SOURCE: Loflin, Christine. “Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Visions of Africa.” Research in African Literatures 26, no. 4 (winter 1995): 76-93.

[In the following essay, Loflin maintains that descriptions of the land, boundaries, and features of Kenya are paramount to Ngugi's novels, asserting that his portrayal of the Kenyan landscape is closely related to the well-being and identity of the community.]

I was living in a village and also in a colonial situation.

—Ngũgĩ, [Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics] (48)

Landscape as an aspect of fiction has tended to be underrated: less interesting than narrative, rhetoric, or tropology. Yet through landscape the author creates the horizons of the novel, establishing it in a historical (or an ahistorical) space. The landscape is not merely the setting of the story: it is a shifting, expanding territory, where the boundaries of public/private, fictional/real overlap. It has been said that African writers are particularly uninterested in landscape description (Roscoe 177-78). If, however, landscape is understood as the description of the land and its role in the cultural, economic, and spiritual life of the community, it immediately becomes clear that landscape is an essential part of African literature. Throughout the African novel, concerns about land use, ownership, spiritual values, nationalism, and pan-Africanism are reflected in the description of the land. In their descriptions of Africa, their mapping of boundaries, their choice of features and background, of what matters in the landscape of Africa, African writers challenge Western visions of Africa and reclaim the landscape for themselves. In Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's novels, the importance of the landscape is paramount, as the landscape of Kenya is intimately related to the community's spiritual, social, and political identity.

Ngũgĩ's descriptions of landscape are shaped by some specific circumstances of Kenyan history: the centrality of land in the Gikuyu worldview, the forced removals of the Gikuyu from the White Highlands, the Mau Mau independence war, and post-independence disillusionment in Kenya. Ngũgĩ himself has insisted on the connection between particular historical events and literature:

Literature does not grow or develop in a vacuum; it is given impetus, shape, direction and even area of concern by social, political and economic forces in a particular society.

(Homecoming xv)

In analyzing the description of landscape in Ngũgĩ's novels, I want to do more than show his mastery of a Western technique; Ngũgĩ's works re-evaluate the importance of landscape, integrating geography with his people's cultural environment, religious beliefs, and economic system.

For the Gikuyu people, land is central to their spiritual, cultural and economic practices:

to anyone who wants to understand Gikuyu problems, nothing is more important than a correct grasp of the question of land tenure. For it is the key to the people's life; it secures for them that peaceful tillage of the soil which supplies their material needs and enables them to perform their magic and traditional ceremonies in undisturbed serenity, facing Mount Kenya.

(Kenyatta xxi)

Jomo Kenyatta's study of Gikuyu culture shows that the Gikuyu see land as connecting them to God and to their ancestors, as well as to the village community. In the Gikuyu myth of creation, the land was given to them by God; in addition, “Communion with the ancestral spirits is perpetuated through contact with the soil in which the ancestors of the tribe lie buried. The Gikuyu consider the earth as the ‘mother’ of the tribe. … Thus the earth is the most sacred thing above all that dwell in or on it” (Kenyatta 21). Ngũgĩ's descriptions of land in his early novels incorporate these traditional Gikuyu beliefs about their land.

Colonialism caused catastrophic disruption in Gikuyu society. Not only were the Gikuyu forcibly brought under British colonial rule; the Gikuyu lands, particularly the area known as the White Highlands, were seen as especially suited for Europeans, because of the similarity between their climate and Europe's:

[A] point which is often overlooked is that regions most favoured by Europeans may be those least suited to Africans. Europeans instinctively select a country where the climate, vegetation and temperature most resemble those of the cold north. Natives, on the whole, thrive best in hotter, lower, wetter places.

(Huxley, White Man's Country 1: 72)

In addition to this suggestion that there was a kind of racial affinity that justified the annexation of the Highlands, Elspeth Huxley and others also claimed that the Gikuyu were not doing anything with the land: “To us that was remarkable: they had not aspired to recreate or tame the country and to bring it under their control” (Huxley, Flame Trees of Thika 45). Throughout colonial African literature, there runs the theme that the land belongs to the people who would develop it, based loosely on the Biblical notion of the good steward. The good stewardship of the Gikuyu, and the environmental value of fallow land, was not yet appreciated by the British.

The British colonists then developed a legal argument justifying the appropriation of land:

the Europeans [misinterpreted Gikuyu land tenure] by saying that the land was under the communal or tribal ownership, and as such the land must be mali ya serikali, which means Government property. Having coined this new terminology of land tenure, the British Government began to drive away the original owners of the land.

(Kenyatta 26)

Thus by a sleight of hand, communal land became the property of the Crown. In actuality the open land the Europeans saw in the Highlands was used as pastureland and woodlands, and also represented future village sites, as populations expanded and farming plots became exhausted. By relocating whole villages as the soil gave out, the Gikuyu were able to design a sustainable agriculture; with the coming of permanent ownership of the land and a growing population, however, they were no longer able to move to open land, and their plots became poor and subdivided.

The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s was a crucial event not only in Kenyan history but also in Ngũgĩ's personal development. His older brother, Wallace Mwangi, was a freedom fighter (Gurr 101). While Mau Mau was strongest among the Gikuyu, it was a national movement that united the Kenyan people: “Through Mau Mau, they organized themselves, in the villages, and in the towns, their vision going beyond the narrow confines of the tribe” (Ngũgĩ, Homecoming 12). Ngũgĩ's political philosophy was strongly influenced by Marxism, but at the same time he felt that he was articulating a nationalist and socialist vision that was essentially African, not Western:

My thesis, when we come to today's Africa, is then very simple: a completely socialized economy, collectively owned and controlled by the people, is necessary for a national culture.

(Homecoming 13)

Although Ngũgĩ's early novels emphasize the relation of a specifically Gikuyu culture to the land, all his works also articulate a national and socialist vision of Kenya.

Ngũgĩ grew up in a small village; his father had four wives and twenty-eight children. He was sent to boarding school to get a British-style education and later studied at Makerere and Leeds Universities. His first three novels, The River Between, Weep Not, Child, and A Grain of Wheat, were written in Uganda and England; Petals of Blood “was drafted in the USA and completed in the USSR” (Gurr 17). The traces of this history are apparent in the Western form and techniques used in these early novels. By examining the changes in the description of landscape in Ngũgĩ's novels, and considering them as a response to colonial literature about Kenya and in connection with Ngũgĩ's critique of the economic and political situation in Kenya, we can trace the development of his fiction from a limited acceptance of Western techniques of description to a rejection of these techniques as implying a view of nature that Ngũgĩ no longer shares.

Ngũgĩ's earliest written novel (although it was published after Weep Not, Child) is The River Between. This novel opens with a sweeping description of the landscape:

The two ridges lay side by side. One was Kameno, the other was Makuyu. Between them was a valley. It was called the valley of life. Behind Kameno and Makuyu were many more valleys and ridges, lying without any discernible plan. They were like many sleeping lions which never woke. They just slept, the big deep sleep of their Creator.

A river flowed through the valley of life. If there had been no bush and no forest trees covering the slopes, you could have seen the river when you stood on top of either Kameno or Makuyu. Now you had to come down. Even then you could not see the whole extent of the river as it gracefully, and without any apparent haste, wound its way down the valley, like a snake. The river was called Honia, which meant cure, or bring-back-to-life. Honia river never dried: it seemed to possess a strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes. And it went on in the same way, never hurrying, never hesitating. People saw this and were happy.

(1)

This opening paragraph can be compared to Western descriptions of landscape. The omniscient narrator supplies a bird's eye view of the landscape and names the prominent features for us. The description is organized along the lines of a landscape painting: first we see the most prominent features, the two ridges, then the valley, and finally the background features are filled in. As in a novel by Dickens, Hardy, or Lawrence, the landscape is used to foreshadow the conflicts in the novel: the river divides the two ridges, but it could also be seen as a uniting force. Ngũgĩ's use of the ambivalent term “between” in “Between them was a valley” (and in the title of the novel) offers at least two interpretations; if people have something between them, it can be joining or dividing them. Ngũgĩ's use of personification in this passage stays within the limits of traditional realism: although the river is described as “possessing a strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes,” the narrator distances himself from this description through the phrase “it seemed.” As a final touch, Ngũgĩ ends the paragraph with a reference to people, like the small figures, sometimes including a figure of the artist himself, included in a landscape painting to provide a sense of scale. An important difference here is that the figures are not of the artist, but of the community itself as collective onlookers: “People saw this and were happy.”

When the landscape is looked at from inside the valley rather than from the air the foreshadowing of conflict is intensified:

When you stood in the valley, the two ridges … became antagonists … they faced each other, like two rivals ready to come to blows in a life and death struggle for the leadership of this isolated region.

(1)

The river divides rather than unites, marking the boundary between the two opposing sides (Christian and traditional villages). By placing these descriptions side by side, Ngugi leaves the “correctness” of either vision open; Waiyaki, the protagonist, must decide whether the Gikuyu are ready to be united or are destined to be split into two camps. The choice of action is linked to the choice of perspective; if Waiyaki can persuade the villages to see themselves as united—part of the same community, the same valley—they will be able to overcome their differences, but if the river is seen as a boundary between the two rather than a unifying force, the social rift will be unbreachable.

Ngũgĩ's description of the landscape is integrated with his development of action and character. Waiyaki's father, Chege, takes him to visit a place sacred to his clan, pointing out medicinal herbs along the way. Here, “the landscape, the forests and hills, are conspiring to unite father and son as they have united the Gikuyu nation for generations. We cannot understand the individual, social, and spiritual significance of either character outside their relation to the landscape” (Roscoe 178). Through this scene, we see how Waiyaki is being educated in the connections between the Gikuyu community and nature, and specifically in the connections to this particular landscape, where medicinal herbs grow, and where there are sacred sites. Ngugi's description of the community's relation to the land at the moment when colonialism, through the arrival of Christian missionaries, was just beginning to make itself felt, echoes Kenyatta's claims about the importance of land to the Gikuyu people: “These ancient hills and ridges were the heart and soul of the land. They kept the tribes' magic and rituals, pure and intact” (The River Between 3).

Throughout the novel, the conflict between Christianity and traditionalism is seen as threatening the people's connection to the land. In one scene, Muthoni, the daughter of a minister, reveals to her sister Nyambura that she wants to be circumcised and become “a real woman, knowing all the ways of the hills and ridges” (29). Nyambura is shocked by Muthoni's decision, as it is against the principles of their church:

For a second Nyambura sat as if her thoughts, her feelings, her very being had been paralysed. She could not speak. The announcement was too sudden and too stupefying. How could she believe what she had heard came from Muthoni's mouth? She looked at the river, at the slightly swaying bulrushes lining the banks, and then beyond. Nothing moved on the huge cattle road that wound through the forest towards Kameno. The yellowish streaks of morning light diffused through the forest, producing long shadows on the cattle path. The insects in the forest kept up an incessant sound which mingled with the noise of falling water farther down the valley. They helped to intensify the silence, created by Muthoni's statement.

(28)

Female circumcision was (and continues to be) one of the crucial conflicts between Christians and traditionalists: to Christians it is barbaric; but without it, a woman cannot be initiated into her clan. That Muthoni, the daughter of a minister, would choose to be circumcised is extremely shocking, and it has stunned her sister into silence. Yet Muthoni's description of her decision shows that she sees this action as the only way to have an authentic connection to the hills and ridges. On the other hand, when Nyambura reaches out to the landscape to reassure herself and support her Christian beliefs, she receives nothing: the insects' noise “helped to intensify the silence” and “nothing moved.” Ngũgĩ's description clearly shows that Christianity detaches the individual from the landscape, both through the loss of traditional initiation rites which would connect the individual to the clan and to the land, and through the loss of traditional interpretations of the landscape—for Nyambura, the symbolic significance of the land in the Gikuyu culture has been lost. The land is silent.

Adrian Roscoe quotes this passage and comments:

Muthoni's announcement is heard by “the river” which neatly divides the landscape and the human community of the book. … Even “the slightly swaying bulrushes” have their place in this scene, repeating a reed-in-the-tide image which J. P. Clark popularized as a symbol of cultural hesitation. Muthoni so far has been weak like this plant; but now by the waters of the Honia she has made a decision which will restore her to strength.

(177)

Thus Ngũgĩ shows Muthoni's choice to be in harmony with the landscape of the valley.

In The River Between, the colonialists have not yet moved into the hills. Their influence is felt through the Christian school in a nearby town, and their political and economic power is known only through descriptions of their houses and through the tax gatherers. Yet Waiyaki, the protagonist, senses what is to come:

And still it rained, with the little streams gathering and joining together. He saw what they were doing—

Carrying away the soil.

Corroding, eating away the earth.

Stealing the land.

And that was the cry, the cry on every ridge. Perhaps the sleeping lions would sleep no more, for they were all crying, crying for the soil. The earth was important to the tribe.

(76)

Waiyaki explicitly connects this irresistible erosion with the white settlers: “That was why Kinuthia and others like him feared the encroachment of the white man” (76). This coming threat emphasizes the importance of Waiyaki's quest to unify the two villages; without unification, both villages will be washed away by the erosion caused by the white settlers.

Near the end of the novel, Ngugi foreshadows the coming of Mau Mau: “suddenly the people who stood on the hills or up the slope saw big yellow flames emanated by the setting sun. The flames seemed near and far and the trees and the country were caught in the flames. They feared” (166). Ngugi's image of the flames of the sunset here suggests that the Mau Mau uprising was a natural, even inevitable, phenomenon.

Throughout the novel, the river Honia is a symbol of life, power and unification. In this image, Ngugi draws on the importance of the river in traditional life, as a source of water, and as a source of spiritual renewal. Even Christianity is included in the landscape through the Biblical language of the river's song: “And Honia river went on flowing through the valley of life, throbbing, murmuring an unknown song. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountains, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (173). The river's warning is unheeded by the people of Kameno: they reject their teacher because he preaches unification with the Christians of Makuyu. With the betrayal of Waiyaki by the people of Kameno, it would seem that the hope of unification has been lost forever, but Ngũgĩ closes the novel with a final image of the river: “Honia river went on flowing between them, down through the valley of life, its beat rising above the dark stillness, reaching into the heart of the people of Makuyu and Kameno” (175). Charles Nnolim, in his essay “Background Setting: Key to the Structure of Ngũgĩ's The River Between,” sees this as a tragic ending: “Ngũgĩ seems to look on Honia River as symbolizing the continued and eternal strife between the Makuyu and Kameno tribesman” (138). However, in “Kenya: The Two Rifts” Ngũgĩ uses a similar image: “Kenya is potentially a great country … the different springs in every tribe and race can and should be channelled to flow together in a national stream from which all may draw” (Homecoming 24). In opposition to the eroding forces of colonialism, Ngũgĩ claims that nationalism and socialism are life-giving, unifying forces. Thus, although Waiyaki, the “middle figure” in between the two ridges, is unable to find a resolution, the Honia River's ability to reach into the heart of the people in both villages implies that there is still the possibility of unification and social change in Kenya.

Early critics of Ngũgĩ's fiction noted his use of landscape as an integral part of The River Between. Ime Ikiddeh saw the Honia River as a symbol of the inherent unity of the two communities: the division between them is an “unnatural struggle” (5). In some Western interpretations of the novel, however, the description of landscape became a point of contention as to whether the novel was borrowing Western conventions of description or was revealing a uniquely African consciousness. In the first group was C. B. Robson, who linked Ngũgĩ's description of landscape with D. H. Lawrence's and universalized the Kenyan struggle for independence in the novel: “Even his attempt to form a ‘new retrospect,’ of the clash with Europe, is conveyed as part of man's struggle to come to terms with the implications of his own momentum” (Robson 129). On the other side was Gerald Moore, who saw African writers in general as expressing a unity of nature that was lost to the West:

What seems to be involved is a complete identification of the poet with the constituent features of the landscape around him. He does not so much inhabit this landscape as become inhabited by it. … Western man simply cannot fuse himself back into a nature which he has deliberately set apart from himself in order to master it.

(Moore 151)

Yet either way, whether these Western critics praise African writers for their continuity with Western traditions or for their alterity, the center of the discourse is the use of these literatures for a Western audience. Chris Wanjala, in The Season of Harvest: A Literary Discussion, criticizes Moore's position, which “implies a homeliness of a writer in an environment of primeval innocence (Garden of Eden?) and bliss”:

Such a society does not exist here in East Africa today. He [Moore] refers the writer's consciousness only to place and disregards the history of the forming nations of East Africa, and the connection of Ngũgĩ's writings to the pre-independence nationalism in Kenya.

(53-54)

The same criticism can be made of Robson's interpretation of the novel: by “elevating” the issue in the novel to a universal crisis of modern man, Robson elides the significance of the novel as a critique of Western colonialism and capitalism. Wanjala asserts that Ngũgĩ's purpose is to portray “the destruction that inhered in colonialism and to evoke the need for a renewal and a rebirth of African cultural and economic institutions that help the African to be at home in his society and in his physical environment” (70). Thus in The River Between, Honia River is a representation of the potential for renewal in the two communities.

Ngũgĩ's use of landscape in The River Between does share similarities with early works by other African authors, such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. In each of these, the author uses some Western techniques and has an orientation towards a Western audience. Ngũgĩ, writing about the “scandalous allegation” that Africans have no culture, has said, “Because he knew that this ‘scandalous allegation’ was also embodied in European books, especially fiction, on Africa, the African writer tried to answer by asserting in the books he wrote that Africa had a culture as good as any” (Homecoming 11). After their early novels, the careers of Ngũgĩ and Achebe moved in different directions, as Achebe continued to claim that English can be African, while Ngũgĩ began to write in Gikuyu. Ngũgĩ puts into practice his own beliefs: “Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it? … The aim, in short, should be to orientate ourselves towards placing Kenya, East Africa, and then Africa in the centre” (Homecoming 146).

Even in The River Between there are elements of this philosophy: the novel centers on the Gikuyu people, and the colonists are only on the fringes of the Gikuyu world. Ngũgĩ carefully depicts the land-centered consciousness of the Gikuyu, and uses their symbolic system to describe and interpret the significance of the landscape. However, the form of the novel is Westernized, and Ngugi gradually turns from this style to develop an African-centered approach not only to the content, but also to the structure of his novels.

Between the publication of A Grain of Wheat (1968) and Petals of Blood (1977), Ngũgĩ published a collection of non-fiction essays, Homecoming (1972), which describe his positions on colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, and post-independence corruption in Africa, as well as his vision of an African-centered world-view. The essays are focused on the present and the future, rather than the past described in his early novels. Significantly, he rejects the romanticism of the past typical of the Negritude poets:

The African writer was in danger of becoming too fascinated by the yesterday of his people and forgetting the present. Involved as he was in correcting his disfigured past, he forgot that his society was no longer peasant, with common ownership of means of production, with communal celebration of joy and victory, communal sharing of sorrow and bereavement; his society was no longer organized on egalitarian principles.

(44)

Ngũgĩ claims that there are no longer any tribes in Africa: “the economic and social forces that gave rise to various nations in pre-colonial Africa have collapsed” (xvii). In this new world, he urges Africans to look, not to the past, but to the future: “For we are all involved in a common problem: how best to build a true communal home for all Africans. Then all the black people, all the African masses can truthfully say: we have come home” (xix). The Marxist ideology and African-centered consciousness of Homecoming form the ideological context of Petals of Blood.

In Petals of Blood, Ngũgĩ moves from the primarily aesthetic and spiritual connection to the land evident in his early novels to an explicitly political and economic relationship between the worker and the land. Instead of identifying characters as Gikuyu or Maasai, he calls them tillers, peasants and herdsmen (Gurr 109), thus de-emphasizing the role of specific cultures in creating and maintaining the people's relationship to their environment. Rather, the cycles of human life are seen as intricately interwoven with the cycles of production:

The peasant farmers of Ilmarog now went into the fields to idly earth up crops that no longer needed the extra earth, or to merely pull out the odd weed. Thistles, marigolds and forget-me-nots would stick to their clothes, and they would now laugh and tell jokes and stories as they waited for the crops to ripen.

(32)

The happiness of the peasant farmers is clearly linked to the time of year and idleness.

Earlier religious attitudes are rejected here:

A donkey has no influence on the weather. No animal or man can change the laws of nature. But people can use the laws of nature. The magic we should be getting is this: the one which will make this land so yield in times of rain that we can keep aside a few grains for when it shines. … Let us rather look to ourselves to see what we can do to save us from the drought. The labour of our hands is the magic and wealth that will change our world and end all droughts from our earth.

(115)

While Karega, the protagonist, shares his community's vision of the land as belonging to the people as a whole, he rejects the magical beliefs of the community in favor of a socialist approach which relies on labor and communal action rather than on ancestral ties to preserve the productiveness of the land. Ngugi even refigures the Gikuyu's reverence for ancestral spirits associated with the land through his revolutionary perspective: listening to stories of the Mau Mau, Karega becomes “aware of a new relationship to the ground on which they trod … everything on the plains had been hallowed by the feet of those who had fought and died that Kenya might be free: wasn't there something, a spirit of those people in them too?” (143).

Godfrey Munira in Petals of Blood is a schoolteacher, like Waiyaki in The River Between. While Waiyaki was at the center of his people's conflict between Christianity and traditional culture, Munira is portrayed as an outsider, not only because he was not born in Ilmarog, but also because he does not work on the land: “Munira did not take part in such talk: he felt an outsider to [the peasants'] involvement with both the land and what they called ‘things of blood’ … he seemed doomed to roam this world, a stranger” (18).

The figure of Munira, the Western-educated schoolteacher, serves as an indictment of a Western attitude toward nature. Munira's aesthetic appreciation of nature is divorced from practicalities: “He would watch the peasants in the fields going through the motions of working but really waiting for the rains, and he would vaguely feel with them in their anxieties over the weather. But the sun was nice and warm on his skin” (20). His attitude is similar to the traditional Western pastoral depiction of rural life, which elevated the picturesque qualities of rural scenes but tended to overlook the poverty of the rural people and their struggles to survive on marginal land. Munira shies away from anything beyond conventional Western aesthetic values. While on a nature walk, one of Munira's students says, “Look. A flower with petals of blood.” Munira immediately corrects him: “There is no color called blood. What you mean is that it is red” (21). Just as he felt outside the “things of blood” the farmers discuss, Munira here avoids the implications of “petals of blood” which will be worked out throughout the novel. Only towards the end of the novel is Munira able to accept this image: after setting fire to a whorehouse, Munira

stood on the hill and watched the whorehouse burn, the tongues of flame from the four corners forming petals of blood, making a twilight of the dark sky. He, Munira, had willed and acted, and he felt, as he knelt down to pray, that he was no longer an outsider, for he had finally affirmed his oneness with the Law.

(333)

Action imbues the petals of blood with meaning. In the earlier scene, however, the children's questions about the relationships of man to nature only irritate him: “Man … law … God … nature [sic]; he had never thought deeply about these things, and he swore that he would never again take the children to the fields” (22).

Munira is an intruder in the community, a man who fails to establish any lasting ties. He is the image of the Western-educated African, aspiring to Western ideals but left out of the real centers of power. He fantasizes about being “lord” of Ilmarog: “he came to feel as if Ilmorog was his personal possession … he felt as if the whole of Ilmorog had put on a vast flower-patterned cloth to greet its lord and master” (21). The language Munira uses, that of owner, master and lord, reveals Munira's desire for power and control; it is the language of the colonial masters. Yet Munira's fantasies about nature do not lead to any ties to the community or to a sense of belonging in Ilmarog, but only to frustration. Munira's alienation from the land represents the contradictions involved in a Kenyan accepting Western premises about nature, power, and community: Ngũgĩ implies that in an African context, these premises are irrelevant and futile.

Karega, the hero of the novel, is also a schoolteacher, but he is able to see the connection of the land to the labor of the people. In addition, he represents Ngũgĩ's desire to create an Afrocentric worldview. Karega asks, “How could he enlarge [the schoolchildren's] consciousness so that they could see themselves, Ilmarog and Kenya as part of a larger whole, a larger territory containing the history of African people and their struggles?” (109). This opinion is echoed later by the narrator, who comments 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” (262). Africans, by accepting a Western-oriented worldview, accepted also the arbitrary divisions created by the colonial powers and then maintained by those in power. A new image of a united Africa would be, quite literally, revolutionary.

In Homecoming, Ngũgĩ claimed that “Now there are only two tribes left in Africa: the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’” (xvii). In Petals of Blood the “haves” are the Europeanized blacks who work for foreign companies: “the new owners, master-servants of bank power, money and cunning” (280). Ilmorog is divided into two parts—a wealthy residential area and the shanty town of the workers. This rift is not illustrated or supported by any split in the natural landscape—there is no river between them—which emphasizes the unnatural nature of the division. The only differences are in the man-made landscape, in which Ngũgĩ juxtaposes the luxuries of “Cape Town” (named after one of the centers of white South African power and privilege) with the open sewers and mud shanties of the “New Jerusalem” (whose hopes must lie in the future). Karega finally blames the system of private ownership for the destruction of the land:

Why, anyway, should soil, any soil, which after all was what was Kenya, be owned by an individual? Kenya, the soil, was the people's common shamba, and there was no way it could be right for a few, or a section, or a single nationality, to inherit for their sole use what was communal.

(302)

Ngũgĩ has moved from a description of a single people's connection with its ancestral homeland to a national, even pan-African, perspective. In the process, he has described how people's relationships to the land, and by extension, to Kenya and to Africa, are mediated by their cultural, racial, and economic situation. Ngũgĩ moves away from traditional descriptions of landscape, as in the opening of The River Between, towards descriptions that expose these mediating factors. For Ngũgĩ, peasants have the most authentic experience of the land, in that their work on the land gives them a connection to the landscape which is not based on ownership or aesthetic distance, but this must be supplemented by teachers like Karega who can provide a vision of Kenyan and African unity. This vision will only become a reality through the masses' struggle against capitalism:

Imperialism:capitalism:landlords:earthworms. A system that bred hordes of round-bellied jiggers and bedbugs with parasitism and cannibalism as the highest goal in society. … The system and its gods and its angels had to be fought consciously, consistently and resolutely by all the working people!

(344)

After Petals of Blood, Ngũgĩ co-authored a play in Gikuyu, Ngaahika Ndeenda. The play was staged in his home town, Limuru, and was acted by the wananchi, or peasants, of the area. By writing in Gikuyu, and choosing the theater over the form of the novel, Ngũgĩ was identifying himself with the African masses, trying to put into practice his idea of cultural and political commitment. As a result, he was detained under the Public Security Act of Kenya in December 1977. After his release, in December 1978, Ngũgĩ said “Ngaahika Ndeenda showed me the road along which I should have been travelling all these past seventeen years of my writing career” (The Weekly Review 32). Since that time, Ngũgĩ has been the leading proponent of writing in African languages.

The use of a foreign language creates a rift between the text and the author. By the time he wrote Petals of Blood, Ngugi had already rejected Western techniques of description as implying Western, not African, relations to the land; now he rejected the language of the West also. Ngũgĩ's decision reflects his concern with the alienation of the African from his own society through the acceptance of Western culture and technology; Ngũgĩ claims that “[l]iterature published in African languages will have to be meaningful to the masses and therefore much closer to the realities of their situation” (“On Writing in Gikuyu” 151).

In Devil on the Cross, Ngũgĩ writes in Gikuyu from a Gikuyu perspective. The narrator of the story is a gicaandi singer, a traditional storyteller. He sprinkles his narrative with African proverbs: “the forest of the heart is never cleared of all its trees” (7); “aping others cost the frog its buttocks” (12); “just as a single bee is sometimes left behind by the others, one question in particular remained lodged in Wariinga's mind” (29); “a man who doesn't travel thinks that it's only his mother who cooks wild vegetables” (71). These proverbs connect the narrative with the oral tradition. They also provide a rhythm to the narrative development and a logic for conversations between characters different from that of traditional Western narratives. Proverbs are used in traditional African orature both to punctuate the narrative and as a form of persuasion: the character in the story who is most able to use proverbs to support his or her own argument usually prevails. In Ngũgĩ's novel, this strategy is used in conversations, as characters argue over the problems of modern Kenya. For example, Muturi argues for socialism in Kenya by referring to Gikuyu proverbs:

That humanity is in turn born of many hands working together, for, as Gikuyu once said, a single finger cannot kill a louse; a single log cannot make a fire last through the night. … The unity of our sweat is what makes us able to change the laws of nature, able to harness them to the needs of our lives, instead of our lives remaining slaves of the laws of nature. That's why Gikuyu also said: Change, for the seeds in the gourd are not all of one kind.

(52)

In another passage, a corrupt businessman also uses proverbs to support his own actions: “I have two mistresses, for you know the saying that he who keeps something in reserve never goes hungry, and when an European gets old, he likes to eat veal” (99). As in the last example, not all of the proverbs are traditional; some are taken from contemporary experience: “Money can flatten mountains” (117). Through these proverbs, Ngũgĩ directs his narrative to a Gikuyu audience. At the same time, he shows that traditional wisdom alone is not enough to guide contemporary African society; it can be called upon to support both African socialism and neo-colonial corruption. Readers must decide for themselves which argument is more persuasive.

In a similar manner, Ngũgĩ incorporates Christian rhetoric and imagery into the novel, beginning with the title, Devil on the Cross. This refers to a recurring dream that Wariinga has:

Instead of Jesus on the Cross, she would see the Devil, with skin as white as that of a very fat European she once saw near the Rift Valley Sports Club, being crucified by people in tattered clothes—like the ones she used to see in Bondeni—and after three days, when he was in the throes of death, he would be taken down from the Cross by black people in suits and ties, and, thus restored to life, he would mock Wariinga.

(139)

In Petals of Blood, Ngũgĩ had rejected Christianity, and accepted traditional wisdom only insofar as it described a communal, socialist society. In Devil on the Cross, however, Ngũgĩ uses both traditional Gikuyu culture and Christianity as elements of contemporary Kenyan culture, and as sources for the rhetoric of his characters. Even the narrator, the gicaandi singer, describes a vision he has had in Biblical and apocalyptic terms:

And after seven days had passed, the Earth trembled, and lightning scored the sky with its brightness, and I was lifted up, and I was borne up to the rooftop of the house, and I was shown many things, and I heard a voice, like a great clap of thunder, admonishing me: Who has told you that prophecy is yours alone, to keep to yourself?

(8)

As in the figure of the Devil on the Cross, Biblical imagery is used to intensify Ngũgĩ's own argument; the range of diction and symbolic structures has expanded considerably from the narrowly socialist rhetoric of Petals of Blood.

The gicaandi singer's story begins with a description of the alienation of a working-class woman in Nairobi. Fired from her job for refusing sexual advances, then rejected by her boyfriend, Jacinta Wariinga is thrown out of her apartment. All of these events make her lose her sense of perspective: “Instantly she felt dizzy. Nairobi—people, buildings, trees, motor cars, streets—began to swirl before her eyes” (12). Without a home, a lover, or a job, Wariinga has no connection to her environment, and is alienated from it. Her dizziness is the result of the social and economic disruptions in her life.

Wariinga then takes a matatu, a van, from Nairobi to Ilmorog. During this trip, several characters discuss the problems of modern Kenya, symbolized by an upcoming “Devil's Feast” for “Modern Thieves and Robbers” in a cave in Ilmorog. The bus trip provides a transition between the real Kenyan city and Ngũgĩ's fictional Ilmorog. Wariinga asks:

For today is there a single corner, even in the most far-flung reaches of Kenya, where a poor man can run to escape poverty? Ilmorog, Mombasa, Nairobi, Nakuru, Kisumu—the water in all these places has become bitter for us peasants and workers.

(41)

Ilmorog can stand for all of Kenya, because the same people control the economy and the political structure everywhere in Kenya.

The division of Ilmorog into two sections, which was described in Petals of Blood, has become even more exaggerated. The rich live in “Golden Heights,” which “contains the homes of the wealthy and the powerful. But do you call them homes or residences! Homes or sheer magnificence?” (130). “New Jerusalem” has also gotten poorer: “The walls and the roofs of the shanties are made of strips of tin, old tarpaulin and polythene bags” (130).

In traditional Gikuyu stories, as in many African stories, ordinary and fantastic events take place side by side—the ordinary world and the spiritual universe are interconnected. In Devil on the Cross, Ngũgĩ utilizes this dimension of African literature for the first time in his fiction, going beyond the limits of Western realism. The best example of the author's use of fantastic elements is the feast in the sumptuous cave for the “Modern Thieves and Robbers.” They have transformed the cave into a huge hall, with chandeliers and luxurious furniture. In this environment, Kenyan businessmen try to outdo one another in stories of white collar thievery and corruption in order to win prizes from the International Organization of Thieves and Robbers. Here, Ngũgĩ plays with Milton's description in Paradise Lost of the devils' first meeting in hell, in which each speaker tries to persuade the others how they should act in the future. The irony is that in Milton's version, the devils are ultimately powerless, subjected to God's will even in Hell, while the thieves and robbers in Ngũgĩ's cave have enormous power in Kenya: only a revolution could stop them.

Another parallel is, of course, Plato's cave in The Republic, in which people are chained to a wall and watch the shadows of figures and other objects carried by unseen people. This parallel is underlined in Ngũgĩ's novel when Wariinga steps out of the cave:

The sun shone brightly on the Ilmorog ridges and plains. The land lay quiet. No cold, no wind. “Although I have just been in the full glare of electric lights, I feel as if I have lived in darkness all my life,” Wariinga sighed, and then she added in a sing-song voice: “Praise the sun of God! Hail the light of God!”

“You should be singing praises to the light of our country,” Gatuiria told her.

(128)

The electric lights, like the fire casting the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, are artificial; the natural light of the sun, as in Plato's allegory, exposes the darkness of the cave. Wariinga's sing-song voice, as she praises God for this light, sounds childlike, a memorized chant. To Ngũgĩ, this Christian response to the evil of the cave is mechanical and pointless, as Wariinga's sighs will not lead to real change. Gatuiria's claim that the light of truth is the light of the country, foreshadows the protests of the peasants, students and workers against the robbers in the cave.

Inside Plato's cave, the people who create plausible fictions about the meaning of the shadows on the wall are praised, while the one who, like Socrates, frees himself and seeks the light of the sun is despised. In Ngũgĩ's novel, the businessmen/robbers in the cave create stories to convince the people that what they are doing is beneficial to the nation:

It was said that I was a man who acted on his words; that I was able to get land for the poor and sold it to them cheaply; and that I did not even keep a plot back for myself because of my love for the people. They started singing my praises, calling me son of Gataanguru, a child imbued with love of the people. Do you see what can be achieved by cunning?

(105)

As in Plato's cave, the stories that make people praise the ones who keep them from discovering the truth are the worst evil. Ngũgĩ's use of allusions to Western canonical figures emphasizes that the businessmen are practicing an unbridled Western capitalism, and are, at the banquet, trying to impress their European masters. They operate within a Western context.

There is a possibility for change. Wariinga and Gatuiria, wandering in the sunlight outside of the cave, enthusiastically sing a hymn to Kenya:

Hail, Mount Kenya!
Hail, our land.
Never without water or food or green fields!

(128)

Their love for each other is depicted as in harmony with the landscape: “Come to me my love! … The grass is a free bed given us by God, and the darkness is his blanket!” (241). As in the conclusion of Petals of Blood, the main characters decide to make “a new beginning for a new Earth” (246) through their own efforts. This new beginning is a violent one: Wariinga discovers that Gatuiria's father was her first seducer, and she shoots him with a pistol. Gatuiria, the man who has been trying to write a new Kenyan opera, is at a loss: “he just stood in the courtyard, hearing in his mind music that lead him nowhere” (254). Wariinga “walked on, without once looking back” (254).

In Devil on the Cross, Ngũgĩ champions women's rights in Kenya. He argues for the education of women, especially practical education: Wariinga trains to become an auto mechanic. Ngũgĩ is particularly concerned about the treatment of women as the sexual possessions of men:

People love to denigrate the intelligence and intellectual capacity of our women by saying that the only jobs a woman can do are to cook, to make beds and to spread their legs in the market of love. The Wariinga of today has rejected all that.

(218)

Ngũgĩ also deplores women's attempts to lighten their skin, straighten their hair, and follow the current fashions, and celebrates the beauty of African women who are strong and independent. Wariinga, at the conclusion of the novel, is clearly the committed revolutionary, while her lover Gatuiria hesitates, uncertain what path he will take.

At times, Ngũgĩ's novel seems too full of speeches, as each character gives his or her own autobiography and either boasts about his prowess (the thieves and robbers) or argues for a revolution. In the landscape of the novel, however, Ngũgĩ clearly broadens the horizons of his fiction, including surreal locations and exaggerated landscapes that heighten the impact of his story. This strategy also aligns his work with the tradition of oral African narratives. Thus Ngũgĩ has not only written Devil on the Cross in Gikuyu; he has also transformed the style and form of his novel, to create an Afrocentric narrative.

Ngũgĩ's most recent novel, Matigari, was published in Gikuyu in 1987. The novel is an allegory, a story of Everyman; as Ngũgĩ says in “To the Reader/Listener”:

This story is imaginary.
The actions are imaginary.
The characters are imaginary.
The country is imaginary—it has no name even.
Reader/listener: may the story take place in the country of your choice!

(ix)

Compared to his earlier works, Matigari has a simplified landscape and a streamlined narrative. Matigari ma Njiruungi (his name means “‘the patriots who survived the bullets’—the patriots who survived the liberation war, and their political offspring,” trans. note 20) has come out of the forests, and like a Kenyan Rip Van Winkle, wanders around the countryside looking for his children and asking, “My friends! Can you tell me where a person could find truth and justice in this country?” (72). Matigari's character represents everyone who toiled under the colonialists and fought in the war of independence; he says, “I tended the estates that spread around the house for miles. … I worked all the machines and in all the industries, but it was Settler Williams who would take the profits” (21). Rumors grow that he is the Angel Gabriel, or the Second Coming of Christ, and the government and the police become anxious to hunt him down. In the end, they accomplish this, chasing him into a river while they ride after their hounds, as if he were a fox, but meanwhile the boy Muriuki, who now calls himself and his friends “the children of the patriots,” has picked up Matigari's gun and sword. Matigari ma Njiruungi remains undefeated.

The landscape of the novel is presented sparingly, as in an oral tale. There is a fig tree, where Matigari hid his rifle, a house he wishes to reclaim as his own with the estates surrounding it, a village, a city, and the country. The house is hardly described at all: “there on the top of the hill overlooking the whole country stood a huge house which seemed to stretch out for miles, as if, like the plantation itself, it had no beginning and no end” (42). It represents the shelter, food, and clothing which should be the result of the labor of the people, but which has been wrongly appropriated by those “who-reap-where-they-have-not-sown” (50). As Matigari talks to the current owners, the sun sets behind the house: “it had left behind a blood-red glow in the evening sky, lighting up the house, the gate and the road on which they stood” (47-48), foreshadowing the fire that will burn it down at the end of the story.

Matigari begins his journey by crossing the river and coming out of the forest. The forest was a haven for the freedom fighters in Kenya, protecting them from the British colonial soldiers. But when Matigari retreats to the forest to find the answer to his question, an old woman rebukes him: “My dear wanderer, you cannot find answers to your questions here where nobody lives. Truth and justice are to be found in people's actions” (87). The wilderness can provide shelter, but it cannot provide answers. It would have been plausible to use the wilderness as a symbol of spiritual renewal and dedication, because of its associations with the Mau Mau movement as the place of resistance to the colonial government. Ngũgĩ, however, explicitly turns away from it, and seeks renewal within the community.

Within the novel, there are enough details of the past history of the country and the freedom fighters to clearly identify the location as Kenya. Yet in his introductory poem, Ngũgĩ insists on the timelessness and placelessness of his story, connecting his narrative to traditional oral folktales. By doing so, Ngũgĩ also implies that the reading of his story should be like listening to a storyteller: each retelling is a reliving, a re-enactment of the story. In Matigari, this connection is particularly powerful: each reader/listener can ask him or herself if the patriots have returned, and where justice and truth can be found in the country. By reading, Ngũgĩ's audience participates in the awakening of the country.

In “A Note on the English Edition,” Ngũgĩ relates some of the consequences of this blurring of fact and fiction:

By January 1987, intelligence reports had it that peasants in Central Kenya were whispering and talking about a man called Matigari who was roaming the whole country making demands about truth and justice. There were orders for his immediate arrest, but the police discovered that Matigari was only a fictional character in a book of the same name. In February 1987, the police raided all the bookshops and seized every copy of the novel.

(viii)

The readers of the book gave life, at least temporarily, to Matigari, whom the police tried to arrest. Failing in this, they arrested the book: “Matigari, the fictional hero, and the novel, his only habitation, have been effectively banned in Kenya” (viii). In this short note, Ngugi shrinks the fictional landscape of the novel into the confines of the book, and then imagines both the book and Matigari as outcasts: “With the publication of this English edition, they have joined their author in exile” (viii). The place of this placeless, timeless book, is the place of exile.

This brings us to the poignant ironies of Ngũgĩ's situation: passionately attached to the land of Kenya, he is in exile from it; committed to writing in Gikuyu, he publishes his novels in that language only to see them banned. The English language edition, translated not by Ngũgĩ himself but by Wangui wa Goro, is to him an exiled version of his text, enclosed in a non-African language. Thus, Ngũgĩ is distanced from his own work, at least from the only version in print. The event of the novel's publication and the circumstances surrounding it become part of the interpretation of the novel; it is only through his fictional character, Matigari, that Ngũgĩ can return to Kenya. The book's publication in Kenya had allowed the author's ideas to reappear in that country, and the landscape of the novel had allowed for the reappearance of heroes in Kenya. The banning of the novel reinforces and intensifies the author's own exile. The landscape of the novel, then, is not only the simplified allegorical landscape of the tale, but also the political landscape which places the author and the book in specific relations to the country, identifying Ngugi and his novel as both Kenyan and expatriate, part of an excluded from the land.

In this examination of Ngũgĩ's fiction, we have moved from a consideration of traditional Western techniques of landscape description applied to an African landscape in The River Between, to a broadening of the concept of landscape to include the social and political environment surrounding the publication of the novel itself. The fictional and factual landscapes of Matigari influence and interpenetrate each other, creating a charged atmosphere that challenges the reader to go beyond a simple aesthetic appreciation of the novel and to engage the political landscape on his or her own terms. The intended audience of Ngũgĩ's later fiction is more and more clearly Kenyan, and African, not Western. The development of his style shows the possibilities and pitfalls of incorporating African elements into a Western form. Ultimately, Ngũgĩ chooses to model the form of the novel itself on the traditions of African orature. In Matigari, the subtle descriptions of the hills and valleys of Kenya have disappeared, but the symbolic, political and factual landscapes stand out more clearly. In this way, Ngũgĩ places his fiction squarely within the larger African political landscape, and outside the mainstream of the Western tradition.

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