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Research in African Literatures 31.2 (2000) 216-217



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Book Review

Ngugi and African Postcolonial Narrative: The Novel as Oral Narrative in Multigenre Performance


Ngugi and African Postcolonial Narrative: The Novel as Oral Narrative in Multigenre Performance, by F. Odun Balogun. Quebec: World Heritage, 1997. x + 180 pp. ISBN 1-896064-06-X paper.

The center piece of F. Odun Balogun's Ngugi and African Postcolonial Narrative is an extended analysis of Ngugi's 1986 novel Matigari. Occupying well over half the book, this reading seeks to vindicate Balogun's view that "the destination at which Ngugi has arrived is that toward which the development of African literature has been heading all along" (14). Successive chapters frame and re-frame the text as "oral-narrative performance," "hagiography," "mythology," reconceptualized realism, and "postmodern deconstructionist experiment," in order to demonstrate the revolutionary potential of Ngugi's achievement for the novel both within and outside Africa (9). Balogun thus takes Matigari as an aesthetic and political summation, one that both incorporates and revises existing orientations for African literature. The rest of the book reviews Ngugi's literary and political trajectory in light of this claim.

Pivotal to Balogun's analysis is the concept that gives his study its subtitle: "The Novel as Oral Narrative in Multigenre Performance." For Balogun, Ngugi's well-known turn to Gikuyu expresses a complex linguistic and political commitment that comes to fruition in the "multigenre performance" that is Matigari. By absorbing the mythopoeic and satirical resources of orature into the framework of novelistic realism, Ngugi forges a narrative instrument capable of overcoming the divide between literate and illiterate audiences, addressing "the ideological needs of his proletarian constituency" (139) and forging an emancipatory consciousness of the struggle against neocolonialism. From this perspective, critics who view Matigari as an ambitious failure, or bridle at its "very aggressive, perhaps oppressive" politics, are either judging it by overly narrow Eurocentric standards or expressing "pro-imperialist sympathies" (16).

Although Balogun's reading of the novel is thorough and often insightful, the book suffers from the hyperbolic claims made on Ngugi's behalf, and from an unnecessarily polemical stance taken to defend those claims. It is obviously important to understand the multiple generic traditions that shape Matigari, and the fierce political pressures that give Ngugi's intervention its urgency and point; it is quite another thing to assert that Ngugi has carried out a revolution in the African novel in which a "relationship of equality has [. . .] supplanted that of exploitation" (7). Nor is this argument made more credible when, after carefully tracing the treatment of Matigari as a Christ figure and taking the text as a contribution to "liberation theology" (113), Balogun then argues that "Ngugi's narration makes it clear that those who believe in the fantasy of Matigari, both as a Mau Mau returnee and as a Christ figure, are the gullible, illiterate common folk who constitute [End Page 216] the majority population" (141). Whether or not such a characterization of the majority population is true to Ngugi, it is difficult to reconcile with professions of "equality," and testifies to lingering ideological contradictions that Balogun prefers to ignore.

The same could be said about the concept of the "multigenre" that underpins the analysis: it asserts a unity rather than exploring the conditions under which generic modes and practices interact. As a result, Balogun is led to celebrate as aesthetic achievement that could more productively be regarded as a powerful but problematic effort to force disparate political discourses into dialogue, to produce an imagined community where none exists (yet). Although the book makes passing reference to Bakhtin, it does not make full use of such crucial concepts as dialogicity or the carnivalesque, which could have illuminated Ngugi's confrontation of motifs drawn from popular and avant-garde political culture. Despite these limitations, h owever, Balogun's study lays out the groundwork for a more nuanced and historical appreciation of Ngugi's achievement.

--Robert Eric Livingston

Robert Eric Livingston teaches comparative literature at the Ohio...

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