Ravinder Kumar Gill
Post-colonial Preoccupations in Ngugi’s Narrative: A Study of Petals of Blood and Matigari
“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content . By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it ...”(Fanon, 169)
Ella Shohat in her crisp interrogation of the concept describes Post –colonialism as "a designation for critical discourses which thematize issues emerging from colonial relations and their aftermath, covering a long historical span…”(328)This also covers, pointedly the post-independence, neo-colonial period. Thus ‘Post-colonial’ implies a movement as well as movement beyond a specific point in history that of colonialism and third world nationalist struggles. The colonial and neo-colonial experiences and the manner in which the aftermath interacts with globalization illuminate the different postcolonial formation in various parts of the world system at the present times. Modern African fiction which is post colonial in nature emerged out of the contact which was both “historical” and “experiential” in dimension. The purpose of this literature is the decolonization of African mind which resists the role of Western Cultural hegemony in determining African states of consciousness. Decolonization is the search or research for positive African ideas, perspectives, techniques and values. That enterprise tautologically is centered on Africa. It therefore involves a parallel process of the Re-Africanization, or a discursive formulation wherein the artist, a conscious act, is building or reconstructing an identity he was hitherto denied or deprived of.
Post-colonialism was structured by the neo-colonial experience. The term neo-colonialism is generally used to describe the high degree of economic and technological influence over a former colony’s economic affairs and economic policy by foreign business interests. In the context of the cultural dynamics of the neo- colonial situation, it also suggests the pre-dominance of the culture and values of the former colonial powers over the base culture. Ngugi defines new imperialism as “the rule of consolidated finance capital… with economic, political, cultural and psychological consequences for the people” (Decolonizing the Mind, 46)and functions as an agent of continued de-Africanization or the subversion of the African culture.
Ngugi’s novels have been perceived largely as discourses on cultural decolonization, they involve the quest for a new socio – political order. His narratives are steeped in Kenya’s historical landscape and at times border close to direct allusion on actual historical personages and events . To Ngugi , the narrative is a tool for shaping , ordering , reinterpreting and regaining the lost signifiers of historical identities . There are four basic thematic strands which tend to characterize Ngugi’s recreation of Kenyan history. His works are marked by the portrayal of a peaceful African past of Pre- colonial period, the injustices of colonialism, a portrayal of the glorious struggle for Uhuru {freedom}, the betrayal and breaches of the common people in the Post-colonial period and the resilience of the people against the neo- colonial consumerisms .
PETALS OF BLOOD: A NEO – COLONIAL REALITY
Petals of Blood , the African Epic , reconstruct a nation ‘s history with all its woes and wounds from the pre- colonial faithfulness to the post –colonial betrayals . Here , Ngugi constructs a chronicle of exploitation and of struggles for liberation , notably the resistance against imposition of British rule and the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950’s. Kenya of Petals of Blood is a land of greed and corruption with a handful turncoat who ruthlessly impose their will on the many to exploit them. Petals appear as the symbol of purity, of inspiration, and of purification; the man {comprador bourgeoisie} who deflowers a virgin by force flowers himself in blood.
Petals of Blood deals in the main with neo-colonialism in all its manifestations: oppression, exploitation, social abuse and injustice and thus “….it probes the history of the heroic struggles of the people of Kenya, from pre colonial times to the present day, within a comprehensive cultural perspective which embraces the political, religious, economic and social life of Kenya”.(Pandurang, 132)Ilmorog, the locale of the novel is transformed into a proto-capitalist society with all the attendant problems of prostitution, social inequalities, misery, uncertainty and inadequate housing. Ngugi hopes that out of Petals of Blood, Kenyans (Africans) might gather ‘petals of revolutionary love’. In the world of Petals of Blood nothing is free and the slogan ‘eat or be eaten’ is commonplace.
The protagonists of the novel are the losers under the new order : Munira , dismissed in colonial days from an elite boarding school for his involvement in a strike against the authoritarian British Headmaster ; Karega , dismissed from the very school for the same reason ; Wanja , whose brilliant studies were aborted when she became pregnant by the industrialist who had seduced her ; Abdullah , who lost a leg in the Mau Mau revolt only to find others reaping the fruits of Independence. Petals represents Ngugi’s anti – imperialist consciousness, which is a part of his dialectical design. New order brings only hunger, pauperization and violence disguised as capitalist development. Ngugi remarks:
“Imperialism can never develop a country or a people. This was what I was trying to show in Petals of Blood; that imperialism can never develop us, Kenyans.”(Writers in Politics, 37)
Any account that neglects the detail and texture of Petals of Blood risks missing crucial features of what makes his work important. What, to a Kenyan reader, may be close to a roman à clef and be scathingly direct (or, inversely, seem specifically wrong or simplistic) may appear quite differently to the foreign reader. When a writer has been gaoled, presumably because of his writing (though this was not the official reason given) it may seem perverse and even ungenerous to insist precisely on trying to establish the nature of the commitment in his work and the form it takes, to indicate the extent to which a novel uses literary and formal devices to shape (which of course is the same thing as distorting) history and our sense of it. But if the literary critic is not able to elucidate the difficulties and possibilities of the mode of discourse with which he is dealing – and thus its interest – he can only abandon the novel to the social historian as so much picturesque but unreliable data the latter needs somehow to verify.
Here my attention will go to an analysis of the role and portrayal of the central characters Karega and Munira, their relation to the problematic heroes (to invoke Lukacs) of the earlier novels; my argument will be that Ngugi through these heroes is indicating and trying to solve the dilemmas of the group to which he belongs, the African intellectual elite in Kenya. This novel comes after a gap of some ten years in Ngugi’s novel-writing, and though in some ways a highly schematic and symbolic rather than realistic novel, it deals with a fuller range of economic and historic analysis than the earlier works. Whether it is in naming the foreign countries and interests influencing Kenyan politics, analyzing the changing class position of the Kenyan bourgeoisie (a dependent comprador group becoming a national bourgeoisie through the use of state-controlled and financed economic agencies), revealing the political motives behind renewed oathing ceremonies (presumably based on what happened after the Mboya and Kariuki murders), subjecting the official versions of Kenyan progress and prosperity to a scathing satire, or presenting the forgotten victims of the drought, there is a density and specificity that shows that Ngugi has done his home-work .
These realistic and even naturalistic aspects of the novel do not, however, make it a realist or naturalist novel. The influence of Ousmane, suggested in the novel itself, is shown by incidents rather than a similar inwardness with union work or the growth of group consciousness. As in his earlier novels, the centre of Ngugi’s thematic concern and his schematic structure is the role of the educated elite, here represented especially by Chui, Munira, Karega, and Joseph, all of whom go (at various times) to Siriana Secondary School. This old-boy tie (statistically or ‘realistically’ improbable, but structurally indispensable) allows Ngugi to make a series of comparisons between the characters as individuals, and also between them as representative members of the intellectual elite making significantly different political choices.
What Ngugi does, especially in his portrayal of Munira and Karega, is to rework his previous concerns with the role and function of the educated minority into a set of divisions. Karega, like Njoroge in Weep Not, Child, is the poor bright boy attracted to the daughter of the wealthy prominent pro-British Christian farmer, whose family intervenes fatally. Once again he has a brother in the Mau-Mau. Munira, the son of the prominent farmer, is the victim, as Njoroge and Waiyaki in The River Between were, of the education he has received and his sense of his own potential and duty. His reason for going to Ilmorog, the desolated. drought-stricken village is part duty, part escape. He is referred to as being in a twilight state – the similarity to Mugo, the central figure of A Grain of Wheat, who escapes from political reality and engagement into a twilight world of religious reverie is clear. His religious concern is to be developed much more fully than Mugo’s till, finally, prey to revivalist religious fantasy, he tries to murder Karega by burning the hut in which, in fact, the directors of the brewery are meeting (I use the word fantasy with some hesitation, but there seems to be nothing more than simple irony in the fact that Munira becomes an instrument of justice and vengeance. The symbolic significance, in other words, underlies the text, rather than being made manifest in it). As befits the would-be Marxist analysis, even religious belief is not autonomous and independent, but comes as part of the schematic opposition – it is organized by Americans who make money from the collections while providing the workers with an alternative to trade-union and political activity.
Karega, by contrast, after an intellectual Odyssey that takes him from idealisation of a previous generation, through Black Consciousness and Negritude, and liberal legally-based reformism, ends with a Marxist understanding of history and class struggle, and a commitment to trade-union organization. At the end of the novel he is gaoled, unjustly accused of the murder, and imprisoned because of his political activity even when his innocence is clear, but the general strike he has been trying to organize springs up miraculously (even the unemployed are going to take part).
In spite of the systematic differences between Munira and Karega, they end as sacrifices and victims. Only Joseph, the totally-committed younger generation militant, seems to escape this sacrificial pattern. The moment of positive communion Munira and Karega share while drinking the Theng’eta after the first harvest is degraded, like the drink itself, in the new commercial Ilmorog. Both stay out of the songs separated from the society around them, in spite of certain group efforts such as the march on the city. Ngugi’s recourse, in the case of Karega, is to take this detachment to be the necessary quality of the revolutionary leader – the militant must be able to analyze piercingly, to reconcile different workers’ interests by making them aware of themselves as a dispossessed proletariat with a common fate rather than as members of ethnic groups. We may seem far removed from the idealistic young figures of reconciling sacrifice in the earlier novels, or from the sacrifice of a Mugo that saves him and those round him from the past, but there are important structural links between these earlier figures, isolated, yet sacrifices for unity, and the isolated revolutionary sacrificing himself for class unity, as there are between the earlier figures and the isolated deranged mystic who believes he is saving the community.
Let us conclude briefly Petals of Blood and the problems it poses for an understanding of Ngugi’s development. The various possible paths for the elite are clear in the comparison of Chui with Karega, Munira, and Joseph, and this marks the fragmentation of the ideal of the intellectual’s clear-cut, central role. Yet, in spite of this, and of the analysis of the country in class and not nationalist or ethnic terms (an important change in the content of Ngugi’s thought), the central structural role of the elite persists. Karega continues to be a mediating figure and to draw his power and unhappiness from that; he acts individually, idealistically, and representatively. The socialist or communist alternative to capitalism here offers the intellectual a way back to importance. Even Munira, though presented as having failed totally in his emotional and political commitments, parodies the same structure in his final actions.
Matigari: A Journey from Unfreedom to Freedom
In Matigari , Ngugi’s most ideologically committed novel , we meet a hero who has emerged from the bush , where he fought for his unnamed country’s independence , to find a nation that is not yet Uhuru . The house which he built and which allegedly belongs to him is legally occupied by John Boy Junior, the son of settler William’s servant. The struggle for the second liberation is concretized in Matigari’s efforts to repossess “his” house. It also takes the philosophical form of the search for truth and justice in this land in which “the tailor wears rags , the tiller eats wild berries , the builder begs for shelter.” (99)
Ngugi wa Thiong'o's book Matigari can be considered a definitive postcolonial novel, as it sets a traditional Gikuyu folktale in the context of an unnamed contemporary African country. Ngugi liberally blends his re-telling of that tale with Western cultural and religious ideas. Most notably, he integrates many stories from the Bible, particularly those dealing with the life of Christ, into his version of this traditional African narrative. Throughout Matigari, Ngugi employs a Marxist, yet distinctly African, perspective, to critique and expose both the overt and sub textual sociopolitical structures that exist in many postcolonial African states. As he meticulously and ironically exposes the true nature of these structures, as well as the intuitions and realms of discourse that perpetuate them, he chips away at their psychosocial power over African society. The Western reader stands accused in his or her own silent complicity with Western (post)imperial activities and attitudes.
In analyzing Matigari, it is tempting to try to locate the novel's autobiographical, nonfictional strains and to conclude that Ngugi's mythical country is a thinly disguised rendition of the author's homeland, Kenya. This assumption is only natural, considering the author-activist's own experiences, which have included imprisonment at the hands of a repressive Kenyan regime. However, such reductive historicizing encourages the reader to underestimate Ngugi's project in writing Matigari. He is purposely vague in establishing both the temporal and spatial settings of his novel; he refuses to define where and when his story takes place, insisting in a prefatory song:
This story is imaginary.
The actions are imaginary.
The characters are imaginary.
The country is imaginary--it has no name even.
Reader/listener: may the story take place in the country of your choice! (ix)
If readers disregard that advice, then they may underestimate and, consequently, miss the book's broader political implications. Matigari is not the story of one isolated country but a schematized documentation of the entire postcolonial experience. In his novel, Ngugi recounts the way in which Western institutions and codes supplant those that are native to Africa in the service of both the continent's former colonizers and their newly arisen African imitators. In that regard, Matigari can be viewed as an abstract philosophical work with both descriptive and prescriptive elements.
The final line of Ngugi's preface “may the story take place in the country of your choice,” (ix} establishes the novelist's narrative double-consciousness. On its surface, the statement appears merely to serve as a framing device to identify and establish the novel's romantic, quasi-allegorical nature. Although the son fulfills that function, it, also demonstrates Ngugi's self-consciousness about the divided nature of his audience. That awareness results in the bi-vocal narrative stance that Ngugi adopts throughout Matigari. From the perspective of his Western readership, Ngugi's apparent blessing functions as an oblique accusation. It unhappily recognizes that a sociopolitical apparatus like the one portrayed in Matigari may be installed in any third world nation that is targeted by the power brokers of the West. Conversely, from an African perspective the line represents a genuine blessing. Not only does it anticipate the novel's revolutionary conclusion, but it stands as a rallying cry for the "wretched of the earth" to follow Matigari's lead in rebelling--both politically and psychologically--against post-colonial domination.
Here , Ngugi explores the various ways in which a post-colonial oligarchy may control and exploit a formerly colonized people. In fact, the book reads like a veritable how-to manual for the installation and maintenance of a post-colonial military dictatorship. The book begins as Ngugi's hero, Matigari ma Njiruungi, returns from what has apparently been an extended guerilla war. After many years of fighting, he has vanquished his longtime foes, Settler Howard Williams and his retainer, John Boy Sr. It quickly becomes obvious that Matigari is an allegorical figure who is meant to embody the spirit of all African freedom fighters. That metonymy is reinforced by many of the character's statements about his personal history, which has been defined entirely by opposition to colonial rule. For example, "I did not begin yesterday ... Just consider, I was there at the time of the Portuguese, and at the time of the Arabs, and at the time of the British--"(45). In fact, the name "Matigari" in Gikuyu literally means "the patriots [plural] who survived the bullets." Likewise, all of the central characters of Matigari are allegorical figures representing the primary social and political forces in the postcolonial power field. The various Settlers Williams are intended to represent all of Africa's former and current foreign exploiters, whereas the John Boys represent those Africans who have collaborated with and profited from Africa's colonization throughout the continent's history. Matigari's apparent defeat of his archenemies firmly grounds Ngugi's tale in the realm of the recently liberated postcolonial world. That tentative, idealized placement is as close as Ngugi comes to articulating a specific setting for his novel. I have already noted that the book is more about a sociopolitical condition than a specific time or place.
In a way, the novelist tries to return ‘Home’ through ‘Matigari’ who has resolved to bring home all his peoples. (By Home Ngugi symbolizes a return to traditional and original native roots and culture of Pre- Colonial Kenya) He is a wonderful inspiration for the people of Kenya to fight back against the neo-colonial agents like Boy and Williams. His presence fills the Kenyans with an air of liberty and they are ready to break the shackles of slavery and exploitation. Matigari wants to bring all his peoples to the real home where they will live to the full with all freedom and affluence. Matigari researching for his family is shocked to discover that the house which he had built and which had been usurped by Settler Williams is now in the illegal possession of his son John Boy Junior who runs a flourishing business in collaboration with Robert Williams. Robert Williams, the son of Settler represents the neo-colonial force, which had come back through the back door in independent Kenya in the name of economic cooperation. While John Boy Junior, represents the Comprador bourgeois forces from within Kenya, which had usurped political power and were openly collaborating with imperialist and neo-colonial forces. There is a waking call to all the sufferers to unite and to root out all what is not Home and to destroy whatever hinders the building of the true home.
Ngugi’s portrayal of Guthera’s hatred of policeman in Matigari traces the genesis of women’s subjugation and exploitation in the independent Kenya. Women are perceived merely as objects and sexual beings. “You see, my entire life has been dominated by men, be they our Father in heaven, my Father on earth, the Priest or all the men who have brought my body and turned me into their mattress”. (140) By refusing to collaborate, Guthera resists the hegemonic domination of an exploitative society and offers an example to others who must do the same. Guthera is also instrumental in continuing the participation of women in colonial revolt.
Ngugi has a vision of a system in the postcolonial world where there will be no class , no corruption and no comprador cobras. He signifies his commitment to his home and its human-beings. The black masks with white souls are to be scrutinized and dealt them with accordingly. Thus Ngugi dreams for an order sans disorder and discord , corruption and exploitation , disparity and disillusionment and subjugation and stratification . The coming together of the peasants and the workers in a united and collective manner against their exploitation and injustices will liberate them from the present state of bondage and life of misery and penury . Time has come for the reaper and tiller , and the worker and laborers to refuse to be “like the cooking pot whose sole purpose is to cook and never eat .”(153)
Notes and References
Fanon, Frantz The Wretched of the Earth, Trans, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, London: Heinemann, 1979
…………. Decolonizing the Mind, London: James Currey, 1986
…………Writers in Politics, London, Heinanmaan, 1981
………….Matigari, London: Heinemann, 1989
Pandurang, Mala, Post – colonial African Fiction, Delhi: Pencraft International, 1997
Shohat, Ella ‘Notes on the Post-Colonial’