Remi denounces Thoni, charging that her deepest love will always be reserved for her first husband, his dead brother. Even when his mother continues to defend his wife’s true affection, he still repudiates her. Hurt by his unloving behavior, Thoni despairingly seeks death.

In scene 2, Omange visits the village, but his and Remi’s political argument is cut short when they notice that Thoni is missing. A village woman brings Remi a farewell note in which Thoni expresses her abiding love. Remi agonizes over the cruel injustice of his behavior. The pastor asserts that the trouble derives from the fact that he put politics before religion. Although Remi does not accept this interpretation, he does at last realize that in pursuing social goals he has neglected the most precious thing, human affection. At the news of Thoni’s suicide, he realizes that his ability to manipulate a crowd does not compensate him for what he has lost in his personal life. He confesses that the city has destroyed him.

Many modern African plays borrow from the traditional forms of public ritual. They deliberately include dance, mime, and music as part of an almost operatic performance. The Black Hermit is more conventional in the European sense. It sets a realistic social context, within which pertinent political issues can be debated. There are no contrivances or innovative theatrical devices to present the plot. This limitation derives partly from the fact that Ngugi wa Thiong’o is attempting a drama of ideas, in the manner of George Bernard Shaw. It also derives from Ngugi’s intention that the play be capable of being staged under very restricted conditions. School assembly rooms and village cultural centers offer few provisions for unusual or complex methods of staging.

The most important theatrical aspect of The Black Hermit derives from its structure. The play establishes two very different worlds: the village and the city. The village maintains a cohesion of traditional behavior. Pagan and Christian beliefs battle each other, but even that conflict does not alter the security and implicit harmony of the daily routine. In contrast, the scenes set in the city reflect a rootless, unprincipled existence: self-serving and grasping, without dignity or moral purpose.

This difference is exemplified in the diction in which the political and personal levels of plot are expressed. Ngugi deliberately differentiates the language spoken within these contrasting lifestyles. In the city, the characters’ speech includes much colloquial slang, intended to indicate an African style of English. Political statements are couched in the most artificial clichés of radical journalism. Neither style sounds very convincing. The village speech has a formal, poetic quality intended to reflect the natural rhythms of the African idiom. The intense feeling conveyed by this diction lends importance and authority to the village tradition. It also brings a classical quality to the tragedy, in which the villagers serve as a kind of Greek chorus. In contrast, the political debate seems banal for being couched in simplistic rhetoric. Despite Ngugi’s determination to devise a mouthpiece for his socialist beliefs, they are hardly attractive when so pompously expressed.

As the play progresses, the story of love betrayed becomes more and more central, finally overshadowing the political debate. The play ends in the village, which signals Ngugi’s realization that it is there, not in the cities populated by corrupt and Europeanized Africans, that the basis for noble nationhood will be found.