Arresting Time, Resisting Arrest: Narrative Time and the African Dictator in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow

This essay argues that the form of Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow challenges the Ruler’s hegemony. In my analysis, the novel’s narrators and Ngũgĩ’s inventive use of rumor, prolepsis, and metalepsis work to create pluralistic modes of community that counteract the autocratic, repressive politics of the novel’s dictator. This analysis adds a distinctively political dimension to the work of narrative theorists like Gérard Genette, Mark Currie, and Brian Richardson, reading the distinctive feature of multiple narrators or proleptic rumors in the novel as signs of resistance. These formal features of the novel present a discursive challenge to the authority of the Ruler. This discursive challenge to authority is significant because the dictator’s power is exercised through the power to speak and shape the world to his own ends. These features of Ngũgĩ’s novel mark a development in the transnational genre of the dictator novel.