The Rhetoric of Irony in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on Cross (1987) and Matigari (1980)

Abstract

Postcolonial African literature has been mainly concerned with the misfortunes engendered by slavery, colonization, imperialism, globalization, and neo-colonization in Africa as it uncovers the interactions between the former colonizing and colonized countries. Therefore, many African writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o have through fiction and magic realism, as natural outcome of postcolonial writing which must make sense of at least two separate realities - the reality of the conquerors and that of the conquered realistic representation - lay bare the devastating aftermath of these plagues. Unfortunately, most critics have been more interested in the issues that the authors exhibit rather than how they are displayed. As a committed writer, he has broached profusely some Africa’s existential problems as reflected in many of his literary text (s), context (s), and pretext (s). In fact, leaning on axiology, as the philosophical study of value, ethics, and aesthetics - value theory and meta-ethics -, this article is a rhetorical reading of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Matigari (1980) and Devil on the Cross (1987) with a view to deciphering the underpinning ramifications of postcolonial irony in the two novels. To this end, it analyzes how text and form are interwoven in the two literary texts as the author sets out to depict the (post) colonial and neo-colonial effects in Africa and how they contribute to the understanding of his political advocacy and philosophy.