Humanist Elements

In Chapter 3, the narrator tells us Gatuĩria is aware "that the slavery of language is the slavery of the mind" (58). Though it seems rather contextual, this quote in fact expresses a central tenet of Ngũgĩ's text—that is, the language that we use and communicate in both shapes the world around us and defines our relationships with this world. In more succinct terms, language is a tool to build a world—to create culture, communicate and collaborate with others, and so on—but it is also a tool that allows us to define ourselves within these constructs. This is why, in Ngũgĩ's novel, it is so insidious when Kenyans refer to themselves first with their English names and later on with their Gĩkũyũ names: it reflects an erasure of culture and, as a result, an erasure of entire worlds and identities. This is also why Gatuĩria wants to find and construct the language for a truly national kind of music, and why he seeks inspiration in the local oral tales of tradition. Outside the world of the text, too, this is a powerful aesthetic claim that Ngũgĩ is well aware of, and this is a major reason that Ngũgĩ deploys local legends, allusions, and the like in service of telling his stories (see the points about indigeneity above).