CULTURAL RETRIEVAL AND REVOLUTIONARY DIDACTICISM IN SELECTED NOVELS BY AYI KWEI ARMAH AND NGUGI WA THIONG'O

Abstract

This thesis seeks to trace the cultural retrieval motifs and the revolutionary didacticism of Armah’s and Ngugi’s novels of the 1970s and 1980s. It also attempts to demonstrate the neo-Negritudinist dimension and Afrocentric orientation of the selected novels, with the purpose of justifying the contention, held in the thesis, that their writers have been working towards a new Black Aesthetics. It, besides, argues that these two writers are campaigning for a ‘return to the source’, in their novels, to face up to neo-colonialism and more particularly to cultural depersonalisation. The choice of the novels has been done on the basis of their representation of their writers’ weltanschauung and their cultural and revolutionary commitments. The thesis focuses on the major ideological (Fanon, Cabral, Baraka) and literary (Sartre, Camus, Wright) influences that the novels have absorbed. It demonstrates the convergences and divergences between Armah’s and Ngugi’s novels and the works on which they have been patterned. The critical framework of the thesis is a combination of the socio-historical and the cultural formalist critical approaches. Chapter One explores the cultural matrix of Armah’s Fragments and demonstrates the writer’s attempts at cultural retrieval. It particularly takes into account the novel’s existentialist dimension. It, besides, argues that Armah has preserved the aesthetic quality of the novel through his use of allegorical didacticism. Chapter Two focuses on Armah’s Why Are We So Blest?. It highlights its Fanonist, Existentialist and Negritudinist dimension. A comparative study is drawn between Armah’s novel and Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’ The Outsider and Wright’s Native Son, with which it shares common literary and ideological features. Chapter Three is devoted to the study of Armah’s novel Two Thousand Seasons. There is a focus on Armah’s Afrocentric position. The major contention held in this chapter is that Armah’s cultural and racial retrieval has a cathartic function. The other argument held in this chapter is that Armah’s obsession with Black consciousness, as witnessed in his racialist discourse, has entailed a lack of concern for aestheticism. Chapter Four studies the ‘return to the source’ motif in Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross and demonstrates the neo-Negritudinist dimension of the novel. It pays special attention to Ngugi’s use of grotesque realism and archetypal patterns of both Greek and Gikuyu culture. Chapter Five explores Ngugi’s use of orature and Mau Mau historiography in Matigari. It, further, focuses on Ngugi’s use of magical realism and hybrid narrative techniques, oral African and Western modernist. It, besides, argues that Ngugi uses Mau Mau and Christianity for revolutionary didactic purposes. It also argues that Ngugi’s authorial intrusions to voice his ideological message tarnish an aesthetically appealing novel. On the whole, the thesis attempts to highlight the impact of the two writers’ didacticism on the aesthetic achievement of their novels. It argues that these writers have become more outspoken about their ideological credentials than hitherto, as a consequence of their overconcern with Black Nationalism and revolutionary change.