Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa

Chapter 10: Inventing Tradition and Colonizing the Plants: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness

Chapter 10 Inventing Tradition and Colonizing the Plants Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness Laura Wright To grasp the ambivalence of hybridity, it must be distinguished from an inversion that would suggest that the originary is, really, only an “effect.” Hybridity has no such perspective of depth or truth to provide: it is not a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures. —Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture In his famous coauthored study The Invention of Tradition, historian Eric Hobsbawm argues that “‘traditions’ which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented.” He goes on to state that “‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.”1 Through repetition and lack of variation, Hobsbawm asserts, ritual becomes codified as tradition in that it ultimately becomes linked with past action, even if only because the action is repeatedly performed over a short period of time. Such a claim is clearly informed by Ernest Renan’s theoretical stance on the importance of forgetting in the construction of nations,2 as is Benedict Anderson’s assertion, published the same year as  | Laura Wright Hobsbawm’s coauthored study, that the nation “is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”3 I invoke these three well-known views of the importance of forgetting, invention , and imagination in the creation of tradition and national identity because of their theoretical relevance with regard to the two texts that I will examine in this chapter, Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood (1977) and South African author Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000).4 As colonial powers imagined narratives of their own national prominence, they subsequently invented a countermythology—dependent upon a discourse of indigenous primitivism, spiritual vacuousness, and intellectual inferiority—that justified their takeover of African lands and the subordination of African peoples.Both Ngugi,who situates his narrative in recently independent Kenya, and Mda, who situates his immediately after the fall of apartheid in South Africa, write novels that imagine and mythologize the impact of precolonial pasts upon the postcolonial present. Both novels deal very explicitly with the potentially devastating effects of capitalist-driven development of the land, particularly as a result of deforestation and the replacing of native flora with European varieties of plants in Mda’s novel and the replacement of the symbolic significance of a plant-based drink in Ngugi’s novel. Characters in both works either seek a return to an imagined traditional identity or struggle to define and occupy a hybrid space, and the presentation of the mortality and vulnerability of plant life functions in both texts as a mirror for nationalist survival. The destruction of indigenous plants and their displacement by alien species can be read on a very literal level as indicative of the decrease in biodiversity that results from the introduction of nonnative species—a product of the slow violence that Rob Nixon characterizes elsewhere in this volume— but such an instance can also be read as a cultural metaphor. Indigenous history, a connection to an authentic past, has been erased by an often appealing but insidious European presence in Africa, and tellingly in both works there are no hybrid plants, only nonnative species that crowd out and starve the native flora. Cultural hybridization is equally problematic, as is symbolically manifest in indigenous characters’ attempts to eradicate invasive plant species or re-create precolonial symbolic meaning. As Qukezwa says about the European inkberry bush in Mda’s novel, “It kills other plants. These flowers that you like so much will eventually become berries. Each berry is a prospective plant that will kill the plant of my forefathers.”5 Similarly, Ngugi’s narrator claims that an early white colonist, Lord Freeze-Kilby, planted wheat as a means of changing “Ilmorog wilderness into civilised Inventing Tradition and Colonizing the Plants |  shapes and forms”6 that would yield European trees and crops. The search for an authentic or “traditional” identity that is somehow uncorrupted by the imposition of colonial culture in both works, then, is played out in part through attempted eradication of...