Petals of Blood (2 page)

Petals of Blood
reflects the many internal journeys Ngũgĩ had made over the years, up to writing the book. It is a different book from his earlier work, with more complex characters, a sharper political, mental
and cultural landscape, harder rhythms, deeper themes. It is tighter, more intense, driven like a racing car over a well-beaten track that leaves no doubt as to his skill, his determination, his destination or destiny. It reflects the endless wars he had fought and survived, and the endless wars he saw ahead of him. He had sloughed, leaving behind, a part of him that was too worn out for the new skirmishes, and armed himself with a new vision imbued with urgency and an uncompromising stand, as if he was declaring his own state of emergency because time had not healed the wounds inflicted on Kenya’s masses who had fought so heroically but had been so bitterly betrayed. The Kenya Ngũgĩ writes about, the Kenya that nobody can take away from him, is the ‘Kenya of the working people of all nationalities and their heroic struggle against domination by nature and other humans over the centuries’. It is a huge Kenya, trampled by earlier colonial raconteurs like Robert Ruark and Karen Blixen, who celebrated the settler culture of ‘legalized brutality, fear, silence, oppression’. It is a Kenya whose face we see reflected in Ilmorog, the centre of action for
Petals of Blood
. Ngũgĩ chooses a barren, drought-stricken part of Kenya where farmers and herders, like their ancestors before them, are battling the elements on the one hand, and politicians who have abandoned them to their fate on the other. The journey of Ilmorog is the journey of Kenya after independence when it donned neocolonial clothes and put the interests of foreigners and traitors first and abandoned the people who had suffered and died for the land. The question of land is very important in the book, as in Ngũgĩ’s earlier books. Land is presented as salvation, as a soul, as a woman, as God, the subject of prophecy, the basis of cultural and political identity. There was nothing people would not do to grab or regain land. Ngũgĩ revists the issue in
Devil on the Cross
where in Ilmorog a clique of thieves and robbers, former businessmen, are celebrating theft and robbery on a grand scale and are working towards a more efficient system of taking people’s land and other goods and resources. Both books breathe the same burning, zealous spirit of concern for a country where the political élite gorge themselves to surfeit as the peasants and workers continue to languish in misery, in prison, on the periphery and where ‘women’s thighs are the tables on which contracts are signed’.

Petals of Blood
is, among other things, about identity: the identity of the oppressed, the unsung hero who never managed to get his reward because of an iniquitous prince in the castle, his desires, his vision, his frustrations, his struggles to the bitter end. Ngũgĩ uses the murder of three petty capitalists to introduce us to a world where the relationship between honourable and despicable, worker and employer, politician and constituent has gone horribly rancid. Who would want to kill what the papers slavishly called ‘the Krupps and Rockefellers and Delameres’ of the country – a money-worshipping country, like neocolonial Kenya? Who indeed? The police force is jumping up and down frantically like a pack of gorillas sprayed with itching gas, but there are going to be no easy answers in a place teeming with robberies, strikes, lock-outs, murders and attempted murders, police raids and hard liquor. Ngũgĩ uses the murder case to tease, entice, and open a pandora’s box of stories within stories, histories, songs, lamentations, ejaculations, fictions and mendacities that resonate back into the centuries.

At the beginning of the story, Ilmorog is a place everybody flees. Whoever goes to the city never returns, except for duplicitous reasons. Teachers who are sent don’t last, cynicism abounds, the kind many heap on Africa today, but Ngũgĩ uses a number of migrants to breathe life into the place. Godfrey Munira, one of the murder suspects, comes from a landowning family firmly settled into the middle classes. He arrives in Ilmorog to start a school, leaving behind a life pockmarked by failure. Nobody gives him a hooting chance of success. Somebody literally shits in his school for good measure. For Munira, however, this is the last station, he is tired of procrastinating; he wants to be a
doer
for once and nothing is going to stop him. He makes the school work but fails to fit into the community. The demons that pursue him erupt when people bring up touchy political issues. He is reminded of his father, his failure to support his own family and his favourite sister who committed suicide. As Munira battles for a connection with his fellow man and society one thinks of the precarious role of the intellectual in a neocolonial society. It becomes evident that Munira embodies the traits of the middle classes: their vacillation when it
comes to commitment to big issues, their entrapment between the ruling class and the peasants, their chauvinisms, their mental terror of progressive class politics. They would rather hide behind highsounding words and wait for the perfect time to choose. The time never comes. Poor piggies, they are often left with religion as their only anchor. Munira, true to his roots, ends up splashing and gagging in that morass.

Munira is joined in Ilmorog by Wanja, granddaughter of Nyakinyua, a heroic old woman who was an active participant in the fight for freedom. Wanja forges a relationship with Munira that promises much but hardens into something rank and nebulous that can neither address the past fully nor navigate the present. She is a woman of mystery and secrets, tormented, with a big burden to carry. She has suffered much in life, like many other women, starting with the sugardaddy who jilted her; she has sold herself in many a bar, but Ngũgĩ does not allow us to despise her because that would be despising a huge section of Kenyan women or Kenya itself. We find out that when the sugardaddy, one of Ngũgĩ’s hairy-chested old hogs who seem only to find peace of mind between the thighs of young women, abandoned her, she threw her child in a latrine. Unlike the exploiters, she has repented. Wanja, like Kenya itself, has to fight to stay alive and destruction is never too far away. Ngũgĩ uses Wanja and Nyakinyua to showcase the plight of women, their contribution to the struggle and their deserved status as equal partners in the share of glory.

The cast of migrants is fortified by Karega, whose mother was a squatter on Munira’s father’s land. Munira and Karega share much history but it does not make for a deep relationship. Karega has fled the ‘soulless, corrupt Nairobi’ 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 earth, at least the hell that concerns Ngũgĩ. Karega is consumed by bitterness because as a school drop-out he has failed himself, his mother, his society. A man of his energy and commitment won’t settle for long in teaching; he wants to change not only Ilmorog but the whole country. He is the doer, the one who feels called to change the status quo of the peasant and worker. To begin with Karega saves a donkey’s life and gets Ilmorog on the way
to the city to demand answers from the local MP. Karega is also the man who asks the big questions. Questions which seem unanswerable and relentless: ‘Where went all the Kenyan people who used to trade with China, India, Arabia long before Vasco da Gama came to the scene and on the strength of gunpowder ushered in an era of blood and terror and instability?’ ‘What has the black man done to attain the true kingdom of his earth? To bring back his mind and soul and body together on his piece of earth?’ ‘How . . . ? Why . . . ? When . . . ?’

Another migrant who says little but sits on a ton of secrets is Abdulla, the one-legged shopkeeper who owns the donkey and knew Karega’s brother back in the days of the Mau Mau. He is gnawed by his failure to avenge a fallen comrade’s death. He is the representation of the ‘positive contribution Kenyan workers of Asian origins made to the struggle for independence and the deliberate attempt by the ruling class and some intellectuals to downplay it’. He is a war hero, who participated fully in the post-independence struggle to liberate the downtrodden. He confirms Ngũgĩ’s multi-ethnic approach to politics as the way forward for Kenya.

In a book of journeys and returns Ilmorog makes its journey to the city. The city is a beast with gaping jaws: it swallows youths, it demands taxes, it sends thugs to demand money for bogus oathing ceremonies. It is an inhospitable place for the pilgrims. The identity of its inhabitants, especially the ruling class, has become deformed. One such man tells in
Devil on the Cross
, ‘a car is a man’s identity. I met my wife once on foot. I did not recognize her.’ ‘Come to think of it,’ another says, ‘his face is beginning to assume the shape of a Peugeot 504.’

Unsurprisingly, the city does not roll out the red carpet for the pilgrims, but welcomes them with empty biblical texts, flatulent speeches, the explosion of guns, the crack of whips and the yellowed fangs of vicious guard dogs. It is like in the old days when the settlers and their colonial governors held sway over the city and the country. Like colonizer, like neocolonial ruling class. Wanja redeems herself by saving the group from the claws of her old hog of long ago. And later when Munira wants to despise her, calling her a prostitute,
Karega reminds him that the definition of prostitution has changed: ‘we are all prostitutes. In a world where a man who has never set foot on this land can sit in a New York or London office and determine what I eat, drink, read, think, do, only because he sits on heaps of billions taken from the world’s poor, in such a world, we are all prostituted.

Ilmorog is transfigured or rather transmogrified by the arrival of capitalism. The dog of capitalism comes with all its fleas and rabies, burying Old Ilmorog and putting a New Ilmorog in its place. The ruling class and its lackeys take over. Loans are given only to result in the seizure of land as schemes fail. The rich own everything including the slums in which the workers and peasants live. The peasants and workers form trade unions to fight back but it is an uphill climb. Karega, the man of many wanderings, devotes himself to the unity of workers and helps the trade unions. He is rewarded for it by being linked to the murder. He is the one who personifies Ngũgĩ’s belief that ‘imperialism, the power of dead capital, in its neocolonial clothes will not be able to destroy the fighting culture of the African peasantry and working class for the simple reason that this culture is a product and a reflection of real life struggles going on in Africa today’. Karega’s defiant stay in prison calls to mind Ngũgĩ’s detention without trial and the detention of many opponents of the ruling class. It is not personal. ‘It is part of the wider history of attempts to bring up the Kenyan people in a reactionary culture of silence and fear and of the Kenyan people’s fierce struggle against them to create a people’s revolutionary culture of outspoken courage and patriotic heroism,’ Ngũgĩ says in
Detained
. We know that once freed Karega will go on fighting. It is this that imbues
Petals of Blood
with great optimism. Where the middle classes give up on the peasants and workers, and see only doom and gloom in Ilmorog, in Kenya, in Africa, he sees hope; he sees future prospects.

Petals of Blood
is so bloody deep and detailed that by the time it ends nobody cares for the fate of the three petty ‘Krupps, Rockefellers and Delameres’, who are just a few shoddy links in a chain of traitors and exploiters stretching back into the sands of time, or whether it was Wanja, Karega, Abdulla or Munira who killed them.
Petals
is a great
history lesson, passionately delivered, deeply steeped in class politics, with the leading question pounding like a hellish refrain:
HOW CAN A WHOLE COUNTRY BE TAKEN IN BY A FEW GREEDY BELLIES?
How indeed? The answer is clear: it is not because people are not trying to lacerate these bellies; it is not because people have lain back and opened their legs to be raped. It is because these bellies are wonderful pupils armed with the colonizer’s trinity: the Gun, the Bible, the Coin. It is because in church they sing: ‘wash me Redeemer, and I shall be whiter than snow’ while dipping their hands in the blood of anybody who opposes them. It is because they have powerful imperialist allies in America, Europe and Japan and they use a whitewashed official version in which the heroes are villains and villains heroes.

By writing
Petals of Blood
Ngũgĩ juggled a big array of balls, one of which was correcting the Africa of European fiction, the Africa espoused by the likes of Ruark and Blixen. He finds Blixen’s type of racism dangerous because it is presented as love, a love he would gladly see blasted with a ton of dynamite. In
Out of Africa
Blixen says: ‘when you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find that it is the same in all her music. What I learned from the game of the country was useful to me with my dealings with the natives.’ Ngũgĩ makes it clear that Blixen mistook the trashy rhythm ground out for game hunters and tourists for the true music of the people, and that a white woman who uses animals to read people’s minds is part and parcel of the reactionary settler culture of the whip, the gun, detention and oppression. Ngũgĩ has also put to rest the Bible as a source of truth; to him it is now a cave which he raids for stories, parables and allegories to fit into
his
world, where heaven is here and now, and passive toleration of oppression in exchange for life after death is out of the question. Ngũgĩ set out to burn the bush of ignorance and indifference behind which many people hide their inaction. It is the reason why the book takes no prisoners and stretches its wings wide to straddle genres – prison diary, whodunit, history book, literary novel – and uses allegory, parable, reminiscence, interior monologue, dialogue and drama to hammer its message home. For anybody who has not worked it out: the days of ‘Please sir, can I have a little
more?’ have given way to ‘Give me my fair share or I will kill you, motherfucker.’

In a world where money has been elevated to the status of world religion and where globalization, meaning the sanctified domination of the world by rich corporations, is seen as a panacea for all problems economic, Ngũgĩ is a writer to cherish for warning, witnessing and pounding on the locked doors of the psyche, especially as for a chilling while it was thought that the end of the Third World War, cynically called the Cold War, would be the end of writers who do not glorify the rich – that they would be cremated along with the remains of the communist empire. Ngũgĩ is sitting pretty because for him history is not some dead skunk reeking to high heaven of centuries of despair, but a mammoth beast, a terrible growler that makes hearts tremble when it bellows for change, change, change; struggle, struggle, struggle. Ngũgĩ has spent most of his life wrestling with the essential issues of life in general and Kenya in particular and has come out of the ring with the definitive African book of the twentieth century.