Pre-Independence Kenya in Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s Trilogy: A Postcolonial Reading of Weep Not, Child, The River Between and A Grain of Wheat

Colonization is one of the most topical issues in the African Literature of the sixties. Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o like many other African intellectuals, restores and exalts the African past not only for the enlightenment of the Africans’ detractors (the settlers) but, above all, for the education of his own people (the Kikuyu). His trilogy made of Weep not, Child, The River Between and A Grain of Wheat is surely appropriate space in which pre-independence Kenya are depicted. As a hierophant of his times, Ngũgĩ shows, how the Kikuyu community, taken as the microcosm of any other people under a colonial power, collapsed with its exposure to the West and cracked with the pressure of an alien force embodied by the British settlers. They lost the precious values that held them together: family life, human dignity but above all, their ancestral land. Ngũgĩ, as a writer in a new nation, appeals this dehumanized people to an awareness in order to understand the real meaning of ‘uhuru’ (independence) and the sacrifices made to achieve it. Yet, he suggests them some necessary strategies for reaching this goal.