“We are poor, You know that.”
“Yes, mother.”…
So you won’t be getting a mid‐day meal like other children.”
(WNC 3)
A few pages later, the narrative shifts from Njoroge’s enthusiasm to the desires of his mother:
Nyokabi was proud of having a son in school.… She tried to imagine what the Howlands woman must have felt to have a daughter and a son in school. She wanted to be the same. Or like Juliana … Her mother’s instinct that yearned for something broader than that which could be had from her social circumstances and conditions saw this. That is why she has impressed upon her husband Ngotho the need for one son to be learned. If Njoroge could now get all the white man’s learning, would Ngotho even work for the Howlands and especially as the wife was reputed to be a hard woman? Again, would they as a family continue living as Ahoi in another man’s land … A lot of motives had indeed combined into one desire, the desire to have a son who had acquired all the learning there was.
(WNC 16)
Throughout the narrative, Njoroge remains unaware of the burden that is being placed on his shoulders. This passage not only speaks to the confusions that have come to define his life as he goes through school but also his lack of awareness of the real purpose of colonial education. His entire experience is thus defined by the disjunctures between his naïve desires and the investments his family and community make on him and the reality of colonial disruption, domination, dispossession, and violence. Njoroge’s sense of optimism is narratively undermined at every stage throughout the novel: His first experience at school is characterized by misunderstanding, harassment, and shame. His encounters with his family’s nemesis, Jacobo and Howlands, and their progeny Mwihaki and Stephen respectively, only further serve to undermine his optimism. Ngugi’s point is clear: The necessary but elusive imperatives for postcolonial revolution cannot be nurtured within the ideologies and institutions of colonialism.
Indeed, school becomes a site for psychical and psychological violence rather than a site for the acquisition of knowledge and discovery of the self. The colonial school offers neither liberatory possibilities nor opportunities for self‐uplift. Instead, the process of education is a means of alienation: School is nothing other than a conveyer of ideologies – colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. Indeed as Njoroge progresses through school, we are told that he “came to place faith in the bible and with his vision of an educated life in the future was blended a belief in the righteousness of God. Equity and justice were there in the world if you did well and remained faithful to your God, the kingdom of heaven would be yours” (WNC 52). The entire education enterprise, buttressed by missionary work, is emblematic of the European colonialist impulse to possess and transform the African mind. Siriana, the high school he attends, is headed by the irredeemably racist school principal:
If he was quick to praise what was good, he was equally quick to suppress what he thought was evil … But he believed that the best, the really excellent could only come from white men. He brought up his boys to copy and cherish the white man’s civilization as the only hope of mankind and especially of the black races. He was automatically against all black politicians who in any way made people to be disconnected with the white man’s rule and civilizing missions.
(WNC 126)
Although education is couched in messianic faith as the spread of Christianity and western civilization, the school headmaster’s benign and slow violence mirrors that of Mr. Howlands and his lackey, Jacobo. Both are united by their belief in white supremacy. The headmaster’s zeal is the classical fusion of religion with civilization in an attempt to socialize Africans to a particular vision of English colonial culture, while designating that which was different as other than truth and in need of tutelage. But the school only effectuates what had already been part of the honorable tradition of western thought with regard to Africa. The humanity of the African had already been questioned by the German philosopher Georg Hegel: “the Africans, having made no history of their own had clearly made no development of their own. Therefore, they were not properly human, and could not be left to themselves, but must be led toward civilization by other peoples: that is, by the peoples of Europe, especially of Western Europe, and most particularly Britain and France” (in Davidson 1991, xvi). In his controversial book Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique, a world‐renowned Human Rights Activist/Lawyer Makau Mutua argues that the entire colonial enterprise amounted to a gross transgression of the fundamental human rights of Africans. According to Mutua, “the process of social transformation and identity reconstruction set in motion by the invasion of Africa by both Christianity and Islam, and particularly the former, dislocated and distorted the African worldview almost in its entirety. The colonial state buttressed that process through the delegitimation of African religions and beliefs, and the legitimation of, at the political and social levels, of the spiritual and religious cosmologies of the invaders” (117). For Mutua, as for Ngugi, the idea of civilization is highly racialized: It signals the psychologically violent ways in which the so‐called privileges of European culture function as a vehicle for the imposition of a naturalized white masculine version of civilization and the notion of human personality development and identity on the non‐European other while simultaneously undermining the cultural integrity of Africans.
How then can Njoroge’s immersion into the colonial world be anything other than a process of unbecoming; a process, as it were, of growing down rather than growing up? In their book Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming, João Biehl and Peter Locke argue that “the notion of becoming [is what] organizes our individual and collective efforts … the intricate problematics of how to live alongside, through, and despite the very profoundly constraining effects of social, structural and material forces” (2017, x). Njoroge seems to be completely unable to adjust or learn and thereby survive his traumatic experiences. At no stage in his life does Njoroge’s world seem to expand. On the contrary, it seems to shrink at every stage, culminating in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. This narrative formulation by Ngugi puts into question the entire notion of becoming that is definitive of the ideologies and narrative architecture of the positivist Bildungsroman. Unsurprisingly then, the optimism that organizes the early parts of the novel turns into tragedy at the end: Njoroge’s tragic end – his deep sense of failure and attempted suicide – speak to the broader ideological implications of his quest “to find a hospitable context in which to realize [his] aspirations” as a colonial subject (Abel, Hirsch, and Langland 1983, 7).
The novel calls for a reading that is open, what Biehl and Locke term “a radical analytical openness to complexity and wonder … so that we can understand how political forces and capital expansions exhaust existing (not ideal forms) and absorb some of the qualities and textures of individual and collective experiments with relating and knowing – lived tensions between power and flight … creation and ruination … belonging and fugitivity” (2017, xi) to the extent that it stages the tension between the imperialist violence of the colonial enterprise most visibly through mental enslavement, land dispossession, and the violation of the bodily integrity of Africans through torture and murder. The narrative ideology of Weep Not, Child stubbornly refuses to endorse Njoroge’s individuality and his naïve desire to accommodate himself to the institutions of colonialism as the path to self‐fulfillment. Instead, Ngugi is more interested in the collective fate of a society almost immobilized by its narratives of an irrecoverable past, a violent and insecure present, and an uncertain future. Ultimately, however, the novel questions these very individual and collective desires based on a white supremacist, racist, exploitative, and violent system that not only devalues African lives (the teacher Isaka’s death is emblematic of this), but also African bodies.
In revisiting one of the most critiqued and foundational texts of East African literature – Weep Not, Child – I have argued for a reading that recognizes what Biodun Jeyifo, in a different context, terms “a convergence
