Early Fictions of School Culture: The River Between and Weep Not, Child

In his early novels Ngugi explored the impact colonization had upon Gikuyu cultures—the introduction of Christianity, which exacerbated existing divisions among village communities; the seizure of land and the impoverishment of indigenous farmers; the introduction of capitalism and its exploitation of native labor; and the institution of military violence and political oppression. How, Ngugi asks, could these incursions be combated and the rights and dignity of Africans restored? The early novels, especially The River Between and Weep Not, Child, examine the use traditional Gikuyu elites made of European education, which brought both liberal concepts of human rights and the technologies of progress and modernization but at the same time was invested with a racist ideology that insisted on Africans’ innate primitiveness and inferiority to Europeans and European Enlightenment culture. The story of anticolonial resistance usually took the form of a tragic romance. However, Ngugi transformed the genre, interlacing a bitter ironic note into the traditional romantic depiction of resistance and struggle.