spiral uncontrollably. Secondly, Nyakinyua’s inference is consistent with the uterine logic all of Ngugi’s novels, in which the child as a sexual product is associated with the social product of resistance: the utopia. Thirdly, I read into the fantasies of hermaphroditic men and transsexual women – fantasies which are themselves not symmetrical – a metaphor for the

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 122.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, pp. 25, 264. 118  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 206. 119  Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender, p. 163. 120   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 161. 116

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displaced womb envy at work within the patronym. The child, produced in the womb, and the mother as its producer are claimed by the father’s name. This act of rewriting Wanja as a man can never be completely successful in a book in which names proliferate at a rate faster than its uterine logic is able to keep pace with. I find in the younger Wanja, impregnated by Kimeria Hawkins (then named Kimeria wa Kamia Nja121), an outlaw woman, rather than the narrative’s sentimental construction of a ‘fallen’ waif who discards her child in a latrine and then languishes in ‘unfulfilled motherhood’.122 Kimeria’s patronym – which might ordinarily have named the child and claimed Wanja the mother – is ‘wa Kamia Nja’ (denoting ‘son of the one who shits outside’123). Wanja ‘throws the baby out with the bathwater’ and returns it to shit (Kamia). By discarding her child in the latrine, Wanja restores her own name; a name that is not a proper name, but an unnameable impropriety. Wanja (denoting ‘the girl [or] someone who used to sit on the outside of her living house, the outsider’124) restores ‘wa Kamia Nja’ to WA (kamia) NJA. Wanja thus remains Wa Nja (‘outside the living house’), an unaccommodated subject who is unreclaimable for patriarchy. What living house might Wanja be outside? In Chapter 4, we saw that the woman’s hut in Gikuyu culture is called Nyumba ya Mumbi, the House of Mumbi. The House of Mumbi also invokes the family and is a political metaphor for the nation. As a prostitute, Wanja is outside the House of Mumbi. Because her sexuality is deviant, she is by definition excluded from the equation between motherhood and the nation, allowing her limited space for a disruptive agency. When Wanja is finally redeemed from her fallen status by becoming pregnant at the end of the novel, I think we need to be extremely suspicious of this cosy resolution. Quite clearly, if Wanja is about to have a child, then she is being brought back into the House of Mumbi, into the fold of childbearing and the nation. And if Wanja is brought into the House of Mumbi, quite clearly she can no longer be ‘outside of the house’ (‘wa Nja’), she can no longer be ‘Wanja’, and she will at some level be obliterated. A similar obliteration is at work in Karega’s thoughts, which conclude the novel. While being visited by a woman named Akinyi, he reflects as follows: Tomorrow it would be the workers and the peasants leading the struggle and seizing power to overturn the system of all its preying bloodthirsty gods and   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 317.   The original and sentimental working title of the novel was Ballad for a Barmaid. James Currey, ‘Publishing Ngugi’, Leeds African Studies Bulletin, 68 (May 2006), p. 40. 123   Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed, p. 101. As with the name of Sir Swallow Bloodall in Petals of Blood, Ngugi is equating Kimeria’s name with excrement and with visceral qualities. This tendency is even more pronounced in the names given to many of the neocolonial ‘ogres’ in his subsequent novel, Devil on the Cross. These aptronyms index capitalism’s exploitative and acquisitive impulses in terms of parasitism and visceral greed. 124   Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed, p. 34. 121 122

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gnomic angels, bringing to an end the reign of a few and the era of drinking blood and feasting on human flesh. Then, only then, would the kingdom of man and woman really begin, they joying and loving in creative labour ... For a minute he was so carried on the waves of this vision and of the possibilities it opened up for all the Kenyan working and peasant masses that he forgot the woman beside him. ‘You’ll come back,’ she said again in a quiet affirmation of faith in eventual triumph. He looked hard at her, then past her to Mukami of Manguo Marshes and again back to Nyakinyua, his mother and even beyond Akinyi to the future! And he smiled through his sorrow. ‘Tomorrow ... tomorrow ...’ he murmured to himself. ‘Tomorrow ...’ and he knew he was no longer alone.125

Akinyi’s name means ‘one who is to come’ or ‘the people who are to arrive’126 and it is clear that Karega not only forgets her while she is beside him, but that he also looks beyond Akinyi in the future in which she is ‘to come’. Akinyi is thus perpetually overlooked, and is only acknowledged by Karega when she confirms his ‘tomorrow’; the tomorrow in which she herself will be negated if Karega looks ‘beyond Akinyi to the future!’ And yet Ngugi’s novel does give Akinyi the last word. Even if her last word is ‘Tomorrow’ – a temporal deferral – it is also a repetition with a crucial difference and as such is freighted with symbolism. In Wanja’s example, her symbolic obliteration at the end of the novel is staved off by a final word that will not settle down – the proliferating names of the father of her child. The Paternal Fiction: Names that Might (Never) Have Been Kimeria’s activities do not merely amount to sexual villainy. He betrays Karega’s brother Nding’uri to the security forces because Nding’uri is sexually involved with Kimeria’s sister. Nding’uri, in turn, understands colonial oppression to include not only the theft of the land, but also the ruination of ‘our women’.127 But the ruination of women is construed somewhat uncritically in Petals of Blood. Nding’uri, whose name denotes ‘one who possesses courage or strength’,128 is ubiquitously privileged in the novel. His courage presumably extends to his ability to rape women: he and Abdulla ‘share’ a woman sexually, despite her unwillingness, and later wonder if she, ‘now a happily married mother of two, even remembered that   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, pp. 344–5.   Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed, p. 155. 127   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 222. 128  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 224. 125 126

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night’.129 The mode of revolutionary presencing here has the effect of aggregating the revolutionary male subject, of reducing him to a phallic monad, and hence limiting the occasion for story. The implication in Abdulla’s reminiscences of this moment of sexual comradeship is that it is perfectly acceptable for rape to be the testing ground for virile heroes, because these women are so contented with their lot once they have become married mothers that they have also become amnesiacs. The amnesiac is a subject without a history, and amnesiac motherhood, of course, is the alternative offered to Wanja at the conclusion of the narrative when she remembers the long-deceased Kimathi as the father of her child. Given the fact that Petals of Blood presents us with a masculine construction of history from which women’s contributions to political struggle are bracketed and in which their subjecthood is ultimately violated or obliterated, I think it is necessary to read the ending of the novel against the grain in order to disclose a space of female historical and sexual agency. Just as we saw with Mumbi in A Grain of Wheat, we might find historical antecedents for a sex worker like Wanja in the revolutionary form of prostitution conducted by Mau Mau women. These women, footnoted by the historical record, slept with British soldiers and loyalists, often for a single bullet, then carried the ammunition to Mau Mau in the forests. As we have previously noticed, the Mau Mau prostitute sleeps with the enemy for the bullet that he would shoot her with if he caught her carrying ammunition, and she delivers the bullet to the Mau Mau fighter who might execute her with it if he knew that she was sleeping with the enemy. The Mau Mau prostitute shuttles between two oppressive structures, between two patriarchies, without acceding to either one, in a way that contaminates two contradictory systems of law. This revolutionary agency resists conceptualization or framing in colonialist or nationalist histories of Mau Mau. It is precisely this kind of revolutionary female sexual agency that Petals of Blood is concerned to foreclose, because revolutionary prostitution does not enable resistance to be represented as masculine virility and sexual potency. As in Ngugi’s subsequent novels, Devil on the Cross and Matigari, the prostitution performed by Kenyan women is of ideological necessity ascribed to a colonial or loyalist influence. For example, Kimeria Hawkins, who betrays Nding’uri (Karega’s brother and Abdulla’s comrade) and impregnates the younger Wanja, is recalled in this way by Abdulla: ‘[We] were going to meet a man, our man, who had some shadowy connections with the colonial police and used to get bullets from them and in exchange, according to him, he would bring them juicy women.’130 It is interesting that Ngugi should elide the agency-in-insurgency of the Limuru prostitutes to whom he is referring by regulating their subversive exchanges through a male character, and especially a character who is ubiquitously depicted as counter-revolutionary. Here, history is a transaction conducted between men, and female agency-in-insurgency is strategically omitted. Gikuyu women’s   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 222.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 221.

129 130

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historical contributions to Mau Mau are mediated by men, thus negating female political-historical agency and reducing women’s involvement in the rebellion to the marketability of their sex functions.131 How might we read Wanja in terms of the Mau Mau prostitute’s agency? And given that Wanja is a vehicle for national self-imaging in Ngugi’s novel, how might our reading avoid repeating a similarly self-interested manoeuvre? In other words, how might we find in the novel a form of female agency that finally disturbs literary criticism’s own self-imaging tendencies? My sense is that the crisis of nomination that we have identified in Petals of Blood allows us to contest the paternity of Wanja’s unborn child. Here, the novel’s own nominative mechanisms establish a precedent that makes the nomination of a father to Wanja’s child unfinalizable. Part of Wanja’s moral redemption resides in the fact that she nominates no less than three former Mau Mau fighters as the actual and symbolic fathers of her child. When her mother asks her who the father of the child is, Wanja draws him on a board: ‘I think ... I am ... I think I am with child. No I am sure of it, mother.’ Her mother was silent for a few seconds. ‘Whose ... whose child?’ Wanja got a piece of charcoal and a piece of cardboard. For one hour or so she remained completely absorbed in her sketching. And suddenly she felt lifted out of her own self, she felt waves of emotion she had never before experienced. The figure began to take shape on the board. It was a combination of the sculpture she once saw at the lawyer’s place [this statue depicts a rank and file Mau Mau fighter] in Nairobi and images of Kimathi [one of the leaders of Mau Mau] in his moments of triumph and laughter and sorrow and terror – but without one leg [Abdulla].132

Who, then, is the father of Wanja’s child? Abdulla is implied and Kimathi and a rank and file Mau Mau fighter are represented. Rather than opting for a univocal reading of Wanja’s act of nomination – a nomination which disintegrates even as it begins to form – I would suggest that any patronym that names the child must necessarily be a fiction. Wanja’s profession as a sex worker asserts the very impossibility of deducing a patrilineage for her child. This impossible deduction becomes, in turn, the fantasized extreme of Ngugi’s narrative. To take such extreme lengths to reconcile national struggle and human reproduction must finally assert disjuncture, and it is within this disjuncture that we may begin to read. The father might be Kimeria, Chui, Mzigo, Munira, one of the townsmen or workers, or Abdulla. Wanja’s gesture – and it is just that, because she cannot name the patriarchal law 131   For an excellent historical account of prostitution during the Mau Mau period, see Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 204–20. 132   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 338, ellipses in the original.

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from the place of castration to which it readily admits (her) – might at first be seen as self-affirming, but it is too easily recoupable for the narrative of the potency that constructs Ngugi’s representation of Gikuyu masculine resistance. In other words, the paternal fiction that operates here is an interested fiction. Kimathi could not be the ‘real’ father – he is already dead before the novel’s chronology begins – despite the monumental virility accorded to Ngugi’s heroes. Quite clearly, Wanja is being instrumentalized at this point in the novel. Her reproductive functions are being pressed into the service of a narrative that equates political resistance and revolutionary heroism with masculine virility. My critique of Petals of Blood is that even in Wanja’s nomination of a father for her child, paternity remains uncertain. How could Wanja possibly know who the father of the child is, given that she’s a prostitute? How can there be only one father when she names at least three?133 At this crucial juncture, we might read the novel against the grain, using Hélène Cixous’ analysis of paternity as a legal fiction. Cixous offers the following rejoinder to Freud’s claims that the turn from maternity to paternity is a cultural advance: What is a father? ‘Fatherhood is a legal fiction,’ said Joyce. Paternity, which is a fiction, is fiction passing itself off as truth. Paternity is the lack of being which is called God. Men’s cleverness was in passing themselves off as fathers and ‘repatriating’ women’s fruits as their own. A naming trick. Magic of absence. God is men’s secret.134

The patronym – the paternal fiction – reconstructs the patriarchal edifice through a sign that constitutes the proper name as law. In this fictional manoeuvre, a masculine ruse posits fixity over the undecidable and asserts the imperatives of phallic privilege. According to Spivak, the result of this ruse is that male and female bodies are ultimately placed in an unequal relationship to the law: The difference in the woman’s body [is] that it exists too much, as the place of evidence, of the law as writing … I am speaking in the narrow sense, of the law as code of legitimacy and inheritance. One version of this ‘simple’ law is written on the woman’s body as an historical instrument of reproduction. A woman has no need to ‘prove’ maternity. The institution of phallocentric law is congruent with the need to prove paternity and authority, to secure property by transforming the woman into a mediating instrument of the production and passage of property.135

133   Bonnie Roos has also noticed this: ‘When asked who the father of her child is, Wanja declines a name …’ Bonnie Roos, ‘Re-Historicizing the Conflicted Figure of Woman in Ngugi’s Petals of Blood’, Research in African Literatures, 33:2 (2002), p. 159. 134  Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, p. 101. 135   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Displacement and the Discourse of Woman’, p. 184.

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One of the important implications of Cixous’ and Spivak’s critiques of the patronym is that they enable us to interrogate both the posited father (Kimathi) and the deducible father (Abdulla) of Wanja’s unborn child at the conclusion of Petals of Blood. Women know they are mothers because they have empirical evidence to support their claim. Men can only claim paternity on the basis of speculation. If paternity is a legal fiction, then Abdulla’s paternity of Wanja’s child is not a logically necessary fiction, given that Abdulla himself is not a stable, uniform or incontestable symbolic entity, given that Wanja nominates more than one father for her child and given that her vocation as a prostitute means that other possible contenders for the paternity of the child abound. Since the father Wanja nominates has only one leg, it is not even too extravagant or outlandish to speculate that she may be alluding to Munira – whose name translates as ‘stump’. The contaminations of the law and the crime mentioned at the beginning of this chapter would allow us to make that argument too. In fact, the paternity of Wanja’s child could hypothetically be contested at any number of levels. I would like suggest an alternative possible father for the child. I make this ideological intervention in order to unharness Wanja’s pregnancy from a patriarchal nationalist narrative. The father I propose would be an unpopular, but perfectly plausible, choice. He is one of the African capitalist élite, Raymond Chui (whose name translates as ‘leopard’136). Both Wanja, the prostitute, and Chui, the footballer, ‘play the field’ at certain narrative junctures. Since any attempt to deduce paternity must be fictional, my reading is not interested in recuperating a paternal fiction. Rather, it investigates the gender-political implications of mooting a (possible) theoretical fiction. Here, we are required to embrace contamination as an act of critique – but then Petals of Blood does exactly this in its eclectic array of literary precursors and in its construction of Godfrey Munira and Inspector Godfrey, which contaminates the positions of the criminal and the officer of the law. In my reading against the grain of Petals of Blood, I would like to interweave this potential father, Chui – the leopard – with a Gikuyu folksong performed by brides-to-be, in which they refuse the husband who has been arranged for them: We have many names for leopards, some owing their origin to superstition and others to the leopard’s way of behaviour which has earned him respect as well as hatred and notoriety. Among our people it is considered bad manners to look a mother-in-law straight in the eye, especially in the case of newly married or engaged couples. From this relationship the leopard got the title of ‘mother-inlaw,’ because of the way he looks at you … In this very old shanty, sung by the girls … as an excuse for not saying ‘yes’ to a proposal, you will note that they make the leopard [ngari] their hero.

136  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 198. It would not matter here whether the patronym is the first name or the surname, since Chui is variously called ‘Raymond Chui’ and ‘Chui Rimui’.

Paternity, Illegitimacy and Intertextuality I waigoko, I waigoko; Maitu araraga akinuma, Akinuma, akinuma Akiningiriria wainoga. I wainoga, I wainoga Mundu uri nderu githuri, I githuri, I githuri, Na ndangireka ndayethere Ndiyethere, ndiyethere, Kimongonye kia mwanake, Kia mwanake, kia mwanake, Kirindoraga, ngainama, I ngainama, I ngainama Ngainamia maitho ta ngari I tangari, I tangari kana ngodu I kiria nyeki … waigoko.

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Oh, Oh, old man Mum nags me the whole night Persuading me to accept a lover. A tired old wart with grey hair on his chest. Old tired wart, old tired wart. She does not think I am able to find A young and healthy man Young healthy man, young healthy man Who will make me turn my eyes down Turn my eyes down, turn my eyes down Like a leopard Like a leopard, like a leopard Or sheep grazing in the field. Old chum …*

* Source: Muga Gicaru, Land of Sunshine: Scenes of Life in Kenya before Mau Mau (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1958), pp. 27–8.

By performatively reading this song into Petals of Blood, I am making an interested ideological intervention. I am trying to open up in the text the traditional Gikuyu social institutions that articulate female desire and dissent. What are the logical steps here? The novel equates heroism with virility. According to that logic, when we propose Chui (the leopard) as the father of Wanja’s child, we construct him as a ‘virile hero’. By making the leopard Wanja’s hero, we imagine a textual space in which she might invoke the song that spurns his advances. Equally, Wanja’s potential choice of the leopard, ngari (or ngare),137 as hero is also an appeal to the mother-in-law. However, this appeal does not denote submission or servility, since the song subverts the sociosexual exchange, instituted by marriage, that would produce the very subject position of ‘mother-in-law’ in the first place. In other words, by reading along these lines, we would be placing Wanja in a structure that undoes itself in much the same way as the Mau Mau prostitute undoes the structures that situate her. And in relying upon the slippage between the Swahili ‘chui’ and the Gikuyu ‘ngari’, we would ensure that the critical violence that we have imposed upon the narrative structure of Petals of Blood cannot remain self-proximate or self-identical. In other words, the semiotic differential between ‘chui’ and ‘ngari’ operates as a disruptive force within my own reading position. My reading is therefore a purposeful ideological intervention that tries to imagine a space of female desire and political dissent, while leaving the possibility of cultural resistance intact. In other words, we would open a space of articulation for Wanja and, with it, a form of cultural agency that refuses its own framing. In this, we aim to posit gender alternatives while suspending our own explanatory force.   J. K. Njoroge, Tit for Tat and Other Stories (Nairobi: Phoenix, 1993), p. 50.

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In conclusion, Petals of Blood critiques the ways in which the remnants of colonial power continue to name post-Independence Kenya. But the novel’s reliance upon paternalistic constructions of history is inconsistent with its disruption of nominative processes. In other words, Petals of Blood is susceptible to the very critique of naming and the very contestation of paternity that the novel itself institutes. Although that may contain damaging implications for a patrilinear construction of historical struggle, I think it also opens up a space in which a radical form of female agency can emerge. One might wonder why there should be a crisis of legitimacy in A Grain of Wheat (in which Karanja the traitor fathers Mumbi’s child instead of Gikonyo, her heroic husband) and then a crisis of nomination in Petals of Blood (in which the father of the child himself becomes difficult to name). The answer, I think, is that the crisis of paternal legitimacy and then the more acute crisis of naming reflect Ngugi’s increasing anxieties about the use of the English language and its cultural inheritances. If names in Petals of Blood will not stay still and readily tip over into their ideological opposites, then this may well be an unconscious way of acknowledging the deeply compromising act of writing against colonialism in English: one of colonialism’s primary legacies. As such, Petals of Blood is only really explicable by thinking about where Ngugi goes next: his revolutionary decision to write in Gikuyu. In my view, the Gikuyu novels – Devil on the Cross, Matigari and Wizard of the Crow – attempt to answer the questions of praxis first formulated in unconscious ways in the narrative of Petals of Blood.

Chapter 6

The Neocolony as a Prostituted Economy Ngugi is perhaps most famous for his decision to write his later novels – Devil on the Cross, Matigari and Wizard of the Crow – in Gikuyu. This ‘linguistic turn’ in his writing career was, of course, the result of ideas about the place of African languages in African literatures that Ngugi had worked out very carefully and had documented fastidiously in his essay collections. But it was also, I think, the result of new modes of cultural engagement that Ngugi and his fellow playwrights first trialled in theatre. We see in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and I Will Marry When I Want (1982) something like the shift from the acts of historical retrieval in Petals of Blood (1977) to the acts of popular cultural retrieval in Devil on the Cross (1981). In this sense, the two plays act as barometers of feeling and orientation during the key period in Ngugi’s transition from Anglophone writer to cultural activist championing African indigenous expression. The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is broadly oriented towards a people’s history of revolution. Since the eponymous character, Kimathi, is already incarcerated when the play commences, much of the action is devolved to the community outside the prison walls. In fact, Kimathi himself is incidental to the play in a very special sense. As Ngugi’s introduction tells us, ‘The play is not a reproduction of the farcical “trial” at Nyeri. It is rather an imaginative recreation and interpretation of the collective will of the Kenyan peasants and workers in their historical and ongoing efforts to resist and overcome oppression and exploitation.’ Hence, ‘the challenge was to truly depict the masses (symbolized by Kimathi) in the only historically correct perspective: positively, heroically and as the true makers of history’. In facing this challenge, ‘Kenyan literature – indeed all African Literature, and its writers is [sic] on trial’. There is a very clear historical and collectivist orientation here. Kimathi is a representative of a broader collective struggle, but he is also quite crucially a representative of a responsive ‘literary’ or cultural orientation. Shaw Henderson, Kimathi’s captor in the play, calls him ‘a poet and a dreamer’. Ngugi himself has written that he ‘co-authored The Trial of Dedan Kimaathi to

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (London: Heinemann, 1976), unpaginated preface.    Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, unpaginated preface.    Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, unpaginated preface.    Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, p. 33. 

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rescue him from political and literary burial’. This is a point underlined by the people who proudly remember the historical Kimathi as a ‘committed organiser of a theatre group he named Gichamu’ when Ngugi and Micere Githae Mugo visit Karunaini, the Mau Mau leader’s hometown. There is a fascinating coincidence here between the activities of theatre or performance and those of revolution – Kimathi’s organizational capacities in both spheres are legendary. The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is all too keen to highlight this coincidence in the masquerades and disguises donned by its key characters. The unnamed woman who is attempting to free Kimathi impersonates Watunda, the fruit seller and Mau Mau contact to whom she was supposed to deliver a gun hidden in a loaf of bread. When she is stopped by a white soldier, Johnnie, who threatens to eat the bread, she first adopts a ‘surprised air of pretended indifference’, then falls on her knees in a gesture described in the stage directions as ‘overreacting’, so that the bread’s contents will not be discovered. When two other soldiers later happen upon the oranges that Johnnie has spilled from the woman’s basket, they argue over whether or not this is a sign that Mau Mau has been in the vicinity – and, ironically enough, it has. These episodes hint towards the theatricality of revolution, because Mau Mau had to perform within a framework of normalcy in order not to give away its identity to the state’s surveillance apparatus and because the civilian population was so brutalized by the Emergency that even domesticity became a performance in the villagized settlements. In fact, one of the key features of Mau Mau in public discourse was that the everyday had begun to assume an uncanny agency, as in the colonial myth of the trusted house-servant killing his master under Mau Mau’s perverse influence. In The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Kimathi himself is reputed to have warned the governor that he would be attending the governor’s dinner, and then to have attended the dinner disguised as a European inspector of police. Furthermore, in an exchange with his captor, prosecutor, judge and childhood bully, Shaw Henderson, Kimathi argues that it is only ‘when the hunted has truly learnt to hunt his hunter [that] the hunting game will be no more’.10 In short, the revolutionary performances that we witness in the play are designed to abolish the differentiated roles of the oppressor and the oppressed. Such performances, of course, are never politically neutral. But more importantly, they are never gender neutral. When the woman assumes Watunda’s guise as a (male) fruit seller, we see a fantasy of gender reassignment that accords with the patterning   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, p. 138.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, unpaginated preface.    Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, pp. 7–8, 14.    Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, pp. 9, 11.    Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, p. 61. 10   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, p. 34.  

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of revolutionary femininity in Ngugi’s later novels.11 The boy and girl whom the woman befriends ultimately deliver the loaf of bread to her disguised as Maasai, all the while assuming that she is a man.12 When the mutual ruse is revealed, a second level of symbolic performance ensues, in which the woman takes the children aside and talks to them in a way that represents ‘all the working mothers talking to their children’.13 In effect, a stabilizing domestic scenario is finally superimposed upon the vicissitudes of revolutionary performance. The closure effected upon the accomplishment of Mau Mau’s local tactical aims (for instance, the delivery of a gun) is the reinstitution of a global family structure that each of the key revolutionary agents in the play appears initially to lack. Kimathi, who – like all of the other adult male revolutionaries in the play – is named, fulfils the nominative role of the father in this structure. Quite crucially, the woman is never named, even though there are mild hints that she is in likeness and proximity comparable to Kimathi’s consort, Wanjiru.14 The historical Wanjiru, upon capture by the security forces, ‘raged against being called “Kimathi’s woman” rather than by her own name’.15 In effect, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi superimposes a family structure upon the nation. Insofar as women are silenced or rendered anonymous in this process, we see a patterning that is consistent with all of Ngugi’s previous works. Given its polemical orientation, the play is geared towards the devolution of struggle to the youth of Kenya. Since Kimathi’s trials and temptations by a range of pro-colonial figures construct him as a Christ-like martyr, his eventual resurrection is achieved through the vicarious continuation of the struggle by his successors. Moreover, since the woman is finally imprisoned and leaves the boy and girl to conduct an armed uprising in the courtroom, revolution is figured as a family inheritance of a sort at the conclusion of the play. This outcome amounts to a continuation of the generational histories outlined in Petals of Blood. By treating Kimathi as a symbol of the masses, the transgenerational struggle in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is consistent with the claims at the end of the play (and the claims of Kimathi’s real-life community) that he has not died. Ngugi himself later claims in an essay written in the early 1980s that, insofar as progressive historians were articulating the desires of the masses, ‘Mau Mau was coming back’ during the early 1980s before the Kenyan state clamped down both on dissident intellectuals such as Maina wa Kinyatti and on popular and patriotic theatre such as Ngugi’s own 11   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, pp. 22–3. 12   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, pp. 58–9. 13   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, p. 59. 14   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, pp. 10, 63. 15   See Luise White, ‘Separating the Men from the Boys: Constructions of Gender, Sexuality, and Terrorism in Central Kenya, 1939–1959’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1990), p. 14, n. 67.

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Kamirithuu Theatre experiments.16 Additionally, Ngugi sees patriotic song, and especially the Mau Mau songs such as those recorded for posterity by Kinyatti, as awakening the masses to their desire for change.17 In this sense, the reawakening of a cultural mood for change through transgenerational struggle is equivalent to the resurrection of Kimathi in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi. And yet this cosy family structure is itself shadowed by the ontological instability of performance. The woman admits that she was a ‘bad woman’ prior to her involvement in Mau Mau, and the girl admits that she ran away from home to avoid sexual molestation and child labour, only to become a prostitute in the city.18 Both of these female characters act as Mau Mau couriers at key points in the play, and the coincidence of their sexual histories and their revolutionary activities almost approaches the revolutionary contributions of the Mau Mau prostitute. The woman is most certainly sexualized in her interactions with Johnnie, even if she spurns his advances. What we see in these female figures is a hinge between the revolutionary women who were involved in Mau Mau and the fallen women or prostitutes who are so characteristic of Ngugi’s later work, but the play seemingly lacks the ability to synthesize these two types into the kinds of revolutionary female sexual agency that the Mau Mau prostitute embodies. Unsurprisingly, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi privileges performance, and especially song, as a means via which the people’s history may be expressed. We see this especially in the vignettes of black history that open the play and in the triumphant freedom song with which the play concludes.19 Each of the acts of the play is called a ‘movement’, in a formulation that may refer to political struggle, historical change or a musical arrangement. The stage directions emphasize that this organization of the play is introduced to collapse the distinction between ‘formal and infinite time’ and to draw attention to ‘the complexity, duality and interrelationships of people and events’.20 The community of the play, its spatial presentation and its experience of history are all arranged with the fluidity of music. What music as a popular cultural form offers Ngugi and Mugo is a participatory and expressive model of community, a common narrative of oral history and a vehicle for political mobilization to which all might eventually contribute. In fact, Ngugi has argued that if modern Kenyan national culture (including theatre) is rooted in concrete experience, it ‘will then be a symphony played by a huge orchestra of all Kenyan communities in harmony’.21 Theatre’s role in this model of communal harmony is   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1983), p. 16. 17   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Barrel of a Pen, p. 16. 18   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, pp. 19, 41. 19   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, pp. 4–6, 84–5. 20   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, p. 2. 21   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, p. 195. 16

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not simply to entertain, or even to articulate. Its role is also to develop and uplift communities. The Trial of Dedan Kimathi set out to improve living conditions and life expectations in the impoverished town of Kamirithu, by entertaining and educating the community, by providing reading material for literacy programmes and by funding other initiatives (such as health initiatives).22 It is clear that Ngugi’s theatre is theorizing its own practice, its historiography, its cultural import and its relations to community in some fairly complex ways at this point. Music and theatre, especially where they comprise popular song and dance-steps, are not only a convenient model for communal cohesion-in-diversity. Instead, both popular forms represent an important cultural touchstone: popular theatrical and musical modes were central in the history of anti-colonial resistance. Ngugi himself has argued for the centrality of popular cultural forms as a site of struggle: Finally, the institution of British theatre in Kenya in the 1950s was a reactionary response to the resurgence of a popular dance and theatre following the return of embittered Kenyan soldiers from the European-generated Second World War. The colonial regime had cause for alarm. The anti-imperialist Muthuu dances had spread in central Kenya like a fire across a dry plain. In Nyeri, Kimaathi had started the Gicamu theatre movement with its base in Karuna-ini. Patriotic dance and theatre had become a common feature in all the people’s own [Karing’a] schools. The British countered this by starting theatre clubs for British plays and players …23

In fact, Ngugi’s own play, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, suffered similar forms of repression when its performance at the Kenyan National Theatre was obstructed by European management. On the opening night, the audience followed the actors as they processed down the aisle and out of the theatre during the finale of the play, participating in a triumphant freedom song. The procession continued to the Norfolk Hotel, built by Lord Delamere and overlooking the site of the 1922 massacre of workers protesting the imprisonment of Harry Thuku, where it was turned back by a contingent of Kenyan policemen. Ngugi and Seth Adagala received a police summons and faced questioning following this incident.24 It is clear that what Ngugi might term the play’s ‘external relations’ to the wider symbolic geographies at work in public space were beginning to unsettle the Kenyan authorities. Popular songs and dances were the vehicle through which such ‘external relations’ were made possible. If song and dance are popular theatrical modes and if they are also conduits to a sophisticated cultural understanding of the history of anti-colonial resistance and to Kenyan symbolic geographies more generally, then we can see why both forms become so central to Ngugi’s I Will Marry When I Want. Embedded in this   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, p. 76.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, p. 67. 24  See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, pp. 42–51. 22 23

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play is an idea of theatre as a participatory mode in which Kenyan communities can rehearse their own historical articulations of dissent. In this sense, I Will Marry When I Want presents us with the history of Kenya through a history of song. Songs and dances such as Kiguunda’s performance of the harvest dance Mucung’wa,25 the more modern Mwomboko, whose performance on stage is interrupted by the arrival of the Emergency,26 and the Gitiiro opera performing the Ngurario wedding ceremony of Gicaamba and Njooki all articulate the relationship of the Kenyan people to the changing conditions of their existence and to the changing modes of their oppression. What we see here are the changing cultural and political textures of Kenyan history filtered through song, which is understood to be a model of communal articulation. However, I Will Marry When I Want is much more than a theatrical treatise on the history of Kenyan popular song. In its involvement of the peasantry in the processes of theatrical production, in its performance in Kamirithuu and in its cultural symbolism, it is a play with very firmly conceived notions of popular performance and of theatre as a democratic public space. Notwithstanding the changing theory and practice of Ngugi’s dramatic art at this point, the gender coordinates of I Will Marry When I Want are disturbingly familiar. We see the habitual association of the family with the nation in Gicaamba’s assertion that a ‘blessed marriage is when / Two people accept to be patriots / Defending home and nation’.27 This association is at work throughout the play, since the songs articulating people’s resistance frequently gesture towards courtship and marriage. Admittedly, the central conceit of I Will Marry When I Want introduces new complexities into the equation between nation and family. The key figures, Kiguunda and Wangeci, are ageing peasants who are painfully reminded that the sacrifices made by their generation in the struggle for freedom have been followed by the disappointments of independence. All that they really own is their home, and they are dispossessed of even this by the end of the play. Moreover, Kiguunda and Wangeci’s daughter, Gathoni, is a fallen woman. Asserting her right to marry when she wants, she runs off with and is impregnated by John Muhuuni, the son of Ahab Kioi wa Kanoru. John’s mother is the significantly named Jezebel, bearing out my assertion that Ngugi’s later work figures the neocolony as a prostituted economy. When John refuses to acknowledge his unborn child, Gathoni is forced into a life as a barmaid and prostitute.28 Even before she becomes a barmaid, Kiguunda accuses his daughter of wearing the ‘fineries of a whore’.29 For his part, Muhuuni calls Gathoni a prostitute when she tells him of her pregnancy.30 These accusations between the seemingly politically opposed representatives of the peasantry and 25   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii, I Will Marry When I Want (London: Heinemann, 1982), pp. 11–13. 26   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii, I Will Marry When I Want, pp. 24–5. 27   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii, I Will Marry When I Want, p. 64. 28   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii, I Will Marry When I Want, p. 104. 29   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii, I Will Marry When I Want, p. 51. 30   Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii, I Will Marry When I Want, p. 98.

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the comprador classes – Kiguunda and Muhuuni – collude to determine Gathoni’s destiny as a fallen woman, despite Gicaamba’s counsel that women have always borne the brunt of economic and political pressures upon men and that gender stereotyping has played a considerable part in Gathoni’s predicament.31 Regression in the Njamba Nene Stories If The Trial of Dedan Kimathi begins to work with a devolved model, in which revolution is a family inheritance, then this may explain Ngugi’s turn towards writing for children in the early 1980s. Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus and Njamba Nene’s Pistol feature a child hero. In the first of the two books, the eponymous hero, Njamba Nene, is an outcast at school because he is from a poor family and because he speaks Gikuyu and other African languages better than he speaks English. And yet Njamba Nene’s fluency in indigenous languages paradoxically better equips him to know his own African setting. His Mother Wacu has taught him ‘a lot of songs about birds, rain, seasons, traditions, culture, as well as others about war and politics’.32 In this sense, he supersedes the Eurocentric knowledge of his teacher, Fartwell Kigorogoru, and his peers. There is an implicit logic of reversal here, in which the child surpasses his teacher both in what he knows and in the political values he holds. This logic is primarily regressive – the child is given cultural primacy over the adult. Njamba Nene’s cultural knowledge is gleaned from his Mother Wacu, who is the constant reference point for culture, history and moral values in the stories. We might go further and say that Mother Wacu is a vehicle for referentiality in the stories. Njamba Nene’s desire repeatedly returns to her (absence) via the signifying chain. To this extent, the loss or lack that Mother Wacu represents is a driving force underlying his desire. It is Mother Wacu’s teaching of indigenous language and culture that anchors Njamba Nene’s knowledge to his primary lifeworld. We see this especially when the bus in which the schoolchildren are travelling on an outing suddenly takes flight. While one child fears that ‘We’ll disappear into heaven and never come back’, Njamba Nene is able to offer the comforts of emotional balance that correspond to a version of the scientific law of gravity: ‘Let us not be afraid. My Mother Wacu says that life is full of ups and downs. One moment you are happy, the other minute you are very sad.’33 If we follow the rhetorical logic here, it is Mother Wacu who anchors her son to the land amid the onslaught of alienating Eurocentric levity. When the bus lands in a forest, it becomes clear that only Njamba Nene’s local knowledge will help the lost boys:

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii, I Will Marry When I Want, pp. 104–5.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus, trans. Wangui wa Goro and illus. Emmanuel Kariuki (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1986 [1984]), p. 10. 33   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus, p. 15. 31 32

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‘How can we know where we came from, and where we are?’ someone asked. ‘I don’t even know what the map of this country looks like,’ he added. ‘If we were in England, I would tell you where we are,’ John Bull said. ‘I know the map of England like the palm of my hand!’ ‘That is all very well, but we are not in England. We are in Africa, and we must know Africa. We are in Kenya, and it is our country Kenya that we must know. … We cannot know where we are, without first finding out where we came from.”34

The leading antagonist here, John Bull, represents cultural dislocation. By contrast, Njamba Nene’s local knowledge springs from his knowledge of indigenous languages and landscapes. And yet the indigenous landscape here is not organized according to a language, but is rather textured according to prelinguistic emotions, affects and moods. In this sense, it corresponds with the wider logic of regression that the Njamba Nene series and Devil on the Cross exhibit. In exploring this landscape, Njamba Nene and his friends negotiate the Imaginary that Mother Wacu represents. Guiding his classmates, Njamba Nene tells them: We will go up Kagerangoro [‘Measure for Endurance’] mountain, cross the Depression of Tears and then go down the Valley of Laughter. If we endure all tribulations and overcome all trials, we shall at the end arrive at the River of Life. We shall walk along its banks, and we shall eventually reach home and rest. But there is another river. This is the river of the Valley of Death. If we cross it or drink of its waters, none of us will ever get home.35

The watershed to which Njamba Nene refers is not merely a feature in the landscape. It is also the endpoint in a narrative of cultural experience, which moves from endurance, through depression, tears and laughter to life. More importantly, it is a watershed in political allegiance. When the children arrive at the two rivers, they are forced to choose between moving towards white security forces across one river and Mau Mau fighters across another. Those who move towards the white counter-insurgency forces are mistaken for terrorists and shot. Njamba Nene and the others move towards the Mau Mau fighters and are directed homewards. In sum, we see Ngugi’s model of indigenous linguistic referentiality linked to knowledge of the African lifeworld and to a politics of struggle. Tellingly, this coalescence of concerns is accomplished via Njamba Nene’s modes of address to an absent woman, Mother Wacu. In the second of the children’s stories, Njamba Nene’s Pistol, we see a concern with masculine rites of passage played out through the figure of the child. Njamba Nene (whose name means ‘Superman or Champ. Literally: “Big Hero”’36) here   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus, p. 19.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus, p. 25. 36   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus, p. 1. 34

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embodies a secondary connotation implicit in his name (‘well-armed’37). In this story, Njamba Nene is asked to courier a pistol hidden in a loaf of bread to a Mau Mau leader, General Ruheni. This act is explicitly cast as ‘initiation for the nation’38 and it parallels circumcision. In other words, Njamba Nene’s progress through the narrative entails a revolutionary rite of passage that parallels a cultural process of gendering. Since he is a child, we might say that the narrative logic is again regressive – Njamba Nene is a small child whose name means ‘big hero’. He is in this sense something like a premature man. When Njamba Nene is caught by the counter-insurgency forces, he outwits them by claiming that his Mother Wacu sent him to buy the bread.39 Here, femininity is again construed as loss or lack: a domestic alibi that enables covert male political rivalries. This ruse enables Njamba Nene to hold the counter-insurgency forces up at gunpoint and to free the other Mau Mau detainees.40 Njamba Nene’s ‘initiation’ ultimately results in him taking a Mau Mau oath and being given the pistol (a substitute phallus) to keep.41 He thus proves the truth of one of Mother Wacu’s proverbs (‘A hero is not judged by his large build’42) and fulfils the regressive logic of the narrative into the bargain. Desire in Devil on the Cross As we shall see, a similar regressive logic is at work in Devil on the Cross. The novel was written during 1978–79, while Ngugi was imprisoned without charge in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. Due to the vastly restricted facilities for research and writing, Devil on the Cross was written on toilet paper and was a collaborative endeavour insofar as Ngugi benefited from the varied expertise and anecdotes of his fellow political prisoners.43 In such personally restrictive conditions, writing the novel became an insurrectionary assertion of intellectual freedom. But it is more than this. The ‘disappearance’ without explanation of a high-profile public figure like Ngugi at the hands of the state is a form of public display aimed at the psychological torture of the nation. The sequestered prisoner is deprived not of his public profile, but of his private moments, since he is watched continuously. Hence, the act of writing – though collaboratively researched – is actually a very powerful reassertion of privacy and self-reliance in an environment of heightened scrutiny and limited resources. In imprisoning the writer, the state covets not the   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics, p. 28.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Njamba Nene’s Pistol, trans. Wangui wa Goro and illus. Emmanuel Kariuki (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1986 [1984]), p. 10. 39   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Njamba Nene’s Pistol, p. 21. 40   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Njamba Nene’s Pistol, p. 23. 41   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Njamba Nene’s Pistol, p. 32. 42   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Njamba Nene’s Pistol, p. 33. 43   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, pp. 8–9. 37

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writer’s public status, but literature’s capacity for secrecy and mystery.44 It is precisely for this reason that the manuscript of Devil on the Cross was confiscated by one of Ngugi’s prison officers, then returned because the difficult Gikuyu prose revealed ‘nothing wrong’.45 The novel’s Gikuyu medium of expression was Ngugi’s response to a challenge by a warder chiding Ngugi for writing in English.46 More interesting, however, are the inspirations for its heroine, Wariinga. Ngugi states explicitly that he developed Wariinga as a tribute to the heroines of Kenyan history, including Mau Mau’s female cadres.47 But it is also clear from his prison diary that the idea of Kenya as a ‘fallen woman’ was prominent in his thinking at this point. For instance, he compares the neocolonial comprador class to ‘a pimp who would proudly hold his mother down to be raped by foreigners’ and states that this class had grown ‘in the womb of the colonial regime’.48 In this way, Wariinga’s development from ‘fallen woman’ to heroine of Kenyan resistance reflects Ngugi’s larger metaphorical aspirations for Kenya. Quite clearly, if Ngugi likens Kenya to a mother who carries the monstrous comprador child of the British colonial regime and who is then pimped to this illegitimate cultural father by the comprador bourgeoisie, then his own act of writing a woman (Wariinga) as Kenya ultimately aims to reconstitute the mother’s body. At one level, this is the condition of all writing. In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes states that ‘the writer is one who plays with the body of his mother’.49 Barthes is adopting a psychoanalytic, and, specifically, a Lacanian, view of language and narration. In terms of psychoanalytic theory, the establishment of significance (whether by ‘author’ or ‘reader’) is a production according to the subject’s desire. In an Oedipalized subject, this desire addresses (through the vicarious medium of the signifier) the original lost object – the mother. I find this observation by Barthes particularly enabling for my analysis of Devil on the Cross. This is a novel patterned by loss – in terms of economic dispossession, in terms of neocolonial political reversals, and in terms of psychosexual anxieties. Wariinga’s mother provides the impulse to narrate in Devil on the Cross, ostensibly because she has lost, or wishes to recover, a child. Once we have read the novel, we are able to surmise that this loss has occurred when Wariinga walks out into an unknown future at the conclusion, for we are told

 See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, p. 20.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, p. 165. 46   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, p. 130. 47   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, pp. 10–11. Since one meaning of Wariinga’s name is ‘a woman in chains’, it is possible that she has an imaginative function as a prison consort. For this translation, see Simon Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 216. 48   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, pp. 13, 53. 49  Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 37. 44

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in the final sentence that ‘the hardest struggles of her life’s journey lay ahead’.50 By telling Wariinga’s story in retrospect, the Gicaandi player’s song leads us to the moment of her disappearance. This is a narrative that begins with its ending and ends with its beginnings. It operates within a nostalgic logic of reversal whose corollary in the human subject is infantile regression. As the Gicaandi player tells us, Wariinga’s mother has asked him to reconstruct the events leading to the moment of loss: And then Wariinga’s mother came to me when dawn was breaking, and in tears she beseeched me: Gicaandi player, tell the story of the child I loved so dearly. Cast light upon all that happened, so that each may pass judgement only when he knows the whole truth. Gicaandi player, reveal all that is hidden.51

By reconstructing that which is prior to the moment of loss, there is a way in which Devil on the Cross metaphorically plays with the mother’s body. Interestingly, immediately after Wariinga has killed her prospective father-in-law and immediately prior to her disappearance, her fiancé, Gatuiria, resembles nothing so much as an infant regressing from Oedipal fantasies to the pre-individuated stage in which it is a Lacanian hommelette, an uncoordinated bundle of preverbal drives: ‘Gatuiria did not know what to do: to deal with his father’s body, to comfort his mother or to follow Wariinga. … He stood there in the yard, as if he had lost the use of his tongue, his arms, his legs.’52 If Devil on the Cross metaphorically plays with the mother’s body, then this metaphor is reiterated at the level of form. The framing of the narrative in the Gicaandi player’s song stages an address to the mother (Wariinga’s mother) through the medium of signification, such that Wariinga emerges as a narrative subject through the mediation of language. In a movement marked by rupture or loss, Warringa disappears only to be recalled in song and story. This rupture or loss marks something approximating the movement from history to literature. What interests me is that it should be necessary for Wariinga’s mother to make such a request in the first place. Why should she not narrate Wariinga’s story? Traditionally, the Gicaandi player fulfils the role of storyteller in Gikuyu culture. Hence, Ngugi’s use of this figure signals a creative intervention that works to indigenize the novel format – to adapt it so that it can accommodate African cultural forms like Gicaandi and their participative modes of social critique. Likewise, Devil on the Cross was the first novel that Ngugi wrote in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. Hence, this novel is ultimately an attempt at cultural retrieval. Culturally speaking, it produces a restorative narrative; a narrative that by definition is always founded on loss. In Wariinga’s mother’s request, I find an allegory of 50   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross (Heinemann: London, 1987 [1982]), p. 254. 51   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 7. 52   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 254.

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feminine subject formation under patriarchy. The Gicaandi player, the ‘prophet of justice’, has access to the Symbolic Order and is representative of the law. Narration (the production of significance) and desire are solely his prerogatives. Wariinga’s mother, who beseeches him (rather than telling him, commanding him or relating to him) is construed according to a lack of desire, because she opens up the space of loss in which narrative and signification occur. Thus, there is a differentiation between active/dominant and passive/receptive modes of desire. Wariinga’s mother is constructed so as to respond only in the latter mode. Corpulent Capital Not only is this novel based upon Gikuyu performance genres like Gicaandi, but its content also includes myths and stories from the oral folkloric tradition. One of the myths informing the novel is that of the irimu (plural marimu), or ogre.53 As we have seen in A Grain of Wheat, one story about the ogre involves a girl who takes the wrong path in a forest and fails to keep an appointment with her lover (a warrior). The irimu captures her and wishes to eat her. She delays his advances by singing to him that she knows of a nicer place to be eaten. Eventually, her lover arrives and kills the ogre.54 The continuation of ogre stories as critical metaphors for socio-economic exploitation is consistent with Ngugi’s attempt to reflect the contemporary problematic of the neocolonial in a recognizable cultural form. In The Language of African Fiction, collected in Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi writes of this attempt: Marimu were supposed to possess two mouths, one in front and the other at the back. The one at the back was covered with long hair. They were cruel, very greedy, and they lived on the labour of humans. What about the latter day Marimus? Would the Marimu characters provide me with the image I sought?55

The Marimu figures are appropriate to Ngugi’s anti-neocolonial project for four reasons. Firstly, they live on the labour of humans and are therefore analytically cognate with a critique of neocolonial capital. Secondly, they are cruel and therefore connote an aspect of neocolonialism’s affective texture. Thirdly, they are greedy, reflecting neocolonialism’s uneven concentrations of appetite or economic demand. Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, the Marimu figures are caricatures of the human, and Ngugi himself has suggested of such political caricature that it ‘accurately describes the infantile imitative mentality, the crass

 Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 213.   Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Literature, pp. 219–20. 55   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 81. 53

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world outlook which like borrowed robes sits uneasily on them and the total lack of any originality in the Kenyan neocolonial ruling class’.56 In Devil on the Cross, the three stories that the old man from Bahati relates to Gatuiria57 contribute to the construction of the neocolonists as ogres. The first story is of a peasant who carries an ogre on his back, works for the ogre (gathering food, water and firewood, and cooking) and wastes away while the ogre prospers. The second story is about a girl: She was named Nyanjiru Kanyarari for three reasons: she was black; she was truly beautiful; and she had rejected the hand of all the young men in her country. But when Nyanjiru saw a young man from a foreign country one day, she immediately claimed that he was the one for whom she had been waiting. She followed him. And do you know what? The young foreigner was a maneating ogre. He tore off Nyanjiru’s limbs one by one and ate them.58

This passage exhibits similarities with the story of the ogre as a kidnapper. But here the ogre story becomes a tale of sexual predation. And it relies fundamentally on a miscegenist myth that we have already noticed at work in Weep Not, Child, in which sexual relations with foreigners offend against nature. The central problem with such a myth is that it turns an analysis of political and economic inequalities into a way of policing female sexuality and disciplining female desire. In the third story, a poor man, Nding’uri: … went to a certain cave where the evil spirits dwelt. At the entrance to the cave he was met by a spirit in the shape of an ogre. He had long hair, the colour of mole skin, and the hair fell about his shoulders like a girl’s. He had two mouths, one on his forehead and the other at the back of his head.59

Nding’uri trades his soul for wealth and is transformed into an ogre who feeds on human blood. He accrues great riches but is eventually killed when his community discovers his secret. Collectively, these three stories frame Ngugi’s representations of the neocolonial comprador class. The compradors’monstrous appearance emphasizes their exorbitant physiological and acquisitive appetites. Their names are also aptronymically placed in the service of a rhetoric of monstrosity. The ogres’ names in Devil on the Cross usually suggest either a voracious potential or a visceral construction of consumption. Their names are: Gitutu wa Gataanguru (‘the hated – or incorrigible, detested, inhuman – tapeworm’60); Mwireri wa Mukiraai (‘one who rears himself   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Barrel of a Pen, p. 20.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, pp. 62–6. 58   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 62. 59   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, pp. 63–4. 60  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 201. 56 57

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[and who] silences other people’61); Nditika wa Nguunji (‘a giant or shapeless person … who folds [or] strangles’62); Fathog Marura wa Kimeengemeenge (‘the first word … refers to a plant used to make sleeping mats or the ceiling of a thatched roof; the second word refers to something huge, shapeless or ugly’63); and Kimeendeeri wa Kanyuanjii (‘he who crushes or grinds … the juice out of someone’64). Even Kihaahu wa Gatheeca’s name suggests gluttony. Sicherman translates it as ‘a bully or neurotic (“Kihaahu”) and a glutton (“Gatheeca,” which literally means “one who stabs”). One translation might therefore be “schizophrenic eater.”’65 This locates Kihaahu within narrative constructions of the visceral, despite his thin body. Like the ogres of myth, the neocolonial acolytes in Devil on the Cross ‘feed’ on the labour of workers in the name of foreign economic interests, meet in a cave and defile the purity of Kenyan women. In Matigari too, the ‘ogres currently running the country’66 translate the defilement of Kenyan women. To cite just one example of this defilement, at a prayer meeting the police attack university students and a woman who is ‘eight months pregnant … [has] a miscarriage there and then’.67 However, the ‘ogre’ myth also serves the purpose of privileging Gikuyu men as the custodians of Gikuyu women. For example, in Matigari, Matigari’s decision to resume the armed struggle is informed by the gender-ideological rationale that the ogre myth consolidates: ‘When the worker in metals returned … home, and found an ogre starving his expectant wife, did he send the ogre peace greetings? Did he not first sharpen his spear?’68 Furthermore, the worker imprisoned with Matigari speaks of the neocolonial villains in these terms: ‘Every worker knows that Robert Williams and John Boy are like twins born out of the womb of the same ogre.’69 Given that human motherhood is granted a privileged place in all of Ngugi’s fiction, it is unthinkable that the neocolonial representatives could be born of a human female. Production in a human womb is, as we shall see, reserved for the heroes of Kenyan resistance. Hence, the ogre figure does not simply contribute to a vernacular theory of neocolonial oppression in Devil on the Cross and Matigari. It also establishes a gendered theory of oppression and national resistance. The ideological upshot is a paternal militarism that must police errant female desire in order to shore up its own founding justifications.

 Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 223.  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 225. 63  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 213. 64  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 209. 65  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 209. 66   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Matigari, trans. Wangui wa Goro (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1990 [1987]), p. 56. 67   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Matigari, p. 90. 68   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Matigari, p. 131. 69   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Matigari, p. 65. 61

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In Devil on the Cross, Ngugi is using myths of the ogre in order to naturalize a certain model of consumption, although the consumption in that novel is predicated, quite crucially, on constructions of the visceral, rather than on constructions of the pecuniary or fiscal. I find the metaphor of visceral greed (including genital and alimentary lusts), which constructs the African representatives of global-industrial ‘corporate’ capital, a useful point of critical departure from which to interrogate Ngugi’s representation of the Kenyan neocolony as a prostituted economy. In effect, the thieves’ sexual relations are an extension of their exploitative financial relations with the Kenyan populace. For this reason, Ngugi’s later novels tend to focus on female sexual objectification as one form of neocolonial commodification, rather than on female economic exploitation or on female revolutionary agency. Once again, Kenyan women bear the burden of political exemplification and are consigned to an object status that leaves a gender-conscious author very little narrative or conceptual space in which to manoeuvre. Most of the thieves are depicted as corpulent and greedy, and all of the thieves have mistresses. These women are either prostitutes or paid-up lovers lured by the material benefits that accompany their status as fallen women. Gitutu wa Gataanguru’s claim that ‘… modern love is inconsistent with a tight fist’70 collapses the distinction between his mistresses and the figure of the prostitute, because he implies that love in the neocolony always involves a financial transaction. Of course, the characters who are imbued with the monstrous aspect of the ogre are not privileged, although their hideousness implies an investment of significance which is the converse of that which is invested in ‘the beautiful’. Nevertheless, the representations of these characters’ wives and mistresses rely upon the same patriarchal constructions as those which inform the representation of Ngugi’s heroine, Wariinga, who is transferred by her uncle to the Rich Old Man in order to consolidate a business deal. Like the sugar-girls who are symbolically devoured by their ‘ogre’ lovers, Wariinga is ‘soft food for a toothless old man’.71 Hence, neocolonialism’s debasement of Kenyan women is rendered primarily in sexual terms, rather than in economic or political terms. And this is a polemical rather than an analytical manoeuvre on Ngugi’s part. It seeks to sway sympathies rather than to address causes. Tropes of the Fallen Woman In Devil on the Cross, Ngugi revisits Gikuyu indigenous forms as part of his political, cultural and aesthetic commitments. However, he does not substantially revise Gikuyu patriarchal productions of the sign ‘woman’ or constructions of femininity more generally. It is not surprising, then, that Wariinga associates her own reproductive history with the speeches of the thieves. When Wariinga leaves   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 100.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 142.

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the cave, we are told: ‘The speeches, the thieves’ attire, their hymns of self-praise, all these things reminded her of the problems she had faced since she became pregnant by the Rich Old Man from Ngorika and gave birth to a baby girl.’72 Obviously, Wariinga’s own sexual history – that of a young girl seduced, impregnated and then dumped by a wealthy older man – is being collapsed quite straightforwardly on to a national historical narrative. By offering Wariinga’s past tribulations as a microcosm of the larger national picture, Devil on the Cross offers us a reductive reading of the gender issues confronting Kenyan women. Furthermore, Wariinga voices the well-worn metaphor equating motherhood with the nation in her musings on the fiscal forces at work in neocolonial Kenya: ‘Wariinga spoke to herself out loud: “Local and International thieves gathered in the same lair, debating ways and means of depriving the whole nation of its rights … That’s like a child planning to rob its mother and inviting others to join in the crime!”’73 Wariinga is not the only character to use the mother as a metaphor for nation. During the journey to Ilmorog, Muturi, the worker, states that ‘This country, our country, is pregnant. What it will give birth to, God only knows …’74 Wangari, the peasant, responds to the next morning’s speeches in the cave with the question, ‘So it really is true that from the womb of the same country emerges both the thief and the witch?’75 At the Devil’s Feast, Mwireri wa Mukiraai’s nationalist capitalism advocates that ‘… every robber should go home and rob his own mother [that is, nation]!’76 and the demonic Voice that Wariinga comes across on the golf course counters Mwireri’s argument with the question, ‘Weren’t we the ones who kept his mother as our mistress – although, admittedly, we had to rape her in the first place?’77 Gatuiria, the intellectual, responds to the resemblances between Wariinga’s daughter, Wambui, and himself by dismissing ethnic divisions in Kenya: A child is a child. We all come from the same womb, the common womb of one Kenya. The blood shed for our freedom has washed away the differences between that clan and this one. Today there is no Luo, Gikuyu, Kamba, Giriama, Luhya, Maasai, Meru, Kalenjin or Turkana. We are all children of one mother. Our mother is Kenya, the mother of all Kenyan people.78

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 182.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 184, italics in the original. 74   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, pp. 45–6. 75   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, pp. 155–6. 76   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 171. 77   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, pp. 193–4. 78   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, pp. 234–5. Obviously, the fact that Gatuiria and Wambui are paternal half-siblings means that his words are unwittingly ironic. The two characters issue not from the same womb but from the same father: Hispaniora Greenway Ghitahy, who is also known as the Rich Old Man from Ngorika. Again, though, this ironic 72 73

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The equation of ‘Kenya’ with a ‘mother’ is produced by almost all of the voices in Ngugi’s narrative, regardless of whether or not those voices are privileged. This recapitulates patterns that we have noticed elsewhere in Ngugi’s fiction, in which a gendered consensus enables political dispute. Again, there is a uterine social organization at work in the novel. This uterine organization works to constrain female sexual and political agency, by limiting the subject positions available to women. We see a similar uterine organization at work in the novel’s imagery. The fruit imagery that indexes labour exploitation in Kenya is not only consistent with the novel’s constructions of corpulent capital and neocolonialist monstrosity. It is also bound into the equation of motherhood and nationhood. As far as the peasant or worker is concerned, the ‘fruit’ represents their material lacks, needs and demands. Muturi and Wangari’s exchange in Mwaura’s taxi makes this figuration clear: ‘Imagine! The children of us workers are fated to stay out in the sun, thirsty, hungry, naked, gazing at fruit ripening on trees which they can’t pick even to quieten a demanding belly! … Fated to lie awake all night telling each another [sic] stories about tears and sorrow, asking one another to guess the same riddle day after day: “Oh for a piece of one of those!”’ ‘Ripe bananas!’ Wangari replied, as if Muturi had asked her a real riddle.79

Although this dialogue overtly addresses the starvation of workers’ children in the context of an economic system that the workers themselves prop up with their labour, I think it is not coincidental that the passage immediately follows Muturi’s associations between Kenya and the figure of the pregnant woman, which I have quoted above. As regards the Kenyan neocolonial comprador class, the ‘fruit’ is a sign of power, privilege and prerogatives. For instance, Gitutu wa Gataanguru’s speech relates how he acquired the land that founded his fortune by borrowing money from a bank employee who has been given ‘an Uhuru fruit’.80 The Uhuru fruit, monetary in form, is metaphorically rendered as a commodity for alimentary consumption. It attests to the greed of the comprador class that devours all of the commodities and resources in Kenya, including land, wealth, food and women. In addition, it is clear that the Uhuru fruit includes the commodification of female sexuality. Another neocolonial acolyte, Kihaahu wa Gatheeca, speaks in wonder of the Uhuru fruit that leads one parliamentary candidate to sell his farm and auction ‘… his very beautiful wife in order to meet his election expenses. … Could it be that this tree yields more fruit than all other trees?’81 The wives and daughters of device offers us an indirect critique of the exploitative comprador class through a latent account of Wariinga’s reproductive history. 79   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 46. 80   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 104. 81   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 114.

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which Kihaahu wa Gatheeca speaks are prostituted – in the broader sense of the word – by the extensive influence of foreign capital. In effect, their oppression shares a commonality with Wariinga, Kareendi and all of the other fallen women in Ngugi’s later fiction. By proposing a relatively uniform or consistent mode of gender oppression applicable to both the richest and the poorest Kenyan women, Devil on the Cross elides both the category of the social and, incidentally, the possibility of unsexualized female labour. In other words, Ngugi fails to differentiate female oppression in terms of class. This is another form of gender exclusion that his novel operates, because if women are unavailable to class analysis, then they are arguably also unavailable to class-bound mobilization against neocolonialism and consequently unavailable to the theorization of history. The commonality of gender oppression contains damaging implications, even when the novel attempts to write women in progressive ways. For instance, where the Gikuyu ‘woman’ aspires to foreign standards of beauty by masking herself in whiteface, she begins to assume the aspect of the ogre. When we first meet Wariinga, she has hair ‘the colour of moleskin’82 due to hair-straightening procedures. In contrast to this simulated beauty, Ngugi posits Wariinga’s originary, ‘natural’ beauty: ‘Often, when she walked along the road without self-consciousness, her breasts swaying jauntily like two ripe fruits in a breeze, Wariinga stopped men in their tracks.’83 I find the ‘fruit’ images associated with Wariinga’s body and breasts (the sign of woman’s nurturing capacity) significant, because they suggest the consumption of the female body by the male gaze – a look which orders its object according to the bearer’s desire. Here, there seems to be little that distinguishes a scopophilic narrative from the gluttony of the ogre who devours the beautiful, unattainable Nyanjiru Kanyarari.84 The consistency of gender representations across politically differentiated contexts would appear to bear out my assertions that Ngugi’s novels mobilize ‘woman’ as a consensual trope that enables political critique. In Elleke Boehmer’s incisive assessment: Ngugi stands with many others when he attacks the colossus of white Western maledom, yet hesitates to dislodge the ramparts of its patriarchy. Simply expressed, the problem would rather seem to be an identification of national freedom with male freedom and an inherited state structure. Thus a patriarchal order survives intact.85

Hence, what is at issue in Ngugi’s narrative is not the production of a (gendered) other by the colonial or indigenous patriarchies, but the substitution of one phallocratic order for another. And, as the barmaid’s attire at the Devil’s Feast shows us, even this substitution is incomplete. The barmaids are dressed as playboy 82

    84   85   83

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 11. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 11. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 62. Elleke Boehmer, ‘The Master’s Dance’, p. 195.

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bunnies. Furthermore: ‘On their breasts were pinned two plastic fruits. … The girls looked like apparitions from another world.’86 Significantly, the barmaids’ breasts are covered by plastic fruit, much as Wariinga’s breasts are inscribed with the image of fruit. The desire that organizes the debased femininity of the barmaids is, I would argue, almost indistinguishable from the desire that informs the description of Wariinga’s body. In the field of representation, there is very little difference between simile (Wariinga’s breasts ‘like two ripe fruit’) and simulation (the fake, plastic fruits pinned on the barmaid’s breasts). Therefore, Wariinga’s femininity is validated in precisely the same terms as the barmaid’s femininity is degraded. In my view, the fruit are symbolic substitutes for woman’s produce or production – the child that exceeds the closed circle of reproduction and that must be named in order to reiterate the paternal fiction and appropriate female production for a patriarchal economy. The only distinction between the barmaids and Wariinga is that the former’s ‘fruits’ are not ‘real or natural’ (they are simulations), whereas the latter’s ‘fruits’ are ‘real or natural’ (and therefore beautiful). The barmaids are constructed according to a model of lack. Wariinga is constructed as the bearer of ‘truth’, beauty or meaning. Hence, Wariinga corresponds with the opposite pole of femininity produced by patriarchy. She is ‘woman’ invested with the phallus, the fetishized woman. Elleke Boehmer has argued along similar lines that Ngugi’s fetishized women are invested with male, or phallic, attributes: Instead of preparing the way towards liberation by dismantling those structures that marginalise and oppress women, [Ngugi] disguises the rigid distinctions that such structures enforce when his women come dressed as men. Instead of questioning processes of objectification, he places a male weapon in the hands of his women characters and sets them on pedestals as glorified revolutionaries, inspiriting symbols for a male struggle. Male values thus come encased in female shape, just as … guns come disguised in loaves of bread.87

If the fruit imagery that constructs Wariinga in Devil on the Cross invests her with the phallus, then we might well ask what unconscious itinerary informs this move. In my view, Wariinga’s ‘breasts … like two ripe fruits’88 might be read as a displacement of the womb envy latent in the Gikuyu patriarchy’s mythical reconstruction of prehistory. According to Gikuyu myth, harsh and promiscuous matriarchal rulers were overthrown when men decided to inseminate them simultaneously and thus incapacitate them. Subsequently, women became ‘mothers of men’. Wariinga’s ‘breasts like two ripe fruits’ imply a displaced womb and a divested sexuality, resituated for alimentary consumption at the site of the (male) infant’s nexus with the body of the mother. The waitresses at the feast with two plastic fruits pinned on their breasts are, in this reading, barren. As consorts to the   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 92.   Elleke Boehmer, ‘The Master’s Dance’, p. 195. 88   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 11. 86 87

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contemporary neocolonial class that has betrayed Kenya, the waitresses’ barrenness parallels one of the Mau Mau epithets for the treachery of Kenyan homeguards: ‘thata cia bururi’ (‘the barren ones of the country’). The narrator’s construction of the homeguards in Devil on the Cross is redolent of these representations. He addresses, ‘… the homeguards, [the] faithful Kenyan watchdogs – you sterile bastards: you sold our country for the sake of your bellies …’89 Against the sterility of the homeguards and their political legacy, the novel offers us a model of fecundity and social regeneration in the figure of the mother. In effect, it is the contemporary debasement of the social that allows Ngugi’s later fiction to universalize the plight of Kenyan women. For instance, Wariinga proposes that Kenyan women’s defilement consists in the frustration of an originary and universal ambition. She says: Let me tell you. When a woman is in her youth, she has beautiful dreams about a future in which she and her husband and her children will dwell forever in domestic peace in a house of their own. There are some who dream of the educational heights they will scale, of the demanding jobs they will take on, of the heroic deeds they will do on behalf of their country, deeds that will inspire later generations to sing their praises thus: ‘Oh, our mother, a self–made national hero!’90

These assertions elide any notions that a woman may be a cultural agent who exists independently of the terms ‘man’ or ‘husband’. It is not only sentimental but also patently sexist to assume that Kenyan women’s ambitions should, or even can, lie solely in obtaining a husband, bearing children and residing in domestic bliss thereafter. Wariinga continues by saying: ‘… There, scattered on the sandy floor, lie the fragments of her illusions … How did the boys put it in their Muthuu dance-song?’ An amazing sight, The clay pot is now broken! When I came from Nairobi, I never knew that I would give birth to A child named ‘Producer of wondrous courage.’ ‘… Today we can only be called the bearers of doomed children instead of the bearers of children of heroic stature.’91

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 138.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 136. 91   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, pp. 136–7. 89 90

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The Muthuu dance-song that Wariinga quotes is traditionally performed by Gikuyu boys prior to circumcision. The dance-song became popular in the 1940s, when Gikuyu soldiers returned from service in World War II and walked along the River Road in Nairobi, relating their exploits. It was performed by Mau Mau insurgents in the forests, and it praised Kenyatta considerably.92 Significantly, ‘Mumbi’ (Moombi) is glossed by Kenyatta as ‘Moulder, potter, creator; name of the first Gikuyu woman. The mother of the Gikuyu nation.’93 In addition, the Muthuu song invokes the traditional Gikuyu saying, ‘Moombi arugaga na ngeo’ – ‘the potter cooks with broken pots’.94 Kenyatta explains the saying in this way: In the pottery industry all the work, from start to finish, is done by women … Men are debarred by custom from approaching the moulding-place, especially when the work is in progress … Should some of the pots break, as they usually do, during the burning time, the women always suspect that some ill-behaved man has crept to the spot during the night and has spoiled their work. To avoid this suspicion men keep away from this sacred ground until the work is finished. … Very few potters have good pots for themselves; they sell all the good ones to others, leaving themselves with the bad ones … This shows that the Gikuyu have developed a system of trading far beyond working merely to satisfy family needs.95

In the context of Wariinga’s allusions, the Muthuu dance-song encodes the traditional sexual division of labour in Gikuyu society (upheld by the myth of Mumbi, an archetype of womanhood), the circumcision ritual and the male potency of erstwhile Gikuyu resistance movements. What is interesting here is that Wariinga should ventriloquize the song by quoting it, rather than performing it and thus assuming a subject position within it. In effect, she is debarred from a nationalist lineage of performance by her gender and she uses this lineage to reiterate the idea that neocolonialism impacts upon women’s reproductive outcomes rather than their cultural or economic opportunities. As Wariinga tells us, those women who pursue education, employment or heroic deeds are automatically subsumed under the category of ‘our mother, a self-made national hero!’ This construction is problematic because female cultural achievements are insidiously reduced to biological ones. Of course, the mother never inhabits an entirely ‘self-made’ subjectivity. Conceptually speaking, motherhood always by definition includes the implied term of the biological father. In other words, Ngugi’s ideological investment in motherhood unavoidably includes a moment of masculine self-inscription. In a related vein, motherhood in Ngugi’s texts often consists in reproducing male heroes. This is suggested in 92  See Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 222, and Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 175. 93   Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 324. 94   Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 324. 95   Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, pp. 87–8.

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Matigari, by the women ‘singing that they will give birth to more Matigari ma Njiruungi’,96 and in Devil on the Cross by Wariinga’s rhetorical question, ‘Wasn’t Kimaathi born of a Kenyan woman?’97 Quite clearly, her question engenders its own answer. Mothers are not only mothers. In a manoeuvre that makes female subjectivity not only limiting, but also derivative, they are destined to be ‘mothers of men’. When Gatuiria reports Wangari’s confrontation with the thieves, prior to her arrest, her words are symptomatic of exactly the derivative status that femininity occupies in Devil on the Cross. Wangari’s words, already derivatively framed by Gatuiria’s narration, are: ‘… These are the imperialist watchdogs … throw them into the Eternal Jail … For that’s the fate of all those who sell foreigners the heritage of our founding patriarchs and patriots!’98 I view this textual moment as one of slippage, in which Ngugi’s uncritical affiliation with the Gikuyu patriarchy is demystified, somewhat ironically, by Wangari’s uncritical support of the patriarchal legacy of Gikuyu resistance. Even as she confronts imperialism, Wangari allows male prerogatives (tantamount to History itself) to supersede female contributions to the founding of culture. In other words, even as she confronts imperialism, Wangari is at some level silenced. She is instrumentalized so as to elide the crucial roles played by the Gikuyu subaltern in supporting and maintaining Mau Mau. As this study has previously outlined, one of these roles was enacted by Nairobi prostitutes who obtained bullets (or, often, a single bullet) from their homeguard clientele. There, the economy of insurgency predicated on female sexual production was not alimentary or visceral, although one need not in principle preclude the possibility that the job at hand or the necessity of concealing the clandestine produce may have required the prostitutes to bite the bullet on occasion. Such readings of insurgency are, nonetheless, foreclosed by Ngugi’s narrative. A similar form of historical silencing is at work as Gatuiria continues to relate Wangari’s confrontation with the thieves to Wariinga: Wariinga, how can I describe the scene adequately? It looked as if everyone in the cave had been transfixed by the electric power of Wangari’s words. Oh, Wangari was beautiful, I can tell you. Oh, yes, Wangari’s face shone as she stood before us all, and it looked as if her courage had stripped years from her body and given her new life. It was as if the light in her face were illuminating the hearts of all those present, and her voice carried the power and the authority of a people’s judge.99

96

    98   99   97

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Matigari, p. 119. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 132. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, pp. 196–7. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 197, italics in the original.

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The value that accrues to Wangari, once she has assumed her patriarchal alias, is youth and beauty. In her younger days, during her resistance activities, she has missed out on the chance to beautify herself in accordance with Gikuyu custom.100 Wangari’s beauty at this point is not ‘natural’, but rather compensatory. It naturalizes the ideology of male privilege. Gatuiria’s (gendered) focalization reveals this in a moment of transgression: ‘Oh, Wangari was beautiful, I can tell you.’ Wangari’s beauty, in order for that value to accrue to her, must be registered by a male gaze which discovers itself vicariously through its gendered other. In other words, Wangari’s beauty bears the mark of male authority and legitimation. Once a courier for Mau Mau, she now carries ‘the power and authority of a people’s judge’. Ngugi’s logocentrism is centred on a nebulously defined people’s justice as due process and the law.101 In Devil on the Cross, the narrative’s phallocentrism is centred on two determinant moments – the student leader giving Wariinga the invitation to the Devil’s feast (in order that she may ‘know’ the causes of her subjection), and Muturi giving Wariinga the pistol (in order that she may effect her liberation). Here, we are not far from locating Ngugi’s self-interested representation of the ‘transparent’ position of the educated subject who reveals to the masses the causes of their oppression, in order that they may liberate themselves, or from the masculine investment which produces the fetishized ‘woman’, bearer of the phallus. Further, the novel’s phallogocentrism is centred on the hierarchical logic of two binary oppositions: the privileged gender binary is the ‘legitimate male worker-peasant / woman as mother as Kenya’ and the subordinated gender binary is ‘illegitimate male ogre-thief-boss-lover-seducer / Kenya as rapable-prostitutedmistress (who is either barren or an irresponsible mother)’.102 An obvious point, but one worth making, is that these binaries are by no means self-evident or ‘true’. They only become meaningful because Devil on the   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 127.   See, for example, General Ruheni’s words to Njamba Nene: ‘But let me tell you this: there is no law that is laid down by Mau Mau that is not in the interest of the people.’ Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Njamba Nene’s Pistol, p. 9. 102   I am working within Gayatri Spivak’s formulation: ‘the discourse of man is in the metaphor of woman’. She proceeds to delineate some of the key facets of Derrida’s work in order to submit deconstruction to a feminist critique: ‘The desire to make one’s progeny represent his presence is akin to the desire to make one’s words represent the full meaning of one’s intention. Hermeneutic, legal or patrilinear, it is the prerogative of the phallus to declare itself the sovereign source. Its causes are also its effects: a social structure – centred on due process and the law (logocentrism); a structure of argument centred on the sovereignty of the engendering self and the determinacy of meaning (phallogocentrism); a structure of the text centred on the phallus as the determining moment (phallocentrism) or signifier.’ Spivak’s reading of Derrida is applicable to Devil on the Cross, but since we are dealing with an African text – rather than with French philosophy – I have shifted the framework of her reference. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Displacement and the Discourse of Woman’, pp. 169–70. 100 101

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Cross narrativizes history into an ideologically constructed logic of binarism, and because the signs ‘woman’ or ‘mother’ or ‘Wariinga’ are the bearers of history’s significance. It seems to me that it is precisely because Ngugi’s interest lies in a self-engendering masculine historical narrative (in which ‘woman’ or ‘mother’ is subsumed by the sign ‘Kenya’) that he overlooks the pervasive silencing of Kenyan women’s voices in narratives of Kenyan history, as well as the possibility that Kenyan women’s subjection may consist as much in the institution and practices of marriage as it does in their restricted access to the job market. Wariinga’s transformation into the ‘new’ Kenyan woman is, in my reading, something of an anomaly, given that the ‘new’ Kenyan woman is construed according to the vestiges of (very old) Gikuyu patriarchal structures of dominance. As Florence Stratton puts it, from Ngugi’s perspective, ‘“a strong determined woman”’ is to all intents and purposes a man. The identification of his heroine with masculine values is Ngugi’s response to the question of how to create a female national subject … [Rather] than rewriting nationalism, he rewrites woman.’103 Jacinta Wariinga (whose name means in one possible translation ‘the flower … decorated with wire ornaments’104) is rendered in terms of pastoral imagery in Devil on the Cross so that the narration constructs Kenyan womanhood in precisely the same terms as the neocolonial acolytes debase it.105 On the one hand, Wariinga refuses to be ‘a mere flower … to decorate the doors and windows and tables of other people’s lives’.106 On the other hand, her breasts sway ‘jauntily like two ripe fruits in a breeze’107 and her ‘clothes fit her so perfectly, it’s as if she was created in them’.108 This inconsistency in the representation of Wariinga is implicit in Ngugi’s attempt to confront Gikuyu women’s oppression without confronting the Gikuyu traditional and neocolonial patriarchies.109 Furthermore, with Muturi’s pistol on her person, Wariinga – biologically coded as female – is narratively and historiographically coded male. Indeed, Elleke Boehmer claims that the gun bestowed upon Wariinga is ‘the quintessential emblem of phallic power’ and that women in his texts ‘are not to be left out of the military-preparedness program’.110 103  Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender, p. 163. 104   Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed, p. 104. 105   The Rich Old Man who has seduced Wariinga as a girl calls her ‘My little fruit, my little orange, my flower to brighten my old age!’ Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 253. 106   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 216. 107   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 11. 108   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 217. 109   Patrick Williams expresses this tension very well when he writes that while Wariinga ‘spectacularly “gets it right” … in terms of the successful transformation of her life, in the eyes of some feminist critics her creator fails, at the ideological level at least, to equal that process of successful change’. Patrick Williams, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 103. 110   Elleke Boehmer, ‘The Master’s Dance’, p. 195.

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However, I would qualify my support for Boehmer’s comments, because she incorrectly implies that ‘woman’ is a subject who does not go to war: an implication that is simply not borne out by the activities of subaltern women who engaged in active combat during the Mau Mau insurgency. The chauvinism that produces the gun as a symbol of phallic power in Devil on the Cross consists in the fact that it is made by the hands of the (male) workers – Muturi’s name denotes ‘smith’ – and that Wariinga derives ‘strength’ from the possession of the gun. As I have already suggested, what we see in Wariinga is a shift away from ‘woman’ as a lack redeemed by motherhood (as in the preceding novels) to ‘woman’ imbued with the masculine attribute of phallus – the fetishized woman. In other words, we see a shift from the female character whose desire and political agency are negated by clitoridectomy and motherhood, to the female character whose politics negates her femininity. In a peculiar moment of slippage, the novel’s patriarchal master-discourse is demystified when Wariinga confronts the Rich Old Man. Realizing that the Rich Old Man is Gatuiria’s father, and that he wishes his son’s engagement to Wariinga to end, Wariinga offers the following bargain: ‘All right. Do you want to marry me? That is, do you want to go through a wedding ceremony so that I can become your second wife?’111 The implication here is that the Rich Old Man’s seduction of the younger Wariinga would be ameliorated if he were to marry the older Wariinga in order to restore her former honour. It is also remarkable that, in a ‘moment of truth’, immediately prior to his death, the Rich Old Man falls to his knees when he recognizes Wariinga’s beauty.112 Of course, Wariinga’s beauty is not ever ‘hers’. In a phallocentric narrative, ‘feminine’ attractiveness is always organized by a male gaze: beauty is in the look of the beholder. In Devil on the Cross, beauty is the cultural value that accrues to Wariinga as a biological female, and this value circulates in an economy of narrative significance which is operated by masculine political investments. In a certain sense, then, Wariinga is a prostitute in the novel’s economy of signs. What Ngugi is ideologically unable to accept is that ‘beauty’ and motherhood (the propensity for reproduction of man-power), which are privileged characteristics in his field of the ‘feminine’, are also modes of subjection by which a patriarchal narrative discourse interpellates its objects. Equally, Ngugi’s subordination of the prostitute or fallen woman carries within it the assumption that she is a palpable entity within culture (she is, in the novel’s nomenclature, ‘Ready-to-Yield’). It seems to me that Ngugi’s oeuvre up to this point attempts, and largely fails, to open up positive spaces of political agency for women.113 Leaving aside the symbolic and institutional importance of clitoridectomy, which props up Ngugi’s

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 253.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, p. 253. 113   The two notable exceptions are Njeri (the Mau Mau fighter) and Wambui (the Mau Mau courier) in A Grain of Wheat. 111

112

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ideological positions throughout the bulk of his fiction,114 the gendering of the landscape and the nation in Ngugi’s fiction works to domesticate female sexuality and to privilege male political prerogatives. From the pristine, agrarian landscapes equated with motherhood in the early novels, to the polluted, grotesque landscapes equated with prostitution or sexual debasement in the later novels, Ngugi’s heroines cannot take up an active role in culture unless they forfeit both their femininity and their sexuality. Where Ngugi does represent Mau Mau women, he never allows the characters to use their sexuality as a weapon in the struggle. And where he represents prostitutes or sexually uninhibited women, he denies them a meaningful contribution to the struggle in an ideological manoeuvre that the history of the Mau Mau prostitute largely contradicts. There is an important exception to this rule. In Matigari, Guthera will not at first prostitute herself with a policeman to rescue her father from execution during the Emergency years – he has acted as a Mau Mau courier, carrying bullets in his Bible. This representation initially represses the historical contribution of prostitutes to Mau Mau. However, Guthera does eventually sleep with a policeman (whom she considers an untouchable) in order to free Matigari from imprisonment and from his fate at the hands of the neocolonial government. By trading sex for Matigari wa Njiruungi’s (‘the patriots who survived the bullets’ or ‘The Kenyan Land and Freedom Army’s’) freedom, Guthera symbolically prostitutes herself for bullets or seeds (‘Njiruungi’)115 and belatedly restores female sexwork-ininsurgency to Ngugi’s narrative of the nation. Of course, Guthera is ultimately reincorporated into the family structure:

‘Yes. We are the children of Matigari ma Njiruungi,’ Muruiki said. ‘We are the children of the patriots who survived the war.’ ‘And their wives as well!’ said Guthera, smiling. ‘Or which other wives and children were you looking for?’116

One might displace the subordinate construction of the prostitute in Ngugi’s later fiction by arguing that prostitution in Kenya speaks to the propensity of female desire to bargain outside of the reproductive enclosure, and outside of the institution of marriage for that matter. In this argument, prostitution is one means by which some Kenyan women have exploited their commodification as ‘beautiful’ and ‘desirable’ objects. Further, it was precisely the class-transgressive potential of prostitutes that contributed materially to the Mau Mau insurgency. 114

 See the song (maranjara) performed during circumcision/clitoridectomy and in preparation for armed struggle. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Matigari, pp. 4, 126. 115   For a fascinating explanation of Gikuyu polysemy in Matigari, see Ann Biersteker, ‘Matigari ma Njiruungi: What Grows from the Leftover Seeds of “Chat” Trees?’ in Charles Cantalupo (ed.), The World of Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1995), pp. 141–58. 116   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Matigari, p. 139.

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A subversive reading of Ngugi’s later fiction might investigate the possible loci of Gikuyu subaltern women’s agency by prostituting Ngugi’s economy of signs. In such a reading, texts like Devil on the Cross or Matigari might begin to speak ‘a bit more fruitfully’ to Kenyan women who actively inhabit the subject position of ‘sex workers’, rather than ‘fallen women’, ‘defiled mothers’ or metaphors for a prelapsarian past and a postlapsarian utopia. Wizard of the Crow Wizard of the Crow (2008) is Ngugi’s most recent Gikuyu novel. At over 750 pages in length, it is epic in scope. In its conspicuous internationalism, Wizard of the Crow is the natural political successor to Petals of Blood. In its polyphonic narrative form, it is the natural literary successor to Devil on the Cross and Matigari. In this sense, Wizard of the Crow consolidates Ngugi’s trajectory and might even be said to constitute the pinnacle of his considerable achievements so far. As one might expect from Ngugi, the distribution of the novel in Kenya was attentive to the needs of an indigenous readership (and listenership). Accordingly, the Gikuyu version of Wizard of the Crow was published in a series of instalments, allowing for oral transmission ‘over a number of sittings’117 among the non-bookbuying community in the manner of the novel’s predecessor, Matigari. Unsurprisingly, given Ngugi’s novelistic career up to this point, familiar themes return. The novel is set in a fictional state called Aburiria, like the Ilmorog of the preceding three novels. Like Kihika or Matigari of earlier fictional generations, the eponymous Wizard of the Crow is an explicitly intellectual figure who exhibits the combined qualities of spiritual leadership and social activism. The political corruption and misrule of Aburiria is scathingly satirized, and its distortion of human possibilities is finally embodied in the grotesque transformation of Titus Tajirika, a businessman who overthrows and replaces the Ruler. Tajirika undergoes plastic surgery as part of an unsuccessful attempt at biological race change and, as a result, comes to resemble the ogres of Gikuyu myth. Tajirika’s transformation is prefigured by the earlier comment of his secretary, Nyawira, that businessmen are the new ogres who break from tradition by feeding constantly on human flesh.118 Moreover, Nyawira tells Tajirika’s two children, Gaciru and Gacigua, a story about a blacksmith’s rescue of his wife and child from an ogre. This story and the community of interest it forms between teller and listeners becomes crucial towards the conclusion of the novel, when Gaciru accuses her father of becoming an ogre.119 This episode tells us much about Ngugi’s hopes for the community-building and consciousness117   Andrew van der Vlies, ‘The Ruler and His Henchmen: Portrait of an African Kleptocracy’, Times Literary Supplement (20 October 2006), p. 21. 118   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow (London: Harvill Secker, 2006), pp. 61–2. 119   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 739.

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raising possibilities of story. In it, a form of communal self-knowledge spread by word of mouth is set against the coercive excesses of the state. For this reason, it is unsurprising that Wizard of the Crow readily cites both Ngugi’s own earlier novels, Devil on the Cross (which Nyawira has been reading) and Matigari, and novels by African women – Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Mariam Ba’s So Long a Letter and Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen.120 The emphasis on bodily monstrosity in Wizard of the Crow is not simply the result of the scatological impulse at work in political satire. It is intrinsic to the novel’s analysis of absolute autocratic power. In a complete autocracy, absolute power is vested in the person of the Ruler. As a result, political power in Aburiria is patterned as embodiment, so that the Ruler’s bodily functions become national news – from ‘eating, shitting, sneezing, or blowing his nose’ to ‘yawning’.121 This inflated exaggeration of the body’s least remarkable functions is a corollary to the impulsive and capricious reflexes that characterize the Ruler’s political decrees. The Ruler’s political henchmen each possess the exaggerated physical features that are necessary to run the police state. As Minister of Information, Benjamin Mambo has an enlarged tongue; as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Markus Machokali has enlarged eyes; and as Minister of State, Silver Sikiokuu has enlarged ears.122 Moreover, the people’s history becomes the Ruler’s story, so that even the populace becomes subsumed into a single corpus of state self-interest.123 In effect, Aburiria is a body monstrously bloated with absolute power; its faculties and organs of state turned towards its own preservation. There are interesting gender implications of this corporeal organization of power. Since Aburiria’s Ruler can only conceive of the nepotistic succession of his absolute power to his four sons, Wizard of the Crow’s critique of dynastic regimes is conducted via a critique of the family.124 The Ruler is not only a father; he is also the ‘Father of the Nation’.125 Yet this coincidence of family and nation – a recognizable and relatively unquestioned motif in Ngugi’s earlier novels – is here submitted to satire. The Ruler’s national family is dysfunctional. For instance, he places his wife, Rachael, under house arrest because she has pointed out that it is unseemly for the ‘Father of the Nation’ to be sleeping with schoolgirls. Rachael’s refusal to let the Ruler see her tears while she endures years of house arrest is an ongoing rebellion against the Ruler’s ‘fatherly’ authority. In its quiet defiance, Rachael’s rebellion is highly reminiscent of Bilquis Hyder’s in Salman Rushdie’s Shame.126 Under house arrest, Bilquis weaves shawls that quietly and persistently detail the various political and personal betrayals committed by her husband, Raza   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, pp. 63, 593, 83, respectively.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 3. 122   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, pp. 13–15. 123   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 20. 124   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 9. 125   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 6. 126  Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Cape, 1983). 120 121

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Hyder. But there are other literary influences at work in Rachael. Since the Ruler has stopped all the clocks in the house to remind Rachael of the moment when she dared to question his authority, Rachael is also a sequestered wife in the manner of Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations127 or even Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.128 These associations are underlined by Rachael’s demise in a fire after the Ruler and his henchman, Luminous Karamu-Mbu, pay her a visit.129 As with Ngugi’s other recent novels, neocolonialism is associated with fallen women in Wizard of the Crow. The male hero, Kamiti wa Karimiri, has an exgirlfriend, Wariara, whose inability to find employment leads her to break up with him and enter into a life of prostitution on Angel’s Corner.130 The heroine, Grace Nyawira, is also a fallen woman in the sense that she has endured a failed marriage to a gold-digging suitor, John Kaniuru.131 The novel’s emphasis upon fallen women is consistent with Nyawira’s feminist claim that, in times of economic hardship, women’s reduced possibilities make them dependent upon men for financial support.132 However, despite identifying the forms of female dependency that facilitate chauvinistic abuse, Wizard of the Crow ultimately endorses the logic of the family, and equates both family and women with the nation. For instance, when Titus Tajirika is brought before the people’s court for beating his wife, Vinjinia, and argues that no one can tell him how to run his home, he is told, ‘… man, woman, and child compose a home, and if one pillar is weak, the family is weak, and if the family is weak, the nation is weak. So what happens in a home is the business of the nation and the other way round.’133 Moreover, Titus Tajirika’s abduction by Nyawira’s female accomplices mimics his earlier abduction by Silver Sikiokuu, as if the women’s group who comprise the people’s court is a reflected image of the state in miniature. This implicit patterning of women as the nation in miniature is consistent with all of Ngugi’s earlier fiction. Indeed, in a moment that echoes one of Gatu’s stories in A Grain of Wheat and its metaphorical echoes of the nation as the House of Mumbi (Nyumba ya Mumbi), Kamiti proposes marriage to Nyawira by suggesting, somewhat opaquely, that they should ‘build a new home’.134 Given its latent associations between the family and the nation, it is unsurprising that both the hero and heroine of Wizard of the Crow should have to negotiate Oedipal conflicts as part of their political maturation. Nyawira is hunted 127   Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1969 [1861]). 128  Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971 [1847]). 129   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 708. 130   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, pp. 66–70. 131   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, pp. 78–82. 132   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 83. 133   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 435. 134   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 724.

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by the Ruler’s cronies, including her ex-husband, John Kaniuru, throughout the narrative, because she is the leader of the Voice of the People Movement and has held several highly visible women’s protests against both the Ruler’s desire to build the Marching to Heaven tower and his incarceration of his wife, Rachael. In an attempt to lure Nyawira out of hiding, John Kaniuru persuades her father to threaten to publicly ‘divorce’ her.135 As the word ‘divorce’ suggests, there is an Oedipalization of Nyawira’s politics in the novel. In fact, her primary conflicts at this point are Oedipal, not ideological. Like earlier heroines such as Mumbi, Nyawira mediates in many of the key antagonistic masculine relationships in the novel. She is Tajirika’s employee. She is the ex-wife of Tajirika’s deputy, Kaniuru. She is Kamiti’s partner in love and in wizardry, and introduces Tajirika to the Wizard of the Crow via Vinjinia. She also intervenes between Kamiti and Sikiokuu’s men, Njoya and Kahiga, when he is imprisoned.136 Kamiti’s Oedipalization is more obscure, and it is more successfully resolved. His powers of wizardry – such as they are – are inherited through the patrilinear line. We are told that Kamiti has inherited his powers of wizardry from his grandfather, who died fighting the British during the war of independence. The powers of prophecy have skipped a generation, since Kamiti’s father is not a seer. In this way, Kamiti’s wizardry is a patrilinear inheritance that, in a cunning narrative twist, avoids Oedipal conflict with the father. Moreover, the only injunction that his father applies to his wizardry is that Kamiti may not use his powers for personal material gain. Instead, his mother, Nungari, tells him, ‘There is no wealth greater than a home of one’s own. A home is husband, wife, and children.’137 In short, Kamiti’s wizardry is placed within a heritage of family resistance to British rule in Aburiria, repeating notions of generational history that are at work in Petals of Blood. The injunction not to use his powers for personal gain places him within a substitutive structure in which a wife and children compensate for his lack of class mobility. We might say that Kamiti’s wizardry repeats the uterine social organization that we have seen at work throughout Ngugi’s novels, from the circumcised female subject of Gikuyu resistance in The River Between, to Mumbi the mother of a new Kenya in A Grain of Wheat, through to Wanja whose desire for motherhood is finally fulfilled in Petals of Blood. It is unsurprising that the Wizard of the Crow’s most important acts of healing intervene to assist marriages in trouble. Firstly, Kamiti helps the ageing Christian couple, Maritha and Mariko, to overcome their waning desire for one another. 138 Secondly, at the request of the long-suffering wife, Vinjinia, Kamiti temporarily heals Titus Tajirika of an illness inspired by racial envy. Kamiti’s partner in wizardry, Nyawira, also turns many of her revolutionary efforts towards rescuing women in failed marriages. Posing with a group of woman dancers as entertainment for foreign dignitaries, 135

    137   138   136

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 297. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 374. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 295. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, pp. 276–81.

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she demands that the Ruler set Rachael free. They sing in protest, ‘You imprison a woman and you have imprisoned a nation.’139 As I have already suggested, it is as if women comprise a sequestered state in Wizard of the Crow. In the novel’s analysis, when the state is personified in the masculine body of the Ruler, women’s bodies must become sequestered from view, their physiologies associated with potentials that the state cannot countenance. Perhaps this is why Titus Tajirika – a victim of Silver Sikiokuu’s plotting against his political rival, Macho Machokali – is so easily persuaded to blame Vinjinia for the political intrigues from which he has suffered.140 As a politically unconnected man, Tajirika is unable to detect the layers of political influence and intrigue in which he is enmeshed. Tajirika therefore points the blame towards Vinjinia, who falls within the sphere of domestic influence with which he is familiar. A similar version of this theme is at work when John Kaniuru’s mistress, Jane Kanyori, returns to demand marriage and half his property with the threat that she will reveal his involvement in the fraudulent embezzlement of money. Her previous sexual intimacy with him has allowed her access to those secrets that make a kleptocracy operate. In this sense, women’s sequestration from public political affairs paradoxically gives them a privileged purchase on the levers of political power. There is an interesting corollary to this construction of women as a sequestered state. Wizard of the Crow is at one level the story of the Aburirian Ruler’s futile search for Nyawira, and this search ends up finding an entire community in Nyawira’s place: when Kamiti is forced to publicly reveal Nyawira’s whereabouts, he makes the rousing claim that Nyawira is ‘you and me and others’, and this leads every person assembled to profess that he or she is Nyawira.141 In this way, the assembly’s claim to be Nyawira is also the community’s claim upon political dissent in an autocratic state. Despite containing gender motifs that seem similar to those we have discovered in Ngugi’s earlier fiction, Wizard of the Crow constitutes an unprecedented advance in its advocacy of women’s issues and concerns. The novel explicitly tackles pernicious social ills such as wife-beating and the gendering of poverty. More broadly, Wizard of the Crow addresses the specificity of ‘Aburirian’ women’s issues, but in its obligations to ‘Aburiria’ as a fiction the novel avoids a parochialism of focus. The novel scathingly satirizes the Ruler’s pseudo-philosophical tract, Magnus Africanus: A Prolegomenon to Future Happiness, by the Ruler, which argues that women ‘must get circumcised and show submission by always walking a few steps behind their men’.142 But perhaps the novel’s most courageous move consists in including frank and mature allusions to the debilitating illness of HIV/ AIDS that has swept the African continent in the years since the publication of Devil on the Cross. Tajirika, for example, successfully uses the threat of ‘the virus 139

    141   142   140

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 253. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 352. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 688. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 621.

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of death’ contained in his faeces to demand an audience with Silver Sikiokuu when he is falsely imprisoned.143 The spurious scientific basis of Tajirika’s threat – since the AIDS virus is not transmitted via excrement – serves to heighten the comic scatological effect. In fact, Tajirika’s descriptions of his mysterious illness to Elijah Njoya align it strongly with sexually transmitted diseases and the ubiquitous habits of non-disclosure adopted by sufferers: … when gonorrhoea and syphilis were deadly menaces, people suffering from them were often described as having fallen victim to a severe strand of flu. It is the same today with the virus of death. Every victim of the virus is said to have died of a kidney problem. My illness was not quite of the heart … I mean it was really an illness without a name.144

There is a very powerful link made here between Tajirika’s previous unarticulated affliction and an illness that dare not speak its name. If we are correct to draw such parallels, then the Wizard of the Crow’s talking cure is a powerful argument for the need to address illness openly and publicly. Even more directly and more bravely, Nyawira refuses to have sex with Kamiti early in the novel, telling him that if ‘a person refuses to wear a condom in these days of the deadly virus and he still wants to go the distance, he is my enemy, not my lovemate, and I should not let him touch me. That is why I threw you off, because I thought you were one of those men who think it unmanly to wear condoms.’145 When Kamiti and Nyawira eventually do sleep together, the heat of passion is briefly interrupted so that he may don a condom.146 It is difficult to praise Wizard of the Crow enough for such deeply responsible acts of storytelling. The novel leads by setting an example on the crucial issues affecting the lives of many African women. In fact, Nyawira functions as a crucial vehicle of a truly feminist consciousness throughout the novel, instructing Vinjinia not to accept Tajirika’s abuse and educating her, and no doubt some readers, with statements such as ‘Rape is rape even when done by a friend or a husband’.147 Such moments amount to a pinnacle in Ngugi’s laudable and career-long efforts to engage seriously with sexism and other issues affecting women. In moments such as these, Wizard of the Crow is a responsible masterpiece that truly befits Ngugi’s status as a titan of world letters. Wizard of the Crow’s critique of state power proceeds through the careful negotiation of a double bind. When the Ruler’s public works project, Marching to Heaven, fails, it is strongly implied that power has foundered on polyglot interests, as in the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel. If the Ruler’s power is based upon 143

    145   146   147   144

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 387. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 337. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 92. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, pp. 202–3. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 429.

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a very literal substitution of the real with aspects of himself (as when he appoints two cabinet ministers to take care of Baby D.), then his will to embody power is surely undermined by a multilingual proliferation of his modes of reference. However, a problem emerges here: if multilingualism is a site of political critique upon which unhindered state power founders, is multilingualism not also a site for the reconstruction of ethnic division? After all, Nyawira points out that class stratification in Aburiria is maintained by dividing the masses along ‘ethnic and sometimes gender and religious lines’.148 In this context, the progressive assertion of linguistic difference is potentially recoupable for the polarizing language of ethnic difference. Wizard of the Crow is aware of the dangers here and addresses them through instances of destabilizing translation. For example, there are numerous examples of scatological misprision aimed at the Ruler, especially by an old man who is not conversant with the lingua franca of Swahili: [When] the old man began to speak it was clear he had difficulty in pronouncing Swahili words for the Ruler, Mtukufu Rais, calling out instead, Mtukundu Rahisi. Horrified at the Ruler being called a Cheap Excellency, one of the policemen quickly whispered in the old man’s ear that the phrase was Mtukufu Rais or Rais Mtukufu, which confused him even more. Coughing and clearing his throat to still himself, he called out into the microphone, Rahisi Mkundu. Oh no, it is not Cheap Arsehole, the other policeman whispered in the other ear, no, no, it is His Holy Mightiness, Mtukufu Mtakatifu, which did not help matters because the old man now said, with what the old man thought was confidence, Mkundu Takatifu. At the mention of “His Holy Arsehole,” the multitude broke out into hilarious laughter …149

In passages such as these, the transformative possibilities of translation and misprision subject absolute power to ridicule. Although Wizard of the Crow is resolutely polyglot in its own expression and multilingual in its orientation, the novel is aware that language’s transformative power often resides in its breakdown. In fact, state power falters upon its inability to impress a unitary message across multiple sites of instantiation within the populace. For example, when one of the Ruler’s outriders on a motorbike tries to announce a message to a queue of jobseekers waiting for work, he finds the queue so long that he is forced to reduce the message to its constituent syllables, with the effect that its force becomes lost upon his listeners.150 One of the reasons that official narratives fail and the Wizard’s ‘cures’ succeed in Wizard of the Crow is that their reception and transmission by the populace submits such narratives to a disseminative force. The Ruler’s decrees and the Wizard’s feats are inflected with speculation, hyperbole and misprision in the Aburirian popular imagination. The powerful force of rumour is that it   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, pp. 725–6.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, pp. 17–18. 150   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 158. 148 149

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‘evokes comradeship because it belongs to every “reader” or “transmitter.” No one is its origin or source. Thus rumor is not error but primordially (originarily) errant, always in circulation with no assignable source. This illegitimacy makes it accessible to insurgency.’151 The rumours surrounding the Ruler and the Wizard work to foster a political community, and this feature of the novel is the culmination of ideas first formed in Petals of Blood, in which a character called Ruma Monga (‘Rumour Monger’) spreads stories of the coming revolution. Equally, Ngugi himself has witnessed how readings of Matigari in Kenya led to stories of Matigari spreading among the Kenyan community. Such subversive rumours of a troublemaker demanding truth and justice culminated in a nationwide search for Matigari (a fictional character) by the Kenyan government.152 The Wizard of the Crow’s ‘artistic’ or ‘theatrical’ performances occasion the rumours that form insurgent collectives. It is significant that the Wizard of the Crow’s own curative powers contain a linguistic dimension. When Tajirika is afflicted by an illness in which he obsessively repeats the words ‘if’ and ‘if only’, the Wizard prompts him to undertake a ‘talking cure’ by articulating ‘the treacherous thought’.153 Tajirika responds by articulating his thoughts more fully: ‘If … my … skin … were … not … black! If only my skin were white!’154 Here, the Aburirian state’s stifling of possibilities and its (neo)colonial legacy conspire to produce neurosis in its population. In short, Tajirika suffers because it would be treasonous for him to articulate his racial envy. Since he is compelled to repress his desire for racial transformation, the repressed thought returns to iterate itself as an hysterical symptom. The Ruler is cured of a similar affliction by the Wizard.155 An important part of the Wizard’s curative process is to ask his patients to consult a reflection of themselves in a mirror. At work in this method is a complex set of associations between the mirror and the work of literary fiction as a reflection of the society in which it is produced. Ngugi writes in Barrel of a Pen: The arts then are a form of knowledge about reality acquired through a pile of images. But these images are not neutral. The images given us by the arts try to make us not only see and understand the world of man and nature, apprehend it, but to see and understand it in a certain way, or from the angle of vision of the artist. The way or the angle of vision is itself largely affected by the margin of natural, social and spiritual freedom within which the practitioner of skills (the writer, the musician, the painter) is operating. …

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 213.   Oliver Lovesey, ‘“The Sound of the Horn of Justice” in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Narrative’, in Susan VanZanten Gallagher (ed.), Postcolonial Literature and the Biblical Call for Justice (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), p. 152. 153   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 179. 154   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 179. 155   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 491. 151 152

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Let me put it another way. The arts present us with a set of images of the world in which we live. The arts then act like a reflecting mirror. The artist is like the hand that holds and moves the mirror, this way and that way, to explore all corners of the universe. But what is reflected in the mirror depends on where the holder stands in relation to the object.156

By the time he writes Wizard of the Crow, Ngugi has developed a reflective but non-mimetic theory of artistic creativity that is grounded in social freedoms. In fact, he argues very pointedly that social repression potentially inhibits creative expression, if the artist chooses not to oppose it. If we follow this idea of a politically oppositional and reflective artistic model, then it becomes clear that one vital function of art is to produce political self-consciousness in the masses (whose own freedom of labour is ‘the final artist’157) and in the ruling élite. In this model, art is a call to political responsibility,158 because politics itself draws upon artistic modes. For instance, in a wonderful extension of his ideas about theatre, Ngugi argues in Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams that: The concept of performance is opening out new possibilities in the analysis of human behaviour, including literature. The exercise of power, for instance, involves variations on the performance theme. Performance distinguishes political prison narratives from other narratives, including those by ‘nonpolitical prisoners’ or other narratives for that matter. The prison is like a stage, but with the audience outside the walls. Both the prisoner and the state are aware of this audience and it explains some of the behaviour of the state and the artistprisoner.159

When we read passages like this, art’s disposition towards power becomes of great interest. In a stunning reversal of the coercive power that the absolutist state claims for itself, the artist-prisoner at some level directs the prison-theatre and commands the private stage upon which only he or she is possessed of genuine insight. Elsewhere, Ngugi suggests that this reversal is accomplished when the artist ‘resorts to pen and paper’ so that his or her prison narrative may contest the ‘performance space of the state’.160 Ngugi develops this theory consistently when he argues that ‘The artistic process is like a mirror lodged in the consciousness. It reflects whatever is before it … and it even has the capacity to mirror what it below the surface of things.’161 The reflective and intuitive capacities of the artistic process affect state power because they alter the definition of the spaces in which   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Barrel of a Pen, pp. 57–8.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Barrel of a Pen, p. 59. 158  See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, p. 5. 159   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, pp. 5–6. 160   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, p. 57. 161   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, pp. 20–21. 156 157

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power is performed. Hence, theatre or political performance is conceived as a ‘field of tensions and conflicts’ that is ‘transformed into a sphere of power’.162 For Ngugi, political theatre is a site of power, especially when it configures its external relations in such a way that the masses have access to the space of the performance. The whole of Wizard of the Crow is the maturation of Ngugi’s vision of the corrupt state and the artist being inimically opposed. The Wizard’s curative method involving mirrors is grounded in a theory of political reflexivity and insight that alters the state’s relationship to the performance space that it would command. In other words, the patient’s encounter with the mirror prompts them into an encounter with a site of self positioned outside of the self. As such, the mirror-image or reflection of the patient establishes the therapeutic subject as a distributed self – that is, a split self which is to be found as much in others as it is to be experienced from within the body. This is stated most explicitly during the ‘cure’ of the Wizard’s most successful analysand, Constable Arigaigai (A. G.) Gathere: ‘We need mirrors to see our shadows. We need mirrors to see other people’s shadows crossing ours ...’163 Moreover, this curative method and its dispositions of self become the basis for an ethical orientation towards the world, since the Wizard tells Arigaigai that his actions will be henceforth be the mirror of his soul. As such, the self becomes a self divided within its intentions and articulated by its effects upon the worlds of others. This is, in effect, the claim that the Wizard makes in his encounter with Silver Sikiokuu. Kamiti tells him that a ‘… mirror captures shadows of ourselves. Shadows that pass through the mirror don’t go away. Traces remain, reflections of ourselves, our hearts, the effects of our actions on ourselves. The only problem is that shadows can intermingle, preventing now one, now another, from being seen clearly …’164 Kamiti is not, of course, really referring to the physics and chemistry of mirrors. He is theorizing power. Wizard of the Crow details a society in which there is no distinction between the person of the Ruler and the government. In such an absolute dispensation of power, all political decision-making is ultimately reduced to impulses and reflexes that originate in the lower functions and pleasures of the body. The birth of Baby D. (short for ‘Democracy’) is simply the most graphic demonstration of this analysis. Additionally, due to the absolutist nature of the state, all desires for or formulations of power are reduced to code, as when the very long queues seeking employment on the Marching to Heaven project become variously misconstrued as support for the Ruler and dissent against his decrees.165 The mirror, then, becomes a critical metaphor for the delirious encounter of

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, pp. 39–40.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 116. 164   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 410. 165   In this respect, Sikiokuu is correct to notice that Tajirika’s ‘actual desire for power came out coded as a desire to be white’ because the code substituted for a treasonous desire to usurp the absolute power of the Ruler. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 343. 162 163

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absolute, solipsistic power with its own unintended or malinformed effects upon the world. However, as I have indicated above, the mirror is also a critical metaphor for the relationship between art and the state. In fact, since art ‘gives voice to silence in the great prophetic tradition’,166 Kamiti’s reflective function is to confront the representatives of the state with those silences that they would prefer not to acknowledge. It is in this aspect that Kamiti’s magical powers reside – they articulate those possibilities that political realities cannot possibly contain. As such, the Wizard’s mirrors have a basis in dissidence, even though Kamiti’s own political orientation is at times less direct and authentic than Nyawira’s. Having said this, Nyawira operates with a very firm sense of the theatrical in her moments of dissidence. She is a consummate performer of guises, roles and subterfuges. As a theatre student, she ‘could change herself into any character, sometimes so realistically that even those who thought they knew her well because of seeing her on the platforms in many student political events were often unable to say whether it was really Nyawira on the stage’.167 When Kamiti meets her, she is disguised as a beggar, inhabiting what she calls the ‘theatre of politics’.168 Ngugi, of course, is very well aware that theatrical performances and theatre groups have played an important role in Kenya’s anti-colonial heritage.169 For Nyawira, the performance of everyday life takes place in accordance with a predetermining political script.170 Moreover, the everyday is a performance that allows the dissident to infiltrate state power and humiliate the Ruler, as when Nyawira and other women suddenly emerge from an undifferentiated crowd to expose their buttocks to foreign dignitaries and a mission from the global bank to protest against the Marching to Heaven project. Disguised as a traditional dancer, Nyawira leads a group of women singing and dancing in protest at Tajirika’s abduction and imprisonment and she goes unrecognized by all who are in the audience: including Vinjinia (on behalf of whom she is performing), her former lover, Kaniuru, and the government minister

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, p. 27.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 80. 168   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 86. 169  See, for example, Ngugi’s extended passage on the history of Kenyan theatre and resistance in Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, pp. 67–9. He also writes extensively on the suppression of theatre within post-Independence Kenya that began with the banning of school plays in 1979 and culminated in the arrests of Maina wa Kinyatti and Al Amin Mazrui in 1982. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Barrel of a Pen, pp. 64–6, 18–19. 170   Ngugi’s autobiographical writings refer extensively to politics as theatre. Speaking of the moment in which the warders at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison maintain the pretence that Kenyatta is still alive, and he and his fellow detainees maintain the pretence of not noticing, he observes: ‘It was a most unreal situation. There was an important drama in Kenya’s history being played outside the walls and here at Kamiti we were all pretences, actors in a theatre of extreme absurdity.’ Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, p. 157. 166 167

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looking for her, Silver Sikiokuu.171 Even Nyawira’s name is a performance, since she is addressed by various combinations of her full name: There was a time when she called herself Engenethi Nyawira Charles Matthew Mugwanja Wangahu, often writing it as E.N.C.M.M. Wangahu. She was not very keen on Engenethi and became Grace Mugwanja. Grace Mugwanja stuck, mostly in the village community, and she held onto it for a while. Her father liked Grace more than Engenethi, and Roithi, her mother, liked Engenethi more than Grace, and both hated Mugwanja with equal intensity, and so to her parents she would always be either Engenethi or Grace. She herself continued struggling with these markers of identity, and after going to college she eventually settled on Nyawira wa Wangahu, though there were some who could not bring themselves to call her anything but Grace Mugwanja.172

Clearly, Nyawira’s identity is both internally differentiated, differently instantiated by her mother, father and community, and distributed across multiple sites. This bewildering array of possible Nyawiras amounts to a proliferation of the patronym in a manner akin to the dynamics at work in Wanja in Petals of Blood. Even if Nyawira were located by Kaniuru or Sikiokuu, the real Nyawira could never really be found. Her identity will not settle. I see this ontological instability as an enabling capacity within Nyawira and it is consistent both with her transformative revolutionary impulses and her vocation as an actress. Identity for Nyawira is always destined to be nothing more and nothing less than theatre. Even her most habitual moniker in the novel, Grace Nyawira, is translatable. Since ‘Nyawira’ means ‘work’173 – ‘Grace Nyawira’ is a politically mobile term that in itself does the work of translation between languages, and that signifies something like the ‘grace in work’ or the ‘work of grace’ perhaps? In short, Nyawira draws our attention to African female subjectivity as a composite of roles, positions, translations and capacities. In this, she is Ngugi’s most truly feminist female character because she does not settle down into a position that can be instrumentalized. The final triumph of Nyawira’s characterization is that she has to assume Kamiti’s duties as the Wizard of the Crow when he is imprisoned.174 It is this ability of the Wizard of the Crow to be in two places at once (in America and in Aburiria) that confounds Sikiokuu and leads him to half-believe in the Wizard’s ability to ‘create living shadows’.175 But more importantly, the Wizard is not a conventionally gendered construct but a genuine and equal revolutionary partnership between Kamiti and   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, pp. 307–11.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 78. 173   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 450. 174   Kamiti’s name shows an astonishing resemblance to the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison in which Ngugi was detained without trial. The resources that feed into Kamiti’s spiritual wisdom are no doubt very deep indeed. 175   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, p. 461. 171 172

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Nyawira. The distribution of function within the Wizard is a metonym for the corporate nature of revolution and contains the reflexive apparatus of the mirror within it. The Wizard’s magic is ultimately a cipher for the immateriality of revolution – that moment in which the self is shadowed in its political purposes by multiple other selves. Of course, the postcolonial critic who reads in translation with a sense of the historical community addressed in fiction must also acknowledge this moment of shadowing. I reserve for my conclusion the problematics of reading Ngugi’s Gikuyu texts in translation and the ethical responsibilities that this circumstance of reading obliges of the Anglophone reader.

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Conclusion

Prostituting Translation: An Ethics of Postcolonial Reading In a footnote to her reading of Mahasweta Devi’s ‘The Breast-Giver’, Spivak mentions that English is a medium of defilement in that text. The same might be said of the English and Kiswahili passages that we find in the Gikuyu editions of Devil on the Cross and Matigari. The ogres in these two novels (which include the foreign delegates to the Devil’s Feast, John Boy junior and Robert Williams junior) defile the Gikuyu language passages via their foreign mediums of expression. Hence, Gikuyu is in these novels posited as an originary language that translates the autochthony or historical priority of the speaking subject. I conclude my study of Ngugi’s fiction with a consideration of the responsibilities that the language politics of his later fiction might oblige during the act of reading his Gikuyu texts in English translation. This consideration is best undertaken via a discussion of Ngugi’s three essay collections: Writers in Politics, Decolonising the Mind and Moving the Centre. In sum, these collections require us to examine how we position literary critical readings in relation to an African cultural politics that might contest our founding assumptions. At the most straightforward level, the act of reading a literary text is itself an exclusionary and élitist gesture in Kenya, since it would have excluded over 90 per cent of the Kenyan population when Ngugi wrote his novels in the 1980s. As Ngugi himself has noted, the ‘present language situation in Kenya means that over ninety percent of Kenyans (mostly peasants) are completely excluded from participation in national debates conducted in the written word’. He states that while writing A Grain of Wheat, he ‘came to realise only too painfully that the novel in which I had so carefully painted the struggle of the Kenyan peasantry against colonial oppression would never be read by them’. Given such high levels of illiteracy, the postcolonial gender critic must immediately mark an asymmetry in his or her position. But even if we were to disregard this substantial caveat, Ngugi’s novels are accompanied by a theory of writing and of language that is rooted in a defined historical constituency. He argues that ‘the very act of writing implies a social relationship: one is writing about somebody for somebody’. Moreover, in Ngugi’s classical Marxist view, social relations ultimately emerge out of the totality of 

          

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 309. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics, p. 43. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, p. 9. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics, p. 5.

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the relations of production. In fact, he suggests that the ‘wealth and power and self-image of a community are inseparable’. Elsewhere, Ngugi states explicitly that there ‘is no area of our lives including the very boundaries of our imagination which is not affected by the way society is organized’. If we concede that the imagination is shaped by power and that this dispensation of power limits the social relationships that our readings may permit, then the postcolonial gender critic – enmeshed in economic privilege, in undisclosed ideological complicities and in the institutions of Anglophone literary criticism – cannot simply assume an unmediated social relationship to a Kenyan peasant constituency. Ngugi’s critique of literary syllabi – at least as they have operated in Kenya and in other former colonies – is that they have frequently functioned as imperial mechanisms, and he goes so far as to claim that cultural imperialism ‘becomes the major agency of control during neo-colonialism’. For Ngugi, literary criticism is not free of a cultural imperialist potential, especially when it emerges from metropolitan locations. He writes: ‘… you have only to look around you and see the mad rush of European critics who only a few years ago, before independence, were so disparaging about African literature and African writers. Now they are the new interpreters, interpreting African literature for the African.’ Moreover, he bemoans the situation in which ‘no expert on the so-called “African literatures” need ever show even the slightest acquaintance with any African language’. Ngugi views literature as a ‘subtle weapon’ of cultural imperialism, because literature ‘works through influencing emotions, the imagination, the consciousness of a people in a certain way; to make the colonized see the world as seen, analyzed, and defined by the artists and the intellectuals of the western literary classes’.10 In this sense, intellectual production sets in place powers of definition that work upon the sensibilities of the disempowered to mystify the conditions of their oppression, and that ‘produce an African permanently injured by a feeling of inadequacy, a person who would look up with reverent awe to the achievements of Europe’.11 If Ngugi’s first move is to reject the notion ‘that a Kenyan child’s route to self-realization must be via European heritages and cultures’, distorting the ‘values of national liberation’,12 then it is obvious that literary criticism’s latent orientations and values are neither neutral nor innocuous. In this sense, the position from which one reads and the interests that are at work in one’s reading assume a crucial importance. In Ngugi’s view, literary criticism aided and abetted colonialism, since the economic domination of Africans ‘was effected through politics and culture. Economic and 

             10   11   12   

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, p. xv. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics, p. 71. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics, p. 5. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics, p. 25. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, p. 23. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics, p. 15. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics, p. 23. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics, p. 35.

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political control of a people can never be complete without cultural control, and here scholarly practice, irrespective of any individual interpretation and handling of the practice, fitted well the logic and aim of the system as a whole.’13 Moreover, literary criticism is never neutral or transparent.14 It is always historically and politically located, because: … the critic, whether teacher, lecturer, interpreter or analyst, is a product of class society. … Therefore, their interpretation of literature and culture and history will be influenced by their philosophical standpoint, or intellectual base, and their conscious or unconscious sympathies. … In criticism, as in creative writing, there is an ideological struggle.15

Operated by demands that are both professional and disciplinary (that is to say, institutional and ideological), the postcolonial gender critic may risk perpetuating cultural imperialist agencies of control, regardless of honorable intentions or individual goodwill. If the politics of literature and literary criticism are complex, then the language that one chooses as one’s medium of expression is even more so. Ngugi’s signal contribution to debates about the language of African literature presumes an idea of a readership and a constituency: ‘the choice of language already pre-determines the answer to the most important question for producers of imaginative literature: For whom do I write? Who is my audience?’16 Far more is at stake in these questions than the simple decision about which readers are qualified to read or are disqualified from reading a particular passage as a result of their particular linguistic competences. Ngugi’s assumption is that language is a ‘people’s collective memory-bank’ of historical experience and that it is a space in which all the living and ancestral voices of a community are articulated.17 He delineates this assumption even more directly in Decolonising the Mind, when he writes that language is ‘a carrier of culture’.18 At stake in the writer’s choice of language is nothing less than a community’s possibilities for self-definition,19 since indigenous languages

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 93.   ‘[T]here are only two types of scholars: those on the side of oppression and those on the side of resistance. Neutrality in such a situation is a myth; or, rather, it means that such a scholar is basically on the side of the bully.’ Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, pp. 86–7. 15   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, pp. 104–5. 16   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics, pp. 53–4. Ngugi argues elsewhere that ‘For the African writer, the language he has chosen already has chosen his audience’. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, p. 73. 17   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics, p. 60. 18   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 13. 19  See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 4. 13 14

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contain the lived and accrued idiom of historical experience.20 Moreover, language mediates all notions of subjecthood, social relations and relations of production: ‘Language as culture is thus mediating between me and my own self; between my own self and other selves, between me and nature. Language is thus mediating in my very being.’21 When we notice the profundity of indigenous languages and the immense cultural and spiritual weight with which they are invested, the complicity of the English language with colonial violence is self-explanatory. Historically, the English language assumed primacy in national culture and in education. It was a prerequisite to rapid class advancement. It was both the ‘language of the elect’22 and a language in which African communities were subject to colonial devaluation.23 In this way, the English language came to dominate ‘the mental universe of the colonized’.24 Its institutionalization ‘resulted in the disassociation of [a Kenyan] child from his natural and social environment, what we might call colonial alienation’.25 But English was not only a vehicle of domination. It has also been a mechanism for the expropriation of cultural value: ‘In the area of culture, the raw material of African orature and histories developed by African languages are taken, repackaged through English or French or Portuguese and then resold back to Africa.’26 It is for all of these considered reasons that Ngugi took the revolutionary decision to write in his Gikuyu mother tongue, and the consequences of this decision introduce considerable ethical dilemmas for the attentive postcolonial critic. To begin with, there is the immediate difficulty of engaging with gender constructions in a text in translation. Since Ngugi’s final two novels were written in his Gikuyu home tongue and translated into English, the English reader surely needs to make allowance for the epistemological uncertainties that translation introduces into a feminist reading.27 Indeed, I would argue that the ‘English’ reader who relies solely upon the English translation must allow for the possibility that the original Gikuyu narrative may contain unanticipated positive (or negative) spaces for Kenyan women. When one reads a translated text in the target language, one must play host to all of the hidden possibilities and limitations at work upon one’s readings that the source language makes available in the original. How, after all, might an Anglophone critic ever know whether or not the English translations of Devil on the Cross, Matigari and Wizard of the Crow are ‘faithful’ to the spirit of the ‘original’ Gikuyu texts? More generally, is any text ever completely   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, pp. 45, 54.   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 15. 22   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, p. 32. 23   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, p. 35. 24   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 16. 25   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 17. 26   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, p. 20. 27   Ngugi certainly conceives of his decision to write in Gikuyu as ‘an epistemological break’ with his past. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 44. 20

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capable of fidelity to its intertexts? Is it not possible that, even as Ngugi’s later texts such as Devil on the Cross and Matigari collapse strategies of inclusion (of Kenyan women into political life) into strategies of recuperation (of Kenyan women into patriarchy), these texts might equally be opening spaces of dissent or opportunity for Kenyan women; spaces that are lost in translation or in cultural recoding and that the ‘English’ reader lacks the competence to decipher?28 The Anglophone postcolonial critic is caught in an uncomfortable double bind when confronting the text in translation. Analysis and critique must necessarily waver between appropriating Kenyan female characters into the self-confirming and culturally ignorant logic of one’s own reading, or lapsing into the debilitating logic of their unrepresentability. Either of these two positions might recuperate the proto-imperialist narratives of an African subject who is capable of being easily appropriated for the consolidation of the imperialist project, or the racist delusion of an inscrutable African subject, whose supposed illegibility confers upon them a subhuman object status. To assume either mode of critique would be to place the postcolonial critic in an unacceptable position of complicity with the mechanics of cultural colonization. In short, reading in translation always carries the latent risk that the critic may read for gender possibility while simultaneously evolving new forms of cultural violence. Following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s deconstructive reading praxis, I would suggest that the impossibility of criticism posits the very necessity for criticism, even while one accepts that ‘english’ criticism can never fully have access to the ‘original’ Gikuyu texts. I use the lower case (‘english’) here to denote my use of a hybrid, cosmopolitan English which coexists among other varieties of equal value. In this sense, I broadly follow Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffith’s theoretical model, in which the lower case functions ‘as a sign of the subversion of the claims to status and privilege to which English usage clings’.29 In other words, the language of literary criticism is never entirely self-present or undifferentiated. However, the Gikuyu ‘original’ in Ngugi’s fiction is clearly not an undifferentiated or selfpresent origin either. Ngugi’s return to writing in his Gikuyu mother tongue is arguably not a return to a plentiful cultural space uncontaminated by colonial influences. Indeed, as Ngugi points out in ‘The Language of African Fiction’, the Gikuyu language also contains the traces of colonial cultural violence: Rival imperialisms and the colonial practice of divide and rule introduced contradictory representations of the sound systems of the very same language, let alone of similar African languages in the same colonial boundary. For instance the Gikuyu language had two rival orthographies developed by the protestant and catholic missionaries. Before this was rectified, two Gikuyu speaking children 28  On the epistemology of translation in Matigari, see Simon Gikandi, ‘The Epistemology of Translation: Ngugi, Matigari, and the Politics of Language’, Research in African Literatures 22:4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 161–7. 29   Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin and Gareth Griffiths, The Empire Writes Back, p. 217.

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could well have been in the position where they could not read each others [sic] letters or essays.30

Of course, Ngugi himself was involved in attempting to rectify the contradictions in the two orthographies. From 1979 to 1982 – in other words, a period covering his release from prison and the publication of the Gikuyu original of Devil on the Cross (Caitaani Mutharaba-ini) – he initiated a ‘study group led by Karega Mutahi, U of Nairobi linguist, to revise inconsistent and inaccurate Gikuyu orthography established by missionaries [and this] group includes writers – such as Gakaara wa Wanjau and Ngugi wa Mirii – and church officials’.31 This intervention on Ngugi’s part does not mean, however, that Gikuyu orthography was restored to a state of pre-existing purity. To claim this would be to suggest that Ngugi’s own ambivalent subject formation within the educated élite had had no lasting intellectual or ideological legacy. It would also suggest that those participants involved had exerted no ideological or institutional influence upon the revised orthography. Most controversially, such a claim would also deny that colonialism and its latter-day transformations had exerted any shaping force on Ngugi or on Gikuyu culture more generally. A denial of this kind would simply remove the entire basis for Ngugi’s creative and theoretical contributions to African thought. Hence, far from treating the Gikuyu language as a pristine repository of culture or heritage, we should entertain the more likely probability that modern Gikuyu, whether it is spoken by the bourgeoisie or the worker, or indeed the peasant, carries traces of the institutional and epistemological violence of colonialism. If this is the case, then the ‘gikuyu’32 used by Ngugi in Matigari or Devil on the Cross is not an homogeneous or undifferentiated ‘means of communication and carrier of culture’,33 nor the founding moment of a community of workers and peasants, but an irredeemably ‘prostituted mother tongue’. Even Kenya, defined geographically by boundaries agreed upon by colonial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884– 85, is a ‘motherland’ forever accompanied by colonial inscriptions.34 Again, I think that a performative reading guided by Ngugi’s own critical thought and by postcolonial theories of translation can help us in conditions of impossibility. Even as he formulated his decision to write in Gikuyu, Ngugi was already thinking about the possibilities that might be created by a model of polycentric translation. That is to say, Ngugi was contemplating the need for the global hegemony of the English language to be replaced by the multiple linguistic centres that minority languages provide. Accompanying these multiple centres, he   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, pp. 66–7.  Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, pp. 12–13. 32   I use the lower-case ‘gikuyu’ to denote an indigenous African language differentiated – or even fragmented – by colonial epistemic violence and neocolonial devaluation. 33   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 13. 34  See Carol Sicherman, Making of a Rebel, p. 45, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 23. 30

31

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envisaged translation becoming a crucial mode of relation in progressive cultural dialogue: We live in one world. All the languages in the world are real products of human history. They are our common heritage. A world of many languages should be like a field of flowers of different colours. … [Our] languages can, should, and must express our common being. … All our languages should join in the demand for a new international economic, political, and cultural order. Then the different languages should be encouraged to talk to one another through the medium of interpretation and translation.35

In Ngugi’s view, polycentric translation is the cultural corollary to the lateral distribution of global power and wealth.36 If we are at all attentive to the linguistic mechanisms of translation and their wider cultural possibilities, then our postcolonial feminist readings surely need to refuse self-confirmatory guarantees. I would like to work within this general idiom, in order to extend the act of reading in translation to encompass a progressive gender politics. Here, a performative methodology geared towards an ethics of postcolonial reading is required of us, and the available precedents within postcolonial feminist theory will prove helpful. In one of her essays, ‘Echo’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes use of translation to disrupt the symmetrical binarism within which gender identities are habitually framed. Spivak’s primary aim in the essay is to read against psychoanalytic theory’s habitual association of narcissism with women by returning to Ovid’s original account of Narcissus and looking for the female protagonist, Echo. Since Echo ‘echoes’, she poses a logical problem for Spivak. Echo confirms Narcissus’ self-love by repeating himself back to him. As such, her agency risks being obscured in the itinerary of his utterances. Spivak has written of a strategic blindness in Ovid’s Metamorposes, in which Echo’s response to Narcissus cannot remain proper to his originary speech: Echo in Ovid is staged as the instrument of the possibility of a truth not dependent upon intention, a reward uncoupled from, indeed set free from, the recipient. Throughout the reported exchange between Narcissus and Echo, she behaves according to her punishment and gives back the end of each statement. Ovid ‘quotes’ her, except when Narcissus asks, Quid … me fugis (Why do you fly from me [Metamorphoses, 150, lines 383–4])? Caught in the discrepancy   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, p. 39.   Speaking of his intellectual preoccupations while a student at Leeds, Ngugi writes: ‘It was once again the question of moving the centre: from European languages to all the other languages all over Africa and the world; a move if you like towards a pluralism of languages as legitimate vehicles of the human imagination.’ Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, p. 10. 35 36

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between the second person interrogative (fugis) and the imperative (fugi), Ovid cannot allow her to be, even Echo, so that Narcissus, flying from her could have made the ethical structure of response a fulfilled antiphone. He reports her speech in the name of Narcissus: quot dixit, verba recipit [Metamorphoses, 150, line 384] – he receives back the words he says. The discrepancy is effaced in the discrepancy of translation. In English, Echo could have echoed ‘Fly from me’ and remained echo.37

What Spivak notices here is that there is a grammatical discrepancy between the interrogative and the imperative forms of the verb ‘to fly’ (fugis and fugi). This discrepancy means that if she echoed Narcissus’ words, Echo would transform them and break the narcissistic logic of self-reflection. By resorting to reported speech, Ovid disguises the anomaly. It is precisely as an inadequate, and, for that reason, interceptive, translation that Echo’s replies retain their ethical integrity. If Echo were permitted by Ovid to truly echo, she would coax Narcissus out of self-fixation and self-interest into a form of relation. Moreover, since Echo cannot be fully translated, her desire eludes Narcissus. This is why Spivak claims that ‘Ethics are not a problem of knowledge but a call of relationship (where being without relationship is the limit case). But the problem and the call are in a deconstructive embrace: Narcissus and Echo.’38 Spivak extrapolates this axiom as a way of thinking about the ethical relationship between the postcolonial feminist critic and the subaltern woman: This feminist is culturally divided from the women at the bottom. I have already indicated that what she sees as her face she knows to be an ‘it’ which she loves, and of which she desires the disappearance – the precarious moment of the Ovidian Narcissus – in order not to speak for, speak to, listen to, but to respond to the subaltern sister. In the current conjuncture, national identity debates in the South and ‘liberal’ multiculturalism in the North want her to engage in restricteddefinition narcissism as well. Simply put: love-your-own-face, love-your-ownculture, remain-fixated-in-cultural-difference, simulate what is really pathogenic repression in the form of questioning the European universalist superego.39

Echo’s ‘undoing moment’40 therefore offers an important corrective to the selfimaging tendencies of the postcolonial gender critic and the wider cultural

37

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Echo’, in Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (eds), The Spivak Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 183, italics in the original. Spivak is quoting Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Loeb Classical Library), (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966), vol. 1. 38   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Echo’, p. 190. 39   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Echo’, p. 186. 40   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Echo’, p. 186.

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narcissism that such self-imaging betokens. In disrupting the cultural self-interest of the critic, Echo opens a space for ethical response to subaltern women. The role of translation is crucial in this ethical structure. Translation is a space in which languages formulate relations in conditions of incommensurability – if only because source language (for example, fugis or ‘gikuyu’) and target language (for example, fugi or ‘english’) do not exhibit likenesses. This formulation of relations in conditions of incommensurability, I think, means that translation provides us with a critical metaphor for how subjects with differently positioned claims upon the world may arrive at a consensual idiom in which ethical reciprocity is possible. I would suggest that the later novels, written for translation, place Gikuyu and non-Gikuyu readers alike in an ethical structure, in which analysis must always account for the linguistically unassimilable. This relational space, I would argue, offers a site of fluid agency, in which the mutability of translation might be thought of as enabling unanticipated and transformatory subject positions. In short, since translation formulates relations in conditions of incommensurability, it becomes something like a critical metaphor for a postcolonial reading ethics. How might a performative methodology of this kind offer an ethically responsive gender critique of Ngugi’s later fiction in translation? As we have seen, the ‘gikuyu’ text is irreducible to the critic reading in translation (it can not be colonized) and it is also irreducible to the intentions of the author writing in his indigenous language (it is already colonized). One productive reading, then, would be to equate both ‘english’ and ‘gikuyu’ texts with the Mau Mau prostitute, who works in the between of colonization and insurgency, and who is finally mastered by neither the masculine insurgent (her political investment is outside of phallocentric narratives of resistance) nor by the colonizing zeal of her clientele (she militates against sexual and racial conquest even as she accedes to it). Of course, the equation between the agency of an historical figure (the Mau Mau prostitute) and a textual feature (translation) is always a catachrestical move that superimposes seemingly irreconcilable orders of human endeavour upon one another. Yet, within the logic of my reading of Ngugi’s novels, and within the logic of the novels’ own gender-political moves, such an analogy is not unfounded. Ngugi himself has written that Devil on the Cross, his first novel in Gikuyu, was a ‘fictional reflection’ of the ‘resistance heroine of Kenyan history’, such as ‘Mau Mau women cadres’.41 Moreover, as we have seen throughout this study, Ngugi’s women act as mediatory agents of male historical exchange. In this sense, they perform the role of translation between irreconcilable political orders. Additionally, Evan Mwangi has argued very compellingly that the untranslated Gikuyu allusions in Petals of Blood form a gendered matrix exhibiting an irresolvable or aporetical quality. One of Mwangi’s most brilliant analytical strategies is to read these ‘untranslated moments as metonymic of the frustrated struggles to convert revolution into final liberation. The metonymy of untranslated language is backed by structural and gendered contradictions that draw our attention to the narrative’s demand to be   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained, p. 10.

41

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read against the grain.’42 Mwangi argues further that there is a key contradiction in the taboo references to female sexuality in Petals of Blood. Specifically, he has noticed that when the villagers overhear the partygoers at Chui’s house singing circumcision songs, there is a discrepant censoring of derogatory Gikuyu words denoting the vagina (‘cunt’).43 These words are rendered in English translation: Njuguma nduku A big club. Ya gukura k–ru kabucu For pulling out a jaw of cunt. K–na igoto Cunt with banana leaves.44

The discrepancy of cultural value between ‘cunt’ and ‘k–ru’ is, in my view, very telling. It indicates that something unnameable (‘–’) supplementing female sexuality and sexual organs is readable only in Gikuyu, but not in English. More interestingly, this unnameable supplement suspends the narrative’s nominative power in a manner that is consistent with my argument that Wanja’s career in prostitution and the historical agency of the Mau Mau prostitute both critique the operation of the patronym in Petals of Blood. If we were to read the unnameable supplement historically, we might argue that it could be read as the clandestine bullet garnered by the Mau Mau prostitute’s revolutionary sexuality. This unnameable supplement to female sexuality is a taboo within the Gikuyu revolutionary culture to which it contributes, and it is invisible to the English colonial culture that it aims to destabilize. In short, within Ngugi’s own fiction, we have a precedent that equates the agency of an historical figure (the Mau Mau prostitute) and a textual feature (translation). To put this another way, if the English language translation ‘defiles’ the gendered Gikuyu matrix of the original text, and if translation is always that irresolvable mediatory moment in which two irreconcilable languages are placed in relation, then the analytical conditions within which a reading of Ngugi’s language politics takes place at the very least invoke the historical activities of the Mau Mau prostitute. In translation, a space of revolutionary female agency and articulation brings the irreconcilable positions of Gikuyu author and Anglophone critic into productive crisis. In short, we could construct an extended metaphor – a conceit – and argue that translation is one viable space that Ngugi’s Gikuyu novels may offer to female political articulation and sexual agency. We could suggest that translation is one textual space that remains irreducible to the agendas of either the Gikuyu author 42   Evan Mwangi, ‘The Gendered Politics of Untranslated Language and Aporia in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood’, Research in African Literatures, 35:4 (Winter 2004), pp. 66–7. 43   Evan Mwangi, ‘The Gendered Politics of Untranslated Language’, pp. 68–9. 44   Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, p. 130.

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or the English reader, in just the same way as the Mau Mau prostitute’s agency remains irreducible to both her colonial clientele and to her Mau Mau comrades. We could suggest that translation – the shuttling between two incommensurate languages − might be designated ‘an ethical space for Kenyan female desire and political agency to inhabit’ in Ngugi’s novels. In conclusion, we have moved a long way from the cultural injunction to silence that traditionally accompanies clitoridectomy. We have moved a long way beyond the limiting female subject positions that were historically constructed within the uterine social organization of Kenyan national struggle. We have also moved a long way from a Eurocentric framework of reference in relation to Ngugi’s African literary texts. In the Mau Mau prostitute’s revolutionary sexuality and her undisclosed investments in national struggle, we have found an historical example of a Kenyan female subject position that is both extraordinarily empowered and necessarily covert. If we are attentive to the forms of agency allowed by this relayed or distributed model of revolutionary femininity, we arrive not merely at the critique of sexist literary representations, nor simply the destabilization of Eurocentric literary critical assumptions. We arrive at something that is surely crucial to the progressive, polycentric global culture that Ngugi has done so much to champion – an ethics of postcolonial reading.

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Index

Abdalla, Abdilatif 140–41 Adagala, Kavetsa 121 African independent churches 34, 38, 40, 88–9 Allen, Gay Wilson 11, 130 Althusser, Louis 37–9 Anderson, Benedict 54, 85 Arnold, Guy 42, 48 Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen 103, 195 Asselineau, Roger 130 Ba, Mariam 178 Barnett, Donald, and Njama, Karari 61–2, 65–6, 68–72, 94, 105, 171 Barthes, Roland 160 Benson, T. G. 123 Berman, Bruce, and Lonsdale, John 64 Bible, The Holy 7, 23, 88, 118–19, 132, 182 Biersteker, Ann 176 Blake, William 7, 12, 132–5, 137 Bloom, Harold 13 Boehmer, Elleke 9, 15, 30–31, 122, 168–9, 174–5 Brontë, Charlotte 179 Bunn, David 19 Carter, Steven R. 120, 141 Ceniza, Sherry 131 Cervo, Nathan 134 Chesaina, Jane C. 20, 34 Christianity 34–5, 38–40, 88, 119, 136–7 Cixous, Hélène, and Clément, Catherine 13, 29, 93, 121, 147–8 Clark, John Pepper 136–7 clitoridectomy (‘circumcision’) 1–3, 5, 10, 11–12, 22, 25, 31–59, 79, 82, 88, 96–7, 101, 105, 112, 123–8, 141–2, 159, 171, 175–6, 180–81, 200 Clough, Marshall 65

Conrad, Joseph 65, 92 Cook, David and Okenimpke, Michael 22, 30, 89 Cowie, Elizabeth 42 Currey, James 64 Curtis, Lisa 139 Dangarembga, Tsitsi 178 Derrida, Jacques 111, 130, 173 deconstruction 10, 111, 173 Dickens, Charles 179 Dunton, Chris 39 Edgerton, Robert 62–4, 67, 70, 72 Emecheta, Buchi 178 ethics of postcolonial reading 194–201 Evans, Jennifer 30 Fanon, Frantz 16 feminism 4, 8–9, 30–31, 33, 58, 122, 173–4, 179, 182, 188, 194, 197–8 Freud, Sigmund 40, 98, 120–21, 133, 147 Gachathi, F. N. 94 Gacukia, Eddah 20, 42 Gellner Ernest 7, 101 Gicaru, Muga 148–9 Gikandi, Simon 22, 25, 55, 57, 107, 160, 195 Glenn, Ian 5, 15, 28, 46–9 Graham, Billy 136–7 Greenfield, Kathleen 110 Gugelberger, Georg M. 119 Gurnah, Abdulrazak 17–18 Harasym, Sarah 62 Hentoff, Nat 137 Hickey, Dennis 38 HIV/AIDS 181–2 Holloway, Emory 11

212

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

Itote, Waruhiu (General China) 67–72, 114 Kanogo, Tabitha 114 karing’a independent schools 34, 38, 40 Kariuki, J. M. 72 Kennedy, J. Gerald 132 Kenyatta, Jomo 1–3, 5, 10, 12, 13, 17–19, 23, 27, 33–6, 39, 43, 48–50, 54, 58, 70, 105, 121, 125–6, 171, 187 Keynes, Geoffrey 133–4 Kihiko, Reuben 87–8 Killam, Douglas G. 19 Kimathi, Dedan 23, 87–8, 108, 122, 126, 138, 142, 145–8, 151–5, 157, 172 Kouba, Leonard and Muasher, Judith 58 Lacan, Jacques 161 La Magna, Giovanna 4 Lamming, George 117–19, 137 Lengila, Seita 1 Levin, Tobe 58 Likimani, Muthoni 115 Lovesey, Oliver 185 Lugard, Lord Frederick John Dealty 48 Maina wa Kinyatti 153–4, 187 Makeri, Wangu 91, 95 Maloba, Wunyabari O. 63–6, 71–2, 114 Marxism 7, 13–14, 86–7, 109, 126, 138, 191 Maughan-Brown, David 6, 22, 29, 61, 85–7, 89, 93, 109–10 Mau Mau (Kenya Land and Freedom Army) 6–10, 11, 20, 22, 22–4, 28–9, 36, 38, 53–6, 59–90, 92, 95, 98–106, 108–15, 122, 134, 136, 138, 140, 145–7, 149, 152–4, 158–60, 170–73, 175–7, 199–201 colonial military strategy 62–6 colonial mythologies 66–7, 74 disguises 67–8 etymologies 61–2 military successes 67 oath 61, 63, 67, 71, 94, 114, 126–7, 136, 159 tactics 68–70 torture 62, 64–6, 89, 94 women 70–73 Mazrui, Al Amin 187

Meyer, Herta 30, 34, 121, 134, 138–9, 141, 143–4, 174 Murumbi, Joseph 140 Musunge, Kamawe 110 Mutwa, Credo 62 Mwangi, Evan 199–200 Naipaul, V. S. 7, 117, 135–7, 140–41 Nama, Charles 97–8, 105 nationalism 1–8, 13, 15, 18–19, 21, 31, 33–4, 37–8, 40, 44–5, 48–9, 52, 56–7, 62, 71, 86, 88–9, 92, 94, 97, 101–2, 105, 107, 112, 114, 117, 129, 142, 145, 148, 166, 171, 174 Nduru, Nyama (Paul Mahehu) 67 Ngugi wa Thiong’o (James Ngugi) biography Christianity 29, 41, 87–9, 97, 101 circumcision 41 education 23–4, 41, 83–4, 117, 197 imprisonment 159–60, 185, 187, 188 language politics 150–51, 158, 191–201 Marxism 86–7, 191–2 Mau Mau 22–3, 89 orature 99, 102–8, 125, 127, 148–9, 154–6, 159–63, 177–8 works The Black Hermit 50–52 Barrel of a Pen 154, 163, 184–5, 187 Decolonising the Mind 84, 162, 193–4, 196 Detained 90, 152, 154–5, 159–60, 187, 199 Devil on the Cross 8, 10, 82, 106, 115, 125, 143, 145, 150, 151, 159–78, 181, 191, 194–6, 199 A Grain of Wheat 6–7, 22, 54, 56–9, 76, 81, 84, 85–115, 117, 145, 150, 162, 175, 179, 180, 191 Homecoming 14, 29, 51–2, 88, 108–9, 118–19, 136 Matigari 8, 10, 54, 115, 125, 145, 150, 151, 164, 172, 176–8, 184, 191, 194–6

Index

213

Moving the Centre 12, 140, 191–4, 197 Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus 157–8 Njamba Nene’s Pistol 158–9, 173 Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams 10, 155, 185–7 Petals of Blood 7–8, 56, 82, 84, 115, 117–50, 151, 153, 177, 180, 184, 188, 199–200 The River Between 5–6, 14, 33–53, 56–8, 81, 101, 180 Secret Lives 6, 59, 73–84 This Time Tomorrow 52–6 Weep Not, Child 5, 10, 11–31, 53–4, 56, 81, 92, 163 Wizard of the Crow 4, 8–10, 58, 150, 151, 177–89, 194 (with Micere Githae Mugo) The Trial of Dedan Kimathi 151–5, 157 (with Ngugi wa Mirii) I Will Marry When I Want 151, 155–7 Njama, Mbugua 48 Njoroge, J. K. 149 Nwankwo, Chimalum 4 Nyanjiru, Mary 95–6

Thomas, Lynn M. 36 Throup, David W. 66–7, 69 Thuku, Harry 155 Tournier, Michel 105 translation 2, 9, 17, 77, 103, 115, 120, 138–9, 160, 164, 174, 183, 188–201

Ogude, James 42 Okpewho, Isidore 99, 162 Ovid 197–9

van der Vlies, Andrew 177 Vaughan, Michael 87, 89–90, 92, 104, 108–9

p’Bitek, Okot 137, 141 Perera, S. W. 113 performative reading 111–15, 146–50, 197–201 Petersen, Kirsten Holst 97 Poe, Edgar Allan 131–3, 137 Poole, Peter Richard Harold 110 Presley, Cora Ann 48, 71–2 prostitution 4, 6–10, 17, 64, 71–2, 82–3, 95, 113–15, 121–3, 128–9, 131, 134, 141, 143, 145–9, 154, 156, 165, 168, 172, 173, 175–7, 179, 196, 199–201

Waiyaki 48–9, 70 Walcott, Derek 7, 117, 128, 130, 135, 137 Wamweya, Joram 68 Wanjiru 153 Wanyoike, Mary W. 56 Welsh, Stephanie 1 White, Josh 137 White, Luise 146, 153 Whitman, Walt 7, 11–12, 130–31, 137 Williams, Patrick 14, 16, 39, 54, 101, 102, 174 Wilson, Christopher 66, 71 Wurmbrand, Richard 136–7

rape 54, 56, 96, 109–11, 144–5, 166, 170–71, 183

Yeats, W. B. 7, 119, 137

Rawcliffe, D. H. 88 Reynolds, David S. 131 Robson, Clifford 21 Roos, Bonnie 147 Rosberg, Carl, and Nottingham, John 34–5 Rushdie, Salman 179–80 Sicherman, Carol 19, 22–4, 29, 35, 41, 48–9, 52, 62, 87, 89, 102–3, 105, 110, 125–7, 138–40, 142, 144, 148, 162–4, 171, 196 Sigurjonsdottir, Sigurbjorg 11 Simpson, Michael 133 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 3, 33, 37, 40, 43–4, 62, 93, 98, 109, 111–12, 130, 147–8, 173, 184, 191, 195, 197–8 Stoneham, C. T. 62–3, 66, Stratton, Florence 9, 106, 142, 174