Weep Not, Child (Penguin African Writers Series Book 3)

by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

The last five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light, and now the time has come for Africans to tell their own stories.

three great rivers: the invisible, the visible, and the oral—or myth, reality, and the oral tradition.

the invisible is the chief source of African literature, which is defined by the presence of myth, and by how myth plays against social reality.

is found, of course, in all the tales and myths, the legends and songs that shape the African consciousness.

two kinds of music: a vanishing world of tradition and myth, and the harsh world of colonialism.

Modern African literature did not emerge as a protest against colonialism. Rather, colonialism brought a certain inflection, a certain emphasis, to the natural progression of the literature from one mode to another.

one of the signal novels to emerge from an artist listening to both the well of tradition and the troubled oracles of his time.

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility orchestrates themes of dichotomy, of romance, of class, that would run through her work.

Hemingway began with The Sun Also Rises, and its themes of stoicism, violence, and nature haunt his oeuvre.

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart introduced the ideas of culture, family, and tradition tha...

But Weep Not, Child was not in fact Ngugi’s first novel. It was his second, but it was published first—and yet it is emblematic of his body of work in the way we believe first novels to be.

It combines the story of adolescence with a tale of political violence and an implied love story, and it brings together, at a stroke, the key themes in the literature of the times.

He wrote it as James Ngugi.

his tale of young love set against the backdrop of opposing families and a world seething with violence and injustice.

In a sense, all the future Ngugis are embryonic in this novel—the seeds of his radicalism, his communism, his campaign for African languages.

Njoroge,

Mwihaki,

It is also a novel about the crossroads of tradition and modernity, about ancient myths confronted by modern realities. Many dichotomies thread through it—fathers and sons, rich and poor, black and white, education and apprenticeship, village and township, home and abroad, exile and rootedness, innocence and experience—and give it its multilayered complexity.

The brevity is also in the sentences. The writing is clear, unpretentious, but shaped with the noble cadences of traditional speech.

Should the African writer use a European language to express his reality, a reality reflecting a consciousness saturated in traditional African languages? Achebe’s solution was the use of Igbo proverbs, songs, parables, and a certain unconscious Igbo cadence in his novels.

he wrote Weep Not, Child in English, and in it you can hear an undercurrent of the Kikuyu language, its cadence, its directness in the formal prose—a kind of manifestation in English of the reality, the tone, the coloration of Kikuyu life, a seeping through of one language into another, giving the novel its rich African feeling.

Weep Not, Child is a novel about loss. It moves through many losses, beginning with the loss of land.

Land here has profoundly different meanings to the colonist and to the colonized: To one it is a source of power, compared to the body of a woman—a haven, an escape from home, a new homeland, and an act of conquest. But to the other it is life itself, life as it streams through the pathways of myth, life as it is embodied in all that makes one human.

Land comes to stand for language, dignity, selfhood, independence, and freedom. It is this mystical sense of the land that is at the symbolic heart of Weep Not, Child, that gives the novel its rootedness, its poignancy, its depth of feeling.

This freedom struggle, with its brutal reprisals against the colonial structure, is all the more forcefully felt in the novel in its contrast with the hero’s innocent and Christian piety.

And you know, I think Jacobo is as rich as Mr Howlands because he got

education. And that’s why each takes his children to school because of course they have learnt the value of it.’

John, the big son of Jacobo,

‘I don’t know. You cannot understand a white man.’

The first one was to drive away the Germans who had threatened to attack and reduce the black people to slavery. Or so the people had been told.

In spite of the fact that

they were all white, they killed one another with poison, fire, and big bombs that destroyed the land.

The other two divided the land of the Black People from the land of the White People.

You could tell the land of Black People because it was red, rough, and sickly, while the land of the white settlers was green and was not lacerated into small strips.

The Indian traders were said to be very rich. They too employed some black boys whom they treated as nothing.

One bundle was for his first wife, Njeri, and the other for Nyokabi, his second wife.

Ngotho did not beat his wives much.

She was right. Njoroge’s heart had felt like bursting with happiness and gratitude when he had known that he, like Mwihaki, the daughter of Jacobo, would start learning how to read and write.

Mwihaki was a daughter of Jacobo. Jacobo owned the land on which Ngotho lived. Ngotho was a Muhoi.

It was on that day that Njoroge learnt that Njuka was the name given to a newcomer.

She did not want her son to associate with a family of the rich because it would not be healthy for him.

Her other son had died in the big war. It had hurt her much. Why should he have died in a white man’s war?

Njoroge sensed that the way he had been brought up was being criticised. It was on that day that Njoroge had come to value Mwihaki,

Before he had started school, in fact even while he made that covenant with his mother, he would never have thought that he would ever be ashamed of the calico, the only dress he had ever known since birth.

Nganga was the village carpenter. Kamau was apprenticed to him.

Any man who had land was considered rich. If a man had plenty of money, many motor cars, but no land, he could never be counted as rich.

‘Blackness is not all that makes a man,’ Kamau said bitterly. ‘There are some people, be they black or white, who don’t want others to rise above them. They want to be the source of all knowledge and share it piecemeal to others less endowed. That is what’s wrong with all these carpenters and men who have a certain knowledge. It is the same with rich people. A rich man does not want others to get rich because he wants to be the only man with wealth.’

‘That’s why you at times hear Father say that he would rather work for a white man. A white man is a white man. But a black man trying to be a white man is bad and harsh.’

Boro, who had been to the war, did not know many tribal stories. He drank a lot and he was always sad and withdrawn. He never talked much about his war experiences except when he was drunk or when he was in a mood of resentment against the government and settlers.

‘We fought for them, we fought to save them from the hands of their white brothers…’