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Is Ngugi Wa Thiongo a Marxist Stone-Throwing Ruffian? a Look at Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross

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Is Ngugi Wa Thiongo a Marxist Stone-Throwing Ruffian? a Look at Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross Volume 5 Issue 1 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND June 2018 CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 Is Ngugi Wa Thiongo a Marxist Stone-throwing Ruffian? A Look at Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross Victor N. Gomia Department of English and Foreign Languages Delaware State University, USA This paper seeks to show that Ngugi Wa Thiongo is committed to the struggle against Neo- colonialism and imperialism in Devil on the Cross and Petals of Blood. It attempts to answer the question whether his commitment is that of an enthusiastic anti-establishment figure or that of a Moses in an attempt to lead his people out of bondage. We look at the selected texts as invitations for the emerging working class languishing under the weight of misery to act. We go further to argue that Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s crusade against the exploitation of Africa and Africans is more suggestive of a prophet than that of a lazy and reckless proletariat prone to arson as suggested by some Eurocentric critics. Frontline African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s disdain for the forces of capitalism is easily gleaned in all of his works. His portrayal and disdain of the havoc colonialism meted on African people is seldom silent even from the titles of his essays over the years: Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics (1972), Writers in Politics: Essays (1981), Education for a National Culture (1981), Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (1983), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), Writing against Neo-Colonialism (1986), Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom (1993), Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: The Performance of Literature and Power in Post-Colonial Africa (1996). His visceral angst on the ravages of the monster of capitalism spurts out at every turn in these works. His denunciation of market economy is evident in many of his artistic works, including especially the acclaimed Petals of Blood (1977) and Devil on the Cross (1982). Petals of Blood Petals of Blood, first published in 1977, is set in immediate post-independence Kenya. The narrative centers around Munira, Abdulla, Wanja, and Karega who are connected by their common affinity to Mau Mau uprising. They each retreat from town to the village of Ilmorog but have to deal with an emerging new world reality evidenced in the emergence of their ascetic enclave into a sophisticated city. The promise of a new nation with plenty for its citizens is quickly dashed against the wall as it has brought in a new cream of indigenes with autocratic sensibilities at the helm of the newly independent Kenya. There is a feeling that there hasn’t been change of any sort with the ousting of the colonial establishment. There seems to be need for http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 90 Volume 5 Issue 1 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND June 2018 CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 fresher struggles for a new social order, and this struggle is signalled at the openings of the story when we learn of the news of the death of three high-ranking Kenyans by fire. A description of the four main characters: Munira, Karega, Wanja, and Abdulla follows with a flashback to Munira’s persevering teaching days at Ilmorog along with his friendship with Abdullah, a shop owner. To Ilmorog comes Wanja who recently severed a brief relationship with Munira. A drought has rendered an already hurting local economy in the village worse. In their quest for relief from the national government and inspired by Karega, the villagers undertake the tedious task of traveling to the capital city where they meet their representative, Nderi wa Riera. Riera is incapable of addressing their concerns. Mother Nature would be the panacea to the suffering of the people in the coming of rains. The heavy rains have brought back promise and hope. Then national government begins a Trans- Africa road construction project that would cut through the Illmorog. This project connects the village to the rest of the country thereby opening the platform for change that is epitomized in the name New Ilmorog. New Ilmorog is a fast-emerging cosmopolitan setting where farmers mortgage parts of their land and take loans from banks for various projects. The novel is brought to a dramatic end when Wanja in an attempt to sever links with her male exploiters invites them to her brothel. Munira, seeing Karega arrive, pours petrol on the brothel, sets it on fire and retreats to watch it reduced to cinders. The other invited men die in the fire. Munira is found guilty of arson; the corrupt local MP is gunned down in his car in Nairobi. While in the interstices of the text such thematic concerns as love, community service, education, politics, the encroachments of urbanity on rural life, the Mau Mau and law and justice can be read, the work really explores the theme of change with capitalism at the center and its resultant effect on everyday people. The brothel and brewery are its offshoots and its proponents; the main characters represent its tenets. Nderi wa Riera, the MP from Ilmorog, who lives away from his political constituency. A demagogue, he does not listen to the appeals of the villagers when they meet him. His interest in Ilmorog is its business potential and what he can get out of it for his personal wealth, not for the people he represents. With Kimeria and Chui, he is a director of the widely successful Theng'eta Breweries. His ally, Kimeria, is amoral and ruthless in his social life and his business. He is part of the emergent middle class in postcolonial Kenya Frantz anon describes as an ‘underdeveloped bourgeoisie’. It is not difficult to see the excesses of this class: when the villagers come to town to meet their MP with their plight, Kimeria holds Wanja hostage and rapes her. Chui is the schoolboy who attends the prestigious, previously European Siriana School, leading a revolt there. Yet when he comes as administrator of the school, his tyrannical acts exceed those of the colonial masters. He too gets into business and clicks in with the wolfishness of both Kimeria and Nderi wa Riera. Almost all the other characters can be lined as victims of capitalism, collaborators with capitalism or small time capitalists. Petals of Blood exposes the effect of capitalism on both everyday people and those in charge in an emerging postcolonial African country. Characters, particularly the elite are seen in the grips of capitalist tenets. As Ngunjiri (25 November 2007) puts it, they are controlled by the 'faceless http://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/index Page 91 Volume 5 Issue 1 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND June 2018 CULTURAL STUDIES ISSN 2356-5926 system of capitalism’. The proletariat loses out to capitalist ploys, exploited either physically or morally by those in the lead. As the village quickly develops into a town, the farmers are constrained to secure their properties and stake them on loans guaranteed by the success of their harvest. At the level of the banks still being controlled by the elite, an unprepared masses dabble into a new economic order that is beyond their comprehension. They are invited to take loans but hardly told how high the interest rates are. Even at the level of their own input on the farms, a good harvest is nothing to celebrate because the banks of the elite have the mortgage of a good harvest in their keep. The whole process then is mounted for the eternal growth of those in power and the continuous suppression of the already downtrodden peasants. Considered as cogs in the wheel of the bourgeoisie, the peasants must never rise beyond their status. They are the proletariat and must not be given access to grow successful businesses. It is in this light that the Thang'eta which Nyakinyua brews at the celebration of the rains is soon being sold. But when it becomes popular, it has to be seized and raised to a corporate status. Wanja who introduces the drink to Abdulla's bar is soon beaten out by big capitalists who force her to stop the business. Signs of a new reality are epitomized in the new cities on the landscape. Nairobi hosts the unconscionable likes of Kimeria and Nderi wa Riera the MP. The tentacles of capitalism creep in to the villages as soon as the light of progress glints in. Modernity becomes synonymous with capitalists trends as exemplified in the conversion to town of the village of Ilmorog which does not only change in terms of the infrastructure but also in terms of the people’s taste. The crippling effect of this modernity-cum-capitalism is captured in Munira’s reflection that 'it was New Kenya. It was New Ilmorog. Nothing was free.' (p. 189) As a teacher, Munirira embodies the capitalist perspective of education when he sidelines the teaching of Africanness, a concept linked to profound personhood and morality. He prefers the teaching of ‘fact’, a concept reminiscent of Dickensian Thomas Gradgrind. After educating himself, Karega's loses his initial faith that education could be a tool of freedom. The failure of the teachers in the novel highlights the fact that utilitarian education is self-destructive just as the capitalist trend is an implosion with a potential to self-destruct. The flashback to the past to the annexation of Kenya by Britain in 1896 gives a historical stretch within which to see the development of capitalism. The annexation itself was a grab spree which while selling the concept of educating the African savages was plainly a hunt for wild beef for the white belly, a pure earth gutter interest in the colonizer’s daily bread.
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