Summary
Part IV
Chapter 11
1. The narrator says that the Trans-Africa Road that links Nairobi and Ilmorog to other cities is one of the most famous highways in all the African lands, but while it offers a vision, it also represents hollowness and failed promises. Life in Ilmorog has changed; the names of multinational corporations are everywhere and children play by the roads with whizzing cars. The road made New Ilmorog like a New Jerusalem.
*
It started with the addition of Theng’eta to Abdulla’s shop—Wanja’s idea—when the plane was bringing people there. There was no temporary boom though; surveyors came, machines roared, huts in the way of progress were torn down. Even Mwathi’s place was in the way and was razed to the ground. Mwathi himself was gone and where he lived was turned into an archaeological site due to all the amazing things found there.
Abdulla’s place kept growing. They added a beer hall and a butchery and a bar. The road seemed like their road still; it seemed like all the other things going on would be temporary.
Nderi wa Riera and two lieutenants came and talked about all of his plans for the area—to make the KCO more powerful, to open a shopping center, to develop the area into ranches and wheat fields, to open a tourist center. But people had to register their lands to acquire title deeds to act as security with the banks. The people were unsure but trusted him, wondering why they once doubted him. All were happy but Nyakinyua, who said something was bothering her but she was not sure what. People began taking out loans to expand their land, convinced by the bank representatives that it would be a good thing.
*
Progress indeed came and changed Ilmorog completely. There was barbed wire, fences, and wealth. Mzigo came and said he would expand the school. The road and trade and progress expanded. They reelected Nderi.
2. Karega came back after being gone for five years. He looked different, gaunter, and Munira was surprised to see him. He thought about the past five years for himself—five years where he was tortured by Wanja, where he found reality only in Theng’eta. Wanja didn't care for him, though, turning her attention to work. She was powerful now and people feared her and sang about her. She and Abdulla were the only local people who had succeeded in getting a building plot and constructing it. All of the workers drank her Theng’eta.
Munira had thought when Karega left that he and Wanja might come together, but that was not the case. He drank more and she kept working. Munira started reading horoscopes and imagining himself being conceived under every star. He met a woman named Lillian who said she had been given a lift from Eldoret and then abandoned here in Ilmorog. He and Lilian began sleeping together but she did not take Wanja out of his mind. He spent hours walking along the Ilmorog Ridge which was now cleaved in half by the Road. He did not know what was happening to the sleepy village. There were tools and dirty water and quarries everywhere. Wambui, a local woman, was even working as a laborer.
Munira brainstormed how to draw Wanja to him and came up with the idea of helping her business expand by advertising. He devised a slogan for the drink, Theng’a Theng’a with Theng’eta. He was delighted with this stroke of genius. It was eventually used, but he received no royalties.
He and Lilian had a falling out and she left. He was falling apart now, undergoing a “complete unmaking...He could see it, he watched the decline, a spectator, an outsider, and he could not help himself” (274).
Karega coming to Munira was a surprise. The younger man asked after Joseph, and Munira said he went to Siriana. Both men were quiet, thinking of their own time there. Karega then asked after the old woman, but this was harder for Munira to talk about, let alone think about. He remembered seeing an announcement in the newspaper that her land and that of others who could not pay their loans were having their land sold off. He went to Wanja’s hut where others were gathered with Nyakinyua to commiserate. She tried to fight back but did not know whom to fight. She died peacefully in her sleep a few days after the news came out. On the day of the sale, Wanja bought the land and thus “became the heroine of the new and the old Ilmorog” (276). They all later learned she and Abdulla had sold their rights to their building to Mzigo and divided the money among the two of them so she could buy the land.
3. Wanja was not the same, though she stayed on as proprietor for a while. Her heart was not in it. She began building a new edifice and one night announced to the crowd that the old Ilmorog Bar was closing. She asked Munira to come to her place, and he was elated.
*
Munira could barely focus the next day. When he went to Wanja’s new bungalow he was surprised to see her wearing a lot of makeup and a wig. She bitterly explained that the bar’s license was taken away for being “unhygienic” and there were new owners taking over soon. She was angry, but then changed her tone and asked what he was waiting for, bringing him into her room.
As he went to grasp her, she told him frankly that there were no free things in Kenya and that if he wanted her he would have to pay. She would charge him one hundred shillings for old times’ sake. He was humiliated but could not resist and paid her. She adopted a sultry tone and said she welcomed him to the Sunshine Lodge.
4. Changes continued apace. The new owners of the town were “master-servants of bank power, money, and cunning” (280), but there was also a shantytown on the outskirts where the unemployed and migrant workers and prostitutes lived. Wanja’s Sunshine Lodge was somewhere in the middle of the two areas and became famous. The Theng’eta Breweries, owned by Mzigo, was now a huge factory complex. All the breweries were actually owned by an Anglo-American combine, of course, but Mzigo, Chui, and Kimeria were three of the local African directors and shareholders.
5. Karega asked, trembling, about Abdulla and Wanja. Munira said simply that Wanja was the most powerful woman in all Ilmorog, like a bird born of ashes. He asked if Karega wanted to see her and Karega hesitated but said yes. On the way, they passed Abdulla’s place, a depressing, mud-walled barrack of a place. Abdulla opened the door and was much changed, with hollow eyes and drink in his voice. He did not recognize Karega at first. He said this house belonged to an important man who charged a lot of money to take a room.
The three of them spoke of Joseph and how Abdulla found him as a child rummaging in a garbage heap, of poverty in general, and how the poor were victimized for their poverty.
Karega and Munira then went to the Sunshine Lodge. They sat down and Munira liked seeing how uncomfortable Karega was. Wanja came out, a little heavier but luminous. She was a little thrown off but recovered herself and smiled at this ghost from the past. She asked what Karega had been doing. He replied that he had worked with the lawyer for a time, who was now a famous politician, and then worked with dockworkers in Mombasa. He was a trade union leader for a time and then kept moving on, looking for jobs in agriculture and then as a storekeeper in West Kenya. He watched the divide between workers and management and was eventually dismissed from his job because he insulted a European expert technician. He now knew workers have no particular home because they belong everywhere. He was proud to carry his property with him.
They were silent for a time. Wanja spoke. She explained how she came to understand that this world was eat-or-be-eaten. She admitted she had thrown her own child into a latrine and how that guilt weighed on her. She has since searched for a child and searched for love and only came close to it with Karega. She then spoke of what Mzigo did to her business and her rage that someone like Kimeria was prospering. She says she sleeps with the three important men and turns them against each other; all want to make her their sole woman.
Her savage tone cut through Karega. He felt the truth in her statement but pushed back that there must be another way. They must create a new world, he burst out. Munira stood abruptly and said they must go.
That night Munira collapsed on his bed thinking of that idea of a new world.
Chapter 12
1. Inspector Godfrey, bored, asks Munira what he means by the new world. Munira thinks about the night. He does not know how to convey to this man who was “administering the corrupt laws of a corrupt world, the overwhelming need and necessity for higher laws, pure, eternal, absolute, unchanging” (296). He explains that over time he stopped drinking, could not teach as he once did, and began feeling that everything was wrong and he was an accident and a mistake. He went to church and was weighed down with guilt. This was also the time they heard about the lawyer’s murder. Karega, Wanja, Abdulla, Njuguna, and Munira met and talked about this tragedy of killing someone who was only trying to help the poor. Munira could not listen to Rev. Jerrod that Sunday, but he came across a group of people listening to someone else preach. It was Lillian, dressed in white, and she spoke of a new earth, another world, and faith in God. She accepted this new life with Christ and asked if someone else wanted to. From that moment Munira beheld this new earth and had Christ as his personal savior.
The Inspector listens but asks why he kept company with people who were obviously less holy. Munira excitedly says he wanted to save Karega from his “dreams...his devil’s dreams and illusions” (299) and the sin of pride. Godfrey sighs and asks how Karega planned to change the world apart from strikes and communist nonsense.
Munira keeps talking about Karega’s pride and then says he knows Karega and Wanja were seeing each other secretly about a week before the fire. Godfrey jumps up in surprise, asks if he is sure, and rushes out.
2. Karega is in a cell by himself. He is resentful that because of the murders, the planned strike was banned. He wonders what fake charges will be brought against him. He reflects on the lawyer and their past together, and himself and how he was different then. He cared mostly for the glorious past and not enough for the present. The changes in Ilmorog within ten years have been monumental, he rues, and the same pattern is happening all over Kenya. He does not know where to turn. Wanja’s view of things was too brutal for him; there had to be a possible human kingdom where kindness and courage and strength prevailed.
When he returned to Ilmorog he worked in the Theng’eta Breweries as a counting clerk and paid attention to the way workers were treated in the factory. Soon people knew something was happening there—people met in small groups, there were pamphlets, a union was formed. The directors and management were surprised at this, as it seemed to come from nowhere. They dismissed Karega because they had to blame someone, but he became the Secretary-General of the Union. Other unions formed in the area and employers became worried. They sowed discord among their employees and a new charismatic religious movement said the real enemy was Satan, which carried off many workers.
Munira was bothering Karega a great deal, trying to convert him and workers. Karega later learned the whole movement was “financed by some churches in America which made a lot of money by insisting on the followers giving a tenth of their salaries as tithe” (306).
Karega's thoughts turn to how a week before the fire Wanja called for him. Sitting in the cell he learns the Inspector wants to connect him with the arson. Godfrey asks him about Siriana and then states that the directors of the Breweries met to discuss his Union’s demands, and then were killed that night. Karega replies that he was at an all-night executive meeting. Godfrey plays a recording of him talking about a “new world.”
For days they go back and forth. Karega tells him he is not interested in ridding the world of individuals; people like the three murdered men are everywhere. Godfrey asks if he met Wanja a week before the fire. Karega hesitates and says yes. Godfrey asks if Abdulla was there and when Karega says no, Godfrey slaps him across the face and calls him a liar.
3. Abdulla has been questioned for nine days now but still feels a sense of relative calm. He did not do it, but marvels that someone somehow carried out his wishes. He hopes Wanja has recovered from the shock. His thoughts turn to the struggle in Ilmorog. His last hope had died when Karega left. Things improved thanks to Wanja, and he took delight in her presence. Yet even that was ruined when Kimeria crossed their path. He visited Wanja at her new whorehouse and felt “somehow personally humiliated by what seemed her irrevocable and final entry into whoredom. It hurt him, but he understood” (311). He stammered out a marriage proposal and she told him seriously that she appreciated the offer but this was her life now.
He tried different businesses after he closed his shop. He felt the new Theng’eta complex was making a mockery of him. He drank frequently to get drunk. He did not want to kill Kimeria, only feast his eyes on someone to whom fate was so generous. He stopped caring about everything else and bitterly said that Kimeria, Chui, and Mzigo could enjoy what he built. Sometimes he saw Wanja and she was always friendly to him, and he knew she was paying Joseph’s school fees. His best companion in those days was Munira, but then Karega returned and Munira became a fanatic. Abdulla found both of them fools; there were no other worlds, only this one. The only thing that brought Abdulla joy was hearing how well Joseph was doing. He wanted to share this joy with Wanja so he went to her and she was crying, but when he told her about Joseph’s success, she embraced him and they made love.
On the fateful Saturday, he was feeling good because of what had happened with Wanja; he hadn’t even drunk anything. He shaved and tried on nicer clothes and went into Ilmorog. Today, the Board of Directors was meeting to decide what to do about the union’s demands. All of his pleasurable thoughts vanished, though, when he realized Kimeria might go to Wanja’s tonight. He felt like a fool, a stooge; it was like all his manhood was vanishing. Suddenly, he decided he would kill Kimeria tonight; he could never face Karega or Wanja or Joseph or Munira again if he did not do this. This act would be his freedom.
Around seven Chui, Kimeria, and Mzigo arrived at the bar. Abdulla called out to Kimeria, who looked at him nervously. Abdulla said he was one of the people who came to his home in the Blue Hills from Ilmorog. Kimeria felt better hearing that, but then Abdulla mentioned the “joke” he played on Ndinguri. Kimeria trembled and Abdulla laughed and walked away.
Abdulla hobbled over to the whorehouse to wait for the “encounter with his chosen destiny” (318). Time passed. He could not believe his eyes when he saw red flames issuing from Wanja’s place, and heard a scream. He broke glass with his walking stick, saw a body, and dragged it out. The gathered crowd pulled the two of them to safety.
*
Abdulla is still calm. The officer tells him he senses he is telling the truth but is covering for someone. He asks if he ever had secret meetings with Karega in Wanja’s hut. Abdulla said he only saw Karega on his way to her hut once, and when the officer asked what he discussed, he said it was personal. The officer is annoyed and asks why he was shielding Karega. Abdulla replies he is not.
4. On the tenth day Wanja is recovered enough from her animal terror of fire. The officer visits her and tells her he knows the three men were specifically invited to her whorehouse that night but he does not know why she would want to burn herself and her house. She says she does not want to talk about that night. He says this is a grave matter and they suspect something political.
The officer then asks if Karega came to see her the week before the fire and she says yes. Abdulla was there too, she says, and the officer asks for more information. Wanja tries to tell him about that Friday but it is hard. She does not know why she wanted Karega over that night. When he came to her she felt pleasure at his arrival and Karega seemed to feel the same illusion of a return to the past. They spoke of Nyakinyua and her husband and their own shared memories. Karega wanted to touch her but stopped himself, sensing it was futile. The “magic string between them was finally broken” (326). She decided to let him go to his crowds and his workers, but she told him frankly that Kimeria, Mzigo, and Chui have decided to kill him like they eliminated the lawyer and he ought to be careful. Karega listened but vowed what those men planned for Kenya would not come to pass.
Before he left he said thank you to her for telling him but that he was sad she was on their side, the side of imperialism and the KCO. She said it was not true and she had tried to fight them. She then savagely cried out that she was dying and had no child. He looked at her, firm in his convictions. He said that they cannot beat Kimeria by joining him.
*
Wanja sat still for hours after he left, pondering his words. She felt their break and her union with Abdulla were almost inevitable. She looked back at all her dreams and saw they were gone; helping Joseph was the only good thing she ever did. She could not return to her previous state of innocence but thought she could at least end her relationship with Kimeria and expose him on her own terms. She would invite the men over and bring in Abdulla and introduce him as her man. This would be a “kind of grand finale to a career of always being trodden upon” (329).
Everything was set until the last day. Chui arrived, then Mzigo, then Kimeria. Wanja was about to get Abdulla when she saw flames and smoke and fainted to the ground. That was all true. Yet what Wanja does not tell Inspector Godfrey is that she had struck Kimeria dead with the panja she was holding before the flames came.
5. Inspector Godfrey is relaxed and curious. He asks Munira about Chui and Kimeria. Then he asks what Munira was doing on Ilmorog Hill the Sunday morning after the arson. Munira can see it in his eyes—he knows. The Inspector nods and says he does know and he will be charging him with burning the house and causing the death of three men. He asks why Munira did it and Munira replies it was to save Karega.
*
That was something that obsessed Munira—he saw Karega ensnared by the Jezebel Wanja and he had to obey the voice of God that told him to save Karega. He prayed for a week for God to show him the way. He bought petrol and went to the whorehouse and burned it. He watched it go up and felt oneness with the Lord.
Chapter 13
1. The Inspector wonders over everything he has heard. He is convinced of the importance of the police force as the maker of modern Kenya. He is disdainful of Munira repudiating his father’s immense property and becoming a religious fanatic. Yet he does think “this system of capitalism and capitalistic democracy needed moral purity if it was going to survive” (334).
2. Wanja thinks about how some people join the struggle and some sit on the fence and others betray it. She feels guilty because it seems that she has chosen the side of the Kimerias. She thinks of her father who never loved her and only cared about money.
She tries to heal from the trauma of the fire. One day her own mother shows up and the two embrace. They talk around the past but do not quite bring it up. She tells her mother haltingly that she thinks she is with child. Her mother asks whose it is and Wanja takes up a pencil and begins to draw a figure. It is Abdulla. Her mother asks who this man is with so much pain and suffering but who is laughing.
3. Abdulla and Joseph are sitting together in New Jerusalem. Joseph is a young man now. They speak of what Munira did. Joseph talks about a coming strike at Siriana while Abdulla thinks of his own life. He speaks up and apologizes for treating Joseph wrongly in the past. Joseph gently corrects him and says he wants to be like Abdulla when he grows up; he wants to be proud that he has done something for his people. Abdulla listens to him, thinking he sounds like Karega. His own time is over; it is time for the new generation.
4. Munira’s parents, his wife, and Rev. Jerrod visit him before the trial. Munira is calm. He challenges his father and asks him why he did not take the Mau Mau oath but took the KCO one. He tells his father to kneel and ask for Christ’s forgiveness. They are all shocked at his behavior. He continues to rebuke them and they go away, weeping for him.
5. Karega gets the news that his mother is dead. She had been a landless squatter her whole life; this seemed utterly absurd. The warder tells him he has a visitor so he meets the young woman out at the barbed wire fence. She is familiar to him from the factory. She tells him confidentially that they are planning another strike and how all employed and unemployed workers in Ilmorog will join. Then she tells him of a political assassination that took place, carried out by a group that called themselves the Wakombozi, or the society of one world liberation.
She asks what they are going to do to him. He says detain him, and he is suspected of being a communist. Her words conjure up sacrifices of working people’s blood, of Africans turning over their own land to foreigners for exploitation. The struggle must continue so they can have a real kingdom of men and women. The woman says determinedly that he will come back, and he murmurs, “tomorrow…” (345).
Analysis
The final section of Petals of Blood concerns the changes that came to Ilmorog, the resolution of the murder inquiry, and, to some extent, where the characters end up. To begin, New Ilmorog is vastly different than Old Ilmorog. Galvanized by Theng’eta, the airplane crash, and increasing investment, it becomes a “sprawling town of stone, iron, concrete and glass and one or two neon lights” (263). The machines came and “wallowed and whined and roared in the mu, clearing brush and grass and occasionally huts that stood in the way of trade and progress” (265). The Trans-Africa Road came, as did a tourist center, shopping center, and banks. There were “Title deeds. Loans. Fencing the land. Barbed wire…KCC. Wealth…The road. Trade. Progress” (268).
The people think that some of this progress is only temporary, or that the people who come here telling them how they are going to make money are sincere. Instead, Nyakinyua and others lose their land, bamboozled by the banks, and other businesses, like Abdulla and Wanja’s, pass out of their hands. What makes these things all the more difficult is that there is no one clear entity to blame: “whom would they fight now? The Government? The banks? KCO? The Party? Nderi? Yes who would they really fight?” (276.)
As they can do nothing, the changes come apace. Soon, there are “new owners, master-servants of bank power, money, and cunning” (280), Africans who reaped the benefits of this neo-colonial situation. Such people live in the best parts of town, for there are now several Ilmorogs. Poor people cluster into the shantytown, and as Abdulla says, “It’s the poor who are held responsible for the sin that is poverty and so they are punished for it by being sent to hell” (284).
Many critics have discussed Ngugi’s critiques of neocolonialism, seeing Petals of Blood as a damning indictment of former colonial powers’ continuing hold over Africa through investment, loans, and control of trade; all of this is aided by local elites. Because of this, the promises of independence do not come to fruition. Josef Gugler explains that Ngugi’s novel shows us “the emergence of a political regime that is authoritarian and corrupt, the rise of the robber barons, and the proletarianisation of the masses…Ngugi's rejection of those who gained advantage by joining the new faith or by betraying Mau Mau to the colonial masters, those who obtain riches through political and administrative office, and those who exploit women, leaves no room for ambiguity. They may have been good men once - the headmaster had promise, there was a time when the member of parliament was truly 'a man of the people' - but they have become the unscrupulous men of the new order. They act out the rules of political and economic arrangements inimical to the masses. They are the worms who have to be eliminated to build a different order.”
This situation entails a new sort of movement, one that Karega exemplifies. He becomes a trade unionist, knowing that it is, as Gbemisola Adeoti explains, “imperative…[to raise] consciousness by the masses of their conditions of deprivation,” and that there is a need to “build a mass organization to redress the prevailing social injustice.” Karega has a socialist/communist vision in which the workers rise up together, acknowledging their past, acting in the present, and working towards a better future. He is at this point the voice of Ngugi himself, calling out those Africans who exploit their own people and work for multi-national corporations. Christine Loflin suggests that Karega excoriates private ownership of land, which perpetuates its destruction, and while he has an “Afrocentric worldview” and “shares his community’s vision of the land belonging to the people as a whole,” he also “rejects the magical beliefs of the community in favor of a socialist approach which relies on labor and communal action rather than on ancestral ties to preserve the productiveness of the land.” Ngugi ends the novel on a hopeful note, with the canceled strike looking like it will be revived and Karega’s work with the union garnering widespread support.
