ON MOVING THE CENTRE OF NARRATION AND DISCOURSE

Abstract

This dissertation is intended chiefly to study Ngugi’s literary response to the Western culture of domination, which manifests itself in a set of hegemonic views about the non-Western communities generally, and the African in particular. While forming the ideological basis for the growth of classical European Empires overseas, this culture for him still continues to impose its standards on the global order, and thus on the post-colonial world. In his most proletarian novels, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross, and Matigari, Ngugi has a “literarypolitical” project of “revisiting” the cultural and political authority of the imperial powers. This project is mainly intended to restore his people’s freedom of thought and action so as to resist the power of the hegemonic interests of Western-oriented international capitalism. Ngugi’s presently discussed novels, by bringing to the fore a set of heated issues bearing on history, culture, and the nation, reverse colonial binarisms in order to combat the hegemonic interpellations of the neo-colonial regime. In Petals of Blood, the idea of history is brought to prominence as Ngugi argues strongly for a radical reinterpretation of Kenya’s working people’s history. In fact, Karega, evidently the mouthpiece of the writer, stresses that the rewriting of Kenya’s history is an important undertaking, but by no means sufficient, to support what he foresees as the class struggle waged by the “wretched of the earth” against the neocolonial regime run by the new “bloodsuckers”. Similarly, Ngugi, through such characters as Nyakinyua and Abdulla, argues clearly for the significance of Kenya’s “oral history” and the heroic history of Kenyans’ resistance to the imperialist “marauders” for today’s struggle which, at all events, runs the risk of being overwhelmed by a false conception of Kenya’s both precolonial and colonial past that is touted by a corrupt ruling elite. In his next novel Devil on the Cross, however, much emphasis is placed upon the indigenous culture of the population, even though Ngugi is very often thought to prioritise political and economic struggles over cultural retrieval. This novel interestingly shows that we can never diminish the instrumental value of culture as a political weapon against imperialism it its neocolonialist stage. This study makes thus the claim that the indigenous culture of the masses can be used in the very definition of the downtrodden classes, to say nothing about the use of such aspects of folk culture as songs, proverbs, and traditional stories as a means of communication with the audience, of whom the “illiterate” masses form the majority. In addition, DOC displays a concern for certain forms of cultural hegemony exercised by such institutions as the school, the media, and the Church. In this novel, indeed, my contention is that the neocolonial ideology is supported in part by the imposition of the Western cultural 7 models on the African people. Consequently, Ngugi’s disapproval of the white culture is an explicit attack on the whole system of the neocolonial power. But, at the same time, nowhere in his novel is there any explicit call for the return to some pristine pre-colonial culture. In Ngugi’s opinion, this atavistic view is not founded at all. Ngugi’s first novel in exile, Matigari, solidifies Ngugi’s immense project of “de-centring” the Western hegemonic political discourse by expressing the felt need for the regeneration of the post-colonial African nation. Ngugi decries violently the currently established Kenyan nation because of its degenerate state that manifests itself clearly in the falsity of foundations upon which it is based. Matigari, the hero of the narrative, represents the daunting challenge of the establishment of an egalitarian society, and the fact that he ultimately falls back on a military action indicates strongly that the nation cannot be “regenerated” unless an armed rebellion of the masses, similar to the epic Mau Mau insurrection, breaks out once again. In general, Ngugi’s literary -and political- project of redefining the narrative discourse about Africa in the post-independence era has to be envisaged within the theoretical framework of postcolonialism and the political framework of his Marxist-based ideology. Ngugi revisits in his works a number of crucial concepts, which include history, culture, nation, with a very clear objective in mind: the political, economic, and cultural autonomy of the Africans and the non-western people at large. This objective has to be achieved, as indicated, whether explicitly or implicitly in all his “popular” novels, as they have come to be called, by the downtrodden people’s resort to armed resistance.