Summary
Chapter 1
As the novel begins, our narrator—a village storyteller and Gĩcaanndĩ player from the fictional, rural outpost of Ilmorog, Kenya—tells us that the story to come is considered by many to be part of a shameful history, while others consider it to be a sorrowful reminder of the truth of their people. Nonetheless, the narrator tells us, he will recount the story for instructional purposes—that is, so that we may learn from the mistakes of its characters. Additionally, he tells us that this story also has religious consequences—that we as an audience should crucify the Devil, not allowing his acolytes to remove him from the cross and rebuild Hell on Earth even after he has been exposed and punished.
Despite the clear importance of the story he has to tell, our narrator informs us that he was hesitant to tell the story, since it is a story that is not for outsiders, one reserved only for the inhabitants of Ilmorog. However, he also recounts that the mother of Warĩĩnga, one of the central characters in the story, has specifically asked him to tell the story so that all that was hidden can be exposed once again. Still, even after this plea for his story, the narrator refuses to divulge his prophetic tale, but the whole of Ilmorog seems to eventually come to him and ask for this story. Eventually, after being beset by uncertainty, the narrator is visited by the divine, who bears him up to a rooftop and speaks to him about the necessity of telling his story. Finally consenting, the narrator accepts his responsibility as a storyteller, prepares himself to tell the story by covering himself in ashes, and begins to speak of our protagonist—Jacinta Warĩĩnga—reasoning that "the voice of the people is the voice of God" (3).
Chapter 2
The storyteller begins the story with the Devil appearing to Warĩĩnga on a golf course in Ilmorog, but before he can even get into his tale, he stops himself, saying that, in truth, Warĩĩnga's story and misfortunes began long before that visit from the Devil. He says that Warĩĩnga worked as a secretary for the Champion Construction Company in Nairobi, but eventually, her boss, Boss Kĩhara, tried to proposition her. When she refused, her boss fired her; moreover, her college-aged lover, John Kimwana, broke up with her immediately after under the suspicion that she had not in fact rejected Boss Kĩhara's advances. Even worse, after her lover and boss both dispensed with her, her landlord kicked her out with the assistance of some rude thugs. As they throw Warĩĩnga out, they toss her a piece of paper, identifying themselves as the "Devil's Angels," a group of "Private Businessmen." Their note also threatens to kill Warĩĩnga if she brings this matter to the attention of the police.
Dejected and defeated, Warĩĩnga opts to leave Nairobi and return home to her parents in Ilmorog. She thinks to herself that perhaps all of her issues are the result of her appearance. Warĩĩnga feels that she is too black, so she applies whitening creams. She thinks her hair texture is too curly, so she straightens and damages it with iron combs. She even hates her teeth, which she feels are not white enough. Even so, the narrator tells us that, in truth, Warĩĩnga is one of the most beautiful Black women alive. When self-possessed, Warĩĩnga can disarm anyone with a look or word, but unfortunately, she is very self-doubtful, often rushing to copy the styles of other people in a way that does not suit her.
Warĩĩnga finds herself inexplicably at the Kaka Hotel bus stop in Nairobi, and as a bus approaches, her burden of self-pity and sorrow makes her almost step in front of a bus to kill herself. She suddenly hears in her head that this is not her time to die, and this voice also reminds her that she has already tried to kill herself in the past. Warĩĩnga cannot see the speaker of this voice, and she is deeply scared, almost fainting in response. Just then, however, someone saves Warĩĩnga from falling and props her up against a building, though she is not in any condition to even note who it is that has saved her. Warĩĩnga then faints and, as she does so, is visited by one of her recurring nightmares from her childhood.
Warĩĩnga's nightmare is a grotesque and terrifying vision of the Devil, dressed in a silk suit, being led to a cross by the vindictive peasants of the world, clothed in rags. They crucify the Devil, telling him that they have seen right through all of his trickery and deceit and that they shall never again allow him to build Hell on Earth for them and their descendants. After three days, however, others dressed in suits and ties come down and remove the Devil from the cross in secret. In exchange, the Devil gives them some of his robes of cunning and deceit. They then walk towards Warĩĩnga as a group, laughing at her.
Warĩĩnga comes to from her dream and is still near the Kaka Hotel bus stop. The stranger who has saved her tells her that he has also saved her handbag, which he returns to her, and that he has been waiting by her side for her to wake up. The stranger tells her that he understands why she would be weary of Nairobi and weak enough to faint, and he mentions that the corruption and neocolonial exploitation of the city is enough to make anyone bitter, angry, and sad. He reflects with Warĩĩnga on where such dubious national practices could possibly be leading the future of Kenya, and Warĩĩnga finds that, though she is a bit confused by the man's arcane language, he is expressing a sentiment that she herself has felt. As a demonstration of just how much she agrees with the stranger, she then tells him the story of her life—or, as she says, a life similar to her own.
She begins the story of a random girl in Nairobi, one she names Kareendi. She says that Kareendi became pregnant while still in school and, regardless of who the father was, received no help from him. Kareendi lashed out at her former lover and decided to have the baby herself, placing the burden of raising it on the shoulders of her parents. Kareendi then enrolled in secretarial school to get a job, but she was unable to find a potential boss who was not only interested in sleeping with her. Eventually, she finds Boss Kĩhara, who employs her and appears to be an upstanding, married man who is involved in the church. She begins work for him, and, even better, finds a young lover that Warĩĩnga compares to the character Kamoongonye from a Gĩkũyũ ballad (about a woman who has to choose between Waigoko, a rich old man, and Kamoongonye, a young and passionate lover). Eventually, however, Kareendi's luck sours when Boss Kĩhara starts to make advances on her. He offers to be her sugar daddy, buying her whatever she wants in exchange for sexual favors, but Kareendi refuses. He even uses the Kamoongonye story in his favor to say that Waigoko's old, hairy chest has been shaved by money. Still, Kareendi refuses and mentions the fact that Boss Kĩhara is a church-man. Kĩhara only responds with a corruption of scripture, saying that the Bible tells us "Ask, and it shall be given you" (19).
After rebuffing her boss again more forcefully and saying she will complain if he does not relent, Kĩhara lets up on Kareendi and says that he was only joking. Even so, when Kareendi is late to work one day, he fires her on the spot and says that her heart is not in her work. When she complains of this to her Kamoongonye, however, he tells her that he suspects she actually did not resist Kĩhara, and is only saying that she resisted now to save face. Kareendi's lover abandons her, and she is back where she started. Everything in her life seems to be inverted, and she does not know how to proceed. Warĩĩnga then closes her story of Kareendi by saying that this situation is that of every woman in Kenya—that, as soon as they are born, they are entirely buried and dead to the world except for their sexual parts.
When Warĩĩnga finishes her story, the stranger tells her that he has been moved immensely. He asks her where she is going, and directs her to the Nyamakĩma bus stop when he finds out that she would like to go to Ilmorog. Just as they are about to part, however, the stranger calls out to Warĩĩnga, handing her a card and telling her that if she would like to learn about the conditions that breed situations like Kareendi's, that she should go to the feast advertised on the card. Warĩĩnga then goes to Nyamakĩma and begins to wait for a matatũ (a type of private bus used widely in Kenya for transport). While she waits, she looks at the card and sees that it is an advert for the "Devil's Feast," a competition in modern theft and robbery allegedly sponsored by the Devil himself, to be held in Ilmorog (25). Warĩĩnga feels both wounded and elated by the prospect of the Devil's Feast, which reminds her of something from one of her dreams. As the chapter ends, Warĩĩnga sits in disbelief and thinks of the strange miracle of the feast.
Analysis
In these brief opening chapters, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o sets the stage both thematically and narratively for the novel as a whole. In particular, in these opening chapters, we already begin to see the importance to Ngũgĩ's story of feminism and gender critique, of the search towards indigenous Kenyan and indigenous African frames for self-evaluation and self-possession, dualities of self and the world that surrounds us, of neocolonialism and oppression of Kenyans by other Kenyans, of the divine, and of the power of social and political collectives. Formally and narratively, these themes are evoked most clearly by an investment in nested narratives (i.e., stories within a story), the heavy prevalence of local adages and idioms, repetitions in language, and allusions to the local folklore of the Gĩkũyũ language.
In the novel's opening, for example, Ngũgĩ uses a frame story—that is, he places the story of the Gĩcaanndĩ player as an introduction to the story of Warĩĩnga—in order to show us that we readers are, surprisingly, outsiders to what is to come. We need to pass through the prophetic mouth of the storyteller and into the local lore of Ilmorog if we are to understand the story at all, and importantly, the storyteller informs us that he is reluctant to even allow us this. Already then, we have a sense of community and locale's importance to Ngũgĩ. Moreover, however, based on the fact that it is the pleas of the masses that spur our narrator to divine revelation, we can also see here the importance that Ngũgĩ places in the collective—specifically, a collective of peasants or workers. As a Marxist, it is one of Ngũgĩ's central hopes or goals that the collective of all workers will redeem the corrupted, bourgeois soul of his country, so the fact that our storyteller finds God in the collective of his village is no coincidence. As Ngũgĩ himself tells us through this narrator, "the voice of the people is the voice of God" (3).
This emphasis on the personal and on the human nature of connection through storytelling then serves as a fitting tie-in to the beginning of Chapter 2, where the narrator stalls after a false start to the story of Jacinta Warĩĩnga that constitutes the majority of the novel. Just as the fate of a country can rest in the hands of a collective, so too can the direction of a story rest in the mouth and mind of one person. After this small crack appears in the narrative, however, the narrator wastes no time in acquainting us intimately with Warĩĩnga's innermost thoughts and most personal experiences. Before we even get to know her well, however, we have already been shown the ways in which her womanhood has made her a victim, both as a result of her resilience (in the case of rebuffing Boss Kĩhara) and her vulnerability (in the case of telling John Kimwana about her boss). Just as this comes to the fore, however, Ngũgĩ already shifts our focus to corruption in Kenya and the ways that evil-hearted people worship at the altar of money, rather than God. He even goes so far as to make this confusing corruption explicit by naming the thugs who evict Warĩĩnga the "Devil's Angels." This, too, then introduces the central devices of antithesis and duality in the text. In things like the Devil's Angels, the contrast between Boss Kĩhara and John Kimwana, and the contrast between Blackness and whiteness which follow from Warĩĩnga's examination of her own appearance, we see that Ngũgĩ advances his text in a dialectical fashion, more or less embodying in a literary context the kind of Marxist historical view he takes more broadly. In this novel, opposites attract, repel, and interact in complex ways to produce the real state of affairs for Ngũgĩ's characters, themselves trapped in a dualistic space that straddles reality and fantasy (or dreams).
This coexistence of dreams and reality is then mirrored importantly in the text in two ways. First, there is Ngũgĩ's description of Warĩĩnga's actual dream, which addresses the ways in which human followers of the Devil seek to reinstate him on Earth even after he has been called out by the masses. Of course, in terms of its meaning, this echoes the ways in which class traitors might stifle the revolution of the masses in a perverted Communist eschatology, but it also literally makes the text bleed between reality and fiction without section breaks, lending the novel and important hybrid character in its form. Second, this hybrid character of the novel is only strengthened formally by the heavy presence of adages, songs, and parables in the text, each of which breaks down the walls between fiction and other genres and potentially paves Ngũgĩ's way towards creating an indigenous African literature, one distinct from the Western canon that Ngũgĩ has spent a great deal of his life contesting. This hybrid, unorthodox approach to literature is then built out even more in Chapter 2 when Warĩĩnga uses a nested narrative rife with allusions to tell us the story of her/Kareendi's life. The Kareendi story, as mentioned, references the Kamoongonye story of Gĩkũyũ folklore, another move which foregrounds the local and prioritizes readers who have familiarity with Kenyan culture. Moreover, it repeats a great deal of what we have already been told about Warĩĩnga by our narrator. Indeed, repetition is an important device in the text (often used to establish the duality or twoness so treasured and interesting to Ngũgĩ), and here it almost seems to produce a familiarizing, incantatory effect that leaves us unsurprised when Warĩĩnga says that Kareendi's story is the story of every girl in Kenya. Even we readers have already heard it before, so how can what Warĩĩnga says not be so?
Finally, Chapter 2 closes with another element that foregrounds the coexistence of fantasy and reality—the Devil's Feast, which comes to play a significant role in the novel as a whole. Unlike the existence of the Devil in Warĩĩnga's dream, however, the Devil's Feast as an event emphasizes another important feature of Ngũgĩ's narratology—that is, the centrality of materials and materiality. The Devil exists here not as an abstract concept, but as a real, physical being who sponsors feasts—themselves testaments to the excesses of materialism and consumption. The materialism of Ngũgĩ's text as a whole of course speaks to his Marxist thinking, but note that it also here shows an additional way in which the religious, divine, or abstractly fantastic is made to clash with and encounter the everyday and the real.
