POST INDEPENDENCE SOCIO-POLITICAL REALITIES IN NGUGI WA THIONGO’S PETALS OF BLOOD

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist, critic and playwright, has drawn worldwide critical attention for his mastery of medium of fiction as well as his activist writings. His large corpus of work carries the stamp of the strong impetus of activist in him and his overtly ideological position has only added a thrust to his fictional works. Ngugi has written both during the colonial and post-colonial periods and as such his works portray different periods in recent Kenyan history--its independence struggle, Mau Mau rebellion which is a recurrent motif in his novels, and the resistance to neo-colonial policies and attitudes in the form of postindependence disillusion evident since his fourth novel Petals of Blood. History and politics thus play a major part in Ngugi’s fiction. His literary consciousness is shaped by liberation aesthetics or poetics of commitment. The present paper makes an attempt to unfold the post independent socio-political realities in Kenyan societies. In Petals of Blood, Ngugi attempts to survey the unpleasant events of neocolonial scenario of the country between 1963 and 1975. As the title implies the new world manifests in the flowering (Petals) of a new egalitarian and just order brought about by struggle and sacrifice (blood). The thematic strands depicted in the novel are politics, colonial and neocolonial, history past and present, its impact, violence and its manifold nature. This artistic representation of betrayal of independence movement is perhaps the most authentic account of the evils perpetrated in independent African society by the neo-colonial masters who represent the interests of western capitalists. In this novel Ngugi depicts the nexus between the above vile forces by illuminating the economic structure and class formations, conflicts and contradictions, and political and cultural struggles in contemporary Kenya. The politics associated with land is central to the complex thematic pattern of Petals of Blood. Ngugi shows how the imperial colonists alienated Africans from their land and later how African landlords occupied Oray’s Publications Impact Factor: 4.845(SJIF) Research Journal Of English (RJOE) Vol-5, Issue-1, 2020 www.rjoe.org.in An International Peer-Reviewed English Journal ISSN: 2456-2696 Indexed in: International Citation Indexing (ICI), International Scientific Indexing (ISI), Directory of Research Journal Indexing (DRJI) Google Scholar & Cosmos. Research Journal Of English (RJOE) Copyright Oray’s Publication Page 2 the same and exploited the poor.