Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and African History: The Second Writing Back in the Later Novels

If in the early novels Ngugi writes back to Europe to address the misrepresentation of Kenya’s history, whose artistic voice bears a collective standpoint of Africa, speaking back to the west or Europe, it is pertinent to note that this nationalistic commitment in literature has also persevered in the later novels and this is what this paper is concerned about. Its aim is to explore the contrasting resonance between Ngugi’s writing back in the early and the later novels. The later novels are <i>Petals of Blood </i>[1977],<i> Devil on the Cross</i> [1980] and <i>Matigari</i> [1987]. It demonstrates that while in the early novels Ngugi’s target addressee are the European literary writers and their history counterparts, whom he has indicted for misrepresenting Africa’s history, particularly through the medium of fiction, drama and history, in the later novels, the focus shifts and the target addressee have altered either. In these novels, he writes back to address the distortional fallacy of Africa’s history by the post-independent European educationists, the post- independent elites and historians trained by the neo-colonialists, underpinned by the post-independent government of Kenya to write another version of the country’s history. The paper has employed postcolonial theory as its critical paradigm.