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Katwiwa Mule

East African literature, like African literature in general, has often been read in terms of the institutions, ideologies, and individuals that gave rise to it and subsequently shaped its unique character.¹ In his authoritative essay, “African Literature and the Colonial Factor,” Simon Gikandi provocatively argues that “what is now considered to be the heart of literary scholarship on the continent could not have acquired its current identity or function if the traumatic encounter between Africa and Europe had not taken place” (Gikandi 2004, 379). Gikandi’s argument is based on the premise that

[M]odern African literature was produced in the crucible of colonialism. What this means, among other things, is that the men and women who founded the tradition of what we now call modern African writing, both in European and indigenous languages, were, without exception, products of the institutions that colonialism had introduced and developed in the continent, especially in the period beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and decolonization in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

(Gikandi 2004, 379; emphasis added)

Gikandi does of course acknowledge here, as elsewhere, that literature in Africa predates the European colonial encounter,² but in accounting for what he and Evan Mwangi in another study call its “strong sense of regionality” (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, vii), both argue that there’s a paucity of writing in this region compared to Western and Southern Africa because, besides the relatively speaking smaller size of Eastern Africa and the region’s relatively late encounter with European colonialism, “all other regions of Africa have been in contact with Europe since the late sixteenth century and have thus developed traditions of culture and writing in European languages that are as old as the colonial encounter” (vii). The point here need not be belabored: For Gikandi and others, what constitutes modern East African literature is largely literature in European languages, and is fundamentally imbricated in, and the subjectivity of its authors overdetermined by, to borrow the words of Biodun Jeyifo, the colonial “sublime” (Jeyifo 2004, xv), that is, the internalized experiences of trauma and inherent contradictions that define even literature that claims to transcend coloniality. In a controversial essay, “The Extroverted African Novel,” Eileen Julien emphatically states that “no African novels erase the history of colonialism and the repression of contemporary regimes” (Julien 2006, 668).

This sublime, according to Jeyifo, is what has fundamentally transformed and shaped “the collective identity of an entire generation … of writers” (2004, xv). To the extent that colonialism still permeates every aspect of life in the continent – state formation, cultural institutions, and identitarian frameworks – Jeyifo’s formulation raises a number of theoretical problems, most notably questions regarding temporality, linguistics, and even coloniality itself: When does the modern begin in the culture of letters in East Africa? Does the modern equal the period corresponding to European encounter with Africa?³ What are we to make of the colonization of the East African coast by Arabs long before the arrival of Europeans and the thriving culture of literary activities, most notably poetry, in Arabic script? Then there is the more intractable cartographical question: What are the geographical delimitations of what is now known as Eastern Africa?⁴ The geographical region designated as Eastern Africa is somewhat peculiar in this sense: It is the one area of the continent where a vibrant writing tradition predates European colonialism and a literature in African languages thrives alongside literature in the former colonial languages. Swahili literature, for example, owes its existence not just to western influence but also to the Islamic and African influences.

Although the foregoing discussion raises important questions regarding literary histories, what I propose to do in this chapter is to redirect readers’ attention to a much‐neglected critical dimension of East African literature: the correlative between genre and ideology. I do this by focusing on the relationship between the Bildungsroman (as autobiographized fiction/fictionalized autobiography)⁵ and ideology (anticolonial resistance) at their point of intersection with the mandates and imperatives for anticolonial texts: their insistence on the recognition of the cultural autonomy on the one hand, and the bodily integrity of the colonized on the other, as integral to their human rights. I take the cue from Joseph R. Slaughter’s assertion that literature is a discursive regime “that can constitute and regulate, imagine and test, kinds of subjects, subjectivities, and social formations” (2007, 8). Slaughter further argues that “[O]ne of the primary carriers of human rights culture, the Bildungsroman has been a conspicuous literary companion on those itineraries, traveling with missionaries, merchants, militaries, colonial administrators, and technical advisors” (123).

Rather than rehash the obvious connections between East African literature and colonialism or read it through its ideological manifestations as many critics have done,⁶ I want to suggest a somewhat different but burgeoning approach which builds upon, rather than displaces, the old vistas of literary and critical engagement by focusing on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child (henceforth WNC) as an exemplar of the way literature responds in the wake of political violence.⁷

My first point of departure is by looking at the ideologies and the normative narrative architecture which gives the Bildungsroman its form and subsequently its ambiguous position in a colonial context. There is, to my mind, a palpable tension between the evolutionary and positivist ethos of the classical Bildungsroman in its eighteenth‐century settings and subsequent developments and the revolutionary imperatives of decolonization in a colonial context.⁸ In other words, colonial ideology (with its dim view of the colonized) and the traditional Bildungsroman are mutually enabling to the extent that colonial ideology conceives history “in teleological and evolutionary terms,”⁹ terms whose rhetorical logic finds expression in the narrative of progressive individual development. Yet, as Tobias Boes reminds us, “the diachronic Bildungsroman plot is [not] too inflexible to accommodate avant‐garde experimentation” (Boes 2006, 239). Thus, if in its traditional form the Bildungsroman represents society as a normative construct, its anticolonial counterpart must of necessity narrate the process of (un)becoming as resistance, self‐reconstruction, and self‐affirmation since the colonized subject cannot change to accommodate the colonial order and the colonial order can only be overthrown rather than reformed. Indeed, this very imperative of decolonization is what serves as the essential context for Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child, a novel “written in the shadow of colonial rule in its most violent form – the state of emergency,” during which period, as Gikandi asserts, “relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, social classes, families, and institutions, were conducted through modes of unprecedented violence” (Gikandi 2000, 71).

A second point of departure is Jonathan Culler’s formulation of the relationship between readerly habits and meaning‐making in a text. According to Culler, reading

is not simply a matter of critical strategy but has an important bearing on the thematic properties of the novel. For if genre is … an interpretation of experience, an attempt to make sense of the world, then we are confronted from the outset with the problem of relating the procedures which we use in interpreting the novel to those that narrators and protagonists attempt to use in ordering their experience. Both are instances of imagination trying to invest its objects with significance, and whether the processes are made to accord or whether they resist close identification, the relationship between them will be of considerable thematic importance.

(Culler 1974, xvi)

Culler raises two fundamental issues with regard to readership: the elusive but distinctive shifts in the discursive control that readers and/as critics exercise over a text on the one hand, and the symbolic investments in the experience and fate of the protagonist on the other.

A third consideration is what Fredric Jameson in The Antinomies of Realism calls “tendencies” of the Bildungsroman, that is its ability to interweave many plots and destinies and to act as a kind of “social Bill of Rights (or Droits de l’Homme) for the novel as a form” (2013, 222). The Bildungsroman, often seen as the narration of the process of subject formation of an individual and the elaboration of their individuality in the process of becoming, often ends up being a novel about the social collective; a depository of the anxieties and symbolic investments of a society in turmoil. The fate of the individual mirrors the fate of society. As Jameson further contends, the endings of such novels should be seen as literary categories whose outcomes have “to be more openly justified by some larger ideological concept” (2013, 195).

Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child has often been read as a Bildungsroman which is also a fictionalized autobiography. Many scholars have noted, for example, the close affinity between Ngugi’s own life as a young man and that of his extremely naïve protagonist Njoroge. According to Gikandi, the tremendous significance of Weep Not, Child in the burgeoning “culture of letters in East Africa” in the 1960s lies in its autobiographical character: “Njoroge’s life and education so closely parallel that of the author that it was sometimes difficult to tell where to draw the line between fact and fiction” (Gikandi 2000, 81). Most notorious in this overly reductive reading of the novel is David Cook and Michael Okenimkpe’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o: An Exploration of His Writings (1997), which not only reduces the novel to a simple didactic propaganda but also sees it as nothing more than Ngugi’s life reproduced in the story of Njoroge. Yet, it is necessary to pay attention to Gikandi’s cautionary observation that the novel should read complexly rather than simply as a reproduction of Ngugi’s life, in spite of Ngugi’s own encouragement of readers to read it this way (Gikandi 2000, 87). Focusing on the novel’s contexts and its manifest propinquity to the life of the author is convenient but inadequate because it ignores the ways in which genre ideology is reworked in the text, especially Ngugi’s negation of the individualistic, humanist, and progressively positivist norms¹⁰ that overdetermine the narrative development of the classical Bildungsroman. I am yet to come across a reading of this novel that takes seriously the ruling ideologies of this genre – namely “the effort to reconcile the subjective condition of the human being with the objective social world” (Slaughter 2007, 111).¹¹ Even the most invaluable critiques of Ngugi’s first two novels pay little attention to Ngugi’s elaborate utilization, reorganization, and contestation of the narrative architecture and ideologies of the genre in both Weep Not, Child and its precursor, The River Between. In one of the most insightful readings of the relationship between Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s work and what he calls “a colonial and exclusionary school culture,” Apollo Amoko (2010, 1) revises the critical consensus around Ngugi’s works that focuses on his literary nationalism, arguing that the failure by Ngugi and his colleagues to take seriously the “institutional locus” of the famous Nairobi Revolution was inevitably what led to its ambiguous successes and legacies. Amoko states: “[T]he institutional context in question is the postcolonial university, a discursive formation whose links to the metropolitan university are more fundamental and enduring than may have been apparent to them and their future admirers … Ngugi’s project to canonize an African national culture from the privileged locus of the postcolonial university can equally be said to have been driven by an imitative fallacy” (Amoko 2010, 5). Amoko likens Ngugi’s attempts to Africanize the curriculum of African literature at the University of Nairobi to Matthew Arnold and E. R. Leavis’ attempts to integrate English culture into the metropolitan university in England which he calls “imitative fallacy” (5).¹² In doing so, Amoko sees The River Between and Weep Not, Child as exemplars of Ngugi’s ability to appropriate this genre of the novel into a weapon of resistance. The two novels, he further argues, enabled Ngugi to assert the demands for the restoration of African rights and dignity and to problematize Gikuyu engagement with the liberal ideas of human rights. While Amoko recognizes Ngugi’s ability to use the genre of Bildungsroman as a mode of questioning to interrogate the entire colonial enterprise and its correlative, decolonization, it is the genre’s correspondence to “the norms and narrative assumptions that underwrite the vision of free and full human personality development” (Slaughter 2007, 40), coupled with its ideological underpinnings as a “coefficient of optimism” (Culler 1974, 28) that receives the least attention in his study. In a somewhat different reading, Gikandi in Ngugi wa Thiong’o, probably one of the best books on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s work to date, locates the text within the contradictory desires and anxieties generated by British colonialism in central Kenya. Gikandi is interested in the social, political, and cultural institutions that were formative to Ngugi’s career as writer: cultural nationalism in central Kenya as it manifested itself in the form of agitation for cultural autonomy; the missionary zeal for conversion of Africans whose activities and ideologies came to constitute a gateway to modernity and civilization; and colonial education provided by missionaries which was intimately conjoined to conversion and colonial civilization (Gikandi 2000, 39).

Published in 1964, Weep Not, Child was the first novel in English to be published by an East African and was written at the cusp of the negotiation for Kenya’s independence. The novel anticipates a series of problems and dilemmas that would come to define the Kenyan, indeed the African, social, political, and cultural imaginary (especially in countries where independence was won through a vicious and bloody struggle) in subsequent decades: How do we confront the immediate past in which, again to use Gikandi’s words, “relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, social classes, families, and institutions, were conducted through modes of unprecedented violence” (2000, 71)? How could an arbitrarily forged state translate into viable (imagined) national community within the context of unfinished decolonization defined by a stubborn refusal to confront the past and instantiate mechanisms for addressing the broader transitional justice? More importantly, how were European powers, so deeply imbricated in massive violations of human rights at home and abroad, to be coopted in the protection of the very same rights in which the crime of colonialism was deeply enmeshed? How could a people considered subhuman be accorded the dignity deserving of human beings? Weep Not, Child, in essence, reads like the classic testimonio – a true witness of the violence that both underwrites and sustains the colonial social order. As Gikandi so limpidly observes, the colonial experience was so harrowing that “the Gikuyu people had come to conceive of the state of emergency as an apocalyptic event (hiingo ya thiina) … because of the unprecedented violence of the 1950s” (Gikandi 2000, 72).¹³

The violence that dominates the entire narrative of Weep Not, Child makes it by any measure an exemplar of a narrative of spectacularity that delicately negotiates between personal testimony (autobiography) and fictional recreation. If in the recent past spectacular first‐person narratives have come to dominate and to define the discourse of human rights in literary studies, it is worth reminding ourselves that the African anticolonial Bildungsroman stakes its claim as a human rights novel by resisting and rewriting the ossified formulaic norms, readings, and interpretations of the genre. Within the context of South Africa, Njabulo Ndebele defines spectacularity as the “representation of … the visible symbols of the overwhelmingly oppressive … social formation” which has, over the years, resulted in a brazen, exhibitionist, “highly dramatic, highly demonstrative form of literary representation … Everything there has been mind‐bogglingly spectacular” (1986, 143). For Ndebele, the spectacular operates within the realm of the obvious because “[w]hat matters is what is seen. Thinking is secondary to seeing. Subtlety is secondary to obviousness. What is finally left and what is deeply etched in our minds is the spectacular contest between the powerless and the powerful” (1986, 143). If we take seriously Simon Gikandi’s injunction that “Modern African literature was produced in the crucible of colonialism” (2004, 379), what this means is that we must pay particular attention to the way a work such as Weep Not, Child provides a space in which the relationship between ordinary people and the unprecedented violence of decolonization is represented in its raw form and afforded time, space, and meaning. At many levels, the experiences of the protagonist Njoroge and his entire family fit neatly into what Judith Butler in a different context calls “the injurability … the experiences of vulnerability and loss” (qtd. in Andrews and McGuire 2016, 3).

Weep Not, Child starts off as the story of Njoroge, a naïve child whose hopes and aspirations are anchored in colonial institutions, most notably the colonial school, but ultimately becomes a narrative of an unraveling society in the face of the challenges and opportunities presented by the colonial experience. The novel opens with the news that Njoroge is going to be attending school. His journey into the thicket of the colonial world is characterized by failures, confusions, disappointments, and ultimately an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide when his world collapses around him. Thus, his journey is atypical of a Bildung, defined neither by social expansion and psychological growth nor by the fulfillment of his desires. The opening paragraphs are characterized by a deceptive sense of optimism embodied in Njoroge’s enthusiasm for attending school. His optimism is immediately undermined by the deep sense of loss and material deprivation that defines his existence and thus ironically informs the decision to send him to the colonial school. Njoroge’s journey into the colonial world thus begins not as journey in search of self but one that is structured by the hopes and desires of his parents, and by extension those of the entire community, to overcome their immediate circumstances. His mother desires to compensate for the loss of her son during World War I, to rise above her restrictive social conditions, and to overcome her material conditions. On his part, Ngotho, his father, sees his son’s education as a means to restore his manhood and thereby his social standing through recovery of his lost land. The opening paragraph of the novel is emphatic on their situation of loss and dispossession:

“We are poor, You know that.”

“Yes, mother.”…

So you won’t be getting a mid‐day meal like other children.”

(WNC 3)

A few pages later, the narrative shifts from Njoroge’s enthusiasm to the desires of his mother:

Nyokabi was proud of having a son in school.… She tried to imagine what the Howlands woman must have felt to have a daughter and a son in school. She wanted to be the same. Or like Juliana … Her mother’s instinct that yearned for something broader than that which could be had from her social circumstances and conditions saw this. That is why she has impressed upon her husband Ngotho the need for one son to be learned. If Njoroge could now get all the white man’s learning, would Ngotho even work for the Howlands and especially as the wife was reputed to be a hard woman? Again, would they as a family continue living as Ahoi in another man’s land … A lot of motives had indeed combined into one desire, the desire to have a son who had acquired all the learning there was.

(WNC 16)

Throughout the narrative, Njoroge remains unaware of the burden that is being placed on his shoulders. This passage not only speaks to the confusions that have come to define his life as he goes through school but also his lack of awareness of the real purpose of colonial education. His entire experience is thus defined by the disjunctures between his naïve desires and the investments his family and community make on him and the reality of colonial disruption, domination, dispossession, and violence. Njoroge’s sense of optimism is narratively undermined at every stage throughout the novel: His first experience at school is characterized by misunderstanding, harassment, and shame. His encounters with his family’s nemesis, Jacobo and Howlands, and their progeny Mwihaki and Stephen respectively, only further serve to undermine his optimism. Ngugi’s point is clear: The necessary but elusive imperatives for postcolonial revolution cannot be nurtured within the ideologies and institutions of colonialism.

Indeed, school becomes a site for psychical and psychological violence rather than a site for the acquisition of knowledge and discovery of the self. The colonial school offers neither liberatory possibilities nor opportunities for self‐uplift. Instead, the process of education is a means of alienation: School is nothing other than a conveyer of ideologies – colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. Indeed as Njoroge progresses through school, we are told that he “came to place faith in the bible and with his vision of an educated life in the future was blended a belief in the righteousness of God. Equity and justice were there in the world if you did well and remained faithful to your God, the kingdom of heaven would be yours” (WNC 52). The entire education enterprise, buttressed by missionary work, is emblematic of the European colonialist impulse to possess and transform the African mind. Siriana, the high school he attends, is headed by the irredeemably racist school principal:

If he was quick to praise what was good, he was equally quick to suppress what he thought was evil … But he believed that the best, the really excellent could only come from white men. He brought up his boys to copy and cherish the white man’s civilization as the only hope of mankind and especially of the black races. He was automatically against all black politicians who in any way made people to be disconnected with the white man’s rule and civilizing missions.

(WNC 126)

Although education is couched in messianic faith as the spread of Christianity and western civilization, the school headmaster’s benign and slow violence mirrors that of Mr. Howlands and his lackey, Jacobo. Both are united by their belief in white supremacy. The headmaster’s zeal is the classical fusion of religion with civilization in an attempt to socialize Africans to a particular vision of English colonial culture, while designating that which was different as other than truth and in need of tutelage. But the school only effectuates what had already been part of the honorable tradition of western thought with regard to Africa. The humanity of the African had already been questioned by the German philosopher Georg Hegel: “the Africans, having made no history of their own had clearly made no development of their own. Therefore, they were not properly human, and could not be left to themselves, but must be led toward civilization by other peoples: that is, by the peoples of Europe, especially of Western Europe, and most particularly Britain and France” (in Davidson 1991, xvi). In his controversial book Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique, a world‐renowned Human Rights Activist/Lawyer Makau Mutua argues that the entire colonial enterprise amounted to a gross transgression of the fundamental human rights of Africans. According to Mutua, “the process of social transformation and identity reconstruction set in motion by the invasion of Africa by both Christianity and Islam, and particularly the former, dislocated and distorted the African worldview almost in its entirety. The colonial state buttressed that process through the delegitimation of African religions and beliefs, and the legitimation of, at the political and social levels, of the spiritual and religious cosmologies of the invaders” (117). For Mutua, as for Ngugi, the idea of civilization is highly racialized: It signals the psychologically violent ways in which the so‐called privileges of European culture function as a vehicle for the imposition of a naturalized white masculine version of civilization and the notion of human personality development and identity on the non‐European other while simultaneously undermining the cultural integrity of Africans.

How then can Njoroge’s immersion into the colonial world be anything other than a process of unbecoming; a process, as it were, of growing down rather than growing up? In their book Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming, João Biehl and Peter Locke argue that “the notion of becoming [is what] organizes our individual and collective efforts … the intricate problematics of how to live alongside, through, and despite the very profoundly constraining effects of social, structural and material forces” (2017, x). Njoroge seems to be completely unable to adjust or learn and thereby survive his traumatic experiences. At no stage in his life does Njoroge’s world seem to expand. On the contrary, it seems to shrink at every stage, culminating in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. This narrative formulation by Ngugi puts into question the entire notion of becoming that is definitive of the ideologies and narrative architecture of the positivist Bildungsroman. Unsurprisingly then, the optimism that organizes the early parts of the novel turns into tragedy at the end: Njoroge’s tragic end – his deep sense of failure and attempted suicide – speak to the broader ideological implications of his quest “to find a hospitable context in which to realize [his] aspirations” as a colonial subject (Abel, Hirsch, and Langland 1983, 7).

The novel calls for a reading that is open, what Biehl and Locke term “a radical analytical openness to complexity and wonder … so that we can understand how political forces and capital expansions exhaust existing (not ideal forms) and absorb some of the qualities and textures of individual and collective experiments with relating and knowing – lived tensions between power and flight … creation and ruination … belonging and fugitivity” (2017, xi) to the extent that it stages the tension between the imperialist violence of the colonial enterprise most visibly through mental enslavement, land dispossession, and the violation of the bodily integrity of Africans through torture and murder. The narrative ideology of Weep Not, Child stubbornly refuses to endorse Njoroge’s individuality and his naïve desire to accommodate himself to the institutions of colonialism as the path to self‐fulfillment. Instead, Ngugi is more interested in the collective fate of a society almost immobilized by its narratives of an irrecoverable past, a violent and insecure present, and an uncertain future. Ultimately, however, the novel questions these very individual and collective desires based on a white supremacist, racist, exploitative, and violent system that not only devalues African lives (the teacher Isaka’s death is emblematic of this), but also African bodies.

In revisiting one of the most critiqued and foundational texts of East African literature – Weep Not, Child – I have argued for a reading that recognizes what Biodun Jeyifo, in a different context, terms “a convergence of aesthetic and political radicalism” (2004, 14), a reading that is informed by an ethos that seeks to interrogate the relationships among literature, violence, and human dignity on the one hand, and, on the other, the narrative architecture of the Bildungsroman at its point of convergence with the liberal discourse of human rights. Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child, more than any other Kenyan novel, is not just a mere reconstruction of how Kenya’s cataclysmic war of decolonization is “remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized” (Paul Fussell, qtd. in Andrews and McGuire 2016, 3), but also a text that reminds us of the potential of the Bildungsroman to engender a “new kind of social content for the novel as form and the possibility of new kinds of narration” (Jameson 2006, 101).

My rereading of Ngugi’s classical text from a human rights perspective has two implications. First, it calls attention not only to the importance of literary history, but also the importance of interrogating some of the foundational texts of African literature through emerging critical theories. To read Ngugi’s work from this perspective is to acknowledge that the restoration of the humanity of Africans that was taken away by the violent process of colonization is a theme that percolates all his creative and polemical works. Ngugi’s concern with the historical violation of the human rights of Africans, and, indeed, of black people, of the working classes, and of minorities throughout the world, is well known. Reading his earliest novel within a human rights framework acknowledges the complex and emancipatory dialectic that characterizes his works. My contention is that if his works are read through emerging theories of human rights, there is a lot to be excavated in his early novels that tend to be seen as less ideological than his later novels. Second, understanding narrative and criticism as generative might clarify some of the critical gaps in the scholarship of Ngugi’s work that are a result of either focusing on its historical and institutional contexts or on his ideological leanings, both of which approaches focus for the most part on the manifest thematics of nationalism and decolonization on the one hand, and the influence of Marxist aesthetics on the other. Ngugi’s attachment to specific geographical constructs, locations, historical temporalities, and socio‐cultural frameworks is what enables his very particularized critique of white supremacist ideologies that undergird colonial domination while at the same time questioning the idea of colonialism as progress and civilization.