PENGUIN CLASSICS
PETALS OF BLOOD
NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. One of the leading African writers and scholars at work today, he is the author of Weep Not, Child; The River Between; A Grain of Wheat; Homecoming; Petals of Blood; Devil on the Cross; Matigari; Decolonizing the Mind; Moving the Center; Writers in Politics; and Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, among other works, which include novels, short stories, essays, a memoir, and plays. In 1977, the year he published Petals of Blood, Ngũgĩ’s play I Will Marry When I Want (cowritten with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ and harshly critical of the injustices of Kenyan society) was performed, and at the end of the year Ngũgĩ was arrested. He was detained for a year without trial at a maximum security prison in Kenya. The theater where the play was performed was razed by police 1982.
Ngũgĩ’s numerous honors include the East African Novel Prize; Unesco First Prize; the Lotus Prize for Literature; the Paul Robeson Award for Artistic Excellence, Political Conscience and Integrity; the Zora Neale Hurston—Paul Robeson Award for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement; the Fonlon-Nichols Prize for Artistic Excellence and Human Rights; the Distinguished Africanist Award; the Gwendolyn Brooks Center Contributors Award for significant contribution to the black literary arts; and the Nonino International Literary Prize for the Italian translation of his book Moving the Center. Ngũgĩ has given many distinguished lectures including the 1984 Robb Lectures at Auckland University, New Zealand, and the 1996 Clarendon Lectures in English at Oxford University. He received the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Cabinet for “his uncompromising efforts to assert the values implicit in the multicultural approach embracing the experience and aspirations of all the world’s minorities.” He has taught in many universities including Nairobi, Northwestern, and Yale. He was named New York University’s Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Languages and Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies. In 2003 Ngũgĩ was elected as an honorary member in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Currently he is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.
MOSES ISEGAWA was born in Uganda and taught school for several years. The author of the novels Abyssinian Chronicles and Snakepit, he now lives in Amsterdam.
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NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O
Petals of Blood
with an Introduction by MOSES ISEGAWA
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First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann, 1977
First published in the United States of America by E. P. Dutton 1978
Published with an introduction by Moses Isegawa in Penguin Books (U.K.) 2003
Published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 2005
Copyright © Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1977
Introduction copyright © Moses Isegawa, 2002
All rights reserved
PUBLISHERS NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
CIP data available
ISBN: 978-1-101-66246-5
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For my mother and Nyambura
In memory of Njinju wa Thiong’o who died on 6.4.74
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction by Moses Isegawa
Part One: Walking
Part Two: Toward Bethlehem
Part Three: To Be Born
Part Four: Again . . . La Luta Continua!
Acknowledgements
Thanks to:
Nyambura for the songs on pages 313, 314 and 315.
Elijah Mbǔrǔ for Hǔni cia Gita on page 340.
PCEA Gathaithi choir for the hymn on page 163.
DK for his song quoted on page 122.
Josh White for his song quoted on page 198.
Mrs Lee and Mrs Keval for typing the MS.
And also to:
The Soviet Writers Union for giving me the use of their house in Yalta in order to finish the writing of this novel.
Dr Samuel Kibicho – for introducing me to the joys of literature, the novel in particular.
Mr Stephen Thiro – for efforts in the past without which I might never have written.
And to:
Many others
One in the struggle
With our people
For total liberation
Knowing that
However long and arduous the struggle
Victory is certain.
Fearful, original sinuosities! Each mangrove sapling
Serpentlike, its roots obscene
As a six-fingered hand,
Conceals within its clutch the mossbacked toad,
Toadstools, the potent ginger-lily,
Petals of blood,
The speckled vulva of the tiger-orchid;
Outlandish phalloi
Haunting the travellers of its one road.
Derek Walcott, from The Swamp
Introduction
Karibu Kenya, Karibu Afrika
In 1959 Ngũgĩ made a life-changing train journey to Uganda; it was the first among many journeys that would lead him away from home and from the landscape, the people, the country he loved. He left behind a country wracked by the war the Kenya Land Freedom Army, also called Mau Mau, was waging against the mighty colonial government. It was a war that touched the popular imagination and was forever to change the fate of Kenya and many other countries under British rule. For the first time peasants, the wretched of the earth, were taking the war to a highly sophisticated country with a long military history. Many expected th
e revolt to end quickly. Britain would triumph. It did not, despite the state of emergency laws and a particularly brutal military campaign, well-captured in one of Ngũgĩ’s books: ‘It was a period of mass trials, mass murder and mass torture of Kenyans.’
The name Mau Mau made hearts tremble with dreams, hope and fear. Ngũgĩ’s elder brother joined the fighters, his mother was arrested and tortured, and his village was razed to the ground. The Mau Mau leader, Dedan Kimathi, took on almost mythical proportions for Ngũgĩ and for many Kenyans. After all, he was said to turn into a bird, a stone, a white man, anything. Only those who have grown up in war-ravaged times know deep down that wars never end; they just mutate and live on in other forms. For Ngũgĩ that war still goes on, and the mission born of it has made literature that much richer. Reading Ngũgĩ is like feeling a fire, scorching your psyche, your heart, your being.
For a man committed to moving the centre from Europe to other parts of the world, it is apt that his writing career began in Uganda, where he wrote two novels. In his book Moving the Centre Ngũgĩ calls the journey to Uganda ‘a homecoming’. Uganda helped him to understand his sense of being Kenyan, most of all, that Kenya was a black man’s country, not a white man’s country as he had thought before his epiphany, and therefore that colonialism was rape, a criminal act, not masturbation, as some apologists rationalized it: it dispossessed, dislocated, and destroyed people’s idea of themselves by trampling on their culture and trying to replace it with the colonizer’s culture. It also meant that there were two histories: the official whitewashed history peddled by the ruling class, and the real living history of peasants and workers fighting against foreign domination. Armed to the teeth with these facts, Ngũgĩ embarked on the next stage of his journey to Leeds, England, where he wrote yet another novel and experienced the centre of the universe moving from Europe as Africans and Asians asserted, or tried to assert, their right to define themselves and their relationship to the universe from their centres in Africa and Asia. Franz Fanon was the prophet of this earth-shattering movement. Africa was gaining independence and for Ngũgĩ it meant ridding itself of its colonial cultural ballast. Closer to home it meant that African, Asian and South American literature had to come to the forefront, to be integrated into world literature. But in 1967 he was shocked to find the English Department at the University of Nairobi organized as if nothing had changed, or was changing, in the world. He and a few colleagues called for its abolition and replacement. There could never be one centre. ‘It was a question of how one centre related to other centres.’ In 1977 Ngũgĩ decided to do most of his writing in Gĩkùyũ so that the peasants about whose struggles he was writing could read his books, so that in the raging cultural war he could stay in touch with his most precious foot soldiers, his constituency, his historical roots. In his book Detained Ngũgĩ calls this a homecoming, a rebirth that enabled him to transcend the alienation to which he had been condemned by years of colonial education.
Petals of Blood reflects the many internal journeys Ngũgĩ had made over the years, up to writing the book. It is a different book from his earlier work, with more complex characters, a sharper political, mental and cultural landscape, harder rhythms, deeper themes. It is tighter, more intense, driven like a racing car over a well-beaten track that leaves no doubt as to his skill, his determination, his destination or destiny. It reflects the endless wars he had fought and survived, and the endless wars he saw ahead of him. He had sloughed, leaving behind, a part of him that was too worn out for the new skirmishes, and armed himself with a new vision imbued with urgency and an uncompromising stand, as if he was declaring his own state of emergency because time had not healed the wounds inflicted on Kenya’s masses who had fought so heroically but had been so bitterly betrayed. The Kenya Ngũgĩ writes about, the Kenya that nobody can take away from him, is the ‘Kenya of the working people of all nationalities and their heroic struggle against domination by nature and other humans over the centuries’. It is a huge Kenya, trampled by earlier colonial raconteurs like Robert Ruark and Karen Blixen, who celebrated the settler culture of ‘legalized brutality, fear, silence, oppression’. It is a Kenya whose face we see reflected in Ilmorog, the centre of action for Petals of Blood. Ngũgĩ chooses a barren, drought-stricken part of Kenya where farmers and herders, like their ancestors before them, are battling the elements on the one hand, and politicians who have abandoned them to their fate on the other. The journey of Ilmorog is the journey of Kenya after independence when it donned neocolonial clothes and put the interests of foreigners and traitors first and abandoned the people who had suffered and died for the land. The question of land is very important in the book, as in Ngũgĩ’s earlier books. Land is presented as salvation, as a soul, as a woman, as God, the subject of prophecy, the basis of cultural and political identity. There was nothing people would not do to grab or regain land. Ngũgĩ revists the issue in Devil on the Cross where in Ilmorog a clique of thieves and robbers, former businessmen, are celebrating theft and robbery on a grand scale and are working towards a more efficient system of taking people’s land and other goods and resources. Both books breathe the same burning, zealous spirit of concern for a country where the political élite gorge themselves to surfeit as the peasants and workers continue to languish in misery, in prison, on the periphery and where ‘women’s thighs are the tables on which contracts are signed’.
Petals of Blood is, among other things, about identity: the identity of the oppressed, the unsung hero who never managed to get his reward because of an iniquitous prince in the castle, his desires, his vision, his frustrations, his struggles to the bitter end. Ngũgĩ uses the murder of three petty capitalists to introduce us to a world where the relationship between honourable and despicable, worker and employer, politician and constituent has gone horribly rancid. Who would want to kill what the papers slavishly called ‘the Krupps and Rockefellers and Delameres’ of the country – a money-worshipping country, like neocolonial Kenya? Who indeed? The police force is jumping up and down frantically like a pack of gorillas sprayed with itching gas, but there are going to be no easy answers in a place teeming with robberies, strikes, lock-outs, murders and attempted murders, police raids and hard liquor. Ngũgĩ uses the murder case to tease, entice, and open a pandora’s box of stories within stories, histories, songs, lamentations, ejaculations, fictions and mendacities that resonate back into the centuries.
At the beginning of the story, Ilmorog is a place everybody flees. Whoever goes to the city never returns, except for duplicitous reasons. Teachers who are sent don’t last, cynicism abounds, the kind many heap on Africa today, but Ngũgĩ uses a number of migrants to breathe life into the place. Godfrey Munira, one of the murder suspects, comes from a landowning family firmly settled into the middle classes. He arrives in Ilmorog to start a school, leaving behind a life pockmarked by failure. Nobody gives him a hooting chance of success. Somebody literally shits in his school for good measure. For Munira, however, this is the last station, he is tired of procrastinating; he wants to be a doer for once and nothing is going to stop him. He makes the school work but fails to fit into the community. The demons that pursue him erupt when people bring up touchy political issues. He is reminded of his father, his failure to support his own family and his favourite sister who committed suicide. As Munira battles for a connection with his fellow man and society one thinks of the precarious role of the intellectual in a neocolonial society. It becomes evident that Munira embodies the traits of the middle classes: their vacillation when it comes to commitment to big issues, their entrapment between the ruling class and the peasants, their chauvinisms, their mental terror of progressive class politics. They would rather hide behind highsounding words and wait for the perfect time to choose. The time never comes. Poor piggies, they are often left with religion as their only anchor. Munira, true to his roots, ends up splashing and gagging in that morass.
Munira is joined in Ilmorog by Wanja, granddaughter of Nyakinyua, a heroic
old woman who was an active participant in the fight for freedom. Wanja forges a relationship with Munira that promises much but hardens into something rank and nebulous that can neither address the past fully nor navigate the present. She is a woman of mystery and secrets, tormented, with a big burden to carry. She has suffered much in life, like many other women, starting with the sugardaddy who jilted her; she has sold herself in many a bar, but Ngũgĩ does not allow us to despise her because that would be despising a huge section of Kenyan women or Kenya itself. We find out that when the sugardaddy, one of Ngũgĩ’s hairy-chested old hogs who seem only to find peace of mind between the thighs of young women, abandoned her, she threw her child in a latrine. Unlike the exploiters, she has repented. Wanja, like Kenya itself, has to fight to stay alive and destruction is never too far away. Ngũgĩ uses Wanja and Nyakinyua to showcase the plight of women, their contribution to the struggle and their deserved status as equal partners in the share of glory.
The cast of migrants is fortified by Karega, whose mother was a squatter on Munira’s father’s land. Munira and Karega share much history but it does not make for a deep relationship. Karega has fled the ‘soulless, corrupt Nairobi’ whose slums with their ‘ditches full of shit and urine, dead dogs and cats, dangerous gases and hellish beer’ are the definition of hell on earth, at least the hell that concerns Ngũgĩ. Karega is consumed by bitterness because as a school drop-out he has failed himself, his mother, his society. A man of his energy and commitment won’t settle for long in teaching; he wants to change not only Ilmorog but the whole country. He is the doer, the one who feels called to change the status quo of the peasant and worker. To begin with Karega saves a donkey’s life and gets Ilmorog on the way to the city to demand answers from the local MP. Karega is also the man who asks the big questions. Questions which seem unanswerable and relentless: ‘Where went all the Kenyan people who used to trade with China, India, Arabia long before Vasco da Gama came to the scene and on the strength of gunpowder ushered in an era of blood and terror and instability?’ ‘What has the black man done to attain the true kingdom of his earth? To bring back his mind and soul and body together on his piece of earth?’ ‘How . . . ? Why . . . ? When . . . ?’