Wrestling with the Devil by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

Author:Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620973349
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2018-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

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Makhan Singh was a communist. He said so both before and after his detention and imprisonment. As such, he was opposed to capitalism. J.M. Kariũki was a nationalist. He was not necessarily opposed to capitalism. He wanted to free national capitalism from foreign control and to build a welfare state in which “everyone will have an opportunity to educate himself to his fullest capabilities, in which no one will die or suffer through lack of medical facilities and in which each person will earn enough to eat for himself and his family.”

However, they shared a common anti-imperialist national tradition that goes way back to the very early political prisoners—Me Katilili, Waiyaki, Ngunju wa Gakere—who all said no to the colonial culture of fear and rejected its aesthetic of blind trust and obedience to foreign economic, political, and cultural occupation and encirclement. On the contrary, they had rooted themselves in the people’s revolutionary culture of outspoken courage and patriotic heroism, a tradition that Kariũki invoked when as a youth he took the oath of loyalty to Kenya Land and Freedom Army. Afterward, in the maize, he wrote in Mau Mau Detainee:

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