Neo-colonialism: with reference to Petals of Blood

 Neo-colonialism: with reference to Petals of Blood:-

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o :-

In 1977, Prof. Ngugi’s life and career took a dramatic turn. Petals of blood painted a harsh and unflinching picture of life in neo-colonial Kenya. That same year Prof. Ngugi’s controversial play, Ngaahika Ndeenda , written with Ngugi wa Mirii, was performed at the Kamirithu Educational and Cultural Centre, Limuru, in an open-air theatre. Sharply critical of the inequalities and injustices of Kenyan society, Prof. Ngugi was arrested and imprisoned without charge at Kamiti Maxium Security Prison. An account of those experiences can be found in his memoir, Detained: a writer’s prison diary. After Amnesty International had named him as a Prisoner of Conscience an international campaign secured his release a year later in December 1978. He resumed his writings and his activities in the theatre and in so doing, continued to be a thorn in the side of the Moi dictatorship. While in Britain for the launch and promotion of Devil on the cross, he learned about the Moi regime’s plot to eliminate him on his return. This forced him into exile, firstly in Britain  and then in the USA . He remained in exile for the duration of the Moi dictatorship. When he and his wife, Njeeri returned to Kenya in 2004 after twenty-two years in exile, they were attacked by four hired gunmen and narrowly escaped with their lives.

Petals of Blood:-

The allegorical nature of Petals of Blood is another factor that can be seen as Ngugi’s effort to recreate revolutionary consciousness. As an allegory, Petals of Blood is aimed at recreating a representation of a neo-colonial Kenyan state through characters, places, and events that mirror the reality of the actual post-independence Kenyan state.

Neo-colonialism: with reference to Petals of Blood :-

As we already know that due to Colonialism colonize came and that's how the problem started and the government started establishing and started ruling they were struggling because of "Elite Africans" we can also see Illusion of power that means who were in power position they were ruling upon poor people or we can also say that African people.

Petals of Blood is situated in the revolutionary nationalism voicing proletariat class perspective. It is very straight in its ideological persuasions, as Ngugi has left behind all social ambivalences and equivocations by this time. Mau-Mau here becomes a full-fledged national liberation movement, and is free from all those ambivalences that we find in the earlier trilogy.

The titanic battle in Petals of Blood is not only for the homecoming of the wretched of Kenya alone or of Africa but of the whole world. Though nativism in the shape of Gikuyu patriotic songs and Swahili expressions is quite audible in Petals of Blood, the novel takes on a pan-nationalist and universalist perspective. Ngugi's nationalist commitment does not restrict or limit his artistic perspective. As a truly socialist artist, he accepts all that is progressive and valuable, from great artists of other countries.

The novel displays Ngugi's fierce commitment to the cause of peasants and workers or 'the wretched of the earth' who through their resistance efforts, get transformed from the objects of pity into the subjects of history. Ngugi in order to become the voice of the powerless and the proletariat consciously chose to "unclass" himself and lingered to achieve a "de-intellectualized" stance. But his class-located interest and his fierce political commitment makes his novel more pronounced, theatrical and partisan in nature.

The story opens like a detective novel with its three main characters- Munira, Abdullah and Karega-in jail, as suspects, being interrogated in the murder of three African directors-Chui, Kimeria and Mzigo, of the Theng'eta Brewery Ltd. The fourth suspect Wanja is convalescing in a hospital from burn injuries. Munira is the recording consciousness of the novel. Therefore, the structure of the novel is Munira's recollections as he sits in his cell, writing copious notes in order to clarify, to explain, to ascertain and to come to terms with himself as well as to satisfy the queries of the probing Chief Inspector Godfrey who shares half identity with Munira.This way inspector Godfrey's interrogation of Munira becomes Munira's self-introspection and the whole novel becomes a direct interior monologue where Munira's self is inextricably woven with the external socio-political reality of Kenya. Petals of Blood emerges from Munira's prison diary almost narrating sequentially twelve years of history, from old Ilmorog to New Ilomorog since Uhuru. Though most of Munira's reminiscences are in sequential order, yet they overflow into the various historical periods, for example the time of 1895, when colonialism made its sly entry into Kenya etc. The novel is interwoven through two time frameworks-one in the present in which Munira writes his notes on what happened where, when and why, during his twelve day interrogation in the jail and the other is the historic time which is that of twelve years since Uhuru, which has brought Munira and others and Kenya and Africa to such a pass. The imprisonment of the central characters throughout the narrative symbolically suggests the manacled spirits and liminality of the people in Africa.