Devil on the Cross is a novel by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, originally written and published in 1980 under the name Caitani Mutharabaini in the Gĩkũyũ language. The following year, it was translated to English by the author himself, and it was published by Heinemann Educational Books as part of its influential African Writers Series in 1982.
As Namwali Serpell recounts in her introduction to the Penguin Edition of the novel, Devil on the Cross had its origins in Ngũgĩ's political struggle, being written during his detainment at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. Ngũgĩ had been arrested earlier on December 30, 1977 for putting on a controversial play—I Will Marry When I Want, which depicted the harsh reality of peasant/working life in neocolonial Kenya. In prison, Ngũgĩ was stripped of his name—instead being called "detainee K6,77,"—and forced to either have only an hour of light a day or exist in a state of perpetual lightness. Ngũgĩ recounts that, during this time of poor sanitation, abandonment by the state, and despondency, what kept him going was reading and writing. In order to keep himself sane and make manifest what he was feeling in his mind and heart, Ngũgĩ then wrote Devil on the Cross on the toilet paper of Kamiti prison. He sought to interrogate what had brought both he and his country to this point, where foreign culture and ideas were embraced, while local culture and truth-tellers were relegated to both literal and figurative prisons.
Key to this interrogation for Ngũgĩ was his choice to write the novel in Gĩkũyũ, his native tongue and a local Kenyan dialect. Though Gĩkũyũ is spoken by less than 25% of Kenyans and read by even less, Ngũgĩ chose to write the novel in Gĩkũyũ because of his views on language, which he sees as not just a means for communicating with one another, but also a reflection of our cultures and the material realties shaped by these cultures. To tell the truth of what was happening in Kenya, Ngũgĩ felt that it was necessary to show this truth as depicted using a Kenyan language, rather than the language of the colonizers who had wrought misery on Kenya in the first place. Ngũgĩ's choice of language for the novel, while later considered a seminal pivot in his career, was initially, however, not without its critics. In a review for the London Review of Books in 1982, for example, Victoria Brittain wrote, "It [would] be tragic if [Ngũgĩ's] response to the political polarisation in his society is to turn his energies inward, so that he writes only in Kikuyu for a peasant audience, and refuses to address the outside world." Humorously, however, the decision to write the novel in Gĩkũyũ may also have saved Ngũgĩ from the novel's censorship: as Ngũgĩ recounts in Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary, while in prison, a guard confiscated a late manuscript of the novel. After weeks of holding on to this manuscript, however, the guard returned it, telling Ngũgĩ that he "wr[o]te in very difficult Kikuyu."
In terms of the novel's plot, the book follows a Kenyan woman named Warĩĩnga, a former sugar girl who once dreamed of being an engineer, as she undertakes two journeys. Warĩĩnga's first journey, undertaken after being fired from her job and abandoned by her lover, is from Nairobi to Ilmorog (a fictional rural outpost), where she is to reunite with her parents. On the way, however, she is invited to a Devil's Feast by a stranger and decides to check it out with a variety of characters that she meets on a private minibus (matatũ). As it turns out, the feast is a competition of businessmen to see who has the most exploitative and profitable ideas for both exploiting peasants and increasing Kenya's dependence on foreigners, even long after independence. The events of the feast and a visit from the Devil himself inspire Warĩĩnga to reform her life, and she is able to eventually become a self-reliant, Marxist engineer who is to be married to a wealthy man she met earlier on the matatũ. Her second journey is then with this man, Gatuĩria, to meet his parents in Nakuru. Upon getting there, however, Warĩĩnga realizes that Gatuĩria's father is the very man who she had an exploitative relationship with as a girl. At the novel's end, Warĩĩnga kills him to save others from his exploitation, committing herself fully to the Marxist struggle and redeeming herself from a helpless victim of neocolonialism to a martyr of her cause.
As one can likely tell from the novel's content, it is a ferociously funny satire that, at the same time, has a great deal of serious things to say about the failed transition to real independence in Kenya. Its characters all reflect and frame the discourse of these social issues in their actions, and, as Gichingiri Ndigirigi has pointed out, even in their names and language. In choosing to interrogate and explore these issues, Ngũgĩ also chooses himself to embody them in his narratology and language, advancing his story with a series of dialectic dualities and centering the language, adages, and fables of the Gĩkũyũ people.
