1 A much earlier version of this research was undertaken with the generous financial assistance of the Centre for Science Development and the University of Cape Town. All opinions expressed herein are, of course, my own.

2 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, 1964; London: Heinemann, 1987. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text.

3 See Emory Holloway, ed., Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose and Letters, London: Nonesuch Press, 1938, pp. 239-40.

4 For an extended commentary on Whitman’s influence upon Ngugi, see Sigurbjorg Sigurjonsdottir, “Voices of Many Together in Two: Whitman’s America and Ngugi’s Kenya”, in Peter Nazareth, ed., Critical Essays on Ngugi wa Thiong’o, New York: Twayne, pp. 93-122.

5 See Gay Wilson Allen, The New Walt Whitman Handbook, New York: New York UP, 1975, pp. 182-3.

6 Allen suggests that “‘On the Beach at Night’ in the 1871 edition answers the despairing question of ‘As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life’ in the 1860 edition. By this time, Whitman’s spiritual crisis was completely over. “What saved him, above all else, was the unifying effect of the Civil War - not only through his own patriotic and devoted services in the army hospitals, but also because the war gave Whitman and the nation Abraham Lincoln.” The New Walt Whitman Handbook, p. 43.

7 The interested reader should consult Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu, London: Secker and Warburg, 1938 (1971).

8 For example, see p. 13, p. 56, pp. 94-5, p. 107, pp. 132-4.

9 A similar cultural injuction forbidding the expression of grief or pain is operative as Gikuyu girls undergo clitoridectomy. For a fuller account of clitoridectomy in Ngugi’s early fiction, see Brendon Nicholls, “Clitoridectomy and Gikuyu Nationalism in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between”, Kunapipi, 25, 2 (2003), 40-55.

10 “Of course, there are writers who show great sensitivity to the social evils perpetrated against other peoples: William Blake, Walt Whitman, Brecht, Sartre for instance. But taken as a whole this literature could not avoid being affected by the Eurocentric basis of its world view or global vision, and most of it, even when sympathetic, could not altogether escape the racism inherent in Western enterprise in the rest of the world.” Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, London: James Currey, 1993, p. 14.

11 My terminology here, “the anxiety of cultural influence”, is indebted to Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, London: OUP, 1975.

12 Wherever I use the term “woman”, I refer not to an ahistorical, universal model of femininity, but to a historically situated and culturally produced sign mobilized within the ideological formation of Kenyan nationalism and imaginatively revisited via the female characters in Ngugi’s fiction.

13 Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing and intro. Sandra M. Gilbert, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986, p. 145.

14 Both Weep Not, Child (1964) and The River Between (1965) were published while Ngugi was studying at Leeds.

15 See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics, London: Heinemann, 1975, p xiii. As if to confirm Ikkideh’s assertion, Weep Not, Child shows that Njoroge’s scholarliness is occasioned by class anxieties: “As [Njoroge] could not find companionship with Jacobo’s children (except Mwihaki), for these belonged to the middle class that was rising and beginning to be conscious of itself as such, he turned to reading.” (pp. 48-9). Of course, the solitary activity of reading is one form of middle-class insularity into which Njoroge himself is becoming assimilated.

16 Patrick Williams has commented that this reduction to type is fraught, since it turns “a systematic colonial policy [of repressive counter-insurgency] into a question of individual malice”. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999, p. 44.

17 This argument is brilliantly developed in Ian Glenn,“Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Dilemmas of the Intellectual Elite in Africa: A Sociological Perspective”, English in Africa, 8,2 (1981), 53-66.

18 For an excellent critique of Ngugi’s gender representations, see Elleke Boehmer, “The Master’s Dance to the Master’s Voice: Revolutionary Nationalism and the Representation of Women in the Writing of Ngugi wa Thiong’o”, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 26, 1 (1991), 188-97.

19 There is an echo of this transgression when Howland’s daughter, a missionary, comes to the school: “Njoroge had not seen many Europeans at very close quarters. He was now quite overawed by the whiteness and tenderness of this woman’s skin. He wondered, What would I feel if I touched her skin?” (p. 46). Njoroge’s speculation here gestures towards the discourse of conquest that organizes the barber’s narrative. Frantz Fanon discusses the male colonized’s cross-racial desire as a form of political conquest in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990, p. 30; and in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1968, p. 63.

20 The description of Jerusalem’s inhabitants as “white” assumes a series of flawed ethnic, racial, geographical and historical definitions. The overarching category of whiteness in the barber’s tale does more to mystify the historical conditions of Kenyan oppression than it does to overturn them.

21 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, p. 52.

22 Interestingly, the members of the indigenous landowning class (Jacobo, Juliana and Lucia) all have Latinate names. This would align them structurally with the Italian prisoners, inasmuch as both groupings are situated between the English colonizer and the African peasantry.

23 See Exodus 8: 20-31 and 9: 8-12.

24 Abdulrazak Gurnah, “Transformative Strategies in the Fiction of Ngugi wa Thiong’o” in Abdulrazak Gurnah, ed, Essays on African Writing, Oxford: Heinemann, 1993, p. 144.

25 This episode arguably replays the original psycho-sexual crisis that the exploitative and invasive colonial relation imposes upon the colonized. Self-evidently, however, the novel revisits this crisis via an anachronous temporality.

26 ibid.

27 Facing Mount Kenya, p. 21.

28 For instance, David Bunn has demonstrated that there is an enabling relationship between colonial discourse and the gendering of the landscape in two novels by Henry Rider Haggard. See David Bunn, “Embodying Africa: Women and Romance in Colonial Fiction”, English in Africa,15 (1988), 1-28. Ngugi acknowledges that Rider Haggard was one of his literary precursors in Carol Sicherman, Ngugi wa Thiong’o: The Making of a Rebel, London: Hans Zell, 1990, p. 21.

29 Brendon Nicholls, “The Landscape of Insurgency: Mau Mau, Gender and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Fiction” in Glenn Hooper, ed, Landscape and Empire, 1770-2000, Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Company,2005, p. 190.

30 For a similar reading, see Clifford Robson, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, New York: St. Martin’s, 1979, p. 28.

31 David Cook and Michael Okenimpke, Ngugi wa Thiong’o: An Exploration of His Writings, London: Heinemann, 1983, p. 56.

32 See Sicherman, The Making of a Rebel, p.4.

33 For an excellent discussion of this ambivalence, see David Maughan-Brown, Land Freedom and Fiction: History and Ideology in Kenya, London: Zed Books, 1985.

34 See the answers to the headmaster’s questions, p. 82.

35 See Sicherman, The Making of a Rebel, p. 395.

36 See the scale map in Sicherman, The Making of a Rebel, unpaginated.

37 Sicherman, The Making of a Rebel, p. 233.

38 ibid.

39 In terms of Ian Glenn’s argument, the crucifix would index the intellectual elite’s resolution of its class-privilege in acts of symbolic self-sacrifice that aim to redeem the community.

40 In Weep Not, Child, Christianity and education lack potency as discourses of resistance. The execution of Isaka, the revivalist, is pathetic because he does not resist the soldiers at all (p. 101). Christianity is a form of subjection, since its emphasis on ascetic quietism is antithetical to the redistributive impulses of collective political resistance. Religious notions of an afterlife and Njoroge’s private investments in gaining the qualifications for political leadership both involve a deferral of rewards that equates with political apathy. Ngugi’s own ideological position at the time of writing provides an interesting comparison. Not only was he highly educated by Kenyan standards, but he had been a devout Christian for at least three years. See Sicherman, The Making of a Rebel, pp. 4-6 and David Maughan Brown,“Matigari and the Rehabilitation of Religion”, Research in African Literatures, 22, 4 (1990), p. 173. The discursive ambivalences in Weep Not, Child suggest that Ngugi was already beginning to question the political and social efficacy of Christianity and education. By 1970, he felt able to claim: “I am not a man of the Church. I am not even a Christian.” See “Church, Culture and Politics”, Homecoming, p. 31.

41 See, for example, the first paragraph of the novel.

42 The Newly Born Woman, p. 66.

43 Jennifer Evans, “Women and Resistance in Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross”, (Women in) African Literature Today, 15 (1987), 131.

44 Ngugi wa Thiong’o: An Exploration of His Writings, p. 67.

45 Herta Meyer, Justice for the Oppressed: The Political Dimension in the Language-use of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1991, p. 30.

The Topography of “Woman” in Ngugi’s Weep Not,Child

Abstract