"Flowers in All Their Colours": Natios and Communities in Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood

How has neocolonial been defined in fiction? Representations vary from depictions of barren wastelands run by corrupt rulers in Ousmane Sembene's Xala (1974) to isolated outposts ruled by megalomaniacal army generals in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Ngugi wa Thiong'o's 1977 novel Petals of Blood, (1) however, takes slightly different tack: it depicts postcolonial African as complex and multifaceted entity, and it represents this in three ways. First, Petals of Blood reveals that there are many ways of viewing postcolonial African nation: examining official national structure created artificially by colonialism (a structure which Ngugi clearly derides), or looking various locally created harmonious and not-so-harmonious communities within official nation. Second, novel presents several different locally created communities, which I will term, following Timothy Brennan, natios. It also espouses an ideal natio based on communal harmony and socialist economics, in which wealth is based on amount of labor put in, and peasants, main labor force, control means of production. Ngugi implies, in course of narrative, that this ideal natio can only be created through armed struggle, which would bring an end to existing official and replace it with his ideal one. This ideal natio would eventually be led by farmers, workers, and intellectuals, and would result in more or less classless society. Third, although novel idealizes natio just described, it also presents its argument through series of contrasts in which official and various natios are played off of each other, suggesting that Ngugi ultimately endorses view of that is multiple and diverse, with structures of complicity and resistance contained within it. In novel, then, there are four kinds of contrasts that Ngugi sets up for us: contrast between several ideal natios and artificial nation; contrast between political betrayal and social justice; contrast between an ironic narration and murder-mystery narrative structure; and contrast between many different commentaries and narrators of action who frequently contradict each other. Since all of these contrasts suggest that there are many different ways of conceiving ideal natio, most of focus of this paper will be on describing and analyzing these contrasts. Before I analyze these three aspects of novel I would like to point out that I use word nation to refer to artificially created neocolonial Kenya that Ngugi critiques, and word natio to describe local communities, some of which he valorizes. I take words natio and from critics Timothy Brennan and Wole Ogundele, respectively. Brennan defines natio as a local community, domicile, family, condition of belonging. (2) Ogundele defines community as at once political and cultural, an entity that problematizes and questions political rationale of nation-state. To Ogundele it is the 'home base' of all major African writers ... 'ground' on which they stand to resist and for resisting cultural and political hegemonies of colonialism as well as neocolonialism. (3) Besides these two definitions, my notions of and natio also involve importance of language in forming concept of community. Indeed, in his other novels and essays Ngugi often refers to language as unifier for or several nations. In his collection of essays Moving Centre, for example, he points out that Kiswahili unites East Africa linguistically and that it is one of fastest-growIng languages in world. He argues that it is national language of Tanzania, an all-Kenya national language, and has similar position in Uganda. It functions as language of unity and is part of East African history. (4) As Ogundele has shown, relationship between and natio in fiction has ranged from assimilation phase during which state absorbs history of particular community, through metonymy In which description of culture of community stands for culture of state, to adversarial relations in which identities of various communities are asserted through local and national languages (MC 116). …

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