Mwaũra's Matatũ Matama Matamu Model T Ford, Registration Number MMM 333
Towards the beginning of the novel, just after Warĩĩnga decides to board Mwaũra's Matatũ, we get a description of the vehicle:
It looked as if Mwaũra’s Matatũ Matata Matamu Model T Ford, registration number MMM 333, was the very first motor vehicle to have been made on Earth. The engine moaned and screamed like several hundred dented axes being ground simultaneously. The car’s body shook like a reed in the wind. The whole vehicle waddled along the road like a duck up a mountain.
In the morning, before starting, the matatũ gave spectators a wonderful treat. The engine would growl, then cough as if a piece of metal were stuck in its throat, then it rasped as if it had asthma. At such times Mwaũra would open the bonnet dramatically, poke here and there, touch this wire and that one, then shut the bonnet equally dramatically before returning to the steering wheel. He would gently press the accelerator with his right foot, and the engine would start groaning as if its belly were being massaged. (29)
This imagery is significant and masterful for many reasons. First, as Namwali Serpell notes in the text's introduction, each detail describing the vehicle here is rooted in the real and the material (i.e., the sound of axes, the sound of a reed, the coughing noise), but that, in aggregate, these details produce a surreal or absurd effect. This is a key narrative technique of Ngũgĩ's. Moreover, note the absurdity in the naming of the vehicle and the excess of M's. This detail seems to merely be a surface-level joke at first, but upon closer examination, one may realize that M is the 13th letter of the alphabet—the letter in the complete middle, just as Mwaũra himself claims to be a middle-of-the-road observer of the conflict between good and evil. Moreover, the 333 serial number of the car evokes 666, the number of the beast. The number being halved here also implies a kind of half effort, and it echoes Mwaũra’s claim that he can take one both to the Devil and to God's kingdom with equal effort.
The Devil's Feast: The Scene
Just after the emcee gives the introductory speech at the Devil's Feast, Warĩĩnga looks around her at the scene in the "cave," which in reality is a very fine home:
It was certainly a feast. The order of the day was drink your fill; indulge yourself by scattering bank notes about. It was an arrangement that pleased most of the competitors, for now everyone had a chance to display his wealth. When it was their turn, many of the guests would order rounds of drinks in measures that were generous—large bottles of whisky, vodka, brandy and gin, or whole cases of beer for each person. Such people would have bitten their lips in anger had they heard that at the table which they occupied there was someone who was ordering hard drink in tots or single bottles of beer. To order single bottles of beer or meager tots of liquor, it was generally agreed, was the drinking style of the wretched.
Many of them had armed themselves with young women—sugar girls—who wore very expensive jewelry, like pearl and ruby necklaces around their necks or silver and gold rings on their fingers. It looked as if the women in the cave had dressed for a fashion parade, for a display of valuable stones. For their girlfriends the men ordered nothing but champagne, bragging: "Let the champagne foam and flow like the Rũirũ River. If we can’t drink it all, we’ll bathe in it." (100)
Here, note the imagery of excess and waste, as well as the general showiness and competitive quality to the wealth being displayed at the feast. Also important is the presence and focus on sugar girls, who are dehumanized and seen as yet another extension of the men's property and wealth, a viewpoint that only becomes more explicit when one's sugar relationships are codified in the tournament rules as something that competitors have to address. In sum, the scene is decadent but it is also tense, even among robbers and thieves. This, too, only becomes more clear as the robbers break up into clans and factions over the course of the tournament.
The Devil's Feast: The Competitors
At the Devil's Feast, the imagery surrounding the competitors is strange and grotesque. To mention one of just two examples, note how, when Gĩtutu wa Gataangũrũ takes the stage, he is described as appearing like "his belly had absorbed all his limbs and all the organs of his body" (108). Moreover, his head is described as being "shrunk[en] to the size of a fist" (108). As another example, consider how Nditika wa Ngũũnji is described as wearing a suit with "tails cut in the shape of the wings of the big green and blue flies that are normally found in pit latrines or among rotting rubbish" (199). Such imagery relates the competitors at the Devil's Feast to demonic entities or mutated abominations of nature, which in turn solidifies readers' sympathies with Marxism and against them.
Njeruca and Nakuru: A Tale of Two Cities
Another stunning example of imagery in the novel comes in the contrasting descriptions of rich and poor communities. When Gatuĩria and Warĩĩnga go to get lunch in Njeruca, for example, he asks her what Njeruca looks like, and Warĩĩnga replies spitefully:
How can you ask that, as if you were a foreigner in Kenya? Have you never visited the slum areas of Nairobi to see for yourself the amazing sight of endless armies of fleas and bedbugs marching up and down the walls. or the sickening, undrained ditches, full of brackish water, shit and urine, the naked children swimming in those very ditches? A slum is a slum. Here in Njeruca we don’t have any drainage. Human shit and urine and the carcases of dead dogs and cats—all these make the area smell as if it were nothing but pure putrefaction. Add to this decay the smoke of dangerous gases from the industrial area—all these are blown toward Njeruca by the wind—and add too the fact that all the rubbish and waste from the factories is deposited there, and you’ll see why I compare Njeruca with Hell. To bury a people in a hole full of fleas, lice, bedbugs—what hell could be worse than that? (146).
The conditions here are incredibly destitute, especially considering that the dangers are not just sanitary, but also environmental (in the form of industrial gases) and perhaps even religious (note Warĩĩnga's equation of Njeruca with Hell). This is especially disheartening when one compares the environment of a place like Njeruca with a place like Gatuĩria's home in Nakuru:
When Gatuĩria and Warĩĩnga walked into the courtyard, they were met by servants in uniform: striped trousers, dark tail coats, top hats and white gloves. Gatuĩria and Warĩĩnga were escorted toward a special room, where Gatuĩria’s father, together with a select inner circle of elders, was waiting to receive them. Things had been organized so that Gatuĩria’s father would be the first to receive his son’s bride, would be the first to touch her. The owner of the homestead had to be the first to receive the bride of his only son, according to modern tradition.
[...]
The men had on dark suits, white frilled shirts and bow ties. The women wore very expensive clothes of different colors. But they all wore hats and white gloves.
On the outer edges stood foreign guests and tourists, dressed very lightly for a sunny day and bemusedly watching the drama unfolding before them as if they were studying the ridiculous products of their own civilizing missions.[...]
A red carpet had been laid at the entrance to the special room. On the floor of the special room was green carpet four inches thick. From the ceiling hung chandeliers like bunches of glass fruit. (282-283)
Here, the details much resemble the details of the home that hosted the Devil's Feast, a congruity that is not without reason (since Gatuĩria’s father is of the class of tycoons that thieves from and exploits common people). The contrast between wealthy and poor home imagery in the novel is thus particularly clear and powerful insofar as it illustrates the extent and severity of the plight faced by the Kenyan poor.
