Petals of Blood Read Free Page A

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 greathistory 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