NICK MDIKA TEMBO ——————— 

Subversion and the Carnivalesque Images of Resistance in Ngg wa Thiong’o’s

A BSTRACT The carnivalesque as a guiding concept provides a useful approach to technique and thematic concerns in the African novel, as some contemporary African novelists have integrated elements of resistance to some form of hegemonic dis/order in their novels. What this essay claims is that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow deploys the carnivalesque as an ideology and weapon of resistance, where the popular voice of the marketplace wo/man is employed to subvert instituted authority. The essay interrogates globalization and Structural Adjustment Programmes, arguing that they are re-invented ideologies of colonization for the twenty-first century. To examine elements of resistance in this novel is thus to examine the ways, both salient and silent, in which the postcolony can combat monstrous postcolonial African régimes and the largely negative impact of globalization on Africa.

Introduction

I thought they were going to reform society and rule justly, and so I watched their proceedings with deep interest. I found that they made the other regime look like a golden age.1

GŨGĨ WA THIONG’O is one of the most important of Africa’s writers, and certainly the foremost voice of East . N From Weep Not, Child, , and to , , Matigari, and Wizard of the Crow, he has consistently used the medium of prose fiction and other artistic devices to critique, lampoon, plead, lament, threaten, and paint a picture of the disaster

1 Plato, in Desmond Lee, “Introduction” to Plato, The Republic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982): 14.

© Spheres Public and Private: Western Genres in African Literature, ed. Gordon Collier (Matatu 39; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2011). 338 NICK MDIKA TEMBO  that lies in wait for Africa for being the unquestioning recipient of Western cultural forms and products. In Wizard of the Crow, Ngũgĩ is deeply moved by the culture of fear that has seen many an African country slide back into autocracy marked by col- lapsing public services. Ngũgĩ draws on his own experience of corruption in (depicted in Petals of Blood, 1977) and of being imprisoned by Daniel Arap Moi’s government (leading to his autobiographical description in De- tained, 1981) to articulate the relationship between the leader(s) and the led and how cheap flattery and blind trust can lead to corrupt leadership and gross violation of human rights. In Wizard of the Crow, Ngũgĩ presents a detailed account of the ‘apemanship’ that informs the Free Republic of Aburĩria, a fictitious totalitarian régime led by a man known only as the Ruler. It is a country ravaged by corruption, stagnating economy, chronic ‘apemanship’, and an array of social problems including “crooked roads, robberies, runaway viruses of death, hospitals without medicine, rampant unemployment without relief, daily insecurity, [and] epidemic alcoholism. [...] Yes, an Aburĩria whose leaders had murdered hope.”2 Ngũgĩ’s disenchantment with the leadership in postcolonial Africa informs his creative life. By the time A Grain of Wheat (1967) was published, for ex- ample, he was already becoming more and more disillusioned with postcolo- nial African leadership in general and the Kenyan authorities in particular.3 His disillusionment gathered momentum later in what Cook and Okenimkpe call the third phase of his philosophy of life, which was “marked by a cor- rosive disillusionment with the character of social forces in independent Afri- ca, particularly Kenya, and a bitter revulsion against the emerging African élite and middle class”4 Because of this, the writer had to shift his emphasis

2 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow (London: Harvill Secker, 2006): 586. Further page references are in the main text. 3 This period has gone down in the history of African writing as the decade of dis- enchantment. It is during this period that Africa saw the publication of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, a “bilious indictment” of the Ghanaian – and, by paradigmatic extension, African – state in which Armah bluntly announces that there are “No Saviours” in post-independent Africa. Instead, we only have “the hungry and the fed. Deceivers all.” See Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968; Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 1988): 90. 4 David Cook & Michael Okenimkpe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o: An Exploration of His Writings (1983; London: Heinemann Educational, 2nd ed. 1997): 15.