Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o & the Crisis of Kenyan Masculinity

From the late nineteenth century, Kenya experienced a particularly brutal history of imperial occupation. During the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’, the British empire spread rapidly across the eastern part of the continent and, establishing a protectorate over Kenya in 1895, subjected the region to ‘violence on a locally unprecedented scale’. Its appropriation of the ancestral lands of the Gĩkũyũ people is a case in hand. By the terms of the British Imperial Land Act of 1915, ownership of these fertile tracts was largely transferred to European settlers, displacing some 25 per cent of the indigenous population and forcing many others into forms of slave labour. In time, economic and political oppression produced organised resistance. Spearheaded by the nationalist movement known as the Mau Mau, the anticolonial struggle for land and rights drew reprisals from the British that, during the 1950s, included widespread detention, forced relocation, torture and execution, and resulted in the loss of some 10,000 Kenyan lives. It was out of this violent history that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, one of Kenya's best-known novelists and political theorists, emerged. Born into a Gĩkũyũ farming family, Ngũgĩ had first-hand experience of dispossession, the dispersal of villages and the horrific treatment of the indigenous population, with members of his own family being tortured and killed during the ‘Emergency’. His work naturally treats the injustices of imperialism and the importance of collective opposition.