SOURCE: Gurnah, Abdulrazak. “Matigari: A Tract of Resistance.” Research in African Literatures 22, no. 4 (winter 1991): 169-72.

In the following essay, Gurnah laments Ngugi's repetitive themes in Matigari, arguing that, despite the novel's positive political message, the work is merely a “simple and unattractive polemic.”

Matigari was written and first published in Gĩkũyũ, sustaining its author's celebrated vow to write “creatively” only in an African language. The Kenyan security authorities' response to the novel, like their response to Ngaahika Ndeenda in 1977, confirmed the political implications on the writer's choice of language. In both cases, the threat of a mass audience for a critical portrayal of the injustices at the structural core of Kenyan society was unacceptable to the authorities. It is not that these criticisms are unprecedented. Ngũgĩ's own Petals of Blood and his polemical writings had voiced similar criticisms with comparable intensity. However, by addressing...