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INTRODUCTION: CHRISTIANITY AND THE FORMATION OF NGŨgĨ WA THIONG'O'S LITERARY CONSCIOUSNESS

Although religion and literature are different disciplines, it is hard to imagine a culture in which literary expression does not draw upon religious icons. This is particularly so in Africa where religion is an all-inclusive philosophy that is hardly separated from the political, the cultural, the social, or the creative realms of society. As a result, any literary attempt to convey the character of African society will necessarily evoke religion's central role in the African worldview where life is governed by religious forces that can be placated, employed, and deployed in the service of humanity (Killam and Rowe 2000: 239). African ontology is dominated by three religious traditions that have been contending for the souls of the African people – the age-old traditional religions, Islam, and Christianity. The latter two waged systematic wars of attrition on traditional African religions and bribed Africans away from their belief systems with the lure of education, jobs, and political power. Religion became a battle-front for the control of Africans' cultural, political, and economic life. This reading of the encounter between African religions, Islam, and Christianity is at the heart of many African novels such as Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons (1973), which looks at both the Arab-Islamic and Euro-Christian agendas in Africa.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is one African writer who has seriously interrogated the role of Christianity in African culture during the period of colonisation and after. In this article, I examine the uses of religion – both traditional and Christian – in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's first two novels. What makes Ngũgĩ an interesting study is that his biography gives his literary praxis a complex dialectic with Kenya's postcolonial experience. As Simon Gikandi, one of his foremost critics has noted, ‘we cannot understand the relation between Ngũgĩ's texts and their contexts without a clear sense of the ways in which his life is wrapped up with the cultural history of Kenya since the 1920s, and how this history is, in turn, woven into his novels and plays’ (Gikandi, 2000: 2). Ngũgĩ was born in 1938 at Kamĩrĩĩthũ, Limuru. This was one of the areas that was most heavily evangelised by the Christian missionaries in the 1930s. Located in the ‘White Highlands’, so-called because it was one of the areas in Kenya where white farmers settled in large numbers, Ngũgĩ's home area suffered from the alienation of African ancestral lands by both the Christian missions and the European settlers (Pugliese 1995: 19–28). The reality of colonisation and in particular the contradiction inherent in colonialism and the teachings of Christianity became an important formative influence on Ngũgĩ's consciousness. The subsequent struggle for liberation from colonialism, which centred on the issues of land and freedom, was crucial to the formation of Ngũgĩ, the writer.

The novels discussed in this article turn on these central issues. Although the second to be published, The River Between (1965) was the first novel Ngũgĩ wrote. Set in the 1930s and 1940s, the novel deals with the conflict between two opposing religious factions: the Christians led by Joshua and the traditionalists led by Kabonyi. The action of the novel centres on Waiyaki, who tries to resolve the differences between the factions by attending the mission school while honouring the traditions of his ethnic group. The novel explores the issues fought over by the Gĩkũyũ community and the missionaries in the 1930s, particularly the issue of female circumcision. Waiyaki's failure to reconcile the tensions that tug at his being adumbrate the concerns and actions of the forces that lead up to the violent confrontation during the Mau Mau liberation war. Ngũgĩ's second novel, Weep Not Child, narrates the events leading the Mau Mau struggle in the 1950s as seen and experienced by Njoroge, Ngotho's youngest son. Njoroge harbours messianic dreams: he believes he has a mission to serve his people and lead them out of colonial bondage to their enlightenment in the independence period. This belief is inspired by the speeches of the Jomo Kenyatta, the nationalist leader, and fostered by Njoroge's faith in Christian-mission education. The novel narrates Njoroge's progressive disillusionment which culminates in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

Both novels take the form of the European Bildungsroman – a story of a young hero's coming of age and draw aesthetic and ideological inspiration not just from the history of colonialism and the anti-colonial struggle in Kenya but also from Ngũgĩ's personal experience of the events he narrates. He forges his autobiography into a succinct authorial ideology that emphasises how personal experience melds with history and politics to shape his practice as writer (Ngũgĩ, Secret Lives, preface). This experience includes his childhood home education in the rich cultural and literary tradition of his Gĩkũyũ people which imbued him with pride in his peasant culture (Ngũgĩ 1986: 10–13), and which was to become an important pillar of his literary praxis. Although Christianity which he formally encountered in 1946 when he joined the missionary-run Kamandũũra primary school threatened to displace the Gĩkũyũ indigenous gnosis from his consciousness, his pride in Gĩkũyũ culture was again restored when he moved to Manguo ‘Karĩng'a’ (independent) school in 1947. Started by Gĩkũyũ nationalists in revolt against missionary denigration of Gĩkũyũ culture following the fallout over the female circumcision controversy of 1929–30, the Karĩng'a schools and churches were founded on the principles of opposition to colonialism and the ethos of Gĩkũyũ egalitarian culture. They sought to neuter missionary influence on Gĩkũyũ culture and emphasised the liberation of the mind as a prerequisite to cultural and political liberation (Kaggia 1975: 74). At the Karĩng'a school, Ngũgĩ developed an awareness of colonialism as an oppressive force. Not surprisingly, following the declaration of emergency in 1952 as the anti-colonial struggle intensified, the colonial government, recognising the subversive role the independent schools played in shaping African consciousness, took them over and ‘placed them under District Education Boards chaired by Englishmen’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 11).

From the innovatory atmosphere of the independent school, Ngũgĩ proceeded to Alliance High school in 1955 as the anti-colonial struggle raged. The school was founded in 1926 by a conglomerate of Protestant missions to be a centre of higher learning in which a select group of African students drawn from every district in Kenya received an education based on Christian values and ‘modelled on British public school lines’ (Pugliese 1995: 28). From 1940–62 under its second Headmaster, Carey Francis of the Church Mission Society (CMS), the school became ‘the training ground for the future ruling elite’ (Pugliese 1995: 28) – a tiny nascent elite alienated from its culture and peasant origins (Sicherman 1995: 13). Owing to the foreign values on which it was grounded, Alliance instated a process in which the African students were mentally subverted. While he was in the third form, Ngũgĩ ‘succumbed to the rigid proselytizing Christian-colonial doctrinarism’ imposed by Carey Francis and finally converted to Christianity. He came to view his indigenous culture – ‘superstition and witchcraft … with derision’ and Christianity as ‘without doubt the greatest civilizing influence’ that would, in time, lead to the change of the old traditional order (Sicherman 1995: 36). The novels under review were written at Makerere, where Ngũgĩ studied for an honours degree in English from 1959 to 1964. His literary consciousness was marked by the formative influence of Gĩkũyũ social and cultural tradition, Western liberal thought, and Christianity. This explains the prominence of Christianity in the novels.

It was the general assumption of the Christianising missions that modernisation through Christianity and education would lead to the jettisoning of traditional values and the adoption of other, initially alien, practices in Africa. However the adoption of western practices and values by African elites was in most cases only ‘skin deep’ (Haynes 2005: 143). This was certainly the case for Ngũgĩ especially because he came to perceive a serious disconnect between the promises of missionary Christianity and the material conditions of his people under colonialism. This led to a gradual dissolution of his Christian faith which culminated in an open rejection of Christianity, which he charged was an ally of colonial oppressors (Ngũgĩ 1972: 31). Despite this, it is an indication of just how deeply Christianity was ingrained in Ngũgĩ's consciousness that it remains an important source of aesthetic inspiration not just in the novels discussed here but in his entire oeuvre. Literary critics, more recently John Anonby (2007), have examined the use of Biblical references and themes in Ngũgĩ's fictions. In this article, I make the argument that in Ngũgĩ's The River Between and Weep Not Child, Christianity and its sacral texts including the Bible are appropriated and reconfigured through the idiom of Gĩkũyũ traditional gnosis. With the exception of the Swahili people along the Kenyan coast who had a centuries-old written script, the Bible was for a long time the only literature available to most Kenyans in their local languages. Ngũgĩ's references to the Bible ensure that his putative audience would be in a position to follow his reconfiguration of Christianity and Biblical themes to tell the Kenyan story. The article examines the ways in which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o draws from his African heritage and melds it with Christianity to forge a new idiom of contestation with the colonial culture. In the process the English language, Christianity, and other elements of modernity including the Western notion of the ‘nation’ are appropriated and processed through the prism of Ngũgĩ's Gĩkũyũ peoples' traditional gnosis. I come to the conclusion that contrary to the assumption that the contact between Christianity and local African cultures always resulted in conflict and alienation, an examination of Ngũgĩ's novels written before his rejection of Christianity – The River Between and Weep Not Child – reveal an interesting inter-illumination between the codes of Gĩkũyũ cultural and literary tradition and those of Christianity. An appreciation of the resultant aesthetic hybridity is important if we are to understand Ngũgĩ's effort to forge a new grammar for his nationalist imagination – a grammar that in the 1960s sought to liberate African culture and literature itself from the hegemonising tendencies of European cultural and literary traditions. By re-appropriating Christianity, its idiom and sacral texts through the African notions of religiosity and in the context of the African peoples' struggles for cultural and political identity, Ngũgĩ spearheaded an aesthetic that enables the African writer to view the outside world through the prism of African culture.

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CHRISTIANITY AND THE SECULAR IMAGINATION IN THE RIVER BETWEEN AND WEEP NOT CHILD

In colonial Kenya, education and Christianisation went hand in hand. Owing to his educational background, Ngũgĩ became not just a Christian but one who was ‘highly cognizant of both the Old and New Testament Scriptures’ (Anonby 2007: 2). Although by 1970 Ngũgĩ had jettisoned Christianity as a faith (Ngũgĩ 1972: 31–6), he is a writer who is intimately familiar with the Scriptural motifs. However, coming of age as both a man and a writer in late colonial Kenya in the 1950s, his life like that of the many other members of his Gĩkũyũ community was greatly disrupted by the events leading up to the declaration of a State of Emergency in 1952 following the eruption of the Mau Mau liberation struggle that eventually led to the dismantling of colonial domination and Kenya's attainment of independence in 1963. The impact of this on Ngũgĩ's literary praxis has been an evolution of an increasingly didactic authorial ideology geared towards giving moral direction and vision to the struggles of an exploited people. In this context, the use of Biblical allusions does not necessarily imply sympathy with Christian beliefs. In fact perceiving a disconnect between missionary-Christian teachings and the material conditions of his people under colonial rule Ngũgĩ had already begun to question institutional Christianity by the time he wrote the novels under review (Gikandi 1987: 148–9). This awakened the nationalist ethos inculcated by the Karing'a independent school and explains the often satirical and subversive ways in which Christian references are deployed in Ngũgĩ's fictions.

The nationalist imperative is crucial to an understanding of the nuanced ways in which Ngũgĩ's The River Between and Weep Not Child interface with Christianity. Also significant is the backdrop of colonial destruction of African institutions against which the narratives unfold. His novels are essentially an attempt to reconstitute a ‘shattered community against all the pressures of the colonial system’ (Davidson 1978: 155). In doing this, Ngũgĩ like Achebe, who created a prototype of the African nationalist novel of the 1960s in Things Fall Apart, sought to validate an African gnosis and historiography that had been denigrated by colonialism. Ngũgĩ's The River Between begins with what Lovesey describes as ‘an almost ritualistic telling’ of Gĩkũyũ history, a ‘mythical’ oral history that conjures the richness of orature (Lovesey 2000: 29). This nationalistic impulse involves a critical engagement with Western epistemological systems like Christianity which came with colonialism. For the writer, new images and knowledge about Africa were ‘reconstructed not simply from what colonialism was attempting to repress, but also from the historical conditions colonialism had created’ (Ogude 1999: 1). Ngũgĩ's early novels up to A Grain of Wheat, his third, constitute what might be described as his nationalist trilogy. They are set in the historical moment where Gĩkũyũ/African and European cultures meet and grapple with each other in the highly asymmetrical relation of dominance and subordination characteristic of the colonial encounter.

The novels construct a discursive space of engagement where the clash between the contesting cultures can be negotiated and hopefully resolved. The process starts with the reconstruction of a new mythos that takes the form of a ‘return’ to the sources of ‘authenticity’ in African culture and history (Gikandi 1987: 156). Melding Christian references to elements of Gĩkũyũ traditional gnosis, Ngũgĩ gives literary expression to the voices of the African and marginalised peoples as they demand a hearing in the colonial – and in later novels – in the post-colonial public sphere. In the process, it becomes quite clear that the result of this collision is not necessarily conflict and alienation but an enriching inter-illumination that yields a new hybrid culture for the nation under reconstruction. In The River Between and Weep Not Child, in particular, this hybrid culture plays a crucial role in specifying what Ogude calls the ‘ideological lexicon of nation formation’ (1999: 1–2). Ngũgĩ uses a Western lingua franca and the form of the European modernist novel as his medium of aesthetic self-expression. Without disavowing the influence of these Western linguistic and aesthetic codes on Ngũgĩ's fiction, I argue that more fundamentally, Ngũgĩ uses the language of tradition, its aesthetic codes and sacral myths to imagine the emergence of the Kenyan nation in the interstitial space between tradition and modernity. The River Between makes frequent references to what it describes as ‘the language of the hills’ (TRB: 3), which the white man cannot speak (TRB: 7). At the centre of Ngũgĩ's nationalist imagination are two essentially religious myths. These myths are so recurrent in Ngũgĩ's writings that they have been described as the ‘icons of Ngũgĩ's narrative’ (Ogude 1999: 88–9). They include the sacral myth of origin of the Gĩkũyũ people and the ‘prophecy’ by the Gĩkũyũ seer, Mũgo wa Kĩbiro through which the entire pre-colonial history is reconstructed. According to the myth, Mũrungu (Gĩkũyũ God) told the original parents of the Gĩkũyũ people – Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi: ‘This land I give to you O man and woman. It is yours to till, you and your posterity’ (TRB: 2, 18). The foundational myth, a narrative that is passed from one generation to the next by word of mouth, stakes a sacred claim on the land. However as The River Between opens, the people's God-given right to the land is already under threat from colonialism. The coming of the white man had been foreseen by the prophet who had warned: ‘There shall come a people with clothes like butterflies’ (TRB: 19). He warns the people of the coming of the white man and the alienation of their lands but cautions restraint pointing out that the people cannot hope to fight the white man with a panga (machete) but must first learn his ‘secrets’. The prophet promises ‘salvation’ from colonial subjugation declaring: ‘Salvation shall come from the hills. From the same blood that flows in me, I say, a son shall arise. And his duty shall be to save the people’ (TRB: 20).

Historically, prophecy seems to acquire exigency at moments of crisis (Johnson and Anderson 1995: 13). Like the great Biblical prophets such as Isaiah, the Gĩkũyũ seer, Mũgo, is an oracle who speaks in such a moment of crisis – a moment that calls for radical social action. His prophecy is clad in a multi-voiced idiom. The Christian nuanced idiom of ‘salvation’ notwithstanding, Mũgo's language reflects the metaphoric richness of Gĩkũyũ egalitarian culture now threatened by foreign influence (clothes like butterflies) as well as the language of Gĩkũyũ traditional kinship and lineage ties (from the same blood). However, his prophetic persona and the cynicism with which the people receive his prophecy (we are told people did not believe him) vividly remind us of the Biblical John the Baptist, who similarly foretold of the coming of the saviour/messiah. The novel exhibits a hybrid aesthetic that seeks to meld the codes of Gĩkũyũ culture with those of Christianity – a Christianity reconfigured to suit Ngũgĩ's nationalistic purposes.

The River Between is set in the 1930s, a period when the Gĩkũyũ people were being intensely evangelised by European missions. This fact is captured in the novel in that the story turns on the historic conflict between the Gĩkũyũ and the missionaries over the female circumcision controversy of 1928–9. The Christian texture of the story is further underscored when we recall that the first draft of the novel was entitled The Black Messiah (Duerden 1964: 1–2), a title that refers to Waiyaki as the ‘saviour’ promised in Mũgo's prophecy and which clearly signals Ngũgĩ's subversive intentions towards Christianity and Biblical narrative. The Biblical narrative is reconfigured in such a way that Waiyaki, a black man, is transformed into a Christ-figure. References to the ‘The Black Messiah’ appeared several times in the first edition of the novel (Cook and Okenimpke 1997: 47–8), and although Ngũgĩ elided most of them, they still recur intermittently in the novel. As Lovesey (2000: 30) observed, ‘this identification of Waiyaki and Christ’ underscores the allegorical nature of the novel. Allegory is further enhanced when the novel equates the colonial dispossession of the Gĩkũyũ’s land with the Israelites' slavery in Egypt, and their pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem. This secular reconfiguration of Christianity raises a fundamental question which is particularly significant in a context where a people are oppressed. What does the Christian notion of salvation mean? As Anonby (2007: 2) asks, is the Biblical ‘Kingdom of God’ to be primarily apprehended in terms of individual experience, or is it realised as communal transformation? Ngũgĩ's answer to this question not just in the novels under review but in his entire writing collection is that a Christianity that puts emphasis on individual rather than communal ‘salvation’ would be irrelevant in Africa. This is a view he expresses cogently in his early collection of essays Homecoming which he describes as ‘an integral part of the fictional world’ of his nationalist novels (Ngũgĩ 1972: xv). Reflecting directly on the role of the church in culture and politics, Ngũgĩ denounces the other-worldly tendencies of Christianity in Africa. He proposes that the Church should learn ‘from the primitive communalism of the early Christian Church of Peter and also the communalism of the traditional African society’ (1972: 36). It is for this reason that in The River Between, Joshua the Christian priest who sees nothing of value in his peoples' way of life is depicted so negatively as a bigoted, unsympathetic, and repellent individual. Although his name means ‘saviour’, echoing the messianic motif, his authority is undermined by his uncompromising persona which alienates followers such as Kabonyi and leads him to lose both his daughters.

Ngũgĩ's call then is for a Christianity that is engaged with the day-to-day cultural, social, and political concerns of its adherents. In a situation where missionary Christianity sought to displace African traditions and replace them with a European-oriented Christianity, Ngũgĩ calls for a Christianity free from the trappings of Western culture and which is ready to dialogue with the traditions of its African followers. Indeed, it is within this authorial vision of a proactive Christian ideology that we may understand Ngũgĩ's reconfiguration of Christianity. Waiyaki's transformation into a Christ-figure, for instance, only finds meaning and relevance in the context of the nationalist struggle for identity and liberation from colonialism. If the 1930s was a period of intense evangelisation of the Gĩkũyũ it was also a period in which their nationalist sentiment was stirring. Since this is the historical context in which the ‘ancient’ prophecy is recalled in the novel, Lonsdale contends that Mũgo, the Gĩkũyũ prophet, had already been ‘assimilated into the Biblical tradition’ (Johnson and Anderson 1995: 243). I, however, think it is Mũgo's rootedness in Gĩkũyũ religiosity rather than in Christianity that gives him the timeless antiquity that Ngũgĩ exploits in his nationalist novels. The setting of the novel at a time of momentous social change and a time when the Gĩkũyũ way of life is threatened by Christianity and colonisation compel the people to recall the sacral prophecy as they strategise on how to face the external enemy. This suggests a link between Mũgo's prophecy and the regenerative politics of generational succession in Gĩkũyũ culture (Ituĩka) in which one generation handed over leadership to the next (Peterson 2004: 15). But new threats called not just for new leadership but also for new strategies of engagement with the enemy. The conflict between young Waiyaki, the saviour promised in the prophecy, and Kabonyi, the leader of the Kĩama (Council of Elders), is partly driven by the elderly Kabonyi's jealousy towards Waiyaki. It revolves around the identity of the saviour foretold in the ancient prophecy who, Kabonyi hopes, would be his son, Kamau. More fundamentally, there's a conflict over the interpretation of the prophecy and the strategies to face the colonial threat.

The literary recovery of the prophecy in the contested public sphere of colonial Kenya gives it a new agency. One of the essential features of prophecy is the extended conversation between prophets and their audiences down through the generations. Prophets do not monopolise the conversation but frequently have words put in their mouths (Johnson and Anderson 1995: 1). Mũgo's prophecy clarified the issue of strategy. As the people recalled, Mũgo had cautioned against hasty resistance and beseeched them to first learn the secrets of the white man. In so doing, it served the decidedly secular purpose of creating a knowledgeable political community by participating in contemporary political debates on how to counter the ‘white’ threat. The prophecy taught the people how to face the colonial present and promised a future beyond colonial subjugation. Inescapably, in the context of the 1930s, it was inevitable that Christian idioms and motifs should find their way into the prophet's language – an example of how people put words in their prophets' mouths. This is hardly surprising. The people wanted to recall Mũgo not as a prophet of confrontation but of reconciliation and accommodation. Their inspiration might have been Christian but it was also, more significantly, secular. It arose out of the peoples' own pragmatic appraisal of the political situation and the ‘enemy’ they are up against – the colonial machinery. Indeed, Mũgo's is a coded language that hides a political message behind an ostensibly Christian idiom. Since he is the last in the line of Mũgo, the prophet, Waiyaki who turns out to be the promised saviour takes on Mũgo's reconciliatory project. By biographical analogy, the fact that Waiyaki is Chege's only begotten son, so to speak, and the prophetic proclamation that heralds his arrival, Waiyaki is analogous of Christ. These Biblical motifs and allusions however have been reconfigured to serve a secular role. The reification of the Christian notion of messianism in the person of a black man highlights the ‘black’ aspect of Ngũgĩ's ideological consciousness which reflects his awareness of the black person's disadvantaged position in the postcolonial world. It is satirical of the conventional association of the saviour with whiteness and thus highly subversive of the discourses of Christianity and colonialist historiography in relation to the black persons' identity in the world.

In seeking to view Christianity and history through the prism of the black person, Ngũgĩ draws from an African gnosis and historiography to reconfigure Christianity while rewriting Kenyan history. For instance, the Gĩkũyũ nationalist Jomo Kenyatta who became first president of Kenya and who fascinated Ngũgĩ was famous for his fiery eyes. In the novel, Ngũgĩ draws attention to the steady gaze of Waiyaki's dreamy eyes (TRB: 6, 10). By this analogy, Waiyaki the Christ-figure becomes a nationalist who in order to fulfil his prophetic mission as decreed by the prophet must learn the ways of the white man. This is why Chege who is described as the ‘embodiment of the true Gĩkũyũ’ (TRB: 38), and speaking in a polyglot language full of Christian undertones sees no contradiction in sending young Waiyaki to the mission school: ‘Arise. Heed the prophecy. Go to the mission place. Learn the wisdom and all the secrets of the white man. But do not follow his vices. Be true to your people and the ancient rites’ (TRB: 20). Tradition is supposed to take precedence over the wisdom of the white man, including Christianity. To underscore this point, Waiyaki's anticipated exposure to the white man's education and Christianity is preceded by his initiation into the secrets of the tribe, its foundational and sacral myths and folklore, which significantly takes place at the sacred shrine (TRB: 38). It is also significant that when his family refuses to denounce female circumcision as demanded by the missionaries, Waiyaki becomes one of the boys who is expelled from Siriana mission school by the missionaries in retaliation. The conflicting demands made on Waiyaki to learn the white man's ways and remain loyal to tradition are the source of the conflict on which the narrative turns. While his expulsion from the mission school enhances the conflict between Gĩkũyũ culture and Christianity, I would argue that the real reason Waiyaki is not allowed so much colonial-missionary education is that it would alienate him from his cultural roots. Expulsion from Siriana opens the way for him to assume his prophetic mission. He remains essentially Gĩkũyũ while his elementary knowledge of the white man's ways acquired at the mission school makes him the natural leader of the reconciliatory project suggested in Mugo's prophecy. In this Waiyaki is quite unlike the elders, among them his own father and Kabonyi – the leader of the Kĩama (Council of Elders) – who are too rigidly set in the ways of tradition, and nor is he like Joshua, the fanatical Christian leader, who sees nothing positive in the ways of the ethnic group. He is rather a synergetic leader who appropriates elements of tradition and colonial modernity to espouse an ideology of passive, long-term resistance to colonialism. This explains his obsession with spreading education in the hills and the fact that though not a Christian himself, he does not find ‘the white man's religion … essentially bad’ (TRB: 141). Some aspects of Christianity such as the element of love and sacrifice appealed to him. As the narrator, obviously expressing Ngũgĩ's views, tells us in a significant passage:

I have argued that Ngũgĩ uses traditional sacral myths to imagine the emergence of the Kenyan nation. But as I have shown, this does not preclude the use of elements of colonial modernity such as Christianity. Ngũgĩ adapts Christian myths and sacral texts for his own uses (Robson 1979: 16). One of the problems with Christianity in Africa, Ngũgĩ has observed, is that it could not ‘separate the strictly Christian dogma or doctrine from the European scale of values, and from European customs’ (Ngũgĩ 1972: 31). Thus apart from using Gĩkũyũ tradition to imagine the Kenyan nation, Ngũgĩ also has the intention of reconciling Christianity to the traditions of his people by ‘washing’ it of the trappings of Western culture to leave only the eternal truth at the core of Christianity. However, the nationalist impetus to his fiction is central to this project as we see in the way he mimics and translates Christian sacral texts such as John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress and the Bible to write a political tale of Kenya's transition from colonialism to liberation. Through this aesthetic stratagem Ngũgĩ transmutes the Christian eschatological vision into earthly political concerns. Widely read in missionary schools, Pilgrims Progress was one of the most influential texts missionaries used to spread the gospel in the colonies. Its portability and simple linear style made it more authoritative and less theologically problematic than the multiple narratives of the life of Christ in the gospels. Like many African Christians before him (Hofmeyr 2004: 7), Ngũgĩ replicates Bunyan's simple linear style plot in his novels and reconfigures Bunyanesque allegories to write an African story of the pilgrimage through the trials of colonial bondage and the hope for eventual ‘salvation’. Bunyan's City of Bondage alludes to the colonial state and the Celestial City becomes the envisioned Kenyan nation.

In an attempt to de-ideologise the Christian discourse in the contested public sphere of colonial Kenya and make it coincident with his peoples' aspirations, Biblical tropes are imbued with new meanings. The notion of messianism captures the nationalist dream of liberation from colonial oppression. This is in fact the meaning of the multi-voiced language Mũgo uses in the prophecy. ‘Salvation’ in the prophetic pronouncement suggests political liberation and demands that Waiyaki take up a political role – a point he woefully misses. This puts him out of sync with the aspirations of the people for ‘freedom now’ as advocated by the Kĩama. His obsessive promotion of education which he sees rather naively as offering the only ‘salvation’ from the problems of foreign subjugation becomes his undoing. Egged on by Kabonyi and the Kĩama, the people reject Waiyaki who significantly is accused of transgressing the sacred oaths of his community by loving the uncircumcised Nyambura, the daughter of Joshua, the Christian priest. These oaths play a crucial social role of binding the individual to a communal project.

However, as a product of missionary education and Christianity, Waiyaki has internalised some ethos of Western individualism which makes it difficult to subordinate his individual will to the demands of a communal polis that has its own ancient rules of belonging. Thus despite his father's exhortation to remain true to the ways of his ethnic group, he is not a traditional man in an essentialist sense. The relationship with Nyambura is allegorical of the eventual reconciliation and reunification of the two feuding ridges, Kameno (the home of the traditionalists) and Makũyũ (the home of the Christian converts), and shows how Waiyaki tries to advance his reconciliatory messianic mission by moulding a new culture out of aspects of tradition and those of modernity – education and Christianity. In fact he, Nyambura, and her sister Mũthoni, who despite being a Christian dies in a botched circumcision, represent a youthful generation that pays dearly for trying to synthesise tradition and Christianity. For them, the new national culture must out of necessity be syncretic and hybrid. In defying her father and opting for circumcision, Mũthoni, for instance, embraces a reconfigured tradition that also includes Christianity. Her vision of the way out of the confusion of values engendered by colonial modernity is expressed in a message to her sister, significantly passed through Waiyaki, from her deathbed: ‘Tell Nyambura I see Jesus…I am still a Christian, see a Christian in the tribe … Look I am a woman and will grow big and healthy in the tribe’ (TRB: 12). Though she has gone against the teachings of the missionaries, Mũthoni does not consider that she has violated her personal faith in Christ. Rather, she has melded Christianity and tradition in her being to emerge a fuller person.

If The River Between foreshadows and clarifies the issues fought over between the colonialists and the Gĩkũyũ nationalists from the 1930s all the way to the 1950s, Weep Not Child narrates the eruption of this struggle into the Mau Mau war of liberation in the 1950s. The events are narrated from the perspective of a young boy, Njoroge, as he comes of age during the emergency declared by the British on 20 October 1952 following the outbreak of the armed resistance. His life unfolds against a complex pattern of relationships that affect the tragic outcome of the novel. His father, Ngotho, served the British in First World War but now works as a mũhoi (squater) on his own hereditary land, now owned by Howlands, the white settler. His elder brother, who fought for the British in the Second World War and witnessed his brother, Kamau, killed, comes back to a life of dispossession. However, sheltered in mission schools and given his youthful naivety, Njoroge is in ignorance of the harsh realities of colonial subjugation. Like Waiyaki, Njoroge has messianic ambitions centred on the acquisition of education. He believes education would in the end enable him to ‘save’ his family from the travails of poverty and dispossession. The novel draws from Ngũgĩ's experience of the emergency and there are striking parallels between his life and that of his fictional character (Sander and Munro 2006: 50–1). It is apparent that Ngũgĩ's experience in mission schools and his Christianity are reflected in his characterisation of Njoroge. The young protagonist sincerely believes in ‘the righteousness of God’ and spends long hours in the chapel where ‘it was possible to meet with God’ (WNC: 94, 108). Njoroge's honest faith in Christianity is shattered when he is picked up by the colonial police and falsely accused of taking the Mau Mau oath. He is expelled from school as a result leading to the destruction of his messianic dreams. This ushers him into ‘a different world from that he had believed himself living in’ (WNC: 120), and marks the beginning of the loss of his Christian faith (WNC: 121). The issue here relates to the notion of individual salvation which, as we have seen, Ngũgĩ believes is not meaningful in a situation where a people are oppressed. What happens to Njoroge compels him to confront his ‘troubled relationship with the culture of colonialism’ (Gikandi 2000: 87). Salvation and education – which Njoroge initially believed to be liberatory – are discredited as false illusions that would not protect one from colonial violence. Although Ngũgĩ is anxious that we should empathise with Njoroge, he is also keen to deconstruct his hero as a ‘visionary and dreamer living in a world of illusions’ (Palmer 1984: 4), illusions that revolve around his blind faith in education and missionary Christianity.

In drawing Njoroge's character, he mines from his personal experience of growing up during the emergency while sheltered in missionary schools. Kenyan history retains its place as an important point of reference and focal point in the novel. The Mau Mau Uprising of the 1950s was not only crucial in Kenya's history but in Ngũgĩ's development as a writer as well (Anonby 2007: 45). These multiple influences shape the texture of the novel. While the myth of origin, Mũgo's prophecy and Christianity remain important sources of aesthetic and ideological inspiration, the emergency situation calls for a review of the strategies of engagement with the colonial state. I have argued that the myth of origin envisioned resistance to colonialism at some point in the future as a means of reinstating the peoples' rights to their ancestral land bequeathed to them by God as recorded in the myth of origin. Hearkening to the politics of generational transfer of power among the Gĩkũyũ (ituika), the resistance in Weep Not Child unfolds simultaneously as a struggle against colonialism and also an epistemological conflict between the older and younger generation over the exact meaning of the ancient prophecy. This conflict mimics the conflict over the meaning of Messianism and salvation in The River Between. In Weep Not Child, we consequently see the younger generation who constitute the combatants in this struggle exhibit an irreverent attitude towards the prophecy as when Boro declares ‘to hell with the prophecy’ (WNC: 27). Boro, Njoroge's elder brother, has just returned from fighting for the British in the Second World War. His family's dispossession leads him to question his father's continued faith in the prophecy and its promise of salvation. This does not mean, however, that he essentially repudiates the prophecy. What he is opposed to is the failure by the elders to realise that the prophecy also called for proactive action to change the oppressive situation. It is this realisation that leads Boro, and many others, to take to the forest to fight the colonial regime.

In essence, Weep Not Child mimics and revises The River Between. It does this without negating the icons of Ngũgĩ's narrative – the myth of origin and the prophecy – through which pre-colonial history is recouped. This ‘mythic dimension’ as Lovesey calls it provides the background against which the Biblical narrative, Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress, the entire discourse of Christianity, are reconstructed to contest missionary Christianity and colonial culture (Lovesey 2000: 34). We see this in Ngotho's allegorical tale in which colonial culture including Christianity is countermanded by the religious myth of origins:

Another important aspect of mimicry and revisioning of Christian discourse in Weep Not Child is the novel's construction of ‘Blackness’ as an ontological and epistemological category that stands in contradistinction to whiteness and operates outside colonial culture and historiography (WNC: 8, 51, 53, 57, 59, 60, 70, 72, 97). The contrasting mythos of ‘Blackness’ and ‘Whiteness’ capture the Manichaeism of the colonial world. Blackness has an obvious dialectic with the notion of a Black Messiah and those of the secret language of the hills which in The River Between make the colonised space an unknowable sphere for the white man. Although Ngũgĩ elided many of the initial references to the ‘Black Messiah’ in The River Between, the later novel demonstrates complex handling and restructuring of Biblical tradition. For instance, the messianic figure is reconfigured as a ‘Black Moses’. This interfaces with his persona as a proactive anti-colonial nationalist especially as he is directly identified with Jomo Kenyatta, the Kenyan nationalist leader, who went on to become the first president of independent Kenya. These analogous associations cast the colonial state as Egypt and Jomo (Kenyatta) as the Kenyan Moses who goes to Pharaoh with the demand to ‘let my people go’ (WNC: 58). This establishes a particularly important link between current Kenyan struggles and the Biblical narrative. Through Njoroge's young consciousness Weep Not Child reads the Biblical story of the Israelites’ plight in Egypt as a narrative of the Gĩkũyũ’s people's predicament under colonialism (WNC: 49). It is important to remember that Ngũgĩ's narrative of the Gĩkũyũ people has its roots in the creation stories of the ethnic group which have been passed down through the generations.

Ngũgĩ's reconfiguration of Christianity and its sacral texts in both The River Between and Weep Not Child, I have argued, is executed through the language of Gĩkũyũ tradition and its cultural institutions. The result is a syncretic culture that prefigures the hybrid culture of the Kenyan nation imagined to emerge in the interstitial space between tradition and modernity. Many critics assume that the question of language became important for Ngũgĩ only in the later part of his career when he started writing in Gĩkũyũ. However, Ngũgĩ's attempts to reshape the English language through nuances of Gĩkũyũ, his re-making not just of English but also of Biblical language, suggest that issues of language and the representation of culture have always been at the fore of his literary consciousness. This is reflected in The River Between which he prefaces with a note in which he promises that the ‘the form of Gikuyu is used correctly for the people and language of the Kikuyu area’ (See: paratext). While this signals the centrality of Gĩkũyũ language, its cultural and aesthetic codes as the primary frames of reference, it is an indicator that anxieties about the efficacy of the English language haunted the author long before he made the decision to jettison English. In a sense, his recourse to the language of tradition in his earliest novels presages his famous rejection of English. I have shown how the English language has been reshaped through the language of Christianity and Gĩkũyũ tradition to represent the Kenyan nationalist struggle against colonial culture. In taking advantage of the dynamic inter-illumination that results from the melding of Christianity and Gĩkũyũ traditional gnosis, Ngũgĩ shows himself a writer without any essentialist tendencies. In a perfect display of his dual heritage as a child of the two worlds in contestation, Ngũgĩ deploys the same pragmatic stratagem in the way he appropriates modernist discourses, such as that of nationalism, to remake Gĩkũyũ language and make an authentic and liberatory narrative of Gĩkũyũ nationalism.

As Ngotho explains to his children how he came to be a mũhoi (squatter) on land that previously belonged to his ancestors (WNC: 26), we realise the word has a different meaning than its ordinary meaning in the Gĩkũyũ language. In the new conditions engendered by colonialism, it refers to Ngotho's ‘dispossessed’ subjectivity in which as a ‘squatter’ he lives in an unequal master-servant relationship with Howlands, the colonial settler. While the English word ‘squatter’ may well capture this relationship, the untranslated mũhoi reflects the ways in which the new colonial dispensation infuses old Gĩkũyũ words with new meanings. As Peterson (2004: 12) shows, Gĩkũyũ precolonial class analysis ‘served the partisan interests of the rich men by making their wealth seem a natural reward for hard work’. However, there were mechanisms through which this analysis was argued with and bargained over. The effect was that the untranslated Gĩkũyũ word mũhoi rings with echoes of precolonial debates over class as the poor strove to extract concessions and largesse from the rich, resulting in the forging of a range of clientele relationships. The verb Hoya, from which Mũhoi is derived, described one such relationship. Hoya ties were consultative relationships contracted between equals devoid of the hierarchical power relationships suggested by the English term ‘squatter’. The Gĩkũyũ word implies a relationship that is forged out of mutual considerations. It includes in its semantic field synonyms ranging from ‘consult’, ‘request’, ‘ask for’, and even ‘demand’. By insisting on using the untranslated mũhoi, Ngũgĩ is keen to recover this vocabulary of argumentation as a strategy of encouraging his readers to envision social change. If we read mũhoi in its social-cultural context, we appreciate that despite the ravages of colonialism it restores some agency to Ngotho. This is because if he were in a relationship of abject dependency on Howlands, the appropriate Gĩkũyũ term for him would be ndungata (dependant, servant, slave). It is this agency, the knowledge that he nurtures the land at the behest of Mũrungu (God) who bequeathed the land to the Gĩkũyũ, that explains Ngotho's spiritual commitment to the alienated land:

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CONCLUSION

Since he started writing in the late 1950s, Ngũgĩ's authorial ideology – his apprehension of Kenya's and Africa's postcolonial condition – has undergone tremendous transformation. He started off as a fairly liberal writer who was convinced that it was possible to forge a national culture out of the best elements of European modernity such as Christianity and education. His long and often agonised search for an aesthetic that might best represent Africa's postcolonial realities has led him, in subsequent writings, to question some of his earlier cultural assumptions. However, while his authorial stances towards Christianity and education have changed over the years as he became ideologically more radical, his aesthetic praxis has remained surprisingly consistent. Reconfiguring Christianity and its sacral texts such as the Bible and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and using them for a political argumentation with the culture of colonialism and, later, that of neo-colonialism is one of the most consistent aspects of Ngũgĩ's aesthetic strategy. He continues to mine Christianity for tropes, metaphors, symbols, and an idiom of representation. This is a distinctive characteristic of the Ngũgĩ's entire literary oeuvre. Thus although his early novels, The River Between and Weep Not Child, are separated from his more recent works by almost four decades, their aesthetic appropriation of Christianity and Biblical narrative presage a mode of representation that is one of the most noticeable hallmarks of Ngũgĩ's literary style. While the proliferation of untranslated Gĩkũyũ lexical items in his English texts is a sign of a writer who perhaps thought in Gĩkũyũ and wrote in English, they also represent a strategy through which Ngũgĩ molests the Western lingua franca – English. It is worth noting these elements, the most nuanced of which find meaning in Gĩkũyũ gnosis, valourise the importance of the Gĩkũyũ tradition as an important site in which both the English language and Christianity are remade to mediate a truly African worldview.