Summary
Part III
1. Munira has been at the station for eight days, writing up his statement and answering questions. He feels a glow inside, a sense that he holds the key to all of this. He thinks of the New Ilmorog with its neon lights and bars and prostitutes and robberies and police, wondering how everything is tied together. Godfrey has not visited him for some time, and he becomes more and more anxious, demanding to see him. He tells the other officers that his recollections are useless; how could one “truly vouch for the truth of a past sequence of events” (191).
The tall officer nervously tries to explain to him he is not really in prison because he has a nice cell and Munira said he wanted to write down his truths. Munira feels a little better and asks for a newspaper. He reads about the murders and how the men were described as “nationalist fighters” who had “entrepreneurial genius” (194). Munira also read how Nderi was calling for a mandatory death sentence for all convicted of thievery as well as all those crimes politically or economically motivated. He laughed, thinking of Nderi’s pompous speechifying in the past.
2. The rain fell after all the charitable donations came in and Munira thought it was a time when God revealed his glory. The others thought the God of Africa was warring with the other Gods. Wanja felt possessed by the rain spirit and wandering around, thinking of her life. She felt grateful to be close to Nyakinyua, more like mother and daughter.
The sun came and the seeds germinated. Though Karega and Munira and Abdulla met at Abdulla’s store and seemed happy, there still seemed to be a more “troubled world” below them which “could, at any time, descend upon them, breaking asunder their rain-filled, sun-warmed calm” (197). The journey had given them all new things to ponder, such as what it meant to be a man.
School resumed and Karega threw himself into teaching. He still had questions, more than ever, about the unity of the African people. He chastised himself for leading the people to the city where they met with failure and humiliation. One day, though, the figure of the lawyer came to his mind and he wrote him a letter asking for books so he could further educate himself. The lawyer sent them but most were not useful. The history books acted like Kenya before colonization was a mess, and there was no pride in this history. He tried political science and literature and was equally disappointed. The lawyer wrote back to him and said he’d asked for works by Black professors and here they were—speaking on behalf of interests and masters.
*
Wanja and other women formed the Ndemi-Nyakinyua Group to work together and cultivate the land. Many joined in, feeling a sense of new birth but also knowing their potential problems were not just about rain anymore. Munira watched Wanja and wanted her more than ever. Abdulla was pleased Joseph was in school, wondering how he ever kept the boy from it.
The rains were late and thus the cycles were altered, but things were improving. But one day men came and began erecting a church building and police post. The people of Ilmorog were unsure about these strangers but soon forgot about them when they left for a time and the rains came again and promised a huge harvest. They began preparing for the circumcision ceremony, and Munira thought this might be the time to possess Wanja again.
3. The harvest times always seemed to release a youthful spirit in everyone.
4. One night, Wanja began speaking to Abdulla, Munira, and Karega, the latter of whom was teaching Joseph algebra. She said they ought to redeem this village and lure new blood, and the way to do this was to brew Theng’eta again. It was a drink whose recipe only the elders knew, and it used to be imbibed at special times. The colonizers outlawed it because they saw its potency but it was time to bring it back. She explained Nyakinyua told her she would show her how to make it and have it ready by the day of circumcision.
*
They all began to work on this idea with an almost religious fervor. Even Karega was looking forward to the day with the dancing, singing, and the ritual. Munira also liked watching the dancing but was an outsider and did not participate.
The day came and the community came together and sang and danced. Nyakinyua sang of their recent history and of other struggles and wars and colonialism and the duty of youth to drive out the foreigners. Karega listened and was sad, as it was “like beholding a relic that had suddenly resurfaced” (210).
*
After the circumcising ceremony by the river, Karega and Munira went to Abdulla’s place to wait for Wanja and Nyakinyua and the mysterious plant, small with four red petals. Nyakinyua said they should come back later in the evening to try it.
After the ceremony, they’d felt a sense of community that came with them to the hut. They sat in a circle, removing items that restricted their movement. Nyakinyua spoke of her age and of her only remaining dream being to join her man in the other world. Her voice created a sense of oneness. The drink came around and Munira took it. It burned his throat but then he felt relaxed and light. He was a bird in the sky, he saw all the colors of the rainbow. He saw the continuous sweep of time and how past present and future were one.
*
Nyakinyua then spoke of their ancestor Ndemi’s curse that his descendants would never abandon the land but would always defend it and all it produced. She spoke of her husband and how the men of his time were forced to work on European lands while others went to war. When he came back he was not the same, seeing something in the terrible light of war. She retreated into herself, not answering the questions on their faces.
*
Karega was confused. What past were they talking about? The past that was a “broken civilization, retarded growth, black people scattered over the globe to feed the ever-demanding god of profit that the lawyer talked about? The past of houses and crops burnt and destroyed and diseases pumped onto a continent?” (214). Or was it the glorious pasts of heroes? Maybe it was multiple pasts.
Suddenly he saw the face of his brother, which made no sense since he did not know him. He began to speak about Mukami. He explained how they met, and how she asked why he did not go to school. He decided to do this and told his mother his plan. Mukami taught him prayer. He prayed for her, sensing she was ill. They spent a lot of time together and then he went to Siriana. They met on Saturdays then, talking about everything in their lives. Over time he started to see she was more irritable, but they still came together and talked of marriage and children and their love.
One day, she was sorrowful and asked if Karega had a brother. He was surprised and said yes. She said that her father discovered who he was and that his mother was Mariamu and his brother was a Mau Mau, and she had to choose between him or her father. Karega went home and asked his mother about his brother. She told him Nding’uri was a Mau Mau who was hanged, but she would say no more.
Karega never saw Mukami again. She jumped into the quarry and killed herself.
4. This confession had an immense impact on the listeners. Munira was filled with rage and went outside; he did not know whether to blame his father or Karega for his sister’s death. Abdulla shook Karega in shock, asking if he was really Nding’uri’s brother.
They all looked at him. He moaned that Nding’uri was the bravest of them all and was “unwept, unavenged he lies somewhere in a common grave. In a mass grave. The unknown unsung soldier of Kenya’s freedom” (221). He remembered how he and Nding’uri came to his mother’s hut and drank millet porridge together. He was to go into the forest in a day or two, but Abdulla had not yet taken the oath. Nding'uri was excited to have a gun and pretended to curse the Europeans and shoot them. The two of them went to exchange grains and pick up the guns but the person there forgot to give them to them, so they decided to return the next day. They were betrayed, though, and the police apprehended Nding’uri. Abdulla got away, and he never saw his friend again. His voice became choked up and he said that when he came out all he wanted was money; he even forgot his vow.
5. Munira would not forget the night of Theng’eta drinking. Wanja eventually asked the question they all wanted to ask of Nyakinyua–what her man had seen in the light, what made him no longer the same. The old woman told them that he would not answer her when she asked, but finally gave way and said, trembling, that he saw “sons and daughters of black people of the centuries rise up as one to harness the power of that light, and the white man who was with us was frightened by what would happen when that power was in the hands of these black gods” (225). He told her the people who came back from Europe’s wars wanted to change and preserve their virtue, but there was much groaning in the struggle.
Abdulla actually groaned in pain and Wanja tried to comfort him. The old woman told them to go home now and sleep.
*
Years later Munira is still not sure what happened that night. He saw Karega and Wanja and Abdulla together and felt estranged from the three of them. Bitterness filled him and he asked her why she came to Ilmorog, as they had peace before she arrived. She snorted back that it was “peace of nothing happening” (226).
*
Munira recalls how he left them and went home. His past flashed before him as if he had never known it before. It was unbelievable to him that Karega seemed more a part of his family than he was. He affected Munira’s family’s history. Why did Karega come here—to throw Mukami’s death in his face? It was galling to him that he had “wined and dined with those who had deformed his father, blood of his blood, and brought death to the family” (227). He needed to take a drastic step to reconnect with his usurped history and inheritance and history. He was not exactly sure who he was trying to avenge, but he needed to do something that restored his sense of belonging and made him something other than an outsider.
Chapter 8
1. Karega’s “head was ablaze with what had gone on in Nyakinyua’s hut” (227). It was painful to hear of what happened to Nding’uri but he felt more connected to him now. He also saw Abdulla as the “best self of the community, symbol of Kenya’s truest courage” (228).
As Karega and Wanja walked back to Ilmorog hill in the dark, Wanja felt a sense of inevitability, as if all these coincidences and vicissitudes were leading to something—but what? They spoke of his history, of her past, and of why she left school. The two of them eventually collapsed on the ground and made love, delighting in their “united flesh” (230). They fell asleep until the dawn broke, and went back into Ilmorog.
2. Wanja was in a trance-like state, feeling at peace and thinking of her father and his growing estrangement from her mother. He was angry her mother’s sister was helping the Mau Mau and that she should remember the Good Book and not bow to idols or murder. Her father beat her mother and then the scene changed to her aunt burning alive and Wanja screamed for Karega. She woke and saw Nyakinyua there with her, and asked her what really happened to her grandfather and why her own father never came back.
3. Karega’s thoughts were also hazy, jumbled. He thought of Wanja, of his childhood, of people like Toussaint L’Ouverture who called out for a new Africa without chains on his legs or on his mind, and he then became other heroes with the same message. He dreamt of his brother, who explained why he took the oath. He asked Karega to name one black man who was not adrift in the land of his birth; he took the path for the people’s land, their bodies, their minds, their black souls. His dream then turned to the children asking him questions, Joseph in particular asking why, if Africans were so powerful, that Europeans came and conquered the continent and lorded over them for years. Karega became enraged and said he’d been reading American children’s encyclopedias and the Bible.
Suddenly he woke to Munira standing over him. Munira was restless and awkward as he asked if, now that their shared history was known, Karega ought to remain here. After all, he drove Mukami to her death. Karega was shocked at these words and rushed at Munira, but then stopped. He was full of anger and loathing but remembered Munira was older than him and had given him a job. He felt a “mixture of guilt, bitterness, inward rage and incomprehension” (240).
Karega spoke as if to people who were not there. They drank Theng’eta but now it seemed like it was a drink of strife. They are all victims and should not hurl insults at other victims. Munira sighed and said his father was a church elder so he was tired of sermons and platitudes. Karega replied that he would not resign. Munira simply said they’d see about that. Karega told him that he came to him because he was Mukami’s brother, and he hoped to get clarity on Chui and what happened at Siriana; now, he has seen so many Chuis, and he does not know if there are any answers, but he wants to stay here and choose his side in the struggle to come. Munira only replied again that they will see, and he should look for employment elsewhere.
Chapter 9
1. The narrator says the rains came and the harvest was good and they would not forget Wanja, Karega, Munira, and Abdulla, who saved them. They even loved the donkey now. The drought would be no more than a faint dream.
Changes were coming to Ilmorog, though not yet. The villagers laughed about the churchmen who came from the city to preach to empty benches.
2. Munira kept to himself more now. Karega spent most of his time with Wanja, and everyone watched the flowering of their youthful love.
3. Munira is trying to recapture this time. He says he tried to save Karega, maybe could have saved him. Wanja was transforming, becoming one with the land and growing in beauty. Munira thought with a pang of how he wanted her, but how she was further than ever from him. He could not help but spy on them, and their love grew as the crops grew.
It was a need and a pain to want to see her. He was obsessed with why she came to Ilmorog, why Karega came. He went to Limuru to get three new teachers, but even that did not help. He felt that Karega first took Mukami, and now Wanja. He began moralizing about their sinful union to the children.
At a gathering among the teachers Munira told them that they should be careful about teaching the children anything about politics or propaganda; all the children needed was facts, and not that misleading information about “blackness, African peoples, all that, because that is politics, and they know what tribe they belong to” (246). Karega, of course, disputed that point of view, and rejoined with his view that there were no pure facts except the oppression of black people/ children had to look at what deformed them yesterday and today and know how to think about liberation. The other teachers seemed impressed by this, and Munira only felt bitterness. Karega was eventually dismissed.
Chapter 10
1. Munira had been at the school for five years. Joseph was doing astonishingly well, as was the village. Drought and the journey to the city seemed far in the past. Ilmorog was still “a kind of neglected outpost of the republic” (248) and outsiders came very rarely. Yet Mzigo came a few times and some changes resulted.
Munira was happy with the way the school was going—they even got one more teacher—and thought he only needed Wanja to be happy. He decided to go to Abdulla’s for a drink, but encountered Nyakinyua in the road. She spoke cryptically of the new teachers, asking why those in power gave with the right hand to take away with the left. Munira did not understand and was a little afraid of her due to her stature in the village.
He went back to his own home, and Wanja showed up. He started, thinking this was an ominous repetition of past patterns. She asked to be invited in and he did so, asking if she wanted tea. She declined for water. She then asked abruptly if he remembered the Theng’eta night and how he asked why she came here. He said she did not have to dwell on the past and did not have to tell him anything. She said with an ironic smile that she wanted to tell him, and came all this way to do so.
She spoke of her fear that she was barren. He interrupted and said he thought she had a child. She said yes but it died, so that is why she came to Ilmorog —she wanted to speak to her grandmother. They went to Mwathi’s place and he told her to copulate under the new moon in the open fields. She did not quite do that, and it was just one more misfortune. Munira wondered why she told him this, as if he was some “witchdoctor’s experiment” (250).
She explained that she wanted him to know how much Ilmorog meant to her, how much Karega meant to her. She wanted him; she felt wanted, felt whole and no longer humiliated. She then looked squarely at Munira and told him she knew he was behind getting Karega dismissed from teaching. She wanted him back—they all did—and that someone would have to pay if this did not happen. She then hurried from the hut, leaving Munira thinking that all were lost but especially her; she had conquered him, but he could do nothing about Karega.
2. Wanja knew if Karega left she would leave too, but she was afraid of what she might encounter in the world. Abdulla offered Karega a spot in his shop, but he could not take it. He was full of animosity and rancor against Munira and the school inspectorate, and did not feel ready to be outside of the school. He did not know of Munira’s attachment to Wanja but would not have understood anyway; he was too young and innocent. Thus he could only see “motiveless paltriness” (253) in what Munira did to him, and felt an acute loss in someone who could have been a hero. His faith was failing.
He turned to Abdulla, who was being kind to him, and asked why he came to Ilmorog. Abdulla explained how he was arrested and then put in a detention camp. He was released after Independence and felt hopeful that things might be different. He waited for land reforms and distribution and a job and a memorial to Dedan Kimathi but none of this came. He did not want to buy land already bought by the blood of the people. It was the “New Kenya” and there were no free things. He saw the tensions mounting between black people, between regions, between homes. He desperately wanted a job but was a cripple and it was not easy to find one. He went to the office and asked for one but encountered Kimeria, the man who had betrayed him and Nding’uri. Kimeria was now handling millions, and the people said that this was a great thing, that Uhuru had really come. Abdulla was overcome by the sense of betrayal and decided to go deep into the country.
Wanja began to sob when she heard the name Kimeria, and told them that was the same man who seduced her away from home. Abdulla was stunned, and Karega was shocked that he was sleeping with the woman of his brother’s murderer.
Suddenly the three of them heard a noise outside. It was a small airplane that was in trouble, and started nosediving to the ground. It landed in a field half a mile away. They and others went to look at it. There was a European and three Africans standing near it who had survived the crash.
News spread of the plane and people flocked there in the hundreds. It was Abdulla who suggested brewing some Theng’eta for all the people coming to the town. It as an immediate success and people came for that as much as the plane. The drink was said to restore fertility to barren women and potency to aging men. Dancing groups form and drinking parties travel there. Ilmorog became famous overnight. A newspaper covered the story of the plane and the tourists flooding the area and the cult that sprang up around the plane. It wrote of Theng’eta and how marvelous it was.
But for some of Ilmorog, this news did not matter as much as the death of the donkey, the only casualty of the plane crash, and of Karega’s departure from the village.
Analysis
When the villagers return home, things begin to improve—the rains come, the harvest is good, there is joy in tilling the earth—but there are also indications that change is on its way. The police post and the church are the first edifices built by outsiders, but this does not ring any alarm bells yet because they are not really utilized (“Ilmorog was still a kind of neglected outpost of the republic” [248]). There is a general sense of ebullience among the villagers, but the four main characters still sense that something is off, or that there is some hint of future trouble: “But brooding not too far below their tranquil existence was their consciousness of the journey and the experiences which spoke of another less sure, more troubled world which could, any time, descend upon them, breaking asunder their rain-filled sun-warmed calm” (197).
Karega continues to undergo his intellectual and ideological awakening. He wrestles with being a teacher, ponders “where was the unity of African people?” (197) and “What of the resistance of African peoples?” (199), and asks the lawyer for texts written by educated Africans. To his dismay, he finds that these writers have no pride in their history, that they “delighted in abusing and denigrating the efforts of the people and their struggles in the past” (199). He decides he wants to know “the truth” but he doesn’t know what the truth is.
The Theng’eta drinking at Nyakinyua’s hut further challenges Karega, who wrestles with Africa’s “several pasts” (214) and tries to reconcile what happened with Mukami. Abdulla experiences Theng’eta by frankly recounting his friendship with Ndinguri and how the two of them were betrayed by Kimeria. Munira was consumed by Karega’s story, feeling as if “before tonight I had never known my family, my past” (226) and that Karega was partly to blame for Mukami’s death. This begins Munira’s increasing spiral into obsession, darkness, and fanaticism. And Wanja ruminates on the story of her grandfather and takes Karega as a lover, seeing in him that same desire for a new beginning. Critic Felicia Annin says of this relationship that it is “a celebration of victory for Ilmorog and a celebration of life itself.” The couple is “linked in the narrative with natural imagery”—this is the time of fecundity, and before Ilmorog begins to change—and is “pure and fully reciprocated.” Unfortunately, due to Munira’s jealousy, which leads to Karega's being fired, the relationship ends.
Critic Bonnie Roos offers a compelling analysis of Wanja, noting how Ngugi was known for advocating for women’s rights and tended to write strong female characters. Roos begins by noting that Wanja is a nurturer/mother figure for Ilmorog and is a “female figure rife with agency and power.” She is not weak, nor dependent on men, nor given short shrift in the narrative. While some critics overemphasize Wanja-as-Kenya, a common allegorical reading of the text, Roos finds this problematic. She claims that while Ngugi does often rely on trope or archetype in his depiction of women, this is done strategically and is often complicated. For Roos, Wanja is “a very real representative of the Kenyan nation” and a complex character in her own right.
First, Wanja is not always defined by her body, even though she is a prostitute at many times in her life. She is also an entrepreneur, an artist, and a skilled worker of the land. Her beauty is tied to the land, which is Ngugi “typing” her to “represent collective women’s identity in [his] vision of nation.” Wanja “becomes a kind of archetypal Earth mother, a fertility goddess, who retains an idealized, intrinsic organic relationship that reveals Ngugi’s Marxist agricultural agenda.” Second, Roos sees Wanja’s loss of her first child as a “symbol for the death of Kenya’s children” and the fact that it died by its mother’s hands as a “distinct reference to the burgeoning Independent Kenya, which is quashed by those very heroes who once struggled to create and nurture it.” When she gets pregnant again, there is a sense of new hope and a chance to right wrongs. But again, things are not so simple. Wanja has a vengeful spirit, some selfishness, and finds it hard to forgive. She is not perfect; she is “quite human, and subject to human pride and error, anger, and passion.” And having a new child in her womb is not what gives her power, which she had all along. Third, her descent into whoredom is complicated, for it is both her being used by men and her using men. She takes a pragmatic approach to the neocolonialism shaping the world around her and adopts an “eat or be eaten” philosophy as she becomes economically self-sufficient. This path tortures her, though, and by the end of the novel, she is ready to tear it all down.
