Petals of Blood

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

PETALS OF BLOOD

NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O
was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. One of the leading African writers and scholars at work today, he is the author of
Weep Not, Child; The River Between; A Grain of Wheat; Homecoming; Petals of Blood; Devil on the Cross; Matigari; Decolonizing the Mind; Moving the Center; Writers in Politics;
and
Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams
, among other works, which include novels, short stories, essays, a memoir, and plays. In 1977, the year he published
Petals of Blood
, Ngũgĩ’s play
I Will Marry When I Want
(cowritten with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ and harshly critical of the injustices of Kenyan society) was performed, and at the end of the year Ngũgĩ was arrested. He was detained for a year without trial at a maximum security prison in Kenya. The theater where the play was performed was razed by police 1982.

Ngũgĩ’s numerous honors include the East African Novel Prize; Unesco First Prize; the Lotus Prize for Literature; the Paul Robeson Award for Artistic Excellence, Political Conscience and Integrity; the Zora Neale Hurston—Paul Robeson Award for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement; the Fonlon-Nichols Prize for Artistic Excellence and Human Rights; the Distinguished Africanist Award; the Gwendolyn Brooks Center Contributors Award for significant contribution to the black literary arts; and the Nonino International Literary Prize for the Italian translation of his book
Moving the Center
. Ngũgĩ has given many distinguished lectures including the 1984 Robb Lectures at Auckland University, New Zealand, and the 1996 Clarendon Lectures in English at Oxford University. He received the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Cabinet for “his uncompromising efforts to assert the values implicit in the multicultural approach embracing the experience and aspirations of all the world’s minorities.” He has taught in many universities including Nairobi, Northwestern, and Yale. He was named New York University’s Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Languages and Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies. In 2003 Ngũgĩ was elected as an honorary member in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Currently he is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.

MOSES ISEGAWA
was born in Uganda and taught school for several years. The author of the novels
Abyssinian Chronicles
and
Snakepit
, he now lives in Amsterdam.

Acknowledgements

Introduction by Moses Isegawa

Part One: Walking

Part Two: Toward Bethlehem

Part Three: To Be Born

Part Four: Again . . . La Luta Continua!

Thanks to:

Nyambura for the songs on
pages 313
,
314
and
315
.

Elijah Mbǔrǔ for
Hǔni cia Gita
on
page 340
.

PCEA Gathaithi choir for the hymn on
page 163
.

DK for his song quoted on
page 122
.

Josh White for his song quoted on
page 198
.

Mrs Lee and Mrs Keval for typing the MS.

And also to:

The Soviet Writers Union for giving me the use of their house in Yalta in order to finish the writing of this novel.

Dr Samuel Kibicho – for introducing me to the joys of literature, the novel in particular.

Mr Stephen Thiro – for efforts in the past without which I might never have written.

And to:

Many others

One in the struggle

With our people

For total liberation

Knowing that

However long and arduous the struggle

Victory is certain.

Fearful, original sinuosities! Each mangrove sapling

Serpentlike, its roots obscene

As a six-fingered hand,

Conceals within its clutch the mossbacked toad,

Toadstools, the potent ginger-lily,

Petals of blood,

The speckled vulva of the tiger-orchid;

Outlandish phalloi

Haunting the travellers of its one road.

Derek Walcott, from
The Swamp

Karibu Kenya, Karibu Afrika

In 1959 Ngũgĩ made a life-changing train journey to Uganda; it was the first among many journeys that would lead him away from home and from the landscape, the people, the country he loved. He left behind a country wracked by the war the Kenya Land Freedom Army, also called Mau Mau, was waging against the mighty colonial government. It was a war that touched the popular imagination and was forever to change the fate of Kenya and many other countries under British rule. For the first time peasants, the wretched of the earth, were taking the war to a highly sophisticated country with a long military history. Many expected the revolt to end quickly. Britain would triumph. It did not, despite the state of emergency laws and a particularly brutal military campaign, well-captured in one of Ngũgĩ’s books: ‘It was a period of mass trials, mass murder and mass torture of Kenyans.’

The name Mau Mau made hearts tremble with dreams, hope and fear. Ngũgĩ’s elder brother joined the fighters, his mother was arrested and tortured, and his village was razed to the ground. The Mau Mau leader, Dedan Kimathi, took on almost mythical proportions for Ngũgĩ and for many Kenyans. After all, he was said to turn into a bird, a stone, a white man, anything. Only those who have grown up in war-ravaged times know deep down that wars never end; they just mutate and live on in other forms. For Ngũgĩ that war still goes on, and the mission born of it has made literature that much richer. Reading Ngũgĩ is like feeling a fire, scorching your psyche, your heart, your being.

For a man committed to moving the centre from Europe to other parts of the world, it is apt that his writing career began in Uganda,
where he wrote two novels. In his book
Moving the Centre
Ngũgĩ calls the journey to Uganda ‘a homecoming’. Uganda helped him to understand his sense of being Kenyan, most of all, that Kenya was a black man’s country, not a white man’s country as he had thought before his epiphany, and therefore that colonialism was rape, a criminal act, not masturbation, as some apologists rationalized it: it dispossessed, dislocated, and destroyed people’s idea of themselves by trampling on their culture and trying to replace it with the colonizer’s culture. It also meant that there were two histories: the official whitewashed history peddled by the ruling class, and the real living history of peasants and workers fighting against foreign domination. Armed to the teeth with these facts, Ngũgĩ embarked on the next stage of his journey to Leeds, England, where he wrote yet another novel and experienced the centre of the universe moving from Europe as Africans and Asians asserted, or tried to assert, their right to define themselves and their relationship to the universe from their centres in Africa and Asia. Franz Fanon was the prophet of this earth-shattering movement. Africa was gaining independence and for Ngũgĩ it meant ridding itself of its colonial cultural ballast. Closer to home it meant that African, Asian and South American literature had to come to the forefront, to be integrated into world literature. But in 1967 he was shocked to find the English Department at the University of Nairobi organized as if nothing had changed, or was changing, in the world. He and a few colleagues called for its abolition and replacement. There could never be one centre. ‘It was a question of how one centre related to other centres.’ In 1977 Ngũgĩ decided to do most of his writing in Gĩkùyũ so that the peasants about whose struggles he was writing could read his books, so that in the raging cultural war he could stay in touch with his most precious foot soldiers, his constituency, his historical roots. In his book
Detained
Ngũgĩ calls this a homecoming, a rebirth that enabled him to transcend the alienation to which he had been condemned by years of colonial education.