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Achebe and Ngugi: Literature of Decolonization

Research Paper

By

Lutfi Hamadi

Submitted to

The 22nd International Conference on Literature hosted by: Yogyakarta

State University and HISKI -- Indonesia
The Role of Literature in Enhancing Humanity and National Identity

November, 2012
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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on postcolonial literature in European ex-colonies
by comparing and contrasting two of the most eminent contemporary African writers, the
Nigerian Chinua Achebe and the Kenyan James Ngugi, known later as Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
For this purpose, the paper traces the most common and different features in these writers’
works, which explore the histories of Nigeria and Kenya in pre-colonial, colonial, and
postcolonial times. Like their characters, both writers were at crossroads of traditional culture
and Christian influence, where they faced the dilemma of growing up in two different worlds
as Africans and as Westerners. Their suffering from the corruption and violence practiced by
post-colonial dictatorships and their incessant attempts to establish an independent
personality and identity found their vent in remarkable creative writings of opposition and
decolonization. Despite a few differences, Achebe’s and Ngugi’s works reveal the
unspeakable effects of colonization on the natives and its persistence in the form of chaos,
coups, corruption, civil wars, and bloodshed. Emphasizing on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,
Arrow of God, and Anthills of the Savannah and Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child, The River
Between, and Petals of Blood, the paper demonstrates how the conflicts between the powerful
colonizers and the defenseless colonized end up with the destruction of local cultures,
histories, values, and languages, and the distortion of the image of the colonized subjects in
the Western discourse, all done in the name of enlightening, civilizing, and even humanizing
them. It also highlights the corruption and oppression of the post-colonial regimes, reflecting
the writers' belief that the independence African countries are supposed to have won is totally
devoid of any content and that the white colonialists are still in power through a few black
representatives. Believing in the important role of literature and narratives in writing history
and uncovering the truth, Achebe and Ngugi present the tribal African societies from within,
with their own strengths and weaknesses, agreements and disagreements, and positive and
negative values and describe the clash between the African and European cultures in their
attempt to raise awareness of the horrible psychological, social, and political repercussions of
the oppression and humiliation the Africans long suffered from by the white colonizers and
perhaps help restore a lost identity.
Achebe and Ngugi: Literature of Decolonization

Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o not only witnessed but also were highly
involved and affected by the critical political events that their countries have been undergoing
since the arrival of the white Europeans by the end of the Nineteenth century. Both of them
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were at crossroads of traditional culture and Christian influence, where they faced the
dilemma of growing up in two different worlds as Africans and as Westerners. As young
boys, both Achebe and Ngugi went to missionary schools where students were not allowed to
speak their indigenous languages. On this matter, Ezenwa-Ohaeto, in his Chinua Achebe: A
Biography quotes him saying later that the children had to "put away their different mother
tongues and communicate in the language of their colonizers" (30) Similarly, Lynne Duke
wrote in the Washington Post how Ngugi was 12 when he "witnessed the beating. Teachers at
his British colonial school in the 'white highlands' of Kenya caught one of the school chums
speaking Gikuyu,"(1) the native language and how the child was humiliated and harshly
whipped.
Born in a Christian family in 1930, Achebe grew up in the Igbo village of Ogidi in
South Nigeria, thus raised in the shadow of two cultures: that of the British colonialists and
his native Igbo people. Being 30 years old when Nigeria became independent, Achebe
witnessed the horrors of colonization, Nigerian dictatorship, and civil wars. In 1967 the
southeastern region of Nigeria broke away to form the Republic of Biafra, a movement which
was brutally crushed by the central government supported by the British in a war that
continued for three years. Achebe and other colleague writers supported Biafra and took a
tour in the United States in an attempt to raise awareness about the dire situation in Biafra.
The movement ended up with millions of victims, mainly from the Igbo tribes. Achebe and
his family narrowly escaped, but their houses had been destroyed. The loss and later
harassment against Achebe's family such as banning him from traveling were so heavy on
him. Such incident-packed life, however, found its vent in remarkable creative writings,
where the characters in Achebe's novels reflect to a far extent the miserable conditions the
Nigerians have been passing through for more than a century.
Ngugi's personal experience in Kenya was not much different from Achebe's. Born in
1938 of Kikuyu descent in a Christian family, Ngugi, like Achebe, was trapped between two
different cultures, that of his indigenous people contrasted with that of the British colonizers.
His father was a peasant farmer, but was compelled to become a squatter after the British
Imperial Act of 1915. During the Mau Mau armed rebellion of the Kenyans against the
British, Ngugi's family suffered a lot as his stepbrother was killed, and his mother was
arrested and tortured. While at mission school, he became a devout Christian, to renounce
Christianity and English in 1967, and change his name James, which he considered a colonial
name. He was 24 years old when Kenya became independent, but his criticism of the Kenyan
dictatorship led him to spend a whole year in prison, where he wrote Devil on the Cross, the
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first modern novel in Gikuyu, his indigenous language, on prison-issued toilet paper. After
that, he lost his job and his family was harassed on so he left on self-exile for London.
Such eventful lives both Achebe and Ngugi have led, together with the instability
their countries have been long suffering from, are evident in their works. For them, the
horrors of colonialism didn't stop with the end of direct colonialism. Like Edward Said's
discourse in Orientalism, Achebe and Ngugi believe that the consequences of colonialism are
still persisting in the form of chaos, coups, corruption, civil wars, bloodshed, and
dictatorship. This has, in fact, been the situation in colonial and postcolonial Africa, of which
Nigeria and Kenya are striking examples. Such conditions are common themes in Achebe's
and Ngugi's works. Like other postcolonial writers, Achebe and Ngugi have tried to show
how the powerful colonizer has imposed a language and a culture, where cultures, histories,
and languages of the natives have been not only ignored but also distorted by the colonialists
in their pursuit to dominate these peoples and exploit their wealth in the name of
enlightening, civilizing, and even humanizing them.
For Achebe and Ngugi, as for other African writers, it was high time that they write
their own history and reflect their own culture; it was time, as Bill Ashcroft entitles his
remarkable book, that the empire writes back; it was time, to use Gayatri Spivak’s words, that
the “subaltern speak”. That is why, in fact, both Achebe and Ngugi are considered among the
fathers of modern African literature. Distorting Africa and stereotyping Africans in Western
texts such as Joyce Cary's Mr. Johnson and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness have
provoked Achebe to say that "the story we had to tell could not be told for us by anyone else,
no matter how gifted or well-intentioned" (Tonkin 1). In his essay "An Image of Africa", he
reasons that "Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as 'the other world', the
antithesis of Europe and, therefore, of civilization" (1043). After criticizing how Conrad
describes Africans as 'rudimentary souls', he furiously attacks what he calls Conrad's
"dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and
continues to foster in the world". (1048)
Likewise, Ngugi was provoked by the negative image of the Africans in Western
discourse. In Postcolonial literatures, Michael Parker and Roger Starkey quote Ngugi
criticizing the African figure in the Western discourse, saying that “great tradition of
European literature [which] had invented and even defined the world view of the Calibans
and the Fridays of the new literature were telling their story which was also my story” (9).
Despite all these strikingly common points in Achebe's and Ngugi's views and themes,
reflected in their literary works, still one important difference should be mentioned, namely
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their view towards the use of English by postcolonial writers. While Achebe's works are all
written in English, Ngugi has quit it and moved to write in Gikuyu, his indigenous tongue.
Ngugi argues that writing in African languages is a necessary step toward cultural identity
and independence from centuries of European exploitation. In his Article, “The Language of
African Literature”, he asserts that language has always been a tool of colonization, where the
lives of Africans were more firmly put in the control of the colonists, thus his assurance that
African literatures could only survive if they were written in native African languages. “The
bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of spiritual
subjugation” (519). In Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, he asserts that "one way in which
the state and the classes it represents exercise hegemonic control over the majority in colonial
and post-colonial situations is through language" (3), and he wonders how a people can
successfully shape a country's destiny if they deny the use of their language. In his essay, "On
the Abolition of the English Department," Ngugi goes further to demand replacing the
English Department at African universities by African literature or at least world literature.
(Bryden 1619-1624)
Achebe, on the other hand, disagrees on this idea, saying in a talk at West Chester
University published in Global Literacy Project "It doesn't matter what language you write
in, as long as what you write is good." He adds that "language is a weapon, and we use it…
There's no point in fighting a language” (2). In his essay "The African Writer and the English
language”, Achebe defends his point that English is the "one central language enjoying
nationwide currency" (par. Use of English), meaning that it is the only common language
different tribes across Nigeria do know. Yet, in "The language of African literature", Ngugi
quotes him wondering in the same essay, “‘Is it right that a man should abandon his mother
tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But
for me there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it’” (517).
Although Ngugi's novels differ from Achebe’s in certain features such as Ngugi’s
exploration in more details the bloody confrontations between the Africans and British, the
detention camps, the ruthlessness of the soldiers of the colonial army and the resistance to the
British Imperialism, still he and Achebe almost tackle the same themes while exploring the
histories of their countries in pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial times. Believing in the
importance of the role of literature and of the narratives in uncovering the truth, they both
present the tribal African societies from within, with their own strengths and weaknesses,
agreements and disagreements, and positive and negative values, just like other human
beings, unlike the stereotypical image given to Africans in the Western discourse. Besides, in
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their attempt to raise awareness of the oppression and humiliation that the Africans suffered
from on the hands of the white man, Achebe and Ngugi describe the clash between African
traditions and religions and European values and Christianity. In addition, their works depict
the corruption of oppressive post-colonial regimes, which reflects the writers' belief that the
independence African countries are supposed to have won is totally devoid of any content,
and that the white colonialists are still in power through a few black representatives. Another
important common factor worth mentioning is that Achebe's and Ngugi's works are full of
African proverbs, songs, and folk tales, all of which show the importance of oral traditions
and storytelling in the African communities. These and other features will be explored in this
paper through studying some works by both writers, with emphasis on those depicting the
three main periods native Africans have passed through, before, during, and after colonialism.
Achebe's Things Fall Apart, to start with, shows that Umuofia village had a system
and tribal order that all the villagers had to obey before the arrival of the colonizers. Written
two years before Nigeria’s independence, the novel presents the tribal life from the inside and
shows the destructive impact of European Christianity on pre-colonial Igb'o culture in 1890s.
In her essay “Storyteller of the Savannah” in The Guardian, Maya Jaggi quotes Achebe
describing the African characters of Things Fall Apart, "I went out of my way to gather all
the negative things, to describe them as I think they were good and bad – and ordinary human
beings as neither demons nor angels. I dare anybody to say, 'these people are not human'." (4)
In response to portrayal of Africans in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, says Patsy Daniels in The
Voice of the Oppressed in the Language of the Oppressor, "Achebe was especially offended
by the lack of speech, the lack of voice, of Conrad’s African characters” (68), thus his project
to correct this situation by speaking up for Africans, by giving voice to the voiceless and
showing the humanity of the dehumanized. Daniels concludes that “Achebe had to use the
platform of imperialist literature in order to revise the history of Africans as written in
literature in English” (4).
In Things Fall Apart, Achebe depicts the culture of the Umuofian society before
colonialism, showing that the Ibos had their own system where "decision making centers
around the democratic consultation of elders, and power is exercised with detailed regard for
the peace and equilibrium of the community as a whole" (Morrison 20). In other words, the
Igbos had their moral and ethical principles on which their society was based. When a
member of the clan violates these principles, he is punished no matter how powerful he is.
We see that Okonkwo is punished when he beats his wife on the sacred Week of Peace, and
he has to make some sacrifices to show repentance. And when he accidentally kills Ezeudu's
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son, he is deprived of his property and exiled for seven years. Again Achebe's point here is
that African societies weren't those primitive cannibals as they appear in Western Texts.
According to Abiola Irele in "The Tragic Conflict in Achebe's novels", "Achebe presents the
society as one that has positive qualities of its own. The coherence and order that make social
life one long ceremonial, the intense warmth of personal relationships and the passionate
energy of the religious life, all these reveal the other side of the coin" (171). Inclusion of
ceremonial dancing, folk songs, story telling, Ibo proverbs, vocabulary and sayings all "serve
as a reminder of cultural distinctness and integrity of the community being described"
(Morrison, 21). It is not uncommon to see traditional songs sung by young and old,
accompanied by drums throughout the novel. In the first chapter of Things Fall Apart, for
example, we read, "Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and
proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten" (6)
This society has its weaknesses too. With no room for feminine characteristics, we see
through Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son, how some practices are unconvincing and brutal: the
newborn twins are left in the forest to die alone; those like Okonkwo's father die in disgrace;
and Ikemefuna, the boy raised and loved by Okonkwo, has to be killed according to their
religion. Even Obierika, the wise man, is skeptical of some Igbo practices. Such practices
urge Nwoye to convert to Christianity in "an act of revolt against his father as well as a
rejection of the society that he embodied" (Irele 168). Similarly, the outcasts in the Igbo
society find in the new religion a chance for self-fulfillment.
This definitely reflects a main theme of Achebe's, which is the clash between the
traditional Igbo of African society and the Christian imperialism of Britain. Unlike Western
discourse, in Things Fall Apart, even the white characters are not stereotyped. While Mr.
Brown, the missionary leader criticizes the Igbo religions, he does that moderately and does
not allow his followers to antagonize the clan. On the other hand, Reverend James Smith,
who succeeds Mr. Brown, is so strict and intolerant that Enoch, a converter, dares to unmask
and egwugwu during a religious ceremony, an infuriating act that is equivalent to killing a
spirit. Consequently, the confrontations escalate between the African clans and the white
missionaries. The villagers are told that their gods are false, so violence breaks out, Village
Abame is destroyed by the white man, and the leaders of Umuofia are insulted and
imprisoned by the Whites. Unable to accept such humiliation, Okonkwo kills a white
messenger, but being let down by his clansmen, he hangs himself, in an end not unlike his
father's, a disreputed one. The title of the book that the British District Commissioner is
writing, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, ironically summarizes
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the Whites' view towards the Africans. In their attempt to dominate the Africans, they are
indifferent about their lives or about their culture. Okonkwo’s death, for the commissioner,
does not even deserve a chapter in his book, though it “would make interesting reading”
(Things Fall Apart 187). In their Postcolonial Literature, Michael Parker and Roger Starkey
see that "the novel insists that the Igbos have a story. This needs to be insisted on, for in the
District Commissioner's eyes Okonkwo has no narrative of his own” (41). It can be clearly
seen that Nwoye's conversion and Okonkwo's death in addition to other incidents are symbols
of the falling apart of the old order, which cannot stand firm in the face of the powerful
colonialists.
Like Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God explores the intersections of Igbo and
European traditions, shedding more light on the catastrophic results of this confrontation on
African societies. The novel fictionalizes a true story that did happen in Colonial Nigeria "in
the village of Umuchu in 1913 [where] the chief priest of that village, Ezegu, was imprisoned
by the colonial administration for refusing to take on the role of Warrant chief" (Morrison,
102). Set in the village of Umuaro in the Igbo land in the 1920s, when British colonization
was well underway, the novel tells the story of Ezeulu, a chief priest of Ulu, who fails to stop
war against a nearby village, thus the society loses resiliency to confront the external threat,
and making it, instead, vulnerable enough to be dominated by the British, who stop the war
and break all the guns in both villages. Although Ezeulu is not as reckless as Okonkwo, he is
trapped and crushed by the intervention of the British officers and Christian missionaries.
Like in Thing Fall Apart, Achebe insists on depicting the well-established socio-
economic and religious order in Umuaro long before the British arrival. For a century, the
villages there have organized different aspects of their lives, starting from religious offers and
rituals, to the agriculture calendar of the community, and not ending with matters of security.
Morrison sees that "Within the political and religious structure of Umuaro, Ezeulu's power is
importantly held in check by the council of elders" (103), which shows that "Achebe's fiction
seems keen to establish the democratic credentials of the Ibo, especially by contrast to
colonialism's autocratic tendencies" (102). However, no matter how well-established this
system is, it fails to face the power of the British colonialism, and the consequence is
inevitable disintegration and destruction, obviously not civilization brought to a group of
cannibals.
The novel exposes the Westerners’ false claims civilizing mission by showing their
oppression and humiliation of the African elders and insults to their religions. Asserting the
presence of two attitudes in the church towards traditional religion, Achebe again refuses to
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stereotype even the Christians, in his attempt to prove that human beings, whoever they are,
can never be stereotyped except by the prejudiced and racists. In short, both novels try to
show that the triumph of the Christian God and the white man has destroyed not only
Okonkwo and Ezeulu, but even "forever deviated the course of Umuaro's history" (Irele, 177)
and, consequently, the continent's history.
Another significant theme in Achebe's works is corruption and oppression of post-
colonial regimes. As a matter of fact, for Achebe, the dictatorial colonial regimes were
replaced after independence by corrupted governments which continued oppression,
repression and persecution in all aspects of life. Achebe explores these plights in postcolonial
Nigeria in several novels, the latest of which is Anthills of the Savannah, in which he shows
that Nigeria is still undergoing the consequences of colonialism by tracing the failed
leadership and the betrayed hope. In this sense, Simon Gikandi describes the novel as a
sweeping meditation on the meaning and failure of nationhood. He adds that the novel is a
representation of the "political and cultural crisis that marks the transition from the colonial
system to a post-colonial situation"(Reading Chinua 18), including a succession of military
coups, the civil war itself and a series of corrupt dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s. In
Anthills of the Savannah, it is quite clear that Achebe can't ignore the deaths of three million
of his fellow Easterners out of war and famine during and after the Biafra experience. Nor
can he turn back to other catastrophic events across the continent, thus his concern of
rewriting the history through narratives by "creating a timeless and autonomous version of
events so that they can speak to future generation [with] new forms of narration that might
have the power to liberate us from the circle of our post-colonial moment" (130). In his The
Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe comments on the failure of postcolonial regimes saying on the
first page that "the Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to
the responsibility and to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true
leadership."
Anthills of the Savannah is set in Kangan, an imaginary African country, where the
President, Sam, or his Excellency, and his boyhood classmates, Chris , the information
minister, and Ikem, an independent-minded writer, but still the poet and editor of the
Government Gazette, are supposed to handle the country's affairs after a military coup brings
Sam to power. However, instead of leading the country into peace and prosperity, it turns to
become a dictatorship. Upon the advice of his commissioner for Home Affairs, Prof. Okong,
a devout Christian, and Ikem's antagonism to his despotism, Sam is convinced that Chris and
Ikem are Heretics and untrustworthy. As a result, a conspiracy planned by Sam and his
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regime turns both men into outlaws and ends in killing them. However, Achebe leaves a
space for hope through Beatrice, Chris's girl friend, who recognizes the real story of Kangan,
unlike the stories of the three friends. According to Morrison, the birth of Ikem’s and Elewa’s
baby girl "in a period of social unrest through a union between a middle-class male
intellectual and an illiterate working class woman suggests the emergent bonding between
classes and the unlimited possibilities that a new path opens up” (145). In her "A Tyranny of
Clowns", Nadine Gordimer considers that Beatrice's creation is Achebe's real triumph, as
despite her Europeanization, or because of this education, and her realization of the
importance of the traditional culture, she could be a kind of goddess. She writes, "The things
that fell apart under the impact of Europe in Mr. Achebe's first novel come together in this
woman" (2). The novel makes it clear that Beatrice "feels the ties to her cultural heritage and
its contribution to who she is now and whom she may become. She recalls her mother's
stories and her father's maxims" (Anthills, 100)
Although the direct clash between Western and traditional values is absent from the
novel, yet the conflict between them is evident in various ways. Those in power are
westernized in a way or another and detached from their own people and their own cultural
roots. It is clear that the decline of the traditional religion was followed by corruption. Taking
into consideration Nigerian's history and how colonial Britain made up the country out of
hundreds of tribes, Achebe tells Amy Otchet in an interview for the UNESCO Courier that,
"When the British were planning their exit from Nigeria, they helped to set one group against
another so that we would fight amongst ourselves instead of against them. Our leaders
inherited that ability to create dissension" (4).
It is true that the use of proverbs, folktales and songs is less in this novel of an urban
society than it is in previous novels; nevertheless, a key ancestral proverb said by Ikem may
tell the whole story "about the origin of evil" as Boyd Tonkin writes in The Independent. “‘If
you want to get at the root of the murder, they said, you have to look for the blacksmith who
made the machete'. For Achebe, European rule hammered out the lethal tools with which
African nations would later destroy themselves and each other" (2). Storytelling lies at the
core of the novel, where Sam, Chris, and Ikem tell their own stories, each in his way, where
Sam uses his capacity to tell stories as one way to keep his position, similar to the ruler in
Ngugi's Wizard of the Crow, where the ruler and his ministers are professional in fabricating
stories to tell to each other and to their people to protect their positions.
Like Achebe, Ngugi addresses the dilemmas of growing up in two worlds, in two
different cultures, as a Kikuyu African and a Christian Westerner. In his early novels, Ngugi
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explores the plight of the African people under the British rule, by using the history of
colonization to throw light on the African past, and, in the process, to enlighten readers and
sharpen their awareness of the detrimental effects of colonialism and imperialism. Like
Achebe, too, Ngugi is furious about what Elleke Boehmer calls in Colonial and Postcolonial
Literature "the imagery of the African continent as savage and degraded, a heart of Darkness"
(83), thus his use of the novel, the colonialists' most used genre, to write back to the empire.
Like Achebe's early novels, Ngugi’s The River Between depicts the conflict of
cultures and the role of Christianity and English education in the Kenyans' lives. It is similar
to Achebe's Things Fall Apart in showing the beginnings of clash between native Africans
and white Europeans. Unlike Achebe, however, Ngugi does not go back to depict the Gikuyu
life and traditions before the arrival of colonialists. He does that indirectly through the
contrast between both cultures.
The story takes place in two mountain ridges, where a Kenyan tribe lives on each,
separated by the Honia River, which means cure, or bring-back-to life, a river that Edward
Said sees as, unlike Conrad's river in Heart of Darkness, "seemed to possess a strong will to
live, scorning drought and weather changes" (Culture and Imperialism 211). The conflict here
is internal, between the two tribes rather than being external, between the colonizers and the
colonized. In the first page of the novel, Ngugi describes the two ridges as ceasing to be
"sleeping lions" united by the common source of life, the river, as they become antagonists.
Waiyaki, the novel's protagonist lives on the Kameno ridge, whose inhabitants still stick to
cultural traditions, most important of which are polytheism and circumcision. The inhabitants
of the Makuyu ridge, on the other hand, have changed and adopted Christianity and British
values. Waiyaki is trapped between his commitment towards his tribe's traditions, his
missionary education and his clandestine relationship with Nyambura, the beautiful daughter
of Joshua, Makuyu's Christian minister. Like Achebe's Ezeulu of Arrow of God, Waiyaki's
father sends him to "learn all the wisdom and all the secrets of the white man. But do not
follow his vices. Be true to your people and the ancient rites" (qtd in Gikandi, Ngugi 17). His
father also tells him that according to the prophecy, a messiah, who understands both the tribe
tradition and the white ways, would come and rid his people of the whites. That is perhaps
the reason why he sends Waiyaki to a missionary school, and when he comes back as an
educator in his tribe, he is called the teacher. As Ezeulu doubts his abilities, Waiyaki wonders
whether he is the awaited messiah. His belief that education will unite his people is opposed
by those who want direct action against the other tribe. Like Ezeulu, too, Waiyaki can't do
that because of his nature and his love to Nyambura. Like several of Achebe's characters, or
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perhaps like Achebe and Ngugi themselves, Waiyaki is stuck in the middle of two different
cultures. His books, finally, seem unable to face either culture, and, like Obi in No Longer at
Ease and Njoroge in Weep Not, Child, his education fails to solve the problem. It is true that
the main conflict here lies within the African community, yet it is obvious that the origin of
evil, or "the blacksmith who made the machete", is the white man. The novel makes it clear
that before the white man's arrival, peace has been prevalent in the region. According to
David Cook, the two villages "were in relative social harmony before being affected by alien
religion and colonial politics" (29).
Again like Achebe, Ngugi doesn't idealize the African society. On the contrary, he,
too, shows that without internal weakness, traditional values wouldn't have given way and
succumbed to the exigencies of colonialism. In The River Between, traditional culture has its
flaws, mainly circumcision of girls. Ngugi criticizes circumcision of girls, but at the same
time attacks the Christian's attitude towards this circumcision, considering that Christian
missionaries condemn the act only because it acknowledges female sexuality, a point which
makes sense at a time when Europe was associated with masculinity juxtaposed against
femininity of the "Other", here, the African. Later in the novel Nyambura herself notices that
circumcision, however, doesn't prevent someone from being a Christian, just like her father
and mother. In "Circumcision in Ngugi Wa Thiong'o’s The River Between", Benjamin
Graves believes that Ngugi's detailed description of the circumcision process "forecasts
somewhat the violence of decolonization" (1). "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
offering" (The River 52). In his analysis of the conflict between two different life patterns in
The River Between, Cook believes that it is not a "mere attempt to reconstruct the past. It
offers stern schooling to younger readers in Africa today who themselves aspire to become
responsible leader” (30).
In Weep Not, Child, Ngugi shifts the light to the direct conflict between the colonizers
and the colonized when white settlers, in cooperation with the wealthy Blacks, have already
taken the native's land, and when nationalist awareness has been formed against oppression
and humiliation. Through Njoroge, a young boy, and his family, Ngugi dwells on a variety of
conflicts: political, cultural, religious, and class struggle. Njoroge’s high hopes for further
education are crushed between idealistic dreams to help his family and country through
learning and the violent reality of the colonial exploitation. The violent resistance of the Mau
Mau rebels against the British domination in Kenya and the government's repression of this
resistance not only shatter Njoroge's plans to attend university but also destroy his family. His
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father dies after being injured while trying to protect his son Boro, who has killed the greedy
wealthy black landlord, Jacobo. Boro later kills Jacobo's friend, Mr. Howlands, a white
landlord, to be arrested later and executed. Kamau, Njoroge's other brother is also imprisoned
for life. Having a third brother who was killed in World War II, Njoroge remains alone with
his mother and stepmother, a situation which means all his dreams have come to an end, thus
feeling depressed for being unable to offer any help to his family or country.
Like Okonkwo's family, Njoroge's family likes to sit together and tell stories, an
emphasis on the importance of African oral tradition. One of these stories is a folktale on how
God created Gikuyu and his woman Mumbi, and offered them the most beautiful land. But
this land was taken from them by the white man. During a strike, Kiarie explains how this
happened saying, "Later, our fathers were taken captives in the first Big War to help in a war
whose cause they never knew. And when they came back? Their land had been taken away
for a settlement of the white soldiers" (Weep 65)
Not unlike Achebe’s novels, Ngugi's Weep Not, Child shows the destructive role of
Christianity on indigenous people. Kiarie told the people on strike “‘how the land had been
taken away, through the Bible and the sword.’ The Bible paved the way for the sword'" (65).
David Cook sees that, in the novel, "Christianity is admired and accepted, and yet is also
looked at critically and askance, till eventually it loses authority" (62). This perhaps reflects
Ngugi’s personal experience with Christianity, where after being a devout Christian, he
turned against it, changed his Christian name, and adopted Marxism.
Petals of Blood, Ngugi's last novel in English, reflects Ngugi's change from
portraying the colonial era to focusing on exploitation and corruption in present-day Kenya.
Like Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, yet more furiously and from a leftist point of view,
Petals of Blood addresses contemporary social, moral, and political deterioration in
urbanized Kenya, together with the indifference and oppression of its regime. Like other later
novels by Ngugi, particularly Devil on the Cross and Wizard of the Crow, it paints a hard
picture of life in the neo-colonial period, or more accurately after what Frantz Fanon calls
"the farce of national independence" (qtd in Boehmer 237). The novel harshly condemns the
ruling elites who, mired in corruption and hypocrisy, exploit the country's workers and
peasants through rotten urban institutions – religious, political, educational, and financial.
David Cook summarizes the novel as an exposition “of the nature of capitalism, of the
insensitivity, callousness and insatiable ambition of those who control vested interests in
order to gain power and wealth, impoverishing the unprivileged, imposing misery and
suffering upon the majority” (87).
 Hamadi 14

The story takes place in the small remote village of Ilmorog, where each of the four
main characters have come in an attempt to escape the ills of the city, the ills which have
afflicted Kenya after independence. Munira belongs to a prosperous Christian family, but he
is in conflict with them, where his father, now a very successful landowner was once accused
by the Mau Mau rebels of collaborating with the British colonizers. He comes to Ilmorog
driven by his sense of failure in the postcolonial economic system and by an overriding desire
to escape communities. He is now a headmaster of a public school in the village. The school
reflects the image of the village, which is described as a wasteland, "a four-roomed barrack
with broken mud walls, a tin roof with gaping holes and more spiders' webs and the wings
and heads of dead flies" (Petals 5). Abdullah is an ex-fighter in the liberation movement and
possesses keen class-consciousness, always thinking of his boss who lives in luxury without
exerting an effort. Karega, the third character, a teacher and an ex-student of Munira, seeks
solutions in the collective struggle, and he becomes a well-known union organizer after being
dismissed from his job. The Female character in the novel is Wanja, a barmaid and an ex-
prostitute. We come to know later that she has turned to prostitution not because of her lack
of morals, but because of the pressures she has been under by the oppressors and the
corrupted. Having in mind that Wanja's name means "mother earth", or "the spirit of the
land", she is perhaps a symbol of Kenya, which Ngugi sees as pushed to urban vices by neo-
colonialists.
The village which was once a thriving commercial center has been turned dead “in the
process dispossessing and making destitute its inhabitants” (Cook 89). It is evident that the
harmonious relationship between its people and nature in the pre-colonial past explains its
previous prosperity. However, as Gikandi concludes, "The peasants' impoverishment in both
the colonial and postcolonial economy could come to be represented in terms of the drought
and the images of death associated with it" (Ngugi 135). Even when the village is
transformed into another metropolitan center, it is not at all a kind of resurrection. It is merely
false economic boom, and the village no more belongs to its people; it is the greedy
capitalists', instead. The destruction of the Mwathi's place is a clear symbol of heading
towards mere materialistic values and vice. Mwathi, the mysterious priest, whose name
means both "shepherd" and "prophet" is described as "the spiritual power over both Ilmorog
ridge and Ilmorog plains, somehow, invisibly, regulating their lives "(Petals 17). Thus the
destruction of such a place, as Gikandi puts it, means that "the old community is destroyed by
the more advanced forces of industrial capitalism" (Ngugi 145). Such theme of disintegration
of traditional Kenya, Nigeria or Africa, is clearly a recurrent theme in both Ngugi's and
 Hamadi 15

Achebe's works, despite the fact that each of the two writers sees and depicts it in his own
way.
Another worth mentioning character in the novel is the lawyer, a liberal or social
democratic Kenyan who, using his education, attempts to assist Kenya's poor, and teach them
the international dimensions of class struggle. The lawyer becomes later a member of
parliament, but he is finally assassinated, providing another lesson to Karega, who has
already learned a lot from him, that change can't come from elite institutions such as
Parliament. In short, thematically speaking, Petals of Blood reflects the failure of
decolonization, depicting how those who are supposed to lead Kenya to real independence
and true freedom have become the cause of its woes. According to Gikandi, Munira, Karega,
Wanja, and Abdulla "are defined by their acute awareness of the gap between the promise of
independence and the travesty of colonialism" (Ngugi, 137). Ngugi refers to Gikuyu culture
and the lost traditional Kenya in a kind of nostalgia to a beautiful romantic past, a past that
has been crushed by the forces of colonialism and postcolonialism.
To summarize, in an attempt to rewrite the history of their countries which has long
been suppressed by European missionaries and colonialists, Achebe and Ngugi believe that
before colonization, the Africans lived peacefully, having their own clashes, but living their
daily life on their own land. When the whites came, things changed. Not only did family
relations worsen and did people experience much harm but even the course of their history
was deviated, and forever. The powerless natives couldn't but succumb to the powerful
Europeans and suffer from what Frantz Fanon calls the psychological and sociological
consequences of colonization (qtd in Ashcroft 124). Both writers dwell on the colonial and
postcolonial situation in Africa, exposing colonization as being responsible for introducing a
feeling of rootlessness among Africans, or to use Fanon's words, a kind of "cultural
genocide". Despite a few differences as for the use of language and political ideologies, both
Achebe and Ngugi address almost the same themes, participating in what Ashcroft calls the
process of literary decolonization, which "has involved a radical dismantling of the European
codes and post-colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses"
(195). In a word, in their attempt to restore a lost identity, Achebe’s and Ngugi’s works are
striking examples of a new discourse, a discourse which writes the history and culture of
subordinate peoples from within, a discourse of decolonization, of opposition and resistance,
against the political and cultural hegemony of the West.
 Hamadi 16

Works Cited

Primary Sources
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“An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness."
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The African Writer and the English Language.” Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. Dec. 13,
2008 <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinua Achebe>.
The Trouble with Nigeria. London: Heinemann, 1984.
Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1965.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

A Grain of Wheat. London: Heinemann,1967.

Devil on the Cross. London: Heinemann, 1982.
“On the Abolition of the English Department.” Ed. Bryden. Vol. IV, 1619-1624.
Petals of Blood. London: Heinemann, 1977.
Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the
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“The Language of African Literature”. Ed. Bryden. Vol.II, 514-540.
The River Between. London: Heinemann,1965.
Weep Not, Child. London: Heinemann, 1967.
Wizard of the Crow. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006.

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 Hamadi 17

Cook, David. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: An Exploration of His Writings. 2nd. ed. Oxford:
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