61 pages • 2 hours read
Petals of Blood
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Themes
Neocolonial Control of Kenya
Having just won its independence from Great Britain, the citizens of Kenya in Petals of Blood continue to see the lingering effects of colonialism, particularly through the systems and structures that were put in place under European control. Religion, education, writing, banking, the police, and more are utilized by groups of people in power to maintain control over Kenya’s citizens, even after independence.
As Ilmorog grows from a farming village to a trade center, poverty only grows, and a rigid class system develops. To maintain control, the wealthy use neocolonial tools like landownership and the banking system. Land “ownership” is a brand-new concept to the villagers of Ilmorog, and they enter into agreements to buy land their families have occupied for generations without fully understanding what the agreements mean. These deals are predatory, creating terms the villagers cannot meet, and as time passes, they lose their deeds or have land bought out from under them due to capitalist greed. Munira explains:
They looked baffled: how could a bank sell their land? A bank was not a government: from whence then, its powers? […] But he could not answer their questions. He only talked about a piece of paper they had all signed and the red blotched title-deeds, another piece of paper, they had surrendered to the bank (327).
Although Europeans no longer have governmental control in Ilmorog, they maintain a grasp on land and finances through foreign investment, relying on newly introduced and misunderstood banking practices such as these. Additionally, Kenyan politicians like Ilmorog’s MP benefit from these exploitative systems and implement them, even though they harm their constituents.
Through other characters in the text, further methods of neocolonial control are explored. For example, Reverend Brown a religious authority, and as such, the delegation to the city seeks help from him. Instead, he cites scripture and sends them on their way. At the end of the text, he informs Munira that he “might have helped” with his situation despite his refusal years earlier (405), showing his hypocrisy and how he uses religion to justify his poor behavior. Similarly, his father is a respected and powerful member of the church yet uses this to exploit his workers and further his wealth. Inspector Godfrey actively investigates the murder of the three men in the fire and preaches his own dedication to the law, yet when faced with an even bigger crime—human trafficking—he elects to ignore these because of the “VIPs” that may be involved. Lastly, Munira and Karega both witness firsthand how the education system fails in its duty to educate the youth and instead attempts to Europeanize them and keep them oppressed. Each of these tools—religion, the law, and education—is heavily influenced by European ideals and designed to ensure colonial rule. While the country is no longer a colony, these systems are ingrained into the fabric of the society, and bad actors step into the power vacuum left behind by the colonizers. By maintaining these colonial practices, the oppression of African people continues even after the colonizer is gone.
Education as a Tool of Both Oppression and Liberation
Education is a key tool in newly liberated nations in their struggle to establish new national identities and exist on the world stage. Through education, they can develop their youth to expand their national identity, grow their culture, and ensure the improvement of the systems and structures. However, it is also a tool with which those in charge of education can disseminate harmful information and reinforce negative policies and procedures. In Petals of Blood, the education system embodies this duality. Characters like Munira and especially Karega are educated by the system and are therefore knowledgeable but they also recognize the system’s flaws. Under colonialism, the education system was designed to create perfect colonial subjects; in their neocolonial society, these motives are still present, and administrators frequently replicate this oppression.
At Siriana, the school where Munira, Karega, Chui, and Joseph study, there is a constant struggle between the government-funded administration and the students. While students seek to know more about their nation and culture, they are instead instructed in European history and languages. Likewise, headmasters Cambridge Fraudsham and Chui stress the importance of not living above one’s station in life. Instead of creating an education system that allows for upward mobility and success, the remnants of Britain’s system instead teaches them how to be “true Africans” (35). Chui’s surprise heel-turn into a dogmatic headmaster shows the results of such an education; though he initially resists, he ends up perpetuating this unequal and biased education system.
Munira explains why schools like Ilmorog’s are struggling for teachers and funding:
After internal self-government, the colour bar in schools admissions and the allocation of teachers was removed. The result was that while the former African schools remained equally poorly equipped, they now also lost the best of the African teachers (128).
In other words, under direct colonial rule, Black teachers could only teach in Black schools. However, when this rule was removed—a positive step—it had unintended consequences as the best teachers left these schools for ones that were better funded and more successful, furthering the gap between schools in cities and those in villages like Ilmorog. As such, the neocolonial education system reinforces class disparities by providing incentives for quality teachers to leave rural schools.
Similarly, Karega grapples with the idea of history and what is recorded—and thus, what can be taught to students. Although he learns of Ilmorog’s history orally from elders like Nyakinyua, he realizes that the only history that is recorded and studied is written through a colonial lens. When he asks the lawyer for knowledge about Kenya’s history, he receives books on history, political science, and literature, which touch on the subject but largely ignore the African people. Instead, these sources disseminate a Eurocentric version of events whereby Africans were “saved” and “civilized” through colonization. This, then, is the battle that faces postcolonial populations: to establish a culture of history, political science, and literature that can push back against the versions created by colonizers. In doing so, education will become a tool for building their youth in a way that benefits their country.
Critique of Capitalism
In his writing and activism, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o promotes a Fanonist Marxist perspective. Rooted in the tradition of Frantz Fanon, this political philosophy examines oppression through the intersecting lenses of race, class, and colonialism. As explored above, Petals of Blood is an explicitly anticolonial novel that situates the ongoing struggle in Kenya within its neocolonial context. For Ngũgĩ, capitalism is an integral aspect of colonialism, and many of the struggles the characters face occur at the hands of a corrupt capitalist society.
In capitalism, land, industries, goods, and labor are commodified and privatized, leading to competition for goods to obtain more wealth. In turn, greed and corruption can often run unchecked, as is seen in Ilmorog as it grows and develops. A small group of wealthy men—particularly Nderi wa Riera, Mzigo, Chui, Kimeria, and Reverend Brown—control the key components of the Ilmorog economy such as the education system, businesses, and religion, which are allowed to exploit people and push them further into poverty. One key example is the question of landownership, which is notably not part of precolonial, pre-capitalist village traditions. Though the villagers are lured by the idea of wealth, power and capital are concentrated in the banks, foreign investors, and upper-class Kenyans—in introducing the capitalist system of landownership, the land is commodified and then taken from the people. Without their land, they are forced into slums and pay rent to a landlord—as such, with the capitalist system in place, Ilmorog’s people not only lose their land but pay to have less than they had before. Another example is that under this new capitalist system, Wanja and Abdulla lose the license to brew Theng’eta. This is intentionally absurd as Wanja is using her ancestors’ recipe. Ngũgĩ introduces this absurd element to argue against the commodification and exploitation of Indigenous knowledge under capitalism.
As an answer to capitalism and its flaws, the novel presents Karega, who embodies the anticapitalist spirit. He is concerned with uniting the people in opposition to their oppressors by forming unions and organizing strikes—real-life tactics that have tangible results. In the end, he rebuffs Wanja’s strategy—to exploit others as she is exploited—though he understands her logic. Wanja feels she is in competition for survival with others and chooses to use them as a stepping stone for herself. Karega, by contrast, believes that solidarity—unifying all of capitalism’s “victims”—is the key to changing the system. Although Karega is often defeated, he sees progress at the end of the novel when Akinyi informs him that “all workers in Ilmorog and the unemployed will join us” (408). The promise of a continued strike at the Theng’eta Brewery, bolstered by solidarity from workers and the unemployed, reignites his hope. Additionally, the deaths of three capitalists in the fire—Mzigo, Chui, and Kimeria—marks hope for Ilmorog’s future.
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