A NATIONS STRUGGLE Consider this. Land in Kenya remains one of the most contestable resources. It simultaneously holds one of the greatest promises of independence, while causing the deepest anxiety and misery to many Kenyans. Around land in Kenya, myths have been invented, shameless lies told, and truth silenced. It is the deeply hidden yet ever present cause for the regional conflicts that we have witnessed in post-independence Kenya. Yet, of the numerous novels in English that Kenya has been gifted with by upcoming writers, none deals with this issue at any length. Kinyanjui Kombani’s The Last Villains of Molo alludes to the land problem more or less as the pre- text for the ethnic clashes that are his major concern, but that is that. So if you want to understand how the land question has been narrated in the Kenyan novel; if you want to contextualise the ethnic and generational tensions that have been nourished by the unequal socio-political and economic structures in this country; and if you want to appreciate the role of other institutions in aggravation of the land problem in Kenya, you have to try the old, critically tried and tested novels like Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child. First published in 1964, Weep Not, Child celebrates a golden jubilee this year, having attracted countless critical responses around the globe, deservedly so. Many critics have read Ngugi’s writings generally, and Weep Not, Child, especially, as an allegory of a nation struggling to remain one in the wake of many external and internal challenges. In fact James Ogude reads the entire corpus of Ngugi as a project in narrating the Kenyan nation within the prevailing political and historical trajectories, while Simon Gikandi sees Ngugi’s works as a tortured pursuit of expressive forms that can reflect the ‘drama of post-colonialism.’ Now is a good occasion, then, to revisit this novel that, for me, raises some questions that we are yet to fully confront but which we should, to avoid what Baldwin elsewhere calls the fire next time. Land, its inadequacy and the aspirations it engenders; the meanings it beholds and the emotions it generated are issues that Ngugi brings out against the background of a colonial regime whose reliance on abstract legalese, economic rationale, and force of arms to appropriate Kenyans’ land ignore more enduring, multifaceted view of this resource. Clearly, land for us in Kenya is not just a factor of production as some national politicians would want us to believe; nor is its ownership sealed in exclusively legal terms. It is a resource whose cultural and symbolic value by far outstrips the economic logic that has tended to stall any attempts at rationalising access to and ownership of land to cater for the cultural and symbolic needs of many of us.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 04:31:39 +0000
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