Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Mau Mau for Children

Abstract

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Mau Mau for Children Frederick Hale (bio) Few African littérateurs have received greater international scholarly attention than the Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, yet literary critics have almost completely neglected his books for children. None of the standard studies of him touches on this dimension of his authorship. Furthermore, writing in the Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English about the development of children's literature in East Africa, Ciarunji Chesaina Swinimer emphasizes that established authors of literature for adults began to contribute notably to it during the 1980s but, inexplicably, fails to mention Ngũgĩ's participation in this breakthrough.1 The underlying reason for this omission is probably that Ngũgĩ's production of juvenile fiction is relatively recent, dating from the early 1980s, approximately two decades after he gained prominence through his works for adults. In the meantime, this increasingly controversial figure had gained a reputation as something of an enfant terrible in the turbulent world of postcolonial African letters, essentially exiled from his native land after enduring nearly a year of detention without trial there at the end of the Kenyatta regime. Furthermore, to date Ngũgĩ has written relatively little for youngsters. Nevertheless, the series of short books that he began to publish in Nairobi in 1982 merits international consideration because it illustrates both how a renowned African author has employed his talent in creating unambiguously indigenous children's literature and how Ngũgĩ's contribution embodies his political agenda in a manner that raises but does not resolve ethical questions. In the present article I shall begin to redress this lacuna in scholarly treatment of Ngũgĩ by focusing on the first two works in that series, which feature the adventures of a boy of the Gĩkũyũ tribe immediately before and after the outbreak of the Mau Mau movement against British colonialism during the 1950s. An understanding of virtually any aspect of Ngũgĩ's authorship, given its decidedly autobiographical stamp, necessitates some awareness of his personal involvement in Kenyan history and his evolving ideological stance. In brief, the Kenyan who was baptized James Ngũgĩ was born near Limuru, less than forty kilometers northwest of Nairobi, in 1938, i.e., approximately fifty years after the imposition of British hegemony over Kenya. He was the fifth child of the third wife of a polygamous tenant farmer. A violent childhood experience of the Mau Mau uprising during the 1950s, during which his mother was detained for three months, shaped his youthful consciousness and provided him much of the material for his second adult novel, Weep Not, Child, which appeared in 1964. His formal education began at age nine when he was enrolled in a nearby mission school. After approximately two years there, however, for reasons he cannot now remember, Ngũgĩ was transferred to one of the Gĩkũyũ independent schools, relics of the tribal religious revolt against the Church of Scotland's hostility to clitoridectomy, a nearly universal rite of passage in Gĩkũyũ society during the 1920s and 1930s, and a topic about which he would later write. That school, like many of its counterparts, was closed during the "state of emergency" that began in 1952 as a defensive colonial measure against revolutionary Gĩkũyũ nationalism. Later, beginning in 1955, Ngũgĩ attended the well-known Alliance High School, which was his springboard to tertiary education at Makerere University College in 1959, when his native land was on the verge of gaining independence from British hegemony. When that uhuru finally came in December 1963, he had just completed his undergraduate studies. At Makerere he had written dramatic pieces and his first novel, The Black Messiah, which was published in 1965 as The River Between, and he had begun to draft Weep Not, Child. Ngũgĩ also began to write a regular column for the Sunday Nation in Nairobi before receiving his baccalaureate degree. After graduating, he worked briefly as a journalist in the Kenyan capital but interrupted that career to pursue postgraduate studies in England. Much of his time in that country, however, was devoted to writing...