SOURCE: Brown, David Maughan. “Matigari and the Rehabilitation of Religion.” Research in African Literatures 22, no. 4 (winter 1991): 173-80.

In the following essay, Brown provides a religious interpretation of Matigari and explores how Ngugi utilizes Christian themes to support his sociopolitical ideals.

Ngũgĩ's use of the imagery and symbolism of Christianity, his attitude towards the Church and its ministers, and the thematic centrality accorded to religion in his fiction all underwent significant changes in the course of his progression from Christian liberalism to the radical socialism, imbricated with cultural nationalism, which has informed his recent writings.

In 1967 Ngũgĩ said that in writing The River Between he was “deeply Christian” and “concerned with trying to remove the central Christian doctrine from the dress of Western culture, and seeing how this might be grafted onto the central beliefs of our people” (Cultural Events II). This process involved the extensive...