Petals of Blood Quotes

“He carried the Bible; the soldier carried the gun; the administrator and the settler carried the coin. Christianity, Commerce, Civilization: the Bible, the Coin, the Gun: Holy Trinity.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood

“This land used to yield. Rains used not to fail. What happened?’ inquired Ruoro. It was Muturi who answered. ‘You forget that in those days the land was not for buying. It was for use. It was also plenty, you need not have beaten one yard over and over again.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood

“Munira relished twilight as a prelude to that awesome shadow. He looked forward to the unwilled immersion into people, huts, without consciously choosing the links. To choose involved effort, decision, preference of one possibility, and this could be painful. He had chosen not to choose . . .”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“Solomon's suitors for myrrh and frankincense; Zeu's children in a royal hunt for the seat of the sun-god of the Nile; scouts and emissaries from Genghis Khan; Arab geographers and also hunters for slaves and ivory; soul and gold merchants from Gaul and from Bismark's Germany; land-pirates and human game-hunters from Victorian and Edwardian England: they had all passed here bound for a kingdom of plenty, driven sometimes by holy zeal, sometimes by genuine thirst for knowledge and the quest for the spot where the first man's umbilical cord was buried, but more often by mercenary commercial greed and love of the wanton destruction of those with a slightly different complexion from theirs.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“It is rather that I believe in the reality of what’s being named more than in the name itself.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“… and there was much blood, many motherless, many maimed legs, many broken homes and all because a few hungry souls sick with greed wanted everything for themselves. They took the virtues that arise from that as true virtues of the human heart. They practised charity, pity; they even made laws and rules of good conduct for those they had made motherless, for those they had driven into the streets. Tell me … would we need pity, charity, generosity, kindness if there were no poor and miserable to pity and be kind to?”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“Many times I would sit and think: we people … we built Kenya. Before 1895 it was Arab slavers disrupting our agriculture. After 1895 it was the European colonist: first stealing our land; then our labour and then our own wealth in the way of cows and goats and later our capital by way of taxation … so we built Kenya, and what were we getting out of the Kenya we had built on our sweat?”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“A woman was a world, the world.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“Men too seemed to think they were better off than women workers because they got a little bit more pay and preference in certain jobs. They seemed to think that women deserved low pay and heavy work: women’s real job, they argued amidst noise and laughter, was to lie on their backs and open their legs to man’s passage to the kingdoms of pleasure.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“If you have a cunt – excuse my language […] – if you are born with this hole, instead of it being a source of pride, you are doomed to either marrying someone or else being a whore. You eat or you are eaten.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“This world … this Kenya … this Africa knows only one law. You eat somebody or you are eaten.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“A worker has no particular home … He belongs everywhere and nowhere. I get a job here, I do it … I carry my only property – my labour power, my hands – everywhere with me. Willing buyer … a seller who must sell … It is the life under this system.’
‘Yes … it’s life,’ echoed Munira, without realizing the full import of the words.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“They told me: this is New Kenya. No free things. Without money you cannot buy land: and without land and property you cannot get a bank loan to start business or buy land. It did not make sense. For when we were fighting, did we ask that only those with property should fight?”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“We are all prostitutes, for in a world of grab and take, in a world built on a structure of inequality and injustice, in a world where some can eat while others can only toil, some can send their children to schools and others cannot, in a world where a prince, a monarch, a businessman can sit on billions while people starve or hit their heads against church walls for divine deliverance from hunger, yes, in a world where a man who has never set foot on this land can sit in a New York or London office and determine what I shall eat, read, think, do, only because he sits on a heap of billions taken from the world’s poor, in such a world, we are all prostituted. For as long as there’s a man in prison, I am also in prison: for as long as there is a man who goes hungry and without clothes, I am also hungry and without clothes.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“Aaaaah. I am old. I have no more dreams. And what are my wishes? There is only one. To join my man in the other world.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“How did we come to be where we are? How did it come about that 75% of those that produce food and wealth were poor and that a small group – part of the non-producing part of the population – were wealthy? History after all should be about those whose actions, whose labour, had changed nature over the years. But how come that parasites – lice, bedbugs and jiggers – who did no useful work lived in comfort and those that worked for twenty-four hours went hungry and without clothes? How could there be unemployment in a country that needed every ounce of labour? So how did people produce and organize their wealth before colonialism? What lessons could be learnt from that?
But instead of answering these, instead of giving him the key he so badly needed, the [books] took him to pre-colonial times and made him wander purposelessly from Egypt, or Ethiopia, or Sudan, only to be checked in his pastoral wanderings by the arrival of Europeans. There, they would make him come to a sudden full stop. To the learned minds of the historians, the history of Kenya before colonialism was one of the wanderlust and pointless warfare between peoples. The learned ones never wanted to confront the meaning of colonialism and of imperialism.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“But at what price has China been able to do that? No individual freedom … no freedom of the press … no freedom of worship or assembly and people wearing drab uniform clothes. Would you wish that for your country? You know when I was young I thought I could solve the problems of the world by shouting a slogan. But as I grow older I have learnt to be more realistic, and to face facts in the face. And we black people must learn not to fly against hard truths even if this means revising our dearly held theories. Take this population problem—!’
‘Are you saying that women should not have more children?’ asked Wanja in a strangely pained voice.
‘No. But it should be paced to keep up with our abilities to feed the mouths. Unless something drastic is done we shall soon be like India, with a thousand hungry mouths reaching out for our throats. Don’t you agree with me?’ […]
‘So people are now the enemy,’ thought Karega.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“Again, I am not so sure that I agree with you. Don’t you think that family planning is a deliberate trick of Western powers to keep our population low? Britain is a tiny island, yet it has over fifty million people: why don’t they curb their population growth? And after all, China is able to feed and clothe her millions.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“He thought for a while.
‘No,’ he said …‘it was not you alone … It was a collective humiliation …’ He did not know how to proceed, so he tried to make it general. ‘Whenever any of us is degraded and humiliated, even the smallest child, we are all humiliated and degraded because it has got to do with human beings.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“We barmaids never settle in one place. Sometimes you are dismissed because you refused to sleep with your boss. Or your face may become too well known in one place. You want a new territory. Do you know, it is so funny that when you go to a new place the men treat you as if you were a virgin. They will outdo one another to buy you beers. Each wants to be the first. So you will find us, barmaids, wherever there is a bar in Kenya. Even in Ilmorog.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“You forget that in those days the land was not for buying. It was for use.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“She liked it best at the counter. There, sitting on a high stool away from the hustle and bustle, she could study people so that soon she became a good judge of men’s faces. She could tell the sympathetic, the sensitive, the rough, the cruel and the intelligent – those whose conversation and words gave her especial pleasure. But she had come to find out that behind most faces was deep loneliness, uncertainty and anxiety and this would often make her sad or want to cry. Otherwise she did not often brood and she enjoyed involvement in her work so that she was much sought by employers.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“Still in her sober moments of reflection and self-appraisal, she had longed for peace and harmony within: for those titillating minutes of instant victory and glory often left behind an emptiness, a void, that could only be filled by yet more palliatives of instant conquest. Struggling in the depths of such a void and emptiness, she would then suddenly become aware that in the long run it was men who triumphed and walked over her body, buying insurance against deep involvement with money and guilty smiles or in exaggerated fits of jealousy. She would often seek somebody in whom she could be involved, somebody for whom she could care and be proud to carry his child.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“I have tried my hands at various jobs, but work in bars seems to be the one readily available to us girls – dropouts from school and CPE failures and even some dropouts from high schools.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“I could not see that I had done anything wrong. I did not feel guilty. When they warned me never to be seen with pagan boys – I don’t know – I felt then that they were beating me not just because I was with a boy but because he came from a family even poorer than ours. I also felt that the way they beat me – it was as if they were working out something between them.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“Then a heated debate would follow between the tillers and the herdsmen as to which was more important: animals or crops. Cattle were wealth – the only wealth. Was it not the ambition of every real man, especially before the white man came, to possess cows and goats? […] But the others argued that goats were not wealth. Since wealth was expressed in goats and cows, the same could not be the wealth. Wealth was in the soil and the crops worked by a man’s hands. Didn’t they know the saying that wealth was sweat on one’s hands? Look at white people: they first took our land; then our youth; only later, cows and sheep. Oh no, the other side would argue: the white man first took the land, then the goats and cows, saying these were hut taxes or fines after every armed clash, and only later did he capture the youth to work on the land. The line of division was not always clear since some owned crop fields and cattle as well. These said that both were important: a person paid goats for a girl, true: but he looked for the one who was not afraid of work. […] And why did the colonial settler and his policeman capture the youth? To cultivate his fields and also to look after the cows. The foreigner from Europe was cunning: he took their land, their sweat and their wealth and told them that the coins he had brought, which could not be eaten, were the true wealth!”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“But you will need to get a teacher who can and will endure all this hostility and indifference of a people opposed to light and progress.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“He pondered this a few seconds. He plucked a ripened yellow kei-apple and crushed it between his fingers: isn’t there a safe corner in which to hide and do some work, plant a seed whose fruits one could see?”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

“Our young men and women have left us. The glittering metal has called them. They go, and the young women only return now and then to deposit the newborn with their grandmothers already aged with scratching this earth for a morsel of life. They say: there in the city there is room for only one … our employers, they don’t want babies about the tiny rooms in tiny yards. Have you ever heard of that? Unwanted children? The young men also. Some go and never return. Others sometimes come to see the wives they left behind, make them round-bellied, and quickly go away.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood