Ngugi Wa Thiongo Research Articles

A Feminist Critique of Women Portrayal in NGUGI WA THIONGO’S Devil on the Cross

African American Literature demonstrates that the Black Women's Feminism Caucus acknowledged that black women faced a dual patriarchal oppression from within their own community and from white society. This paper examines how Devil on the Cross portrays a Kikuyu woman striving for liberation and transformative change in Kenyan society. Employing a feminist perspective, the researcher contends that Ngugi Wa Thiong'o illustrates the plight of women in Kenyan society, interpreting feminism within its cultural framework. Building on this foundation, the study advocates for the designation of essential services such as police protection, justice, shelters, helplines, and community support services, ensuring they receive adequate support and resources to operate during pandemics and other public emergencies affecting women and girls. It emphasizes the necessity of involving women and women's civil society organizations in policy formulation, development, and implementation to integrate their knowledge, experiences, and needs into response strategies. Furthermore, it stresses the importance of prioritizing prevention and protection against gender-based and domestic violence in national responses by collecting detailed data on the prevalence of such violence and identifying which demographics of women and girls are most vulnerable. Keywords: Domestic violence, Feminist critique, Fiction, Women emancipation, Women portrayal

The Neocolonial Structural Model Re-Foundation and The Pragmatic Inference of Organizational Culture in Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Devil on The Cross (1980)

Through the frame frequency of the imported state and the westernization of the African political order, the social construction of the African bureaucracy appears as a structural device of abstraction, exploitation, and brutality. Then, through the frame of reference with the importation of conceptual juridical coordination and perceptual representative consensus, the African public administration enhances a frameshift transformation and a succession of causality. Therefore, in combinatorial and transactional analysis, the framework of Devil On The Cross progresses in a method of empirical processing decomposition. Within this respect, the elemental and pure imaginary of the African administration proceeds as a functional derivative governmentality and a colonial functional inception power. Subsequently, with its interaction design, processing system, and volume technique, the realm of Devil On The Cross inserts a paradigmatic analysis and a value engineering within which this African administration happens as an characteristic structural formula and an inefficient relational frame theory. Moreover, within the space-time continuum, the configuration management and the linear configuration programming of the African management apparatus, Devil On The Cross becomes a holomorphic function and an analytic continuation that reveal the anachronism nature and the asynchronous system of the African post-colonial administration.

Colonial Resistance and Cultural Revival: Insights from African Postcolonial Writings

The impact of colonization on native cultural life, modernization, and anticolonial nationalism led African writers to reflect on colonial encounters and their effects on social, economic, and cultural aspects. They felt tension between traditional and colonial values, seeking to re-discover cultural roots. Through a critical evaluation of the significant works by key African postcolonial writers such as Cyprian Ekwensi, D. O. Fagunwa, J. P. Clark, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, this article seeks to explore how these African authors have dealt with the issue of colonial encounter in their writings. The focus is also on highlighting how these African authors have voiced their opposition to colonial legacies and have actively engaged in the resuscitation and celebration of local customs and cultural heritage through their writings in the postcolonial era. This research highlights the significant role that literature has in creating and expressing postcolonial African consciousness by analysing topics such as resistance, identity, tradition, and cultural pride. The study also examines how these literary contributions have actively questioned and dismantled colonial narratives, creating an opportunity for the genuine voices of African nations to emerge and thrive.

A Literary Analysis of Oral Tradition in Ogba Cosmology

The whole world in Ogba cosmology exists for man’s sake and the universe is divided into two: the visible and invisible parts (the heaven or sky and the earth). The sky is the invisible as well as the underworld that is below the earth, while the earth is visible part. Ogba people believe in the link between earth and heaven which they reflect in their oral traditions. This paper analyses the oral tradition of the Ogba people; their origin, religion, belief system and their functions and relevance to human experience. And to achieve this, a brief analysis of Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Devil on the Cross and Chinua Achebe’s Thing Fall Apart are used as oral traditional novels. The paper comprises the introduction, themes and languages of the oral tradition, the oral tradition of Ogba people, an overview of the oral tradition and finally conclusion. The paper discovers that oral tradition features prominently in the works of African writers; explaining in details the culture milieu as perceived in festivals, dances, funerals and songs. The paper focuses on the aesthetic values of the Ogba cosmology using ethnopoetics and historicism as a theoretical framework. The paper finds out that the oral tradition of Ogba people is a unifying force that brings the people together to live in peace, unity and love.

Postcolonial Psyche in English Novels from India and Africa

Purpose: Postcolonial Themes in English Novels from India and Africa is a thematic analysis of four novels, two from India and two from Africa. The novels are: Anita Desai’s Cry the Peacock, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Matigari. They represent the vast postcolonial writing which has emanated from these two lands as a result of the disaffection that indigenous writers felt that colonialism had exacted on their people, culture and literature. The novels stand out in their treatment of the postcolonial themes of conflicts between the colonial and the local, the past and the present, the traditional and the modern, the communal and the individual aspects of the European colonial legacy in both India and Africa. A study in Postcolonial English novels from India and Africa is important as it may unfold the comparative experience of the effect of colonial period and the literary reaction by English language novelists from these two lands, which were subject to more or less similar colonial master.
 Findings: The study reveals that all the four novels share in common the strong postcolonial theme which is at the crux of everything that follow. The story of the coming and going of the colonial powers in India and Africa had left their mark and it was not naturally compatible to the peoples of the populace in these two environments that were both colonized by the British.
 Methodology: This article is based on a textual analysis of primary and secondary materials. The primary materials were obtained from the four selected English novels from India and Africa: Anita Desai’s Cry the Peacock, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Matigari. The secondary materials were obtained from various books and articles published on the novels and on the subject of discussion as well.

Alienation and identity crisis on fictional characters in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965)

This paper attempts to highlight the story of a whole community of the Gikuyu people who inhabited the ridges of Kameno and Makuyu in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s The River Between. The paper will integrate the public aspects of the novel with the dramatic actions of the private individuals. The main characters, as protagonists in the conflict, represented opposing forces within the society and yet they remained convincing as human beings. Alienation and Identity Crisis on protagonists and other significant fictional characters will take the centre stage of this paper. There are so many editions of The River Between but this paper used the 1988 version, ISBN 043590017X.

Body Politics in Beauty Pageants: A Study of Miss Nepal Discourse

The paper attempts to explore how the female body is often controlled by the power politics, which is discussed with reference to the Miss Nepal beauty pageant. The pageant being organized since 1994 has drawn not only ideological and ethical debate, but it has also generated street demonstrations including violent confrontations since then. Though women’s wings of various politico-cultural organizations tried to stop it by organizing various protest movements, multiple forms of regional and community-based beauty pageants are proliferating in Nepal. This study primarily tries to observe the forms of body politics that exist in Miss Nepal beauty contests from the perspective of indigenous aesthetics. Secondly, it analyzes how the female body is tied with the power politics in the name of beauty pageants from the Gramscian notion of ‘hegemony’ and Ngugi wa Thiongo’s ‘decolonizing the mind’. Finally, as indigenous aesthetics is an extensive domain, this paper recommends some ways to deal with the Miss Nepal beauty pageant issues, especially with reference to the indigenous Newa: women aesthetics.

Fragmentation, Distortion and Dispossession of Indigenous Values: A New Historicist Reading of Ngugi Wa Thiongo's Dreams in a Time of War

Fragmentation, Distortion and Dispossession of Indigenous Values: A New Historicist Reading of Ngugi Wa Thiongo's Dreams in a Time of War

LINGUISTIC REVITALISATION AND THE DRAMA IN AFRICAN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES

This paper explores the drama written in indigenous African languages across many countries in Africa. It highlights the intellectual snobbery suffered by drama written in indigenous languages, probing the reasons behind the critical marginalization. It equally probes the elemental compositions of drama written in indigenous languages, investigating how oral elements revitalize and fertilize the dramatic works. The theoretical framework for this study was anchored on Ethnodramatics, a theory of indigenous drama projected by Affiah and Osuagwu while the inspirations which substantiate indigenous African languages as viable and effective linguistic mediums for dramatic creativity are derived from Ngugi wa Thiongo’s theoretical postulation on the language of African theatre in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986). The paper reveals that traditional African drama in indigenous languages creatively utilizes oral resources and elements such as proverbs, riddles, mime, music, songs, dance, and other folk arts in ways that embellish and relive their drama. The paper concludes that by writing in indigenous languages, playwrights expand the resources and frontiers of African indigenous languages, a situation that nurtures and preserves them.

REPRESENTATION OF THE COLONIZERS IN A GRAIN OF WHEAT BY NGUGI WA THIONGO

Representation, in its postcolonial sense, has been the subject of investigation with all its discursive practices and manifestations in the Orient as well as in the Occident. The global South, in particular, has been the focus of the representative discourse conceived, initiated, crafted and executed by the West in order to form the nexus between power and knowledge to carry out, expand and justify the colonial project. The resistance by the colonized was either in the form of armed struggle or through a complete denial; rejecting everything that is Western or belongs to the colonizers. In particular, Ngugi WaThiongo opted for the later and ceased writing in English to express his dismissal against the institution of colonization. The Kenyans, in their holistic ways, represent them on account of their epistemological as well as on ontological grounds thus belittling, maligning, outcasting, othering and subalternizing them and resurface their own cultural, traditional and linguistic subtleties and sensibilities to mark a point of departure from the colonizing forces. The research concludes that representation, in its Saidian sense, was countered by the Africans in their narratives by reciprocity and they reconstructed their discourse to reimaging and repaint the image(s) of the West in their texts. Keywords: Imperialism, colonialism, representation, culture, resistance.

Decolonizing the Postcolony: Of Men, Spatial Politics and the New Nation in wa Thiongo‟s Wizard of the Crow

The advent of democracy – and in particular multi-party democracy – was thought to be relieving for Africa, especially in terms of the desire to undo the damage of colonialism. A careful look at Postcolonial Africa today, relative to the desire for economic and political freedom, reveals conditions that suggest that not much progress has been made. Ngugi wa Thiongo‘s Wizard of the Crow blatantly explores Africa‘s complicity in a seemingly cyclic colonization in the 21st century and its attendant consequences for the total liberation of Postcolonial Africa. Employing Bakhtin‘s theory of the carnival and other such concepts as polyphony and the grotesque, this paper examines the correlation between masculine representations, spatial re-organization and futurity as alternative ways in thinking about Africa‘s future. The result of the analysis is that the correlation between forms of communities and forms of masculinities is an indication of a vision of hope for Postcolonial Africa.

Towards Literature as a Reconstruction of History: A Study of Ngugi Wa Thiongo and Micere Githae Mugos' The Trial of Dedan Kimathi

Towards Literature as a Reconstruction of History: A Study of Ngugi Wa Thiongo and Micere Githae Mugos' The Trial of Dedan Kimathi

Africa and the West: Between Tradition and Modernity in Shimmer Chinodya’s Dew in the Morning (1982) and Ngugi WA Thiongo’s weep Not, Child (1964)

European colonizers have impoverished Africans for spoiling their natural resources. African Anglophone writers such as Shimmer Chinodya and Ngugi WA Thiongo respectively in Dew in the Morning and Weep Not, Child devote most of their writings to land issues and cultural alienation. The aim of this article is to display the strategies of the White man to achieve his objective, and the contribution of his black collaborators to take Africans’ lands. It also reveals the importance of African traditional practices in the resistance against colonialism. Finally, it shows the perpetual quest of western education by Africans to “beat the white in his own game”.

Women as agents of conflict resolution in Femi Osofisan’s Moroutodun

Over the years, there have been incidents of class struggle and secessionist agitations especially in developing nations such as Nigeria. This has drawn the attention of the government, security agencies and the ruling class who deem it a threat to the peace and unity of the nation. Many of such agitations are tackled using different strategies to manage the situations especially when it results to crisis and clash of interests leading to destruction of lives and properties. Nigeria, has recorded several incidents of agitations mostly from minority and separatist groups who see themselves as the oppressed and marginalized in the aspects of leadership, governance, power and unequal distribution of the nation’s abundant wealth and resources. The literary world has contributed severally through the works of contemporary African playwrights such as Ngugi wa Thiongo, J.P Clark and Femi Osofisan, who have successfully woven their themes on issues such as conflict, emancipation, oppression and social struggle. This paper is premised on the theory of conflict resolution techniques and dispute management systems and textual analysis as its method. The paper examines the portrayal of women as agents of conflict resolution in Femi Osofisan’s Moroutodun. It further draws the attention to the integral role of women in bringing about peace, positive change and development in the society. The paper concludes that womenshould be given a chance as men to contribute to peace-building and conflict resolution in the society.
 Keywords: Women, Agents of conflict resolution, Moroutodun, Femi Osofisan, Nigeria

Africa in the Novels for Young People in France and in Germany by Élodie Malanda

Reviewed by: Africa in the Novels for Young People in France and in Germany by Élodie Malanda Sibylle Weingart Translated by Nikola von Merveldt L'AFRIQUE DANS LES ROMANS POUR LA JEUNESSE EN FRANCE ET EN ALLEMAGNE 1991-2010. Les pièges de la bonne intention. [ Africa in the Novels for Young People in France and in Germany.] By Élodie Malanda. Series: Francophonies; 12. Honoré Champion éditeur, 2019, 583 pages. ISBN: 978-2-7453-5071-8 L'AFRIQUE DANS LES ROMANS POUR LA JEUNESSE EN FRANCE ET EN ALLEMAGNE 1991-2010. Les pièges de la bonne intention. [Africa in the Novels for Young People in France and in Germany.] By Élodie Malanda. Series: Francophonies; 12. Honoré Champion éditeur, 2019, 583 pages. ISBN: 978-2-7453-5071-8 About seventy years ago, certain colonial structures changed in many of Africa's fifty-four states. African men and women fought for formal independence from the former colonial powers then and in the following decades. However, these "formal" forms of independence were only snapshots of the ongoing political, economic, and cultural struggles for Africa's real and lasting independence, not only from Europe. One of the decisive steps of decolonization is cultural in nature, as the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo points out in his seminal essays "Decolonising the Mind" (1986) and "Moving the Centre—the Struggle for Cultural Freedom" (1993). In these essays, Ngugi calls for cultural self-empowerment and the self-liberation of African people from colonial projections or racist violence by Europeans. This call was also addressed to white Europeans and white authors, with the appeal to engage in self-critical self-reflection, to be aware of one's own privileges, to think about "whiteness," to question socialization with colonial clichés regarding Africa and African people, and to challenge racially grounded stereotypes in one's own writings and thoughts and actions. In times of Black Lives Matter, this call has gained new urgency. In her doctoral dissertation L'Afrique dans les romans pour la jeunesse en France et en Allemagne (published by Honoré Champion, Paris, 2019), the Luxembourg researcher Élodie Malanda expertly examines the question of what "African images" contemporary children's and youth literature from France and Germany, both former colonial powers in Africa, "send" to their readership today: of the continent in general, of [End Page 116] individual countries, and of African men, women, and children. She bases her analysis on 150 selected novels of contemporary children's and youth literature published in France or Germany between 1991 and 2010, including some translations from English. In her book, Malanda examines the important question of the extent to which colonial discourse and colonial "fantasies of omnipotence" are perpetuated in contemporary children's and youth literature, or whether and to what extent there has been a change in discourse, a disruption or a critical reflection of the "forms of representation" of Africa and African people in French and German children's literature. The subtitle of the doctoral thesis, Les pièges de la bonne intention (The Pitfalls of Good Intentions), already dampens expectations of great changes in the "Africa images." It may remind readers of the saying "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," pointing out the jarring contradiction between the intention and literary outcome of many of the novels examined. Many of these books are indeed imbued with the authors' and characters' sense of mission to promote understanding among nations, to sensitize the readership to political problems, and to put the colonial idea of white superiority in the text itself in its place. Forewords, blurbs, and biographical information about the authors also bear eloquent witness to this. In addition, some of the authors (such as Yves Pinguilly, Hermann Schulz, Nasrin Siege, and many others) claim the status of "friend of Africa," "white African," or "Africa expert" for themselves, and insist on their intimate knowledge of the countries based on regular visits or longer stays. But this does not save them from traps in their own texts, which sometimes reproduce subtle or even crude colonial clichés, as Malanda can demonstrate with her astute interpretative work. Malanda investigates how these contradictions between good intentions and controversial...

Third Time Lucky: Freshlyground and Cross-border Censorship in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT In 2010 South African band Freshlyground produced a satirical music video critical of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s 30-year long tyrannical rule titled “Chicken to Change.” For eight years after the song’s release, the band was barred from Zimbabwe. Using Ngugi wa Thiongo’s “enactments of power” concept and Michel Foucault’s insights on censorship, this account investigates the cross–border and esthetic censorship dynamics that prevented the band from landing and performing in Zimbabwe. The paper argues that the Zimbabwean state used its national borders and ports of entry as a music censorship mechanism and provides a nuanced appreciation of performance censorship in contemporary postcolonial Zimbabwe.

Clash of Cultures and Resistance in Selected African Plays

Protest African drama that appeared in Kenya and other African countries was due to the bad conditions that Africans lived during the period of colonization. This paper uses the post-colonial theory to explore how resistance in all of its armed and unarmed forms succeeded in awakening the African continent after long years of marginalization. It also tackles the clash of cultures which represents another kind of resistance, dealing with clash of cultures between the European and the African. Moreover, it will focus on the colonial discourse the colonizer relied on to assert the inability of Africans to express themselves without this discourse which the Europeans (colonial powers) invented and deliberately used to establish and deepen their domination over the black continent even after their departure.
 
 For this purpose, the researcher will analyze two different plays written by the Kenyan playwright Ngugi Wa Thiongo, The Black Hermit and The Trial of Dedan Kimathi. The clash of two cultures will be studied in The Black Hermit, while resistance and armed resistance will be examined in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi.

THE RELATION BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND COLONIALISM IN NGUGI WA THIONG’O’S THE RIVER BETWEEN

This article is aimed at describing how the relation between Christianity and colonialism is constructed in The River Between (1965), a novel by Ngugi wa Thiongo. Using postcolonial approach focusing on the analysis of the characters and conflicts, this study reveals the mutual relation between Christianity and colonialism. Christianity becomes the ideological apparatus to build a colonial myth, doctrine, or perspective, while Christian missionaries gain the colonizers support from the colonial administrators. Their antagonistic relation can be explored through the natives re-reading of the Bible to review the colonialism and get rid of the colonial bondage. As postcolonial literature, The River Between offers counter-discourse against colonialism. However, some parts of the text are still slipped in the colonial hegemony.Keywords: Christianity, colonialism, postcolonialism, ideological apparatus, counter-discourse

The Pitfalls of National Consciousness as Depicted in Matigari by Ngugi wa Thiong�o

The paper provides insights into how national consciousness is eroded in post-colonial Africa with reference to Matigari by Ngugi wa Thiongo and the impact of this erosion on the marginalized, largely impoverished masses, who continue to live on the periphery of society. The African elite (bourgeoisie), who are the new rulers after colonialism, become so obsessed with their own material enrichment and their new found power, that the imagined state, for which so many had fought and sacrificed their lives, becomes a mere pipe dream. It is with this background in mind that the paper intends to examine how the pitfalls of national consciousness highlighted by Fanon in his text The Wretched of the Earth find resonance in Ngugis non-fiction work Matigari and the crucial issues that the text raises in terms of how the new rulers abuse their power and the mechanisms that they implement to entrench their authority. Through Ngugis use of the fictional protagonist Matigari, we are taken on a journey that unearths the rampant corruption and brute force of the regime as they strive to annihilate any opposition that dare question their abuse of power.Keywords: Post-colonialism, National consciousness, Othering, Oppressive regime

Postcolonial Ecocriticism and the African Response to Human Experience and the Environment

Postcolonial ecocriticism is a theory that looks at both the environment and people, how both are interconnected, reflect and define each other. Writers symbolically use wholesome social environment to indicate spiritual and moral vivacity of a society while unhealthy environment shows exploitation, extreme materialism, moral decadence, and spiritual ineptitude of a society. This paper looks at Postcolonial ecocriticism as a local response to global environmental issues, and also explores the colonial impact and legacy on human and nonhumans in Africa. The paper is reliant on Postcolonial ecocriticism and uses Frantz Fanon’s thoughts in Wretched of the Earth as the theory that guides the analysis of Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s I will Marry When I Want and Athol Fugard’s Sorrows and Rejoicing. The plays serve as the primary texts of this research paper. Thus, this paper will look at the interconnectedness of humans and nonhumans in the two select plays. The paper specifically sees Postcolonial ecocriticism as Africa’s local response to the global environmental writings that have occluded the issue of colonialism and displacement. The paper also establishes a connection between the anthropos and nonhuman elements in African drama.