Assignment

Assignment writing: Paper 206: The African Literature 

This blog is Assignment writing onPaper 206: The African Literature assigned by Professor, Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

• Name: Nidhi Dave
• Roll no: 16
• Enrollment no: 4069206420210005
• Email ID: davenidhi05@gmail.com
• Batch: 2021- 23( MA Semester 4)
• Submitted to: Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

🌟Fanonism and Constructive Violence in Petals of Blood:

✒️Introduction:

Constructive violence is used to resist injustice and repressive social order. Ngugi' Wa Thiong'o's novel is a stinging indictment of Kenyan governing elites who exploit workers and peasants, as well as a vital and unwavering denunciation of neocolonialist institutions such as Christianity, politics, schools, commerce, banks, landowners, and even motorways. Petals of Blood also shows how important collective action is in empowering ordinary people to fight oppression. Ngugi declared that using violence to oppose this repressive social system is justifiable, echoing Franz Fanon's beliefs. Violence, according to Fanonism, is a productive force. Other than violence, colonized countries have no other option for decolonization. Kenya has a long history of struggle and violence, culminating in the 1963 'Uhuru' (independence).

✒️About author:

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, original name James Thiong’o Ngugi, (born January 5, 1938, Limuru, Kenya), Kenyan writer who was considered East Africa’s leading novelist. His popular Weep Not, Child (1964) was the first major novel in English by an East African. As he became sensitized to the effects of colonialism in Africa, Ngugi adopted his traditional name and wrote in the Bantu language of Kenya’s Kikuyu people.

Ngugi received bachelor’s degrees from Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, in 1963 and from Leeds University, Yorkshire, England, in 1964. After doing graduate work at Leeds, he served as a lecturer in English at University College, Nairobi, Kenya, and as a visiting professor of English at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, U.S. From 1972 to 1977 he was senior lecturer and chairman of the department of literature at the University of Nairobi.

The prizewinning Weep Not, Child is the story of a Kikuyu family drawn into the struggle for Kenyan independence during the state of emergency and the Mau Mau rebellion. A Grain of Wheat (1967), generally held to be artistically more mature, focuses on the many social, moral, and racial issues of the struggle for independence and its aftermath. A third novel, The River Between (1965), which was actually written before the others, tells of lovers kept apart by the conflict between Christianity and traditional ways and beliefs and suggests that efforts to reunite a culturally divided community by means of Western education are doomed to failure. Petals of Blood (1977) deals with social and economic problems in East Africa after independence, particularly the continued exploitation of peasants and workers by foreign business interests and a greedy indigenous bourgeoisie.

Ngugi later published the memoirs Dreams in a Time of War (2010), about his childhood; In the House of the Interpreter (2012), which was largely set in the 1950s, during the Mau Mau rebellion against British control in Kenya; and Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening (2016), a chronicle of his years at Makerere University.

✒️Petals of blood:

Petals of Blood is a novel written by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and first published in 1977. Set in Kenya just after independence, the story follows four characters – Munira, Abdulla, Wanja, and Karega – whose lives are intertwined due to the Mau Mau rebellion. In order to escape city life, each retreats to the small, pastoral village of Ilmorog. As the novel progresses, the characters deal with the repercussions of the Mau Mau rebellion as well as with a new, rapidly westernizing Kenya.The novel largely deals with the scepticism of change after Kenya's independence from colonial rule, questioning to what extent free Kenya merely emulates, and subsequently perpetuates, the oppression found during its time as a colony. Other themes include the challenges of capitalism, politics, and the effects of westernization. Education, schools, and the Mau Mau rebellion are also used to unite the characters, who share a common history with one another. 

✒️Fanonism:

Fanon provides a view of violence as a constructive force in Wretched of the Earth. "National liberation, national renaissance, restoration of people's nationhood, commonwealth: whatever the headings or new formulas used, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon," he says, adding that "the naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives that emanate from it." (Fanon, p. 27-28, 1985). "The rise of violence among the colonized people will be proportional to the violence exercised by the threatened colonial regime" (p. 69), but native violence brings the people together. It liberates the locals from his despondency and passivity, as well as his inferiority complex. For an individual, it acts as a "cleaning force."

Ngugi and Constructive Violence:

It is not savagery to use violence to change an individual's unjust social structure; it purifies man. It is unlawful and dehumanizing to use violence to uphold and maintain an unfair repressive social order." -In a 1963 examination of Majdalany's state of emergency, Ngugi declares. It presents Ngugi's perspective on violence as a constructive force, and his attitude is quite positive, similar to Fanon's. "Imperialism, the power of dead capital, in its neo colonial garb, will not be able to eliminate the fighting culture of the African peasantry and working class for the simple fact that this culture is a product and a reflection of real life conflicts going on in Africa today," he says. (see p. xvii)

Kenyan History of Violence:

For millennia, the coast of Kenya has been open to outside influences; intruders' treasure hunting began in the early eleventh century, and conflict with the natives was the seed of more violence. During the next four centuries, Indonesians, Arabs, Portuguese, and Omani Arabs arrived to trade and halt. After the sixteenth century, the first Europeans arrived in East Africa as explorers and traders. Settlers did not begin to go inland Kenya until the late 1800s. Europeans were stealing land from the indigenous Bantu peoples, the Kikuyu, in Nairobi, Tigoni, and Limuru. The United States' war for land began, and throughout the colonial period, British settlers and bureaucrats established a system of brutality and tyranny.

Waiyaki Wa Hinga and others led the early campaign for independence in the late 1800s. The genuine struggle for freedom began in the 1950s, when Dedan, Kmathi, L'Ouverture, Ole Masai, Chaka, Mathenge, Turner, and other brilliant leaders launched the Mau Mau campaign. It was an armed conflict between the Gikuyu peasantry and British colonial soldiers (Maughan, 1985, p.20). Mau Mau had a big influence on Ngugi. It was a war that captivated the public imagination and forever altered the fate of Kenya and many other British-ruled countries. For the first time, peasants, the poor of the earth, were fighting in a highly developed country with a long military history (p, xi).

Constructive Violence in Petals of Blood:

In Ngugi's 1977 novel Petals of Blood, he is looking for a political plan to abolish "e Whole ing," or global monopoly capitalism, of which Africa is a fundamental part. (Dorn,1999). The Kenya Ngugi talks about in this novel, the Kenya that no one can take away from him, is the 'Kenya of the working class of all nationalities and their heroic struggle against control by nature and other humans throughout the centuries.'

Nobody cared about the fate of the three small preys, the Krupps, Rockfellers, and Delameres, or if Wanja, Karega, Munira, or Abdullah was the one who killed them by the time Petals of Blood finishes. Wanja, an extraordinary struggling female character who, like Kenya, must battle to stay alive and for whom destruction is never far away, is an extraordinary struggling female character. She enables herself to become cruel like the surroundings after being humiliated by society and the world's hatred. "You eat someone or you are eaten," she explained the truth of the neocolonial position. You either sit on someone or they sit on you." She questioned, has Kimeria sinned less than her, why is she the only sufferer. She stroked his head with the punga before the person. According to Fanon this is individual freedom and it will calm and clean her burning heart.

Abdullah, the shy Mau Mau fighter, was completely betrayed by the country for which he fought. The newly independent Kenya was unable to rehabilitate the one-legged fighter who had given up his family and land for the sake of the country. The unsung hero had the opportunity to redeem himself, but Kimeria, the same guy who betrayed his friend during Mau Mau, was involved with the spoils of his business, his earnings. He wanted to revenge the death of his comrade, Ndinguri, and free Wanja from his claws by killing Kimeria. By doing this act of violence, he reserved his manhood.

Karega, the traveling guy, commits himself to worker solidarity and assists the labour union. He disagreed with Wanja's ideology and continued his search for lost innocence, optimism, and faith. He believed that being a perpetrator of violence would not prevent violence. He was certain there had to be another way to the 'new world.'

Munira, the man of God,was likewise haunted by the need to escape the circumstance; as a passive "observer of life," he desired a connection that would drive him to act. To show the behavior to himself, he even took personal revenge by dismissing Karega. Finally, he was moved by a supernatural intuition to construct a secular new universe.' He wished to save Karega from Wanja's terrible hug. He made the decision to set fire to the 'Sunshine Lodge,' a prostitution den. Kimeria, Chui, and Mzigo, the neocolonial agents, frequented the area. This deed was a reenactment of his childhood, in which he threw the sin, the corruption, into the fire.

Conclusion:

Ngugi eventually exposes some optimism through constructive violence in this novel. In the violent act of purifying, all of the protagonists actively participate or lend silent support. Following the arson, Wanja's pregnancy, Joseph's school rebellion, and Karega's fate in fresh strikes and protests in Ilmorog, a future generation will be born with the spirit of purification and courage inherited from parents who fought for freedom and social revolution. Constructive violence, such as arson, will burn down the corrupted, rotting society, bringing hope and promise to the future.Kenya is reborn as a new country.

Work cited:

Amin, Tasnim. “Fanonism and Constructive Violence in Petals of Blood.” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH, vol. 6, no. 4, Apr. 2017. 

“Fanonism” (1998) Key Concept in Post-Colonial Studies, Routledge.

Thiong'o, N.W. (2005) Petals of Blood. Penguin Books: New York.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Ngugi wa Thiong’o". Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 Jan. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ngugi a-Thiongo. 

Thank you....