Joya F. Uraizee, Saint Louis University, Missouri
How has the neocolonial nation been defined in fiction? Representations vary from depictions of barren wastelands run by corrupt rulers in Ousmane Sembene's Xala (1974) to isolated outposts ruled by megalomaniacal army generals in Gabriel Garca Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Ngugi wa Thiong'o's 1977 novel Petals of Blood,1 however, takes a slightly different tack: it depicts the postcolonial African nation as a complex and multifaceted entity, and it represents this nation in three ways. First, Petals of Blood reveals that there are many ways of viewing the postcolonial African nation: examining the official national structure created artificially by colonialism (a structure which Ngugi clearly derides), or looking at the various locally created harmonious and not-so-harmonious communities within the official nation. Second, the novel presents several different locally created communities, which I will term, following Timothy Brennan, natios. It also espouses an ideal natio based on communal harmony and socialist economics, in which wealth is based on the amount of labor put in, and the peasants, the main labor force, control the means of production. Ngugi implies, in the course of the narrative, that this ideal natio can only be created through armed struggle, which would bring an end to the existing official nation and replace it with his ideal one. This ideal natio would eventually be led by farmers, workers, and intellectuals, and would result in a more or less classless society. Third, although the novel idealizes the natio just described, it also presents its argument through a series of contrasts in which the official nation and the various natios are played off of each other, suggesting that Ngugi ultimately endorses a view of the nation that is multiple and diverse, with structures of complicity and resistance contained within it. In the novel, then, there are four kinds of contrasts that Ngugi sets up for us: the contrast between several ideal natios and the artificial nation; the contrast between political betrayal and social justice; the contrast between an ironic narration and a "murder-mystery" narrative structure; and the contrast between many different commentaries and narrators of the action who frequently contradict each other. Since all of these contrasts suggest that there are many different ways of conceiving the ideal natio, most of the focus of this paper will be on describing and analyzing these contrasts.
Before I analyze these three aspects of the novel, I would like to point out that I use the word "nation" to refer to the artificially created neocolonial Kenya that Ngugi critiques, and the word natio to describe the local communities, some of which he valorizes. I take the words natio and "community" from the critics Timothy Brennan and Wole Ogundele, respectively. Brennan defines the natio as "a local community, domicile, family, condition of belonging."2 Ogundele defines the community as "at once political and cultural," an entity that "problematizes and questions the political rationale of the nation-state." To Ogundele it is "the 'home base' of all major African writers ... the 'ground' on which they stand to resist and for resisting the cultural and political hegemonies of colonialism as well as neocolonialism."3 Besides these two definitions, my notions of nation and natio also involve the importance of language in forming a concept of community. Indeed, in his other novels and essays Ngugi often refers to language as the unifier for a nation or several nations. In his collection of essays Moving the Centre, for example, he points out that Kiswahili unites East Africa linguistically and that it is one of the fastest-growing languages in the world. He argues that it is the national language of Tanzania, an "all-Kenya national language," and has a similar position in Uganda. It functions as a language of unity and is a part of East African history.4 As Ogundele has shown, the relationship between the nation and the natio in fiction has ranged from the "assimilation phase" during which the state absorbs the history of a particular community, through "metonymy" in which the description of the culture of a community stands for the culture of the state, to "adversarial" relations in which the identities of various communities are asserted through local and national languages (MC 116).
Petals of Blood shows us that there are different structures that make up the postcolonial African nation, one of the most obvious of which is the official national structure created artificially by colonialism. In particular, the novel suggests that most political or literary theories about the official nation (including those propounded by Benedict Anderson and E. J. Hobsbawm)5 are simplistic because they fail to take into account the complexities of the relationship between the nation and the natio. For example, Ali A. Mazrui, a political scientist from Kenya, argues that stable African nations can be built in five processes: "cultural normative fusion," or shared values and language; "economic interpenetration," or the active involvement of different subgroups within a country in the national economy; "social interaction," or the narrowing of the gap between the rich and the poor; "conflict resolution," or the building up of institutions which throw up leaders and allow clashes to be peacefully resolved; and "a shared national experience," or a sort of historical awareness of a shared past that gives its people a collective history.6 Mazrui insists that all five processes must interact with each other in order to create stable African nations. This definition presupposes stable African nations, whereas in actuality not all the nations in Africa are entirely stable. Instead of such a definition, Ngugi seems to be arguing (along the lines of political scientists Hobsbawm and Anderson)7 that the official notion of the African nation is false and unnatural, with imaginary claims to unity, collectivity, and geographic space.8
In Writers in Politics Ngugi explains further his main intention in identifying the artificiality of the national structure created by colonialism. He points out that, in Petals of Blood, he was really trying to reveal how "imperialism under colonial or neo-colonial conditions, can never develop our country, develop us Kenyans into anything creatively meaningful for all our peoples ... the working people of Kenya ... have always struggled for a free, united Kenya in which the wealth of our land would go to feed, clothe and shelter Kenyans first."9 This "free, united Kenya" is clearly one of the ideal natios he has tried to depict in the novel. In Moving the Centre he defines the neocolonial condition that prevents the emergence of such a natio as one in which the nation is "nominally independent with comprador-type regimes running the economy, politics, and culture of the country consistently on behalf of the West" (MC 55). Such a nominally independent nation (which he also describes in Devil on the Cross as a government of thieves and robbers) corresponds to the official, artificial nation he presents in Petals of Blood.
Instead of such an artificial construct, then, Ngugi would prefer a community of formerly oppressed peasants and workers, all striving toward an ideal natio free of evil and avarice: "the poor, the downtrodden, the masses ... would continue struggling until a human kingdom came: a world in which goodness and beauty and strength and courage would be seen ... in ... one's contribution in creating a more humane world in which the inherited and inventive genius of man in culture and science from all ages and climes would not be the monopoly of a few, but for the use of all, so that all flowers in all their different colours would ripen and bear fruits and seeds" (PoB 303). This ideal natio, the second aspect of Ngugi's representation of the nation, is based on a communal harmony in which wealth is distributed according to amount of labor put in, in which the unscrupulous rich do not profit from the labor of the miserable poor, and the peasants themselves control the means of production. As Karega (one of the narrators of the novel and Ngugi's mouthpiece) puts it, the creation of this ideal natio involves an armed struggle, which would completely destroy the existing system and replace it with a new one. This struggle would bring "to an end the reign of the few over the many 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" (PoB 344). So the ideal natio is one formed by socialist revolution led by farmers, workers, and some intellectuals, which will lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat and a more or less classless society. Here, clearly, Ngugi replaces his own notion of a complex nation with one formed simply by socialist revolution.
Part of the leadership for this revolution is to come from intellectuals, who, although once part of the natio, are now in a state of imprisonment or exile. In Moving the Centre, for example, Ngugi points out that many leading Kenyan writers are in exile (MC 45), and many African writers have been jailed during the colonial and neocolonial eras. This sense of exile that the average African experiences is described further in Writers in Politics: "the majority of Africans live in conditions of linguistic prisons and exiles in their own countries. What meaningful participation can there be in the economic, political and cultural life of the country if this is only mediated by a handful of the educated, the corpus of interpreters who have been lucky to get a formal education?" (WiP 81). Clearly, then, if the revolution is to be achieved by intellectuals and peasants alike, the first step is to reconnect oneself to the physical, spiritual, cultural, and linguistic roots of one's natio.
Ultimately, though, Ngugi tends to valorize this ideal natio, which is free of corruption and contradiction, but is also unachievable. Thus, despite his attempt to make the nation appear multiple and diverse, at the end, Ngugi presents a singular response himself. This singularity is not a weakness, but precisely Ngugi's point: that all Kenyans, other than the wealthiest class, would benefit from the creation of an ideal natio brought about by revolution. Ngugi's own position, then, is textual, and he inserts his own voice as one among many others. As Ngugi wrote nostalgically in Writers in Politics: "the petals of blood of the turbulent twentieth century may well be replaced by petals of love, of a more humane society in which the condition for the development of any one people, race, class and gender is the development of all. Classes and class struggles are not dead!" (WiP 9394).
As if to underscore the nature of these class struggles, Ngugi bases his narrative structure on a series of contrasts. One of the first is that between several ideal natios and the artificial nation. Like his earlier novels The River Between and A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood depicts all the contradictions between and within the nation and the natio in neocolonial Africa. It also contrasts the official state and all its corruption with the ideal natio, which can provide intellectual and cultural harmony for those who can connect to it. Here his objective is to describe the centuries of Kenyan resistance to colonialism and neocolonialism. Carol M. Sicherman indicates that in earlier novels, resisters against British rule associate freedom not with the dominant KANU party but rather with Dedan Kimathi's, Stanley Mathenge's, and Waruhiu Irote's Land and Freedom Army, or the Mau Mau movement. Ngugi's first three novels, The River Between (1965), Weep Not, Child (1964), and A Grain of Wheat (1967), form, in the views of many critics, a trilogy of sorts, beginning with the female circumcision controversy of 1929, through the Emergency and Mau Mau of 1952 to 1956, to independence in 1963.10 Since Petals of Blood describes the period of 1970 to 1974, it examines the present in light of the past.11
As regards the second contrast, that between political betrayal and social justice, the opposition between the several ideal natios and the artificially created nation appears as an opposition between political betrayal and social justice. This opposition the author terms elsewhere as that between "imperialism and capitalism, on the one hand, and national liberation and socialism, on the other."(WiP 74). The artificial neocolonial nation (it is unnamed in the novel but is clearly meant to represent modern-day Kenya) appears to be a place where national culture is in decline due to poverty and the commodification of human and natural resources, a culture characterized by betrayal on many levelspolitical, social, and economic. Ogundele, describing this process, claims that it shows the "destruction of the community as a distinctly 'alter-native' political entity."12 Due to economic exploitation by British imperialism and Kenyan neocolonial capitalism, according to Ngugi, Kenya has been plunged into a literal and metaphorical drought that has turned men into blind beggars who cannot remember their past glories and who cannot see beyond a future in which all actions are determined by material gains. Ilmorog, the village where the action unfolds, and a pseudonym for Limuru, Ngugi's own hometown, is an "isolated, deserted, drought-stricken but autonomous community" that ends up disappearing or becoming commercialized. (PoB 126). Christine Pagnoulle refers to Ilmorog as "a wasteland, a place of starvation."13 In particular, city politicians are expert only at enriching themselves off the sweat of the poor Ilmorog farmers and selling off Ilmorog's assets to multinational imperialists for selfish material gain.
In depicting neocolonial Kenya this way, Ngugi is honest in his assessment. In the 1970s, for example, Kenya experienced what Bruce Berman has described as a growth in capitalist social forces, including a consolidation of indigenous capital, with the state involved, directly and indirectly, with multinational corporations to get local ownership of the industrial sector. Also, the state itself and its bureaucracy became increasingly centralized. Moreover, the strengthened state machinery helped to suppress class, ethnic, and regional struggles and conflicts at all levels. Opposition parties such as the Kenya People's Union were suppressed, and dissident politicians were detained and assassinated.14 As Berman indicates, "the state passed into the hands of African bureaucrats and politicians and was readily turned to their class project. In the process, the [colonial] state apparatus expanded in size, grew even more complex, and ... remained the foundation of the state with restored and augmented powers."15 He points out that the dominant class changed in structure, but the political economy of Kenya was determined by "particular tracks of capitalist development laid down in Kenya during the previous 60 years."16 This point about the adverse effects of capitalist development is echoed by Ngugi in Writers in Politics where he states that "the state is there, in other words, to protect the free operation of finance capital. And as long as the state is able to deliver that stability, does it matter how much ethnic cleansing it does?" (WiP 93).
Perhaps because the novel critiques the neocolonial state described above, there is a third contrast in the way it describes the nation. The narration is heavily ironic; it uses elements of the detective novel, but the unraveling of the murder mystery is not the main objective. One of the most obvious clues to the ironic nature of the narration is the misleading structure of the novel itself.17 The story progresses through a series of questions and is set up as a detective novel in which the chief objective is to find a murderer. However, catching the murderer has ultimately got very little to do with the novel's underlying theme of neocolonial Kenya's betrayal by corrupt capitalists and multinational imperialism. Ngugi seems to suggest that just as government institutions are inadequate to define the nation's structure, so, too, finding the murderer of the three industrialists is an inadequate solution to Kenya's problems. Indeed, the novel's ambivalent structure leads the reader to ask a series of questions: Who betrayed neocolonial Kenya? Why did Kenyans allow this betrayal to take place? Why is Kenya constantly plagued by drought and famine? Who should own the drought-infested land? What is the true history of Kenya? How can the damage of neocolonialism be undone? And finally, how can patriotic Kenyans get rid of the stooges of imperialism? The answers to these questions are buried in the text. Kenya was betrayed by multinational capitalism and imperialism, and the corrupt Kenyan bourgeoisie (represented by the three murdered businessmen Mzigo, Kimeria, and Chui) allowed this betrayal to take place. Their wrong-headed economic policies aggravated the water distribution problems. Ngugi suggests that Kenya's problems could be corrected if farmers owned land individually or in communes, and if workers and peasants took control of the means of production.
Ngugi also contrasts layers of narration. The novel's structure is complex in that the various commentators and narrative voices telling us the story frequently contradict each other, suggesting not only that different natios or communities are ideal, but also that neocolonial Kenya is a nation that has been betrayed. The story unfolds from six different points of view. There are four primary narrators: Karega, the school teacher turned labor union leader; Munira, the school teacher; Wanja, the barmaid turned prostitute; and Abdullah, the bar owner. In addition, there is a third-person narrator who, comprising several voices of the past, speaks with wisdom and authority. There is also a third-person narrator who, like a reporter, describes some events in a detached and cold manner. Clearly, Ngugi endorses a multiple approach to the history of the nation. As Sicherman points out, Ngugi blurs traditional distinctions between history and literature, and as a result also blurs the lines between some of his narrators and some of his characters.18
Karega, who may be seen as Ngugi's mouthpiece, is one of the main narrators of the story. Ogundele calls him an ideologue who is all for "a destruction of the present and a complete break with the past."19 Karega's socialist vision, Ogundele suggests, is only a prelude to the real finale, which is Wanja and Abdulla's discovery of each other.20 His socialist vision, however, dominates most of the scenes he appears in. He frequently rails against the prevailing economic system in which the corrupt and evil prosper and the poor and innocent suffer, believing that in order to change the nation studying the past is essential: "To understand the present ... you must understand the past. To know where you are, you must know where you came from, don't you think?" (PoB 12728). Studying the past, however, should not involve glorifying it.21
Karega is obsessed with the problems of poverty and exploitation. At first he looks to responsible and humane leadership as the solution. Later, however, his attitude changes to one of absolute rupture with those in authority. In one scene, he describes what he thinks will bring about change: "But the poor, the dispossessed, the working millions and the poor peasants are their own lawyers. With guns and swords and organization, they can and will change the conditions of their oppression.... They'll seize the wealth which rightly belongs to them" (PoB 326). Organized labor, able and willing to take up arms to achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth, seems to him to be the key to creating the ideal nation (PoB 301). He starts by making the brewery workers aware of their own exploitation, trying to organize them into unions (PoB 3045). When he hears that industrial workers are beginning to demand their rights, he imagines how it would be if capitalism and imperialism were nonexistent: "The system and its gods and its angels had to be fought consciously, consistently and resolutely by all the working people ... it had been the peasants, aided by the workers, small traders and small landowners, who had mapped out the path. Tomorrow it would be the workers and the peasants leading the struggle" (PoB 344). That power, however, is to be acquired by the peasants in the future.
In contrast, the narrative, composed of what I would call the voices of the "old folks" (the voices of wisdom and authority mentioned earlier), speaks to us from the underside of the text and provides another historical dimension to Karega's perspective. Indeed, these third-person voices function as a sort of oral history,22 becoming griots, who call up the names of Kenya's past heroes to act as witness and judge of the indecencies of the present. For example, they mention the folk hero "Ole Masai," invented by Ngugi as a way of showing his own awareness of ethnic rivalries in neocolonial Kenya.23 Another hero Ngugi mentions in the novel is Waiyaki, the Gikuyu leader of the resistance against the British in the 1890s. Waiyaki played an important role in Gikuyu folklore, seen variously as a martyr or a disciple of God.24 The listing of these and other heroes is clearly aimed at getting contemporary Kenyan readers to think about their own place in history, and to call attention to the errors and omissions in colonial historiography.25 Thus, the "old folks" echo the thoughts and ideas of the Kenyan people. At one point, a voice reflects on the benefits and costs of the great Trans-Africa road linking Ilmorog to Nairobi. Commenting that the road is an unintended tribute to visionaries and freedom fighters who dreamt of ways of fighting against tyranny, the voice concludes: "They [the visionaries] had seen that the weakness of the resistance lay not in the lack of will or determination or weapons but in the African people's toleration of being divided into regions and tongues and dialects according to the wishes of former masters, and they cried: Africa must unite" (PoB 262). This statement suggests that one of the main problems of the Kenyan nation is that of class, and that Kenya will be stronger when economic inequalities can be erased.26
Unlike the voices of the old folks, Munira's voice is concerned primarily with individual and personal preoccupations. Munira focuses primarily on his emotional turmoil, his feelings of guilt and insecurity. He seems to be uneasy, even terrified, of the power of women and sex, and his thoughts when under interrogation as a suspect for the triple murder fluctuate between an extreme religiosity and a fascination with sexuality. To him, all women, especially prostitutes like Wanja, are the root of the nation's problems. Thus, his concept of the ideal natio is male-centered, requires blind belief in the biblical apocalypse, and can be achieved by eradicating fleshly temptations by any means necessary. He vaguely articulates a vision of a new world that is based on an extreme form of religious emotionalism: "New life with Christ in Christ. I accepted the law" (PoB 299). More ominously, his religious vision contains a desire for personal revenge against a rival, Karega, who has displaced him in love, as well as an urge to depict Wanja as the cause of both his and Karega's ruin. Finally, Munira's ideal natio is disconnected from the past. He is, as Sicherman suggests, unable to deal with all his problems and retreats into "a crazed, ahistorical religiosity."27 Thus, he conceives of a plan to save the world from Wanja by burning down her whorehouse (PoB 33233). Unfortunately for Munira, Wanja is rescued from the fire by Abdullah, while her three clients, Mzigo, Kimeria, and Chui, are burnt to death. Ultimately, then, Munira is unable to achieve his ideal natio. Instead, he is found guilty of the triple murder and awaits his sentence in jail.
Wanja, Munira's main "fleshly temptation," is another major voice in the story. Her sense of the nation is very different from Munira's, and there is almost no conception of an ideal natio. Through her we experience what kind of world neocolonial Kenya is to a poor, undereducated rural woman: a world of missed opportunities, sexual oppression, and economic exploitation. However, like Munira, she frequently experiences guilt and fear, guilt at having destroyed her first child and terror at the implications of suffering death by fire. She also seems to be afraid of the death of her soul. After her lover, Karega, leaves Ilmorog, she uses the only power she has to survive: sex. However, as readers we get few glimpses of what she feels once she has achieved the power and financial security she so desires. While she spends most of the latter part of the novel selling her body for money, she is really a woman of many selves. All of her various selves, however, fall into two categories: victim and whore. Sadly, she seems unable to find an identity for herself outside of these two poles. For example, even when she is a prostitute, she alternates between helping the poor and satisfying the greedy rich. When she finally decides that she has got to choose an identity for herself rather than having it imposed on her, she hatches a melodramatic plot. She determines to kill Kimeria, the rich businessman who raped and humiliated her. When Munira's act of arson forestalls that, she looks to Abdullah, the man who saves her from the fire, for support (PoB 338). Clearly, even at the end of the story, she is unable to change the corruption in Kenya, far less achieve an ideal natio.
Abdullah the bar owner's narrative voice is much less dramatic. The stories about his past rarely reveal a lot of details, and he seems a temperamental and disgruntled storyteller. However, like Karega, he too at first believes in the importance of the past. In his mind, he relives the past struggles against oppression and colonialism: "he would feel that Mau Mau was only a link in the chain in the long struggle of African people through different times at different places" (PoB 137). This is almost identical to Ngugi's own description of Mau Mau in Writers in Politics: "Mau Mau is the spirit of all the working people of Kenya and Africa" (WiP 111). Abdullah clearly believes in and emulates those who fight against colonialism and corruption, and rejects those who capitulate to the oppressors. In this capacity, Abdullah appears to be more mythical than real, and his traditionalism is tied to a fighting spirit. This can be seen in the fact that, although he prefers armed struggle to bring about an egalitarian natio, free of corruption, he is also one of the few people who fights successfully on an ideological level. While he is not very good with words (unlike Munira and Karega), he is strong in deeds: he chooses poverty and humiliation over profits gained from multinational capitalism and economic corruption. Although unable to prevent the destruction of Ilmorog and Wanja, he remains an example of integrity and perseverance. Able to recognize the symbolic nature of his own role in shaping the ideal natio's history, he becomes an inspiration for Karega, and others of Karega's generation.
Finally, the reporter-like narrator is rather detached and factual, and yet he tells us nothing about either the official nation or the various ideal natios. He creates the illusion that he is an impartial observer (which he is not) and gives us the impression that he is a detective who is filling in the missing links of the murder mystery. This renders his narrative profoundly ironic and distances it from the real history of the nation. For example, he introduces us to all the main characters right at the beginning of the narrative, yet tells us very little about each of them beyond the fact that they are being arrested in the fallout of the murder of the three businessmen. The triple murder, of course, has little to do with the real problems of Kenya, beyond naming three culprits of corruption. Hence, his narrative does not provide relevant details about neocolonial Kenya.
In conclusion, to use a musical metaphor, the main notes that the novel sounds in the first part of its song about the nation are discordant. The official nation that is neocolonial Kenya, the song tells us, is a barren wasteland, whose resources have run dry due to bureaucratic corruption and greed. In the second part of its song, the novel uses a different key to present a different melody, namely, that of the ideal natio, based on communal resource sharing and led by the people who produce most of the resources: peasants and workers. However, this melody is left incomplete: what we hear has to do more with what this song (or natio) could be like than with what it actually is like. In the third part of its song, the novel uses a plethora of contrasting melodies to do the following: to describe the differences between the official nation and the ideal natios; to lament that the people of Kenya have experienced betrayal rather than justice; to use ironic interludes about the need to solve a murder mystery which is irrelevant; and to present multiple and conflicting soloists who sing about the nation and their own ideal natios. However, none of these soloists blend their voices well together, nor do they ever really produce a harmony. Their performances tell us that official songs about Kenyan history are simplistic and misleading and should be replaced by melodies about local communities and natios. But when we try to hear those local melodies again, we realize that even they are scratchy and false: they have lost notes and overstretched tones. For example, Ngugi's preferred refrain about the ideal communal-type natios, sung by Karega and the "old folks," achievable through armed revolution, is one that could, if responded to by the Kenyan people, benefit all classes and ethnicities. The problem remains in the response that the refrain relies on: it is based on a false notion of unity among Kenyan farmers and workers. There is no sense, at the end of the song, that the average Kenyan farmer could act as a chorus leader or rallying point for all the others in a chorus, a community, or a natio. Yet, despite this lack of a unified response, Ngugi's song nevertheless remains haunting. Indeed, although his use of contrasting melodies and discordant harmonies resists providing a blueprint for social change, it does give us provocative hints of what kinds of potential harmonious melodies (or ideal natios) could be produced, if the Kenyan people were to sing together in greater harmony and unity.
Notes
1. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood (New York: Penguin, 1977; rpt. 1991). Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation PoB.
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2. Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989) 2.
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3. Wole Ogundele, "Natio, Nation, and Postcoloniality: The Example of Ngugi," Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Texts and Contexts, ed. Charles Cantalupo (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1995) 113.
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4. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (London: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1993) 170. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation MC. Later, Ngugi imagines what a wonderful place a united East Africa would be if it were linked by "a common geography, a common tradition of resistance, a common language, and with political unity bringing about the economic integration of our 60 million people under one strong federal state" (172).
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5. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
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6. Ali A. Mazrui, Cultural Engineering and Nation-Building (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972) 27778.
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7. See Hobsbawm 13738 and 171; and Anderson 114.
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8. See Brennan 45, 8, 108, and 123; and Ogundele 113. See also Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Peter Worsley, The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
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9. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Writers in Politics: A Re-engagement with Issues of Literature and Society, Studies in African Literature Series (Oxford: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997) 9394. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation WiP.
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10. The female circumcision controversy of 1929 refers to the situation in which the Church of Scotland Mission in Kenya declared that all Kenyan converts and mission school children would have to stop practicing cliterodectomy. As Jessica Powers points out in her article entitled "Female Circumcision and Conflict in Kenya, 19291960" (www.suite101.com/article.cfm/african_history/45388 [Copyright © 1996-2003 Creative Marketeam Canada Ltd.]), as a result of this decree by the church, many Gikuyu elders set up their own schools and refused to come to the mission. While Europeans saw cliterodectomy as unhealthy and immoral, the Gikuyu people regarded it as an important rite of womanhood and adulthood. The Gikuyu reacted against prohibitions on this practice fiercely and sometimes violently. The Emergency and Mau Mau rebellion of 1952 to 1956 refers to the revolt that took place in 195257, led by Gikuyu farmers and peasants. Jessica Powers's article entitled "Mau-Mau: Nationalist Movement or Kikuyu Grievances" (http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/african_history/ 91796) points out that the leaders of the revolt were Gikuyu farmers and peasants who formed what was called the Land and Freedom Army, and whose aims were to get back land from British settlers through violent means. In 1952, the British declared a state of emergency in Kenya and tried to tackle the problem. In 1957, they were able to destroy the movement by killing more than 10,000 of the guerrilla fighters. In 1960 the state of Emergency ended and in 1963 Kenya became independent with Jomo Kenyatta as the first Prime Minister (http://www.hartford_hwp.com/archives/36/097.html).
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11. Carol M. Sicherman, "Ngugi wa Thiong'o and the Writing of Kenyan History," Research in African Literatures 20.3 (Fall 1989): 349.
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12. Ogundele 126.
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13. Christine Pagnoulle, "Ngugi wa Thiong'o's 'Journey of the Magi': Part 2 of Petals of Blood," Research in African Literatures 16.2 (Summer 1985): 266.
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14. Bruce Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination (London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya; Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990): 426.
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15. Berman 42627.
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16. Berman 427.
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17. Cf. Pagnoulle 264.
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18. Sicherman 348.
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19. Ogundele 128.
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20. Ogundele 128.
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21. Here, as Sicherman suggests (353 and 363), Karega articulates both the need to revise Kenyan historiography and Ngugi's own attempts to connect his own rural past, full of folk traditions, to his present life as an internationally recognized author. In many parts of Petals of Blood, Karega points out that Africa has not one, but several pasts. He describes the glorious past of ancient Egypt and Ethiopia and the centuries of the European slave trade when Africans were scattered all over the globe, despite their heroic resistance against exploitation (cf. 67 and 214).
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22. This stress on orality underscores Ngugi's argument that events and people disconnected from European culture also often lacked written documents, so that the job of the historian in such cultures is to "unravel oral history and analyze physical and linguistic evidence in order to assemble a coherent account of historical developments" (Sicherman 357).
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23. The fact that Ngugi gives this hero a Masai name suggests that he believed in the Mau Mau being a national struggle. It also underscores the author's belief that the ideal natio is based on class rather than ethnicity. As he argued in Writers in Politics, the basis of the Mau Mau was the struggle over land, or rather, the desire of Kenyans to regain their own land (cf. 108).
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24. Sicherman 360.
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25. Sicherman 351.
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26. Cf. Ogundele 115.
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27. Sicherman 364.
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