Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

First published: 1977

Type of work: Social and political criticism

Time of work: Modern Kenya in the 1970’s, about twelve years after independence.

Locale: The village of Ilmorog, Kenya

Principal Characters:

• Munira, the protagonist, the headmaster of the school in Ilmorog, a deeply religious individual
• Abdulla, the owner of a local shop and bar
• Karega, an extra teacher recruited by Munira
• Wanja, a young woman with a checkered past who works in Abdulla’s shop
• Inspector Godfrey, the investigator of the murder of which Munira and his two friends are accused
• Chui, a former classmate of Munira, one of the brewery directors killed in the fire which Godfrey is investigating

The Novel

Petals of Blood is a novel of social and political criticism cast in the form of a crime story. Three directors of the local brewery in Ilmorog have died as a result of a fire. Arson is suspected, and the novel opens with the arrest of the four principal characters: Munira, the protagonist, headmaster of the school in Ilmorog; Karega, a teacher at the school; Abdulla, the owner of a local shop and bar; and Wanja, a young woman who works in Abdulla’s shop and who later becomes a prostitute.

The story then unfolds through a series of time shifts, moving from the present to the past. It was twelve years before the time of the fatal fire that Munira first made his way to the village of Ilmorog. He had come because he wanted to establish a school that would provide the village children with a good Christian education. At that time, Ilmorog was a dusty, sleepy, wasteland of a village, and since others had come before him and left, everyone in Ilmorog believed that Munira too “would go away with the wind.” Munira, however, is made of sterner stuff. He stays and enlists the support of others, including Abdulla, Karega, and the very attractive Wanja; a considerable part of the novel is devoted to revealing the manner in which the lives of these four people become entangled.

Inspector Godfrey, a strong believer in the police force as “the maker of modern Kenya,” is in charge of investigating the death of the three directors. Godfrey is a relentless interrogator of Munira and his friends, and through his investigation the reader learns about the four principal characters and their involvement with one another.

Ngugi also reveals the physical and spiritual changes that have transformed the village of Ilmorog from a “small cluster of mud huts” to a bustling new town “of stone, iron, concrete and glass and neon lights.” This transformation has brought with it much of the materialistic baggage associated with Western progress, and with this “progress” has also come corruption and the abuse of power. A multinational corporation owns the brewery, while the villagers are still poor; the wealth from the new Ilmorog is enjoyed by greedy investors from faraway Nairobi. Small shopkeepers such as Abdulla have been wiped out, and the beautiful Wanja has become a brothel owner to service the decadent desires of the new rich. The venerable hero of the Mau-Mau resistance is a ruined cripple in the free Kenya for which he had fought so hard, while the fat directors of the brewery enjoy a life of pleasure in exclusive country clubs.

The interrogation and the responses by the four principal characters are not presented in straightforward fashion; rather, information is provided in fragments and the reader is expected to follow the clues carefully. From the present, Ngugi moves to the past of the principal characters, and even to the past of their ancestors.

The four characters move back and forth from Ilmorog. When Munira first comes to Ilmorog, Abdulla is already there as a shopkeeper and bar owner. Wanja joins them, but her desire to marry Munira is doomed from the beginning, because Munira is still recovering from the trauma of his own failed marriage. Then comes Karega; there is a bond between him and Munira, because both of them were expelled from the high school which they attended in the village of Siriana. Ngugi uses this opportunity to describe the high school experiences which they shared; these reminiscences also sketch their schoolmate Chui, another important character, one of the three directors killed in the fire. In their youth, Chui was very much a rebel, but as the story proceeds the reader learns how Chui became a member of the establishment.

From time to time the four characters break off to go out on their own; Wanja and Karega return to their home region in the highlands, while Munira goes off to help the oppressed Kikuyu tribe. All four gather again, and involve themselves in traditional ceremonies and dances—a time of great joy in which they feel a strong identification with the roots of their culture.

Munira, a deeply religious man, is both puzzled and angered by Wanja’s illicit affairs; he is particularly disturbed by her secret meetings with Karega. As long as she lives, Munira believes, “Karega will never escape from her embrace of evil.” Feeling compelled to save Karega, almost looking upon it as a messianic duty, Munira sets fire to Wanja’s home, which to him is a “whorehouse.” As the fire consumes the house, the flames “forming petals of blood,” Munira is convinced that he is one with God and that he has obeyed the higher Law although he has broken man’s law. Having learned the facts of the case, if not their deeper meaning, Godfrey charges Munira “with burning Wanja’s house and causing the deaths of three men.”

The Characters

Munira, the protagonist, carries the main thread of the narrative. Born to a wealthy family, his father a prominent landlord and his brother “a big man in an oil company,” Munira is obsessed with doing good. It is this motivation that brings him to the village of Ilmorog to start a school. He is described by Inspector Godfrey as “the odd man, the black sheep of an otherwise white family.” Munira is a complex character, and in his creation Ngugi has attempted to introduce a man of epic proportions, dramatizing many of the contradictions of Africa itself. He is a genuinely religious man, but his fervor spills over into fanaticism, leading to tragedy.

The other characters are not so fully developed. Abdulla, the shopkeeper and bar owner, is a former Mau-Mau resistance fighter, a forgotten hero. It appears that Ngugi sought to evoke a sense of pathos in the distance between Abdulla’s heroic past and his drab present, but the characterization is too sketchy, and it is impossible to take Abdulla seriously.

Karega is a stubborn young man. Munira takes to him right away and to some extent educates and awakens Karega’s potential for action. When Munira learns that his sister Mukami (now dead) and Karega were lovers, he is alienated from Karega, but he still wants to save him from Wanja.

Wanja is introduced as she lies in a state of delirium in the hospital, as a result of the fire which burned down her house. Her background is gradually presented; she is described as a very beautiful young woman, her head crowned “with a mass of shiny black hair.” She disappears from Ilmorog and later returns in a white Peugeot loaded with merchandise, the envy of the village; at first, the source of her newfound affluence is not known. In depicting her transition from rural innocence to urban decadence, Ngugi suggests the impact of industrialization on a rural community.

Inspector Godfrey is something of a caricature. A self-made man, he is a firm believer in the “sanctity of private property.” He sees himself as the protector of the new Kenya, and he is unable to understand the radicalism of men such as Karega and Munira. Men such as Karega, he believes, ought to be shipped out of Kenya. While he is disturbed that a man such as Munira, the son of a wealthy family, should espouse radical social views, he acknowledges the need for the high moral standards that Munira demands—a vital need in a would-be capitalist democracy. He is all the more shocked, then, when he learns that Munira has committed murder in the “name of moral purity.”

Chui, Munira’s former classmate, was in their high school days regarded as the man most likely to succeed. In the figure of Chui, Ngugi embodies the British traditions of pre-independence Kenya. In school, Chui was the quintessential athlete, always neatly dressed, quoting Shakespeare. When the seeds of unrest stirred Kenya, however, Chui was one of the first to join Munira and lead a strike; both were expelled. In independent Kenya, Munira continued to be critical of the establishment, but Chui became increasingly supportive of the status quo, enjoying the good life in the new Ilmorog Golf Club, feeling “his huge stomach with one hand, glass of champagne in the other.”

Critical Context

Petals of Blood, Ngugi’s fifth novel, resulted in his arrest by the Kenyan government. His imprisonment without trial became an international cause celebre; among those protesting his incarceration were C. P. Snow, Harold Pinter, and James Baldwin. Even before the appearance of Petals of Blood, however, Ngugi had established himself as a major figure among contemporary African writers; his novel A Grain of Wheat (1967) was particularly well received. While all of his fiction is concerned with social issues, Petals of Blood is his most explicitly political novel, didactic in its analysis of a revolution betrayed.

Like most of Ngugi’s works (in addition to novels, he has published short stories, plays, and essays), Petals of Blood was written in English. He has also, however, written a novel and a play in Kikuyu, the language of his native region in Kenya.

Bibliography

Cima, Richard. Review in Library Journal. CIII (October 15, 1978), p. 2135.

Ikiddeh, Ime. “James Ngugi as Novelist,” in African Literature Today. No. 2 (1969), pp. 3-10.

Moore, Gerald. Twelve African Writers, 1980.

Ms. Review. VIII (July, 1979), p. 34.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. LXXVIII (February 19, 1978), p. 3.

Robson, Clifford B. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1979.

Updike, John. Review in The New Yorker. LV (July 2, 1979), p. 89.