Ngugi Flashcards
Discuss Matigari in terms of Decolonizing the Mind, language
Ngugi’s philosophy as outlined in Decolonizing the Mind (basically, Africans should write in African languages) is first and arguably most dramatically manifested in this text. It is quite similar in subject/character/assorted plot detail to his traditional novel Petals of Blood, which is sort of a perfect manifestation of the modernist novel, but this is originally written in Gikuyu and only translated to English by Ngugi himself, and has a set of formal experiments to make it more familiar to Kenyan audiences (it’s got a sort of repetitive and cyclic structure to make it comparable/familiar to the oral story telling traditions, it has a lot of Biblical resonances so it is resonant with popular religious discourses, it’s written in straightforward language to make it easily read out loud to illiterate audiences, the characters are heavily allegorical/archetypical in a sort of mythological way, etc…).
Discuss the name Matigari
It’s an affectionate term for Mau Mau revolutionary fighters used by Kenyan sympathizers. When Ngugi wrote this the story spread so fast and so compellingly (thanks arguably to all of those formal innovations he worked out to make it accessible) the name “Matigari” was spoken about so widely that the government actually thought there was a revolutionary named Matigari. (This might not be terribly reputable but it’s definitely part of the general mythos that surrounds the text, and is all the more compelling because the text depicts a similar word-of-mouth transmission to what allegedly happened in real life)
What is the ideology behind Matigari?
Very Marxist
