Ngũgĩ's Fictional and Non-Fictional Representations of the Mau Mau War: An Insight from a New Historicist Perspective

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child, a novel, and Dreams in a Time of War, a childhood memoir, especially, regarding how the Mau Mau War became a dissidence strategy against the containment and subjugation of colonisers. This qualitative study espouses Stephen Greenblatt's ‘Invisible Bullets’ as a theoretical treatise that informs the rereading of the memoir and determines its relationship to the fictional depiction of the uprising in the novel. It establishes that both narratives share historicity, which prompted the Mau Mau War and subsequent production of containment and subversion. Hence, the article argues that the two works — text and co-text — are more collaborative than antagonistic in representing the Mau Mau struggle for liberation. Through close reading, the two narratives illustrate how the colonial authorities deployed diverse means such as land appropriation, legal injustice, deadly working conditions for labourers, eradication of traditions, imprisonment, expulsion from schools, discrimination in transport and settlement schemes, retarding local educational initiatives, and media control to consolidate containment. As such, the study is significant in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s scholarship as it establishes the author’s subversive perspective behind writing the childhood memoir to reflect the well-established autobiographic novel’s incidents of the Mau Mau War.