Ngugi wa Thiang’o and National-Consciousness: Re-Reading the Early and the Later Novels from a Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

The discourse of national-consciousness in African literature is so pertinent that early and contemporary African writers have “embraced” it with intense, artistic interest and literary enthusiasm. Consequently, in poetry, drama and the novel, critics and scholars have explored varying “faces” of national-consciousness, which on the one hand have opened the readership eye to its ever existence in the texts and equally have enriched the literature and the criticisms of the continent on the other. This paper, as innumerable others explore this discourse in the early and the later novels of Ngugi wa Thiang’o, one of such prolific African writers. These are Weep Not Child (1964), The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977), Devil on the Cross (1980) and Matigari (1987). The aims are two-folds. First, to unveil the great pertinence Ngugi accords to national-consciousness in his novels. Second, using the postcolonial standpoints of Franz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Kwame Nkurumah for instance, the paper corroborates that while in the early novels Ngugi accentuates cultural and political consciousness, in the same vein, he demonstrates how these two forms of national-consciousness have metamorphosed into revolutionary consciousness in the later.