Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Petals of Blood is a novel of social and political criticism cast in the form of a crime story. Three directors of the local brewery in Ilmorog have died as a result of a fire. Arson is suspected, and the novel opens with the arrest of the four principal characters: Munira, the protagonist, headmaster of the school in Ilmorog; Karega, a teacher at the school; Abdulla, the owner of a local shop and bar; and Wanja, a young woman who works in Abdulla’s shop and who later becomes a prostitute.

The story then unfolds through a series of time shifts, moving from the present to the past. It was twelve years before the time of the fatal fire that Munira first made his way to the village of Ilmorog. He had come because he wanted to establish a school that would provide the village children with a good Christian education. At that time, Ilmorog was a dusty, sleepy, wasteland of a village, and since others had come before him and left, everyone in Ilmorog believed that Munira too “would go away with the wind.” Munira, however, is made of sterner stuff. He stays and enlists the support of others, including Abdulla, Karega, and the very attractive Wanja; a considerable part of the novel is devoted to revealing the manner in which the lives of these four people become entangled.

Inspector Godfrey, a strong believer in the police force as “the maker of modern Kenya,” is in charge of investigating the death of the three directors. Godfrey is a relentless interrogator of Munira and his friends, and through his investigation the reader learns about the four principal characters and their involvement with one another.

Ngugi also reveals the physical and spiritual changes that have transformed the village of Ilmorog from a “small cluster of mud huts” to a bustling new town “of stone, iron, concrete and glass and neon lights.” This transformation has brought with it much of the materialistic baggage associated with Western progress, and with this “progress” has also come corruption and the abuse of power. A multinational corporation owns the brewery, while the villagers are still poor; the wealth from the new Ilmorog is enjoyed by greedy investors from faraway Nairobi. Small shopkeepers such as Abdulla have been wiped out, and the beautiful Wanja has become a brothel owner to service the decadent desires of the new rich. The venerable hero of the Mau-Mau resistance is a ruined...