IMPLICATIONS OF UNETHICAL MODERN REALITIES IN NGUGI WA THIONG’O’S “WEEP NOT CHILD
Abstract
As a mouthpiece of his Gikuyu society and chronicler of Kenyas modern history, Ngugi is widely acknowledged as a humanist among the post-colonial novelists of the common wealth writers. He wasan egalitarian and much favoured for the growth and the development of his East African literature and of his country. He was born on 5th January 1938 in Limuru, Kenya. He was christened as James Thiongo Ngugi and was the fifth child of the third wife of his father. He attended Alliance High School and later Makerere University, Uganda and the University of Leeds, England. He was influenced by the works of Karl Marks, Friedrich Engels and West Indian born social theorist Frantz Fanon and so on.In his early days of University education, he began writing plays and stories criticizing Kenyan society and politics. He was also a Columnist for Sunday Post, Daily Nation and Sunday Nation in the early 1960s.Weep Not child was his first novel published in 1964. He won the first East African writer to be identified into world by the publication of this novel. The implication of unwelcomed modern realities into the natural society is the predominant theme of this novel. This article focuses mainly on how the so-called modern reality has been nurtured as a foster child of the inhuman world and also how Ngugi was being a very expressive as well as an articulator for his oppressed society. The novel abounds in many unwarranted brutal realities which have caused disfiguration in the ancientness or primitiveness of African culture. As Ben Okri said in his preface to the novel Weep Not Childthe divisions in Society, the root of betrayals, the problematic question of the land, the never-ending implications of colonial rule are the modern realities which affect the well-being of the people and of the basic structure of the society. The primitiveness of African continent and its copious cultures usually do not hold hand in hand with the enforcement of western principles and traditions. As a result, it lost countless innocent lives as well as incarceration many youths.