Ngugi’s own encouragement of readers to read it this way (Gikandi 2000, 87). Focusing on the novel’s contexts and its manifest propinquity to the life of the author is convenient but inadequate because it ignores the ways in which genre ideology is reworked in the text, especially Ngugi’s negation of the individualistic, humanist, and progressively positivist norms10 that overdetermine the narrative development of the classical Bildungsroman. I am yet to come across a reading of this novel that takes seriously the ruling ideologies of this genre – namely “the effort to reconcile the subjective condition of the human being with the objective social world” (Slaughter 2007, 111).11 Even the most invaluable critiques of Ngugi’s first two novels pay little attention to Ngugi’s elaborate utilization, reorganization, and contestation of the narrative architecture and ideologies of the genre in both Weep Not, Child and its precursor, The River Between. In one of the most insightful readings of the relationship between Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s work and what he calls “a colonial and exclusionary school culture,” Apollo Amoko (2010, 1) revises the critical consensus around Ngugi’s works that focuses on his literary nationalism, arguing that the failure by Ngugi and his colleagues to take seriously the “institutional locus” of the famous Nairobi Revolution was inevitably what led to its ambiguous successes and legacies. Amoko states: “[T]he institutional context in question is the postcolonial university, a discursive formation whose links to the metropolitan university are more fundamental and enduring than may have been apparent to them and their future admirers … Ngugi’s project to canonize an African national culture from the privileged locus of the postcolonial university can equally be said to have been driven by an imitative fallacy” (Amoko 2010, 5). Amoko likens Ngugi’s attempts to Africanize the curriculum of African literature at the University of Nairobi to Matthew Arnold and E. R. Leavis’ attempts to integrate English culture into the metropolitan university in England which he calls “imitative fallacy” (5).12 In doing so, Amoko sees The River Between and Weep Not, Child as exemplars of Ngugi’s ability to appropriate this genre of the novel into a weapon of resistance. The two novels, he further argues, enabled Ngugi to assert the demands for the restoration of African rights and dignity and to problematize Gikuyu engagement with the liberal ideas of human rights. While Amoko recognizes Ngugi’s ability to use the genre of Bildungsroman as a mode of questioning to interrogate the entire colonial enterprise and its correlative, decolonization, it is the genre’s correspondence to “the norms and narrative assumptions that underwrite the vision of free and full human personality development” (Slaughter 2007, 40), coupled with its ideological underpinnings as a “coefficient of optimism” (Culler 1974, 28) that receives the least attention in his study. In a somewhat different reading, Gikandi in Ngugi wa Thiong’o, probably one of the best books on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s work to date, locates the text within the contradictory desires and anxieties generated by British colonialism in central Kenya. Gikandi is interested in the social, political, and cultural institutions that were formative to Ngugi’s career as writer: cultural nationalism in central Kenya as it manifested itself in the form of agitation for cultural autonomy; the missionary zeal for conversion of Africans whose activities and ideologies came to constitute a gateway to modernity and civilization; and colonial education provided by missionaries which was intimately conjoined to conversion and colonial civilization (Gikandi 2000, 39).
Published in 1964, Weep Not, Child was the first novel in English to be published by an East African and was written at the cusp of the negotiation for Kenya’s independence. The novel anticipates a series of problems and dilemmas that would come to define the Kenyan, indeed the African, social, political, and cultural imaginary (especially in countries where independence was won through a vicious and bloody struggle) in subsequent decades: How do we confront the immediate past in which, again to use Gikandi’s words, “relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, social classes, families, and institutions, were conducted through modes of unprecedented violence” (2000, 71)? How could an arbitrarily forged state translate into viable (imagined) national community within the context of unfinished decolonization defined by a stubborn refusal to confront the past and instantiate mechanisms for addressing the broader transitional justice? More importantly, how were European powers, so deeply imbricated in massive violations of human rights at home and abroad, to be coopted in the protection of the very same rights in which the crime of colonialism was deeply enmeshed? How could a people considered subhuman be accorded the dignity deserving of human beings? Weep Not, Child, in essence, reads like the classic testimonio – a true witness of the violence that both underwrites and sustains the colonial social order. As Gikandi so limpidly observes, the colonial experience was so harrowing that “the Gikuyu people had come to conceive of the state of emergency as an apocalyptic event (hiingo ya thiina) … because of the unprecedented violence of the 1950s” (Gikandi 2000, 72).13
The violence that dominates the entire narrative of Weep Not, Child makes it by any measure an exemplar of a narrative of spectacularity that delicately negotiates between personal testimony (autobiography) and fictional recreation. If in the recent past spectacular first‐person narratives have come to dominate and to define the discourse of human rights in literary studies, it is worth reminding ourselves that the African anticolonial Bildungsroman stakes its claim as a human rights novel by resisting and rewriting the ossified formulaic norms, readings, and interpretations of the genre. Within the context of South Africa, Njabulo Ndebele defines spectacularity as the “representation of … the visible symbols of the overwhelmingly oppressive … social formation” which has, over the years, resulted in a brazen, exhibitionist, “highly dramatic, highly demonstrative form of literary representation … Everything there has been mind‐bogglingly spectacular” (1986, 143). For Ndebele, the spectacular operates within the realm of the obvious because “[w]hat matters is what is seen. Thinking is secondary to seeing. Subtlety is secondary to obviousness. What is finally left and what is deeply etched in our minds is the spectacular contest between the powerless and the powerful” (1986, 143). If we take seriously Simon Gikandi’s injunction that “Modern African literature was produced in the crucible of colonialism” (2004, 379), what this means is that we must pay particular attention to the way a work such as Weep Not, Child provides a space in which the relationship between ordinary people and the unprecedented violence of decolonization is represented in its raw form and afforded time, space, and meaning. At many levels, the experiences of the protagonist Njoroge and his entire family fit neatly into what Judith Butler in a different context calls “the injurability … the experiences of vulnerability and loss” (qtd. in Andrews and McGuire 2016, 3).
Weep Not, Child starts off as the story of Njoroge, a naïve child whose hopes and aspirations are anchored in colonial institutions, most notably the colonial school, but ultimately becomes a narrative of an unraveling society in the face of the challenges and opportunities presented by the colonial experience. The novel opens with the news that Njoroge is going to be attending school. His journey into the thicket of the colonial world is characterized by failures, confusions, disappointments, and ultimately an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide when his world collapses around him. Thus, his journey is atypical of a Bildung, defined neither by social expansion and psychological growth nor by the fulfillment of his desires. The opening paragraphs are characterized by a deceptive sense of optimism embodied in Njoroge’s enthusiasm for attending school. His optimism is immediately undermined by the deep sense of loss and material deprivation that defines his existence and thus ironically informs the decision to send him to the colonial school. Njoroge’s journey into the colonial world thus begins not as journey in search of self but one that is structured by the hopes and desires of his parents, and by extension those of the entire community, to overcome their immediate circumstances. His mother desires to compensate for the loss of her son during World War I, to rise above her restrictive social conditions, and to overcome her material conditions. On his part, Ngotho, his father, sees his son’s education as a means to restore his manhood and thereby his social standing through recovery of
