Khushbu Lakhupota
MA Semester 4
Paper 206 The African Literature
Written Assignment
A Study of the Novel Petals of Blood by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
Batch 2020-2022
Submitted to: Department of English, MKBU.
18 March 2022, Friday
A Study of the Novel Petals of Blood by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
Political Fury and Failed Vision:
Petals of Blood, written by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o is published in 1977. This work is more tensed. It reflects the effects of Neocolonialism. The power was replaced. In, A Grain of Wheat Ngugi shows that the native people used to wait outside the office of MP. The MP was not interested in improving the situation of poor farmers. The farmers struggle to regain the land was endless and the people were given fake promises. In Neocolonialism Black people formed the government and ruled over their people. The vision of freedom failed. The same problems can be seen in Petals of Blood also. Individuals fight with the power existing in the society. Petal of Blood presents a very complex structure of society and presents political fury and failed vision in a neo-colonial country. Petal of Blood is one of the most complex and extended works of post independent African fiction. The novel takes the readers back to the historical memory and through the story of four main characters Ngugi retells the story historical past of Kenya and the anti-colonial struggle. Though the technique of flashback and multiple narrative techniques the novel is the detail of metamorphosis of Ilmorog. This metamorphosis is from an agricultural village to an industrialized one. Ilmorog is a fictional village which is transformed by the influences of Neocolonialism. It has become a New Ilmorog in which the masses of the population are marginalized. At the close the novel shows the possibility of political organization by the working classes. Divided into four parts Petals of Blood starts with a knock at the door, the knock at the doors of four characters which gives a feeling of suspension to readers. Munira, Karega, Wanja and Abdulla are wanted at the New Ilmorog Police Station. The Police have come to investigate about a murder in Ilmorog. The four of them have come to Ilmorog with a dream but their dreams are scattered in this wasteland. Structurally the novel is a master piece of Ngugi as it swings between past and present. With the personal life of characters the political issue of the nation is involved. The personal and political get mixed in the novel. The novel is a very good example of political discourse and it focuses on the political ideology. Petals of Blood shows Ngugi's social visions and marks his commitment to the cause of dispossessed. Godfrey Munira is portrayed at the outset as an uncommitted, alienated individual. who chooses not to choose, and thus adopts the position of the "neutral" onlooker on the margins of society. The character of Munira is a complex version of Mugo from A Grain of Wheat. At initial stage Murina had anti-colonial stand which was the result of his childhood confusion and sense of loss. Munira, an educated fellow, vaguely senses that something is amiss in his life; he is apparently both attracted to and repelled by the material success and hypocritical religiosity in a family run by too possessive a father. Munira is dislocated from his family and society and has a dream to find out his own way of life. Munira had to obey his father strictly. In his family he felt religious hypocrisy. He felt that the workers are freer than him. The first notable act by Munira was to ask for the transfer to Ilmorog because abandoned and wretched Munira hoped to escape from his guilt-ridden life. In Ilmorog Munira wanted to avoid involvement and arranged a busy work schedule for him.
"classes all day; a walk to the ridge; then a stroll to Abdulla's place [a small bar]". (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 19)
He rarely ventured back home and, when he did, hardly ever stayed more than a night. In Ilmorog his teaching profession failed to protect him from a reality; the reality which constantly presented the alternating series of commitments and rejections. Munira once went out on a nature study and realized a thin line which separates an apparently innocent observation of nature and its possible political implications or interpretations. In front of a worm-eaten flower "with petals of blood," actually "a solitary bean flower in a field dominated by white, blue and violet flowers," Munira attempted to explain the phenomenon away by saying that the students should refer to the color as red instead of blood, that such worm-eaten flowers cannot bear fruit, and that a flower can also become this color if it is prevented from reaching the light. But the pupils continue to question him: "Why did things cat each other? Why cannot the eaten eat back? Why did God allow this and that to happen?" Confronted with these questions, the uncommitted Munira seeks refuge within the four walls of his classroom, swearing never to venture out with the children again:
"Man... law... God... nature: he had never thought deeply about these things, and he swore that he would never take the children to the fields. Enclosed in the four walls he was the master, aloof, dispensing knowledge to a concentration of faces looking up to him. Then he could avoid being drawn in... But out in the fields. outside the walls, he felt insecure." (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 22).
Munira's disengagement from both his family and society led him to think that something is amiss in his life and it was impossible to escape from both the collective and individual past by denying their existence. His family background was one of the causes of his alienation and he groped to find something new but feared to find it. Munira's problem was more social than familial general and personal. Such a reading corresponds to Ngugi's apparent attempt to pinpoint, in his treatment of commitment or the lack of it, some of the major obstacles to the full growth and social integration of sensitive Africans. Munira's world is an image of disintegration, decay and despair. It is an image of crude mercantilism and callous exploitation of the Kenyan peasantry by the national bourgeoisie allied to international forces. Such situation of malaise can inspire not commitment but alienation and apathy in a highly sensitive individual. Despite Munira's insistence on his neutrality as he argued that he was not his brother's keeper. (Thiong'o. Petal of Blood 49), the social malaise underlying his attitude was gradually brought into the open during and after the Emergency Journey to the city. Munira, who took part in this great trek to avoid being left behind, actually participated not only in the strong communal bond spontaneously created between the members of the delegation, but also shared in the collective suffering that the delegation experienced at the hands of both nature and the callous city dwellers. It was this experience that started Munira along the path of full awareness:
"It was the journey, Munira was later to write, it was the exodus across the plains to the Big Big City that started me on that slow, almost ten-year, inward journey to a position where I can now see that man's estate is rotten at heart. Even now, so many years after the event, he wrote, I can once again feel the dryness of the skin, the blazing sun, the dying animals that provided us with the meat, and above us. soaring in the clear sky. hawks and vultures which, satiated with meat of dead antelopes....waited for time and sun to deliver them human skins and blood. The journey toward the kingdom of knowledge ..." (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 117 18)
limoroge is a beast with gaping jaws which swallows youth. It is a big city with its indifferent to rural needs. The delegation here encountered a degree of callousness and inhumanity that bordered on sadism. The delegation were equally poorly treated by a household of foreign priests who denied them food but offered them prayer, and who had come from Christian lands eager to civilize Africa but whose own faith and civilization prompted them to reat their dogs with more respect than they show for the Africans. The darker side of the novel is de cynical and diabolic character of Nderi Wa Riera, the M. P. He had gone out for a business inspection. He was looking for special places were ageing Europeans could buy an African virgin girl of fourteen or fifteen as in this fallen city hairy-chested old hogs seemed to find peace of mind between the thighs of young women. In this colonial game the natives were denied the right to grow to full flowers in air and sunlight.
In such a society, non-commitment generally becomes a form of rebellion without a clear program, of rejecting what is while lacking a vision of what should be. In effect, this is the atitude of the major characters in Petals of Blood, particularly Munira. The turning point in Munira's life from indifference to a real awareness and commitment starts many years after the historic journey that ultimately brings development and change to Ilmorog. As Munira points out in his mixture of an autobiographical confessional and some kind of prison notes," this change is for the worse: "They went on a journey to the city to save limorog from the drought [but] brought back spiritual drought from the city" (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 195). In conjunction with this growing awareness, what Munira hears from Karega about the generalized situation of oppression and exploitation throughout the country finally convinces him of the "overwhelming need and necessity for higher laws, pure, eternal, absolute, unchanging" (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 296). His objection to the social rottenness is not political, but religious, with the aspiration to justice transferred from the secular to a different dimension.
From this moment onward, Munira is committed to the vision of a new world to replace the present corrupt one. In effect, under the pressures of full awareness, Munira drifts into rationality and becomes a fanatic, with all the fanatic's destructive potential. He started to see reality only through the prism of religion, is ready to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, rebukes himself for having been an outsider, and decides to end this "accident by another accident" (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 298). He comes to conceive the world as only a stepping stone for the heaven-bound pilgrim.
Convinced that the world is corrupt through and through, Munira takes it upon himself to bring others to see the light," "to discover this new world," and, by so doing, to save people Convinced that the world is corrupt through and through, Munira takes it upon himself to from "committing the unforgivable sin of pride. Of thinking that workers could change the evil could change this world contemplating that man unaided by God through Christ could change himself, could change the world, could improve on it" (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 299 1003. Thus Munira trails Karega and Abdulla to prevent their having contact with Wanja, who has become, in his eyes, the devil incarnate, the Jezebel, intent on men's souls:
"From nowhere, a voice spoke to him: She is Jezebel, Karega will never escape from her embrace of evil. In the dark, the message was clear: Karega had to be saved from her... save him. voice insisted. Munira knew that he would obey the voice. Christ, after all, had beaten the traders who had been spoiling God's temple. What was important was not just passive obedience to the law but active obedience to the universal law of God. It was a tremendous revelation." (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 332)
In the final act of commitment, Munira sets fire to Wanja's brothel:
"He walked to Wanja's place. It was not he. Munira. He was doing this only in active obedience to the law. It was enjoined on him to burn down the whorehouse-which mocked God's work on earth. He poured petrol on all the doors and lit it up. He walked away toward Ilmorog Hill. He stood on the Hill and watched the whorehouse burn, the tongues of flames from the four corners forming petals of blood, making a twilight of the dark sky. He, Munira, had willed and acted, and he felt, as he knelt down to pray, that he was no longer an outsider, for he had finally affirmed his oneness with the law." (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 332-33)
Munira, who came from the landowning , the family firmly settled into the middle class, had come to Ilmorog to get a hooting chance of success. He had come to limorog as it was the last station for him to leave behind the life of failure. He wanted to be the door and was tired of procrastination, Munira's battle was a battle against the neocolonial society. In this neocolonial society the peasants were entrapped between the ruling classes, their chauvinisms and the mental terror of progressive class politics.
The cast of migrants is fortified by Karega who is unlike Munira. Karega is a doer. Karega has fled the 'soulless, corrupt Nairoby whose slums with their "ditches full of shit and urine, dead dogs and cats, dangerous gases and hellish beer are the definition of hell on the earth, at list it is the place where Ngugi lived. Because of such situation Karega was consumed by bitterness. He was a school drop-out and failed himself, his mother, and his society. Karega wanted to change not only Ilmorog but the whole country. Karega asked questions which seemed unanswerable and relentless.
As regards commitment, the character of Karega more closely reflects Ngugi's position. Munira's revolt and fanaticism do not seem to be predicted by his affluent background; the case of Karega is different. He is the prototype of the revolutionary, according to Inspector Godfrey: he is from a very poor background, from a family of which his mother is the sole support. They are among the numerous squatters living on meager wages on Munira's father's property. Before the story begins, Karega has been ejected from Siriana for taking part in a strike and has never had the opportunity to attend university. As in Munira's case, the false values prevalent in society are at the root of his detachment and indifference. However, he is convinced from the beginning that sacrificial commitment is required. When talking to the uncommitted Munira about Mau Mau martyrdom to liberate the country, he says of his own brother's death, "You mean his being hanged at Githinguri? It was a collective sacrifice. A few had to die for our freedom". (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 50) Though a radical, Kihika-type commitment is implicit in this quote, it takes Karega a long time to organize his consciousness into a coherent social vision. As with the other major characters of the novel, the turning point in Karega's radical but passive rejection of neo colonial society occurs during and after the journey to the city, which convinces him of the need for united action and organized struggle by the oppressed. The journey also introduces him to the lawyer, the ideologue, the man with "an inner light, an inner consciousness" (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 159), capable of uncovering the political aspects of the peasants plight. Karega learns from him that the exploitation derives from the fact that their leaders have chosen to minister to the "blind and deaf monster of capitalism," that neo-colonial education obscures "racism and other forms of oppression" and is meant to make us accept our inferiority so as to accept their superiority and their rule over us." The lawyer describes how his experience of America helped him transcend the narrow racial view of oppression and exploitation and reach a perception of the universal dimension of the problem:
Then I saw in the cities of America white people also begging I saw white women selling their bodies for a few dollars I worked alongside white and black workers in a Detroit factory. We worked overtime to make a meager living. I saw a lot of unemployment in Chicago and other cities. I was confused. So I said: let me return to my home, now that the black man has come to power. And suddenly as if in a flash of lightning I saw that we were serving the same monster-god as they were in America... I saw the same signs, the same symptoms, and even the sickness... and I was so frightened... I cried to myself: how many Kimathis must die, how many motherless children must weep, how long shall our people continue to sweat so that a few, a given few, might keep a thousand dollars in the bank of the one monster-god that for four hundred years had ravished a continent? And now I saw in the clear light of day the role that the Fraudshams of the colonial world played to create all of us black zombies dancing pornography in Blue Hills while our people are dying of hunger." (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 165 (66)
Later, as Karega wants to learn more about the foundations of exploitation, the lawyer sends him a number of books, cautioning him that the critical issue is choice: "You serve the people who struggle; or you serve those who rob the people. In a situation of the robber and the robbed, in a situation... there can be no neutral history and politics. If you would learn, look about you: choose your side". (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 200)
Karega wanted to learn more about the foundations of exploitation and the lawyer helped him. Karega wanted to fight system from the within. Karega's Marxist ideology and phraseology become more pronounced. He becomes the champion of proletarian struggle and wants nothing for himself, having submerged his own interests in the general interest. He takes it upon himself workers' power. Unlike Munira, who acts out his radicalism by destroying the three business to organize workers wherever and whenever he gets a job, believing that unity is the key to tycoons in the brothel fire, Karega makes it clear to the investigating Inspector Godfrey that he is not concerned with eliminating individuals: "I do not believe in the elimination of individuals. There are many Kimerias and Chuis in the country. They are the products of a system, just as workers are products of a system. It is the system that needs to be changed. workers of Kenya and the peasants can do that". (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 308) and only the
Karega becomes the herald of change and new possibilities. His political awareness leadis him to conclude that no potent or lasting change will be possible unless people are roused from their present alienation by the vision of an attainable society more inviting than that in which they now live. class struggle: outlines the main features of this new world from the standpoint of Marxist
"The true lesson of history was this: that the so called victims, the poor, the downtrodden, the masses, had always struggled with spears and arrows, with their hands and songs of courage and hope, to end their oppression and exploitation: that they would continue struggling until human kingdom came a world in which goodness and beauty and strength and courage would be seen not in how cunning one can be, not in how much power to oppress one possessed, but only in one's contribution in creating a more humane world in which the inherited inventive genius of man in culture and science from all ages and climes would not be the monopoly of a few, but for the use of all, so that all flowers in all their different colours would ripen and bear fruits and seeds... Choose brothers and sisters in sweat, in toil, in struggle, and stand by one another and strive for that kingdom." (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 303)
Wanja is a prostitute. Through the character of Wanja Ngugi shows the plight of women in neo-colonial society. Ngugi has shown a woman's struggle in society parallel with the political struggle. Ironically Wanja was happy to get a job of a barmaid at Abdulla's shop.
"It will be my first night as a barmaid in Ilmorog." (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 49)
In her narrative Wanja takes us back to her childhood which helps us to understand that why she has chosen to be a prostitute. In her childhood she had a boy friend and her father did not like that. In her speech Wanja has woven the words of her father. She says:
"My father said: She is now a woman; she even talks to her mother as equals. They locked me in my room and they both beat me, my father with his belt and my mother with a cowhide strap we used for tying and carrying things. This will teach you to come home holding hands with boys! (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 45)
Girls cannot have equal rights as compared to boys. In a patriarchal structure a girl is forced to become and behave like a woman. This role of woman is defined by society. The force hrings dissatisfaction and frustration in a woman's life. The seeds of hatred were there in Wanja from her childhood. She says:
"I silently cursed at this world." (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 45)
Wanja is involved in an act of vengeance. She hates the world and the men who hated. her. At school she was exploited by her math's teacher. He never missed a chance to detain her a little longer at school. The result was she got good marks in that subject but at the same time she was no more a virgin. The crucial situation came when she became pregnant. She ran to her lover to marry him but she was humiliated by him. That's how started "a tortured soul's journey through valleys of guilt and humiliation and the long sleepless nights of looking back to the origins of the whole journey". (Thiong'o. Petals of Blood 48) She says:
"At the same time I hated the young man who had been the cause of my suffering I nursed the pain in my soul. I am a hard woman and I know I can carry things inside my heart for a long time. I wanted to find something that would really hurt them and humiliate them as they had done to me." (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 46)
Fire has become a symbol in Wanja's life. When she was asked about fire she said:
"I suppose it does not matter. But fire is a nightmare in our family. My aunt died of arson. I left Bolibo Bar because a room I rented there was burnt. So you see I have been running away from one fire into greater flames". (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 382)
This is very much symbolic as fire can be both the preserver and destroyer of life. This incident occurs only in Wanja's life. Ironically and symbolically a woman always has to give ordeals in patriarchal world even the question asked by students to Munira is also applicable to Wanja's life. A student picked up a worm-eaten flower and Munira explained to them:
"This is a worm-eaten flower...it cannot bear fruit. That's why we must always kill worms...A flower can also become this colour if it is prevented from reaching the light."
The students asked:
"Why cannot the caten eat back?" (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood 26)
It can be said that Wanja is that worm-eaten flower who wanted to hit back. She wanted to see the pain the eyes of men. It is the failure of society that Wanja could not live a respectful life.
Wanja's keen insight into the reality of neo-colonial Kenya actually reveals that there is no difference where the worker is exploited, on the plantation, in a factory or sexually used as a prostitute. Here is a prostitute pointing a finger at general prostitution! As F.E.M.K. Senkoro points out, Ngugi does not limit himself to the naturalistic rendering of prostitute alone Wanja is portrayed both as "a prey but also as a symbol, a character who is able to scrutinize and penetrate (Thiong'o, Petals of Blood) the neo-colonial world.
The character of Abdulla is both a relic of the past and the incarnation of a present of frustrated dreams. He is a living monument to what commitment to the national cause involves, having lost all his family, his fand and one leg in the struggle. He is also a bitter reminder that those who enjoy the fruits of independence are not those who fought for it. Abdulla's story. though brief, actually spans all the themes of the previous novels: the alienation of Africans from their land and culture; their reaction to this loss in the form of Mau Mau resistance and warfare, the liberation of the homeland and the accession to independence, with all its potential; and the betrayal or destruction of this potential by former nationalist leaders.
The writer is concerned with the plight of Kenyans. The more he portrays their negative conditions of life, the more he is drawn into the struggle to change these conditions.
Works Cited:
Thiong’o, Ngugi Wa. Petals of Blood. London: Heinemann, 1977.
Zala, Heena K. Speaking Subaltern: A Study of Select Novels of
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and Buchi Emecheta. 2015.