Thinking Activities Petals of Blood

 Hello Readers,

Petals of Blood often surfaces in debates regarding the twentieth century’s most notable African novels. Nggu wa Thiong’o was a student of Chinua Achebe’s until they had a violent disagreement about philosophy, at which point Nggu wa decided to abandon English in favour of his native Kenyan tongue, Gikuyu. For Africans, an African language. Achebe intended for his work to reach a bigger audience. Ngg’s final English piece, Petals of Blood, appeared in 1977.

The novel largely deals with the scepticism of change after Kenya's independence from colonial rule, questioning to what extent free Kenya merely emulates, and subsequently perpetuates, the oppression found during its time as a colony. Other themes include the challenges of capitalism, politics, and the effects of westernization. Education, schools, and the Mau Mau rebellion are also used to unite the characters, who share a common history with one another.(From Wikipedia)

Neo colonialism : with reference to petals of blood:-

 Petals of Blood might be handled through the same emphasis placed by Thiong'o on the potency of the colonial languages as regards putting out new alienated identities and minds. To illustrate, when imparting the school memories in the past, Karega complains of the fact the Western literature and English language are taught at school in place of their national historical achievements and literature by turning attention to the black headmaster’s reprimand of the teachers concerning the insufficient education of English: “Teach them good idiomatic English” (Petals 173), which points out his adoption of the significance of

English and his anxiety to impose it on the colonized students.

 Karega continues to narrate the approach of the headmaster to Shakespeare whom he speaks in praise of since he attributes significance and perfection to this poet as is disclosed in the novel: “He read a passage from Shakespeare … ‘Those words are words of a great writer – greater even than Maillu and Hadley Chase.’ … whoever heard of African, Chinese and Greek mathematics and science?” (Petals 172). This specifies the belief that the Eastern nations have not been able to make any contributions to the scientific world whereas the Western science and literature as more estimable and praiseworthy subjects have to be instructed at each school in Africa.

 Karega reveals his discomfort caused by the subjects and fields of study at their school that are inculcated into them in order to make the Western figures and historical events absorbed well when he mentions it: “Chaucer, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Livingstone, Western conquerors, Western inventors and discoverers were drummed into our heads with even greater fury. Where, we asked, was the African dream?” (Petals 173).

Now I want you to go back to Ilmorog. Get yourselves together. Subscribe money. You can even sell some of the cows and goats instead of letting them die. Dive deep into your pockets. Your businessmen, your shopkeepers, instead of telling stories, should contribute generously. Get also a group of singers and dancers – those who know traditional songs. Gitiro, Muthuu, Ndumo, Mumburo, Muthungucu, Mwomboko, things like that. Our culture, our African cultural and spiritual values, should form the foundation for this nation. (Petals 172) While accentuating the nationalist premises and discourses in order to delude the natives into the conception that he strains only for his society’s advantage and well-being, Nderi, on the other hand, does not display any interest for the native citizens’ anxieties about famine and poverty, only suspending the agency of solutions and pointing them to beseech assistance from other citizens in Ilmorog. Turning to certain evasiveexpressions like “Thank you. My people of Ilmorog. This is the happiest day of my life since you gave me your votes and told me to go forward and forever fight as your servant in Parliament” (Petals 182), his speech encompasses so-called sincerity and modesty which at first alleviate these people’s apprehension; however, they rapidly notice their misunderstanding and being misled by Nderi whom they see as the only prospect of hope and concrete solution (Petals 182). These natives, as innocent and poor citizens who come near Nderi after a long travel merely in order to ask for his assistance, are arrested by the police since they are accused of prompting a protest and riot against Nderi although they are not involved in such a protest which is triggered by a number of citizens in the streets being really bothered by Nderi’s delusive and vain promises that he never stands by faithfully (Petals 183). Supposing these citizens as those who could pose an obstacle to his private and self-centered financial schemes, Nderi decides to exterminate them when dwelling on his profits as the writer puts it: KCO had originally been a vague thing in his mind. It had grown out of his belief in his cultural authenticity which he had used with positive results in his business partnership with foreigners and foreign companies… He, Nderi wa Riera, was convinced that Africa could only be respected when it had had its own Rockefellers, its Hughes, Fords, Krupps, Mitsubishis … KCO would serve the interests of the wealthy locals and their foreign partners to create similar economic giants! (Petals186) As a black politician who is convinced that the European logic and styles are essential to be imitated and attained by such societies as themselves, Nderi pursues the colonialist desires covering Kenya’s transformation into a setting which is a quintessential European country where imperialistic ambitions are brought into action. He wishes to produce a native country that does not lag behind the modern and developed European countries. Rather than getting a handle on Ilmorog’s sufferings and famine, he is obsessed with giving extension to his economic and political relations with foreign sectors and dignitaries being his cooperators on the course to generating a new country with the replacement of the so-called old, backward and expired one. In considering the native delegation members demanding immediate help and elucidating the country’s knots as overload and his adversaries, he contemplates that “It might be his enemies who had learned about the drought and engineered the whole thing to see what he would do about it, certainly to embarrass him” (Petals 180). The priest sums up the suffering and agonies experienced in the once colonized countries as he emphasizes: So I said: let me return to my home, now that the black man has come to power … I cried to myself: how many Kimathis must die, how many motherless children must weep, how long shall our people continue to sweat so that a few, a given few, might keep a thousand dollars in the bank of the one monster-god that for four hundred years had ravished a continent? And now I saw in the clear light of day the role that Fraudshams of the colonial world played to create all of us black zombies dancing pornography in Blue Hills while out people are dying of hunger, while our people cannot afford decent shelter and decent schools.

Thiong’o may be claimed to handle mainly the issues of the colonial languages and the local elites in his works. One of Thiong'o's views on the consequences of acquiring or learning the colonial languages is that colonialism is not only a process of material exploitation of the colonized societies with rigid force as this process also needs to encompass the alienation of the native minds which are preoccupied with the nationalist and patriotic ideology, so language takes on the role of making the native society vulnerable to the colonialist ambitions. He proposes the potential disadvantages of the colonial languages which have been utilized by the Western nations so as to bring the colonial process into its final and most effective phase where the native peoples begin to take up inferiority complex due to their local languages.

 culture. Supposing the language as a conduit of culture and worldviews of a society, he thinks that language serves as an integral process of inculcating the Western ideology into the minds of the native citizens. Thus, language learning is not an innocent process of enrichment and development in that it supplies the colonizing nations with new types of the colonized individuals who are unconsciously willing to be exploited because of being brainwashed by adopting the colonial language or the colonial culture and civilization. The reader often comes upon characters who are eager to learn the colonial languages and who are hammered with the Western views as well as these languages in the fiction of Thiong’o such as Njoroge in Weep Not Child and the black headmaster Chui in Petals of Blood. Thiong'o usually makes references in his theoretical works to the local elites in the once colonized countries in which the tools of colonization are transmitted to the native rulers whose only aim becomes accumulating their wealth and sway over the native land. He argues that the ex-colonized countries have to question their current circumstances and discuss if they desire to gain their entire independence by forcing the colonial powers and their exploitive system out of the country. Given that each once colonized nation owns the chance of generating its own colonialist elites who the white colonizers hearten to enter a rigorous partnership in exploiting the masses, the countries gaining their independence recently must construct a secure basis so that the harmful legacy of colonialism cannot trace a fitting space for its persistence.  

Work ciated:-

Karagoz, Cengiz. “Thiong'o's Criticism of Neocolonial Tendencies: Petals of ...” ResearchGate, İksad Publications -2020©, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342199989_Thiong'o's_Criticism_of_Neocolonial_Tendencies_Petals_of_Blood_and_Weep_Not_Child.