One of the themes of Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is the transformation of Ilmorog from a neglected rural village in to an industrial town. There is a cultural centre for white tourists, a church, a brewery, bars and a brothel. But there is no mention of a cinema. That might reflect the realities of post-independence Kenya, although I suspect it is more likely to be Ngũgĩ’s lack of interest in the movies.
The cinema does not feature in the other books by Ngũgĩ that I have read, from the early novels Weep Not, Child (1964) and The River Between (1965) to the more mature A Grain of Wheat (1967, revised 1987). That is not so surprising, since all three are set in rural communities and concern people with little or no experience of the city.
Petals of Blood (1977) is different. The principle characters — teachers Munira and Karega, trader Abdulla and bar girl Wanja — are all outsiders, who come to rural Ilmorog to escape problems connected with city life. All four subsequently go on a journey to Nairobi with the villagers, as a consequence of which Ilmorog undergoes its own urban transformation.
And while Ilmorog does not get its own film house, there are one or two places where the cinema creeps into the narrative. For example, Wanja is first seduced by a married neighbour, who takes an interest in her when visiting her parents.
Later he gave me a lift in his lorry and took me to an afternoon film show in the Royal Cinema in the city. School could never thereafter be the same.
A similar transaction appears in a different context much later in the novel. The delegation from Ilmorog has travelled to Nairobi to lobby the town’s MP, but he is away investigating a scandal in one of the tourist resorts he owns. A foreign newspaper has written that these are “special places where even an ageing European could buy an authentic African virgin girl of fourteen to fifteen for the price of a ticket to a cheap cinema show”.
I’m not sure if Ngũgĩ intends the irony, or if the parallel is a coincidence.
When Ngũgĩ invokes the movies rather than going to the cinema, it is the familiar territory of the Western. This happens when Munira is crawling the bars of Kamirithu, the author’s home town, and chances upon Wanja. He sees that her attention is elsewhere:
What seemed to draw her out was people: young men in tight American jeans and huge belts studded with shiny metal stars, leaning against the walls by the juke-box or at the counter by the high stools, chewing gum or breaking matchsticks between their teeth with the abandoned nonchalance of cowboys in the American Wild West I once saw in a film; young men and bar girls trying out the latest step.
This simile is picked up in an argument that they then overhear between some of these young men, who are disputing the merits of popular musicians Kamaru and DK. One of them says:
Geee — I gonna dance to Jim Reeves and Jim Brown and break a safe or two like some cowboys I saw in the Wild Bunch — Geee.
But this is a rarity. Ngũgĩ’s cultural references are more frequent and more detailed when it comes to literature, songs and art. There is even a whole plot twist in Petals of Blood built around advertising slogans.
For example, when Karega first visits Munira in Ilmorog, the older teacher surveys his own modest house with disapproval.
The sitting room, like the rest of the house, was rather empty: one wooden bench, a table with huge cracks along the joints; two folding chairs and a shelf fixed to the wall and graced with old copies of Flamingo, Drum, African Film and torn school editions of Things Fall Apart and Song of Lawino.
Flamingo and Drum were popular magazines, while African Film carried crime-themed photo-stories. According to Matthias Krings of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, these photo novels served as film surrogates, telling cinematic stories before commercial African cinema existed.
Then, towards the end of the novel, Abdulla is visited by Joseph, an orphan he rescued and who the four main characters have collectively helped educate. In this moment looking to the next generation, the boy is given a significant literary talisman.
Abdulla and Joseph sat outside their hovel in the New Jerusalem, talking. Joseph was now a tall youth in a neat uniform of khaki shirt and shorts. He held Sembene Ousmane’s novel, God’s Bits of Wood, in his hands but he was not reading much.
text © Ian Mundell 2015
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